Jill gave me a child-rearing book, Blessings of a Skinned Knee, which, among other tips of real sense, advises that dinner hour is sacred.
I looked across the living room. Alex munching chicken nuggets by hand and Ned absently spooning in white rice as he watched Toy Story, his spillage mounting like a snow bank at his feet, didn't spell "sacred."
So we inaugurated the Stimpson Family Dinner Hour. Most families have one. Kramer on "Seinfeld" said so. "And do you know what happens over dinner?" Kramer said. "You talk about your day! 'How was your day today? Did you have a good day or a bad day today? And how was your day today?'"
Jerry, stunned: "I'm glad we had this talk."
Kramer, agitated: "Oh, you have no idea!"
Ned will eat most of what we eat, more or less: spaghetti, roast chicken, broccoli, spinach and peas. He loves potatoes and rice, and may be moving into childhood's renowned "white phase" at the table. "TA-toe," coos Ned. Both boys will eat chicken and fries from numerous cheap spots around our neighborhood. The Chinese hole-in-the-wall around the corner serves a lo mien so good I swear they put opium in it. Whatever Ned doesn't eat of that is gone in a few seconds.
Alex will eat the chicken from the lo mien, but in general he would still have to loosen up a lot at the table to even qualify as "picky." 'Whatever fires in our heads regarding good and new foods hasn't yet fired completely in his, and his eating is still kind of parked at chicken nuggets and crunchy stuff like pretzels. Kind of, though in the past year Alex has taken many steps toward eating like a Manhattanite and started to accept yogurt (the expensive stuff), ice cream (Mister Softee), and pizza (preferably in the restaurant). Both boys can each now take care most of the toasted cheese off a full slice, which is heartening. "Jeez, that sounds pretty good," more than one nutritionist has said of Alex's eating.
But dinner at the table has as much to do with sculpting behavior as it does with diet. The dinner hour campaign goes hand in hand with my new Skinned Knee-inspired parenting energy, which the other day included an honest-to-dad memo to Jill. "I think we should start doing the following things with the boys immediately," I e-mailed her. "1. Make the boys wipe up their own spills. No exceptions! 2. Make the boys use the hand-broom and dustpan to sweep up their own crumbs. No exceptions! 3. Make the boys take their own dishes into the kitchen after dinner. NO EXCEPTIONS!" Skinned Knee stipulates that everybody should do these chores, as well as have an assigned seat at the dinner table, though it doesn't say so in capital letters.
Ned has been eating at the kiddie table for a long time (see "snow bank"), but for an embarrassing number of months Alex has slipped through our parental net and chowed down on nuggets in front of the TV. Even though he's shown sparks of wanting to eat at the table -- he took the Chinese beef off the plates of dinner guests about six months ago, and usually hangs around munching his pretzels when grandma and grandpa come to dinner -- I knew I couldn't simply staple a special-needs 5-year-old into his assigned dinner seat and open fire with peas and broccoli.
One night I coaxed him to the kiddie table and sat down with him over some baked ravioli. Pizza, I'd been assured, could be the gateway to pasta. "I think Alex wants more and more to eat with someone," I told Jill the night before. I gave him a fork and took a fork myself, and I nibbled. I cut his single ravioli square into four pieces and mine into six, to make mine last longer. I speared one of his quarters and held it up for him. He took the fork, gently removed the ravioli with his fingers, and held it to his lips. Touching the lips with many foods is Alex's way of convincing himself he's an adventurous eater, I think. Most of them he passes back. There is almost never any pile of food at Alex's feet.
Then he nibbled. Alex ate ravioli!
He ate it the next night, too. Time for the grown-ups' table.
I'd sure like to get this dinner-hour thing down soon. The boys' bouncing around at Passover caused a terrible row, and now more holidays loom. Ned we can kind of count on, especially if there's something white to eat. Alex is tougher, and to special family dinners I plan to bring an emergency kit of favorite toys, scented candles (his old EI special-ed. teacher has pointed out that unusual smells sometimes calm autistic kids), and the Doomsday Machine of Mutually Assured Peacefulness with Alex at dinner: Cheese Doodles.
But still, it'd be nice if we had something approaching a normal meal.
Skinned Knee, the parenting book Jill lent me, stresses that sharing food is a sacred part of family life (the book talks specifically about Jewish family life and the importance to it of sharing food; I come from more a pioneer-in-a-blizzard heritage, where everybody hoards what they have: this could explain past friction when Jill always asked for a piece of my pie...). The book also says that children should not only be taught to respectfully break the McNugget, but even respect the seating arrangements.
At our dinners, I take an end seat -- a position of authority I think has more to do with tradition in other families than personal charisma on my part -- and Jill sits on my left. Alex sits on her left, and Ned sits on my right. The chair to Ned's right is empty, because if anybody sat there they'd kick over the stack of books Jill has been meaning to take to the Salvation Army.
"How was school today, Alex?"
Alex doesn't answer much, and he particularly doesn't answer much when not 15 minutes before he discovered the bread-making machine in the kitchen corner. Tonight Jill has made Chinese beef and peppers with white rice. We've discussed what Ned thinks of rice, and bear in mind that it was Chinese beef that Alex swiped from those guests' plates weeks ago. So we're hopeful.
"Did you have a good day today, Ned?" I asked.
(Jerry, stunned: "I'm glad we had this talk...")
"Oh good day, yeah," he said, I guess. But his next words are quite clear: "More rice, please!"
We give him some. He holds a handful in front of my nose and says, "Here, daddy." Alex is screeching in front of the TV, aghast that Wee Sing Train has actually been darkened for family dinner time. I get up and bring him back. Jill has placed little cuts of beef on each boy's plastic flower plate. Each boy also has a fork; Ned uses his with growing skill (tonight's snow pile is small), and Alex will often eat things off a utensil that he wouldn't like to touch, which makes sense. Once he ate a mean off the plastic head of a toy chicken, which doesn't make sense. "That is, I admit, crazy," said Jill.) Alex should by all rights eat some bread tonight, judging from how he's been incessantly fiddling with Jill's bread machine in the corner of our kitchen.
"Alex, we sit down to eat dinner!" We do now, anyway.
"Okay all right okay," he says. He tries to sail around my end of the table and toward the kitchen like a linebacker dodging a block to get to the quarterback. I snag him.
"Back to the table, Alex."
"More rice, please!" Ned says.
I seat Alex while Jill scoops out more rice for Ned to handle. Alex picks up the beef and places it on his closed lips, which he seems to believe is as good as eating. He places it back on the plate and bolts, this time slipping past me into the kitchen and crying, "Chicken!"
"Make him the damned nuggets," Jill says. "Pick up your rice, Ned."
"Rice. Oh yeah. Rice."
The damned nuggets take 15 minutes, so in the meanwhile I ask Alex if he'd like something else. He gets a bowl out of the drawer and looks at the cabinet above the fridge. "You want a few pretzels, Alex?" He stares at the cabinet out of the corner of his eye, appears sheepish and indecisive, then bolts for the broom closet on the other side of the room.
"Cheez Doodles!"
No way, Alex. What do you think this is, Thanksgiving?
"Alex, you can have some pretzels."
"Cheese Nips."
"You can have some Cheerios," I say.
"Pretzels," he says softly. "Pretzels please daddy."
I shovel some out. "You have to eat them at the table with us, Alex," I say. "At the big table."
"Okay all right."
He sits. I eat my cool Chinese food and see that Ned is on his tummy across the empty chair to his right, slapping at the stack of books and I guess hoping that its collapse will take our mind off the rice that has to be swept up at the base of his chair. Actually Ned's getting better about learning how to sweep. So's Alex, which is good because when the timer goes ding and his chicken is done, he bolts from the big table back toward the TV. We've been eating for 15 minutes. (December 2003)
"If you look around, probably a third of what you own has to do with your kids." -- Our last mover
I've taken three of the plastic bins that Jill labeled and stacked on the boys' toy shelves and flung their contents around the living room. I've then waded through and kicked toys under chairs and couch, then sprinkled pretzel crumbs among them. Then I have left the room on an urgent yet unrevealed errand.
I haven't done any of that. I can't even get out of the recliner. The big square cushions lean against the entertainment cabinet. The video drawer is open, the tapes tumbled from their boxes. Pez dispensers are scattered where Alex rooted for Charlie Brown and Snoopy to go with viewing "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Track of the two plastic train sets is spun across the floor, Ned's pattern as random and beautiful as tea leaves, the little cars tipped on their sides as if victims of some moment of miniature switchman's carelessness. A superball waits by the ottoman. Over there, Elmo is face-down like William Holden in the pool in Sunset Boulevard. Two plastic bowls, empty of all but pretzel salt, sit beside the TV. A sippy thing lies on its side in a tiny yet spreading pool on the coffee table. Directly beneath it, and about to receive a drip, sits somebody's little brightly colored plastic head.
This took the boys, I don't know, half an hour. Time was, when Jill was off shopping on the weekends and I had both guys, I'd cordon off a section of the living room and sacrifice it to this mess, reasoning that if I could keep the rest of the house safe it was worth losing all floor space between the dining table and the big window.
No more. These days, I'm turning my children into ants.
"Alex, Ned! Clean-up time!" I clap my hands. All I need's a whistle. My eyes fly around the room. If it's mine, kick it under the couch. If it's Jill's, ignore it. If it's theirs, pick it up and place in a little hand.
"Take this to your room, Ned. To your room. Alex, take this into the kitchen sink. Go put it in the kitchen sink, Alex. Your little plastic dishes go in the sink. The kitchen sink." I steer Alex's shoulders. Off he goes, pausing to shoot a glance over his left shoulder as he rounds the dining room table, watching to see if I'm still watching. I am. He vanishes into the kitchen, and I hear his bare toes slap the floor tiles, the pitter-patter of little feet put to work.
To my boys' credit, I can't remember the last time I really to toss one of their little plastic dishes in the sink.
When he comes back, I'll find something else for his toy shelf and rifle him toward Jill, who's waiting to put toys back onto their shelves in their room. I think I realize what Jill might not about Child Command: Your sole job is to find them stuff to do a few seconds before they actually get done doing what you told them to do a few minutes before. Fall behind, and they wander away like a herd with the fence down.
Ned has appeared with the same bucket of toy train track I dispatched him with a moment before, trying to loaf while I daydream. I spin on him, feeling like the Captain Hornblower of toy pick-up. "To your bedroom, Ned."
"Oh, bedroom. Ya..."
Back comes Alex. What took him so long? "Alex, do the train track for me. Put the train track back in the case for me." Do one piece of track and he gets the point. Clatter clatter goes the track back into the case. Without being asked, he shuts the case and hefts it toward the linen closet, where it lives.
If my family is really lucky, it's also laundry night. Jill or I haul it up from the laundry room and fold it. But once folded, it's stacked in category-like piles on the dining table: our stuff, two or three stacks of the boys' shirts, the boys' pants, the boys' socks. Here's where the drill really pays off. "Guys! Laundry!"
The first trick with putting away laundry is to bookend the boys: Me out by the dining table, Jill waiting by the dresser in their room. "Ned, Alex, laundry!" Ned snaps right to, and I had him two balled-up pairs of socks, and he's off. Alex I must pry from the Elmo video, and I place two folded-up T shirts in his arms. "Take them to mommy in your bedroom, Alex. To mommy in your bedroom." By then Ned returns, and I hand him one folded-pair of pants. He bolts for his bedroom, ricocheting off Alex who's returning to this chore by way of the Elmo video. "Alex, more laundry. Take it to mommy." I hand him two folded up T shirts.
The second trick here is to keep the boys' loads small. Repetition teaches them the chore. Also, the more trips they have to make, the more tired they'll get.
Alex hasn't returned from depositing his T shirts, and I suspect he's wandering his room, supposedly helping Jill. But I hear her voice rising, and more likely any household organization has degraded until Alex is rooting the dresser drawers for wooden puzzles.
"Use hand-over-hand with Alex if you have to," I call to her. "Keep talking to him. A stream of words. Don't let him let up!" Did she hear me? She did. I hear her talking.
A baseball cap and a sweatshirt, too, to go with the whistle. And a stopwatch. (January 2004)
I'm settled in for the evening -- which to Ned seems to be mean that I've stepped through the front door and unzipped my coat -- when he says, "Play Pillow?"
Sometimes Ned likes to fall into my stomach. Other times, he likes to jump on my crotch. Still other times he will just walk on my back, which I don't mind since five years of fatherhood have taught me it's the closest thing I'll get to a massage.
The action takes place on our bed, a broad, flat, soft space where little bones are unlikely to hit anything hard once it's cleared of such landmines as a hardcover book, one of Jill's bigger belt buckles, or much change. I clear the bed until I'm sure the only thing Alex and Ned could probably hit are each other: Nothing scoops at my heart like the clunk of two little skulls coming together, unless it's Jill demanding "What happened!?" afterwards.
Guys rough-house. I used to rough-house -- "rassle" -- with my big brother. He was nine years older, but I finally got him to the floor when I was about 26. My mother used to cheerlead: "Cut it out 'fore you break your necks!"
Rough-housing with your little boys, I've always heard, is one of fatherhood's most robust pleasures, a special one reserved for dad. You don't see too many moms take they toddlers and pretend they're James T. Kirk on a hostile planet. "My little bear- Oh, Alex. No. Sweetie, my neck!" says Jill, as Alex gets her in a good grip for The Bronco Buck (see below). Also, nobody ever mentioned dad's nausea -- the heat makes me woozy, along with Ned and Alex's little feet coming down on my skull until it feels like a canned ham in a pile driver -- but I take the condition as a reminder that I'm pushing 42, and Alex and Ned are not. Ten minutes into it, I'm murmuring to myself like an outfoxed superhero: Losing ... power ... Must ... conserve ... strength ...
I forget when Ned started this (too many blows with the little feet, maybe). He used to ask to play Pillow by demanding, "Put your head down!", but lately he just says, "Please." He soon summoned Alex, with whom I never rassled. He never seemed to want more than the occasional tickle, which he asked for by saying, "Again?" "Alex, c'mon. Play Pillow!" Sometimes Alex will just come running when he hears Ned's alarm, which to the rest of us is just piercing laughter. Alex comes running and bolts onto the bed. Sometimes he tries to burrow under me. Other times we go for something more acrobatic.
On my little sons I practice several kinds of takedowns:
The Bronco Buck: Alex and Ned climb on my back one at a time. My head is low, my face buried in the down blanket. I can't breathe; I'm sweating and getting a headache; they don't care. Sometimes Alex will pull my T shirt back down if it's hiked up on my back, but other than that my own sons don't care. As if smelling my blood, this is their favorite. They wrap their arms around my neck, brace their legs against my rips, and let me buck them off over the shoulder. This allows them a scrumptious roll on the mattress, unless I miscalculate and buck one of them into another. "Bump my head!" Ned complains, rubbing. Alex just giggles until he realizes it hurts, then lapses right into crying, then back to giggling. "I'm okay," says Ned. "You okay, dad?"
The Quarterback Sack: My favorite. Shoulder to chest (spearing with your make-believe football helmet is a penalty ...), arms around the shoulders, full follow-through to the turf. Trash-talk as I let them up. They giggle insanely.
The Jujitsu Toss: Variation on the Bronco Buck. I sweep my arm back and then forward, cutting Alex's legs right out from underneath him. Sort of carry/drop him, preferably face down. If face-up, follow through with vigorous tickling. Check everyone for fractured necks.
The Simple Shove: Quick and efficient, heel of the hand -- gently -- to the chest bone. This works especially great on Ned, and allows him to ham it up a little bit, as if acting for the ref. He's getting taller, and he falls like a tree.
Once in a while one of them will clip me in the eye, and tearfully I make a mental note to pick up a pair of goggles. Alex starts to tickle my foot. "No fair!" I bark. Sometimes we play while Jill is working at the computer nearby. Once after a spectacular jujitsu toss, I looked up to see her staring.
Is she going to congratulate me? I wondered. "You wanna watch their heads?" she said.
God forbid I try to take a break to eat dinner, give them a bath, or clear my aching head (... losing ... power ...). "Noooooo!" shrieks Ned. "Play Pilloooooo!" It took me a long time to figure out who the "pillow" was; one too many blows with the little feet, maybe. But I still outlast them, until they've stopped bolting and kicking and instead just plop onto me like sacks. It is a manly game, and we will play it again tomorrow and tomorrow and forever. (January 2004)
(Editor's Note: Jill again contributes this week's essay, which is not completely true.)
(Wife's Note: I know I agreed to take out that paragraph on the "Sesame Street" figures, but it renders the next-to-last line ("the intruders are gone") semi-senseless, and I think it doesn't read better without it. So, do what you want. You usually do. Xxx)
I am the only person who sorts toys. Not in the world - just in our house. Jeff is happy if toys are put away. "Put away" means, simply, "off the floor." Matchbox cars, dinosaurs, balls, Lego blocks, crayons, finger puppets, Play-doh, Mr. Potato Head ears and hands, and small boardbooks get thrown into the same box without regard for any of the systems I've established.
This makes me sound, I know, OK, anal. By systems, I just mean boxes, some even labeled "boardbooks" or "dollhouse furniture." It's not as if you have to decide where the farm animals go. When you're done, you have an array of boxes, pleasingly filled with like objects: all the "Toy Story" characters, or small stuffed bears, or crayons, or wooden train track.
We've started going on nursery school tours for Ned. The schools I like best are the ones where teachers sort blocks not just by size, but by shape. These teachers understand the beauty of a shelf of books arranged by type: all the skinny hardback picture books, uncluttered by the chunky little boardbooks or floppy limp paperbacks.
I spend a fair amount of time sorting, and it's time you can spend thinking of other things, like what to make for dinner, or the stack of papers you don't have time for, or what party favors a group of 3-year-olds might like, and where you left the Oriental Trading catalog. But when I'm sorting I find myself thinking about the secret lives of toys.
I'm tossing dollhouse furniture into the pink plastic crate, and as I throw in the dad doll, followed by a chair, a bookcase and a bed, I think how chaotic it must seem to them, how maybe the mom doll is yelling at the kids to pick stuff up, and then turning to the dad doll and stamping her plastic foot and saying, "Look at this place! I'm SICK of plastic furniture. I'm SICK of the way the chairs are always scattered around the house! I'm SICK of the way the bed looks on top of that bookcase! What about my systems?"
The dad doll, slumped next to the chair, is looking bushed, as usual. "Look at me," he snaps. "I'm too tired even to sit in that chair! Why can't I just sit and have a beer? I work all day and then I come home and work some more." The mom doll screams, "Stop complaining! At least you get to leave the house every day. I spent my day underneath a pile of plastic dishes!" Then I think how the "Sesame Street" linking figurines were in the same box, and maybe the mom doll is furious because not only is the house a mess, there are uninvited guests and they never have any privacy.
Would they be happier in some other household? Some cleaner, more organized home, where their little fixed smiles might reflect a matching inner feeling of calm satisfaction? I bought these dolls on eBay, and I wonder what kind of house they used to live in, if they miss it, or if, despite how roughly the boys treat them and how the cat stalks around and bats paper near their furniture, they've come to appreciate how lively our house is? Or are they seething?
Now I'm straightening up the skinny paperbacks, which Alex adores. They're British books from the late '60s, with artwork I would have disliked about 10 years ago, but now I love. Very Mary Quant-Carnaby Street. Alex likes the stories because they are simple and direct, and he's memorized about half of the lines so he can repeat them or fill them in if we pause. I like them because of the saturated colors and sharply outlined illustrations. In "Rain," a girl recalls a rainy day at school when her dress got a bit wet and the children had to stay inside during recess. Her teacher is young and has a fashionably short '60s cropped haircut. She wears glasses. I wonder if she has a boyfriend, or if she lives alone in some not particularly hip or safe part of the city, or if she has a roommate who goes out a lot while the teacher stays inside grading papers and wondering if she'll ever meet anyone. All the girls, young teacher included, are wearing miniskirts.
As I give the books a final pat, I imagine the teacher at Sunday lunch with her family. They're talking about a recent episode of Coronation Street. They've run out of something essential and British: Bovril, or Marmite, or Typhoo tea, and the teacher goes out to get more. As she waits on line to pay for it, she bumps into a neighbor's son. He's back from teaching English. (In India or Burma? Singapore? Hong Kong? Some Commonwealth or other.) They reintroduce themselves, make plans to meet for a meal or a film.
While they plan to see "Georgy Girl" or "Billy Liar" or "Alfie" I finish organizing. Final check on toy barn with its silo (always to the left, box of animals in front). Stuffed animals back in the basket behind the door. Boardbooks in a blue crate.
Check on the dollhouse family. Imagine that even if the furniture isn't beautifully arranged in a palatial dollhouse, they have some shreds of hope to hold onto, now that the intruders are gone and the furniture, at least, has been placed right-side-up. The doll mother is even lying on the bed. The father is sitting in the chair. (February 2004)
The last toy is off the living room and has clattered into whatever plastic well Alex or Ned dumped it from an hour ago. The boys have pitched the last of their dinner plastic-ware into the kitchen sink - good thing the fine china is a long way off - and it's time to begin our evening's last round-up.
"Alex! Ned! Time to brush teeth!"
We have a wooden two-step stool the boys stand on before the bathroom mirror, one at a time. Whoever gets there first goes first; whoever gets there second shuts and locks the bathroom door behind him. I've never told them to do this, but apparently they take this nightly ritual seriously. "Bring the stool over, Ned. Watch your toes when he sets it down, Alex."
Alex has the yellow toothbrush, Ned a black, two-piece travel job I found in the bottom of a linen-closet bin last night. Both boys, Ned especially, quickly turn toothbrushes into flat blossoms of bristles. Ned is a little further along in learning to brush his teeth, though his efforts still often degenerate into sucking off the Buzz Lightyear toothpaste. Ned likes to brush by the book, too: Brush! Brush! Bunny, the short history of a bunny, as you can guess, brushing his teeth. "Read the book!" Ned demands before he even puts brush to baby incisor.
"Hop up onto your stool, little bunny," the book reads. "Move the toothbrush up and down. Brush your front teeth and your back teeth. Up and down, up and down."
From where he stands on the stool, Alex's full face appears in the mirror of the medicine cabinet; seems like yesterday when all that appeared was his nose and forehead. I brush Alex's teeth. "It isn't enough that he's learning to brush," his pediatrician said in a testy mood months ago. "His teeth have to brushed clean!" Alex has, however, progressed far since his only visit to a dentist, who specialized in special-needs kids, about two years ago. Then, Alex would only open his mouth to scream (which still facilitates a good dental exam). Also, some dental students checked him over in pre-school and he came with a note that said he claimed he might have had a cavity, but nothing ever came of it.
He freely opens his mouth to let me scrub. Trouble is, he also dances on the stool and claps his hands about his head. "Alex, hold still!"
He sort of does, and I work off all the chicken nuggets and saltines and ice cream and pretzel rods and other stuff that constitutes his diet, and which I'm sure is propelling him toward a first cavity. We've got to get Alex back to the dentist soon. At his last appointment, though, the pediatrician fingered his lips and teeth like a horse trader and clucked with approval.
I brush Alex's front teeth and his back teeth, up and down. It goes quick once he settles down. "Okay Alex, drink." I hand him the plastic cup. He sips, then often shakes the cup in the sink to empty it. Sometimes he declines and cup, and keeps clapping.
"C'mon, Alex, drink. Tonight, huh?" He drinks. "Okay, you're outta here! Dry your hands and face." He gets down off the stool and rubs his face and hands, sort of, on the towel on the rack, then opens the door and heads out, usually straight to his bedroom.
Ned's next. All that's left to me when he brushes is squeezing Buzz's sweet blue glop on the brush, which Ned takes. "Read the book," he says again. He holds the bristles between his front teeth. "'Brush your front teeth and your back teeth. Brush your top teeth and your bottom teeth.' Brush bunny, Ned!"
"Eh-" he says around the brush.
"'Take a big sip of water from your cup, and gargle gargle! ... and spit!'" Ned doesn't usually gargle, but he does spit, right on target near the drain, with an accuracy I find for some reason encouraging. "Dry your hands and face, Ned!" He does, then it's time to dim the lights in the bedroom and read some other books. One of them is entitled "The Loose Tooth." (June 2004)
Until this year, Alex, almost monotonously, logged nine or 10 hours' sleep nightly, with an occasional pitter-patter into mom and dad's bedroom, usually around 4, to see what was happening.
"Alex go to bed!"
We've built a bedtime routine: toy pick-up by 8:15; brushing teeth by 8:25; in the big chair in the room reading or listening to mom sing by 8:30; Alex yawning once by 8:40; Alex yawning hard and often by 8:45; the binkie gently tumbling from his open mouth by 8:50. Ned we'd put to bed or take back out to the living room and let watch TV with us. Sometimes we'd do this with Ned before Alex was asleep, and one of us would keep hammering Alex with Green Eggs and Ham until the binkie dropped, part of a bedtime strategy Jill came to call "divide and conquer."
"Who has Night Duty?" I ask Jill.
"I'd rather get up for the school bus," she says.
Jill and I have worked out a strategy for overnight, in which one of us handles the kids if they get up, the other gets up at 6:30 to wake Alex for the school bus. (On weekends, we split the Night Duty at 4 o'clock.) It's a gamble: 6:30 is 6:30, but if the kids sleep through the night, you get a solid seven hours, maybe more. If they don't, your Night Duty could resemble that of a ship's captain during a hurricane. More than once, too, Jill has nudged me awake to handle the kids even thought she had night duty!
Why did you do that?! I demand in the morning.
Sorry, sweetie. Could you shut the curtains a little bit?
On a bad night, I try to not push Alex back to bed. But I do send him back with fewer and fewer words each time. I start by explaining as I escort him to his positively delicious-looking bed just why he should turn in: the bus is coming in the morning; we're all going to bed, it's time to pointless drivel from dad pointless drivel from dad pointless- My explanations shrivel, eventually, to just taking his hand, hustling him back to the bed, and turning without a word to shut the door. Again and again and again. It takes about five such trips, on a bad night, before peace.
Ned isn't guiltless here, I should say, not during the evening and not during the overnight. Alex usually does go to sleep first, and we often go into their bedroom half an hour after putting Ned to bed and find him sprawled on Alex's mattress and inching his big brother off the side. (I decline to speculate from which of his parents Ned got his sleeping style.) Often too, Jill and I wake up in the wee hours to find Ned dead to the world between us, in our bed. "How did he get between us? How did he do that!?" Jill marvels.
Alex bustles lately between 3 and 5 a.m. My strategy of night duty is to lay down with him on his bed. It's a soft bed. I built it. That was tiring. It has soft blankets. I'll be softly dropping away when his arm will touch my cheek or chest like a warm sausage. I'm starting to lose control of this, too: Last night I had the Duty and took Alex to bed -- I guess, because I have no memory of this -- and laid myself beside him, and when my eyes opened again it was 1 a.m. Alex was softly snoring. I went through the unreality of brushing my teeth at 1:15 a.m. and slid into my own bed. A few hours later, my eyes come open in the dark to see both my sons' shadows in the bed with us ("...how did he do that?.."). Alex tried to shove his feet under me; Ned scrabbled and flapped. What are the odds I'll be able to wake Jill and convince her while she's still groggy that she has Night Duty?
"Go to sleep, Alex. The bus is going - to - come - early! Alex, in three hours I'm to be coming in here to get you up for the school bus, and you are not going to feel like getting up." He won't be the only one. (June 2004)
After her numbskull husband got her whole family into a wrong lane of the Triborough Bridge and, instead of back home to Manhattan, marooned their rental Taurus among about a trillion vehicles on a Queens side street, Jill shot from the car to see what in heck was holding up traffic.
She slammed back in, announced that it was just volume and we were all exhausted after a week on Cape Cod, and then the bad F word slipped out a couple times, under her breath. And then of course Ned, a tender age 3, echoed the F word from the back seat.
I saw Jill's lips tighten to keep in a laugh. "I wasn't saying that, sweetie," she called into the back seat. "Mommy was saying 'quack, quack.'"
I married Jill for her quick wit. (The same wit, come to think of it, that got us misdirected a few minutes before, when I asked her for directions and she turned in the passenger seat next to me and said, "Okay. First, clip your nose hairs.")
We got home eventually - and found a great parking space that probably wouldn't have been available if I hadn't gotten us lost - and were no sooner unpacked than we were, for first time in more half a decade, carrying on almost normal adult New Yorker conversations right in front of the kids.
Of the ruses I've pulled on my kids - detours in the Park to avoid ice cream stands when I was too tired; proclaiming toy stores "closed" even as customers entered and exited right in front of my sons' eyes - I like "quack" the best. It makes Jill and me laugh, for starters, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with a couple that needs a laugh more.
Yes, amazing how domestic life lightens when you put one simple new word in the right spot. I'm making that household with a smart woman, too, to come up with "quack." I thought it was magical how almost all the bad-F-word phrases become kind of gentle when you substitute the Q-word. We haven't done a lot of this substitution: I've never believed in "bullcrap," and, as George Carlin said, "'Shoot' is just 'shit' with two O's."
"Quackface."
"Quackhead."
"Thanks a quacking lot." (We said this one right in front of Jill's parents.)
"Where's the quacking spatula?"
"Ah," said our friend Joe, when he learned about our new word, "and you thought when you were feeding all those ducks in Central Park, they were thanking you..."
"Quack" came along just in time. Jill has lately informed me that I can't say "goddammit" anymore, ever, around the boys. "What the hell does that mean?" Ned wanted to know the other day. I still remember when I ripped the tab on one of Alex's diapers when he was three and said "dammit," only to hear him recite it, over and over and over, a few moments later. Nothing that makes a dad so proud also makes him so worried.
The danger is even greater now (..."I wasn't saying that, sweetie..."). A few weeks ago, Ned tried very hard to tell a mom he'd just met in Burger King about the movie Mighty Wind. MW isn't well-known, and this mom had never heard of the movie until I filled her in, and you could tell that she wanted me to keep Ned clear of her little boy until she figured out what was going on. At a Cape Cod ice cream stand last week, what could have been an awkward moment with a friendly little boy, who was trying to recommend the vanilla swirl a little too ardently, could've been a goddamned quack-up if not for Alex's practiced ability to shake hands.
Worried about what? Worried that because of such words people won't like my boys, or worried that such words will act as a mirror of my household, and so people won't like me or my boys? People seem ready to think little enough of one's children without hearing what the kids have picked up in some rented back seat. (September 2004)
(Jill rebuts last week's essay.)
For the sake of accuracy in reporting (since what Jeff writes about is not, strictly speaking, the complete truth) I'd like to say a few words on a recent topic.
Whenever the subject of using Bad Words comes up, I like to say I'm from Queens, that I don't use these words in front of my children, and that sometimes life is so annoying it just feels good to say a few. I guess I was caught unprepared that September day, after a lovely but long week in Cape Cod, and after a long and not so lovely drive back to New York.
How we wound up in Astoria (which is in Queens) when we were supposed to be in Manhattan. On the Triborough Bridge, which connects Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx in some mysterious way, Jeff said, "Which way should I go?" And I said, clearly, Left. I even pointed left. But Jeff felt he'd be better off hedging his bets and staying in the middle lane, where eventually he found himself drifting to the right. Between feeling exasperated that he wasn't following my directions and having to cope with back-seat demands ("Mommy! Mommy! Want cracker! Want Buzz Lightyear!"), which is much more difficult than driving, especially when you have someone giving you directions, I stopped paying attention. But it wasn't my hands on the wheel, so I'm not accepting any blame for winding up in Queens. Nothing worse than someone asking directions and then not taking them. It reminds me of what a graduate student once told me about how Parisians ask for street directions: By listening huffily to your answer and then interrupting to say, "Non, non!" and then giving you what they think are the correct directions.
The comment about nose hair. What a mean thing to say! People are probably asking, Why would Jeff's wife have said something so cruel? Jeff's account of this not particularly critical event is accurate. Mostly. I'd like to correct the record, however, and point out that I snapped, "First, clip your nose hairs!" after Jeff had already ignored my directions ("Take the left lane off the Triborough") and gone his own way. Then, when he felt himself floundering and clearly couldn't avoid taking the first exit into Queens (either that, or get on the Grand Central Parkway) he turned on me and said, "Why didn?t you give me directions?" So I did.
The parking space. Grasping at a silver lining, Jeff says we got a great parking space when we got back, which we wouldn't have gotten if he hadn't gotten us lost ("Gotten": like it took careful choreography to get there instead of simply not listening). A) It wasn't that great. "Great" means in front of your apartment building. B) Maybe if we hadn't gotten lost, we would have gotten an even better spot. Say, one in front of our building.
The word itself. It wasn't actually under my breath. If it had been, Ned might not have heard it so clearly that he was able to repeat it with such perfect clarity, inspiring me to change the initial consonant and tinker with the internal vowel. Something about the sound of my three-year-old saying The Word over and over again galvanized me.
Using our new word ... ... feels pretty good! It's nice to have a secret from the world, though most people with at least a 6th-grade education can probably figure out what you really mean. My family certainly knows now. "What a quacking lie!" Jeff said the other night, on an unrelated topic. "You can?t say that anymore," noted Uncle Rob. Still, it is a relief to have a bad word I can say in front of my children, though I think they will probably pick this up eventually.
Everything else seems true enough, especially the part about how quacking smart I am.
(JS replies: I too find the word handy, such as during last night when we were watching Matchstick Men and Nicolas Cage called a doctor "an f---ing quack!" I turned to Jill with an index finger raised and corrected him: "No. 'A quacking f---." We shared a laugh after a tough weekend.) (September 2004)
Unless someone's sick, each overnight starts the same: the slide between the sheets around 10:30; the tingle of blood down my legs; the sudden moan from my tired, tired soul, and either me or Jill proclaiming, "This is the best part of the day. Sad to say." Then I read until the words swim, click off the light, place my head on the pillow, and within a few minutes the world goes away.
The world returns some time later, my glass of sleep shattered with a touch or push, or the slap and scurry of puppet-sized feet that not so long ago in my life, in the dark, would have seized my heart and sent me through the ceiling. Tonight, it's Ned and/or Alex.
I often have "night duty" (I get to sleep an extra half hour in the morning), so Jill touches my arm in the dark and murmurs, "Jeff..." in that pillow voice of hers that I once longed to hear and long to hear forever.
"...Jeff, could you take Ned and/or Alex back to his bed?"
That voice of hers in the dark. Once she woke me when she had night duty!
I've tried to share a mattress with my guys, but trying to sleep beside Ned is like trying to sleep beside an Alaskan King Crab who's had too much coffee. Alex, of course, likes to sleep diagonally.
I try to not glance at the green numerals on the clock-radio, but always do. 3 a.m. and change I can live with. 5 a.m. and change counts as a full night. Anything before 1 a.m. kicks me. All nights feel the same, at first, strangely, until I actually look at the clock. We have a never-sleeping clock here, in the dining room, on the VCR - all the way, in fact, back to the boys' room.
Alex is easy to take back to his bed, though. He's often on his feet anyway, beside our bed, rooting the piles of clothing in the rocking chair for something soft to cuddle. I tap his back. "C'mon, Alex, back to bed." Patter patter patter as he scoots down the corridor, out into the dining room, clearing with bat's vision the table that cracks me on the thigh more nights than not. I trail his shadow into his room, see the shade of his T shirt scramble onto his bed. He snuggles down on his twin bed, where I keep a spare pillow from the couch and a bed sheet. Sometimes I lay down beside him, my head at the foot of the bed, and if I'm lucky I don't pop awake until 5:30, wondering where in hell I am.
Ned's usually more of a pry job. Unless he's really out there between us, he starts with the air raid siren the second I lift his head from my mattress. He'll screech "Noooo!" and/or "Mommy!" until I'm sure the neighbors must be phoning the 23rd Precinct. Some nights, Jill implore me to just bring him back. Some nights, she'll accuse me of making him scream.
But this is night after night now, and I'm feeling pushed around. I lug Ned to the couch, flip him onto his stomach - just to allow me to pat his back better; not to muffle his neighbor-waking cries in the cushions - and tell him we all have to go to sleep. This worked well the other night, but that was the first time I'd tried it, and taking Ned by surprise is already harder as he closes in on age four.
(Jill and Ned watched a new reality show last night about nannies who rescue troubled families. One couple with young kids hadn't slept together in four years, because the mommy kept giving in and sleeping with her son. The show had twin benefits in my home: making Ned drowsy, and showing Jill that the Stimpsons aren't on the absolute bottom of the Overnight With Little Kids barrel.)
Speaking of "four," that's about the middle of Alex's graveyard shift on a bad night. My reminders that the school bus is coming "in a few hours!" bounce off him like popcorn. He kicks his legs and chatters like a squirrel. I get harsh - I want him to know that this behavior at this pitch-black hour is pissing off his parents off. If I get too harsh, he calls for mommy. "Ah mommy!" he says, arm stretched out rigid in the general direction of our bedroom.
"Mommy's asleep!" I hiss. "You're stuck with me! Go to sleep!"
On the most lively nights, it all turns into a game of Musical Beds: Me asleep alone on Alex's bed. Alex asleep over on Ned's bed. Ned asleep on my bed, and in my spot. Jill asleep where she should be. I consider moving her to the couch, just to get us through the night properly. (November 2004)
(Jill again contributes this week's essay.)
About a year ago life had become so unbearably cluttered – children, toys, school applications, medical appointments, lists, worries, actual clutter (itself deserving of a parenthetical list, only this would consist of piles: of magazines, newspapers, mail, things I mean to get to, school stuff, invitations, receipts, recipes, phone messages, clothes, an old booster seat, tote bags from software vendors, shopping bags) – that I had begun dreaming about white. All white dishes. White walls. White sheets. White tile. White T-shirts. White underwear. White bathrobe. White jeans. White containers and white things contained. White writing paper. White envelopes. White blankets. White towels. (Not white shoes, however.) What would I listen to? The White Stripes, I guess, or the White Album, or Barry White, or James White and the Blacks.
Around this time, I bought a bunch of white cardboard magazine holders at Ikea because I was there and they were cheap. These sat around in shrink-wrap for about six months until I established a blinding row of them to act as lateral files. I admit I almost never look at anything I’ve ever filed. Still, it’s hard not to file. What to do with articles you think are going to save your life? Or at least your social life?
This shining block on an otherwise ratty looking shelf brought to mind the organizing binge I started about seven years ago, when I discovered within myself a capacity to organize that surprised me after the years of not being able to find things. One day out of the blue it occurred to me to take all the extension cords we owned and put them all in the same place. It may not seem like much to you, but it made an unmistakable difference the next time we wanted one and were able to pluck a cord out of the closet within seconds.
But when my first son was born (and hospitalized, and complicated, and out of our hands for over a year) I just got away from All That. Alex was in the hospital for a year, and I was hardly in a mood to whistle while I worked at organizing and whipping up cheery meals. At some point I believe I stopped opening mail altogether and then had to spend some months digging out of a few holes created by that. On the other hand, Jeff did keep on paying bills, and we never ran out of toilet paper. So there.
Now Alex is six and still somewhat complicated. But we’re stable – all four of us, now – so it’s time to get back to looking through boxes at the inventory. Have to face that the inventory consists of mostly crap. Here’s what strikes me about Life, Stuff and Organizing (to paraphrase those silly California Closet ads): life’s like a video game. Just like in Tetris or Space Invaders, a constant influx of stuff comes streaming into your life, and the less you can control it, the faster it comes. The more quickly it piles up.
I needed new containers, and I needed to conform rigidly to container type. This sequence of very organized thinking led to a container binge, with many happy hours spent in The Container Store, a place I love because of the feeling of serenity I get from staring at shelves of white plastic boxes or glass jars.
At Target a few months later I moved on to white mini drawers. These completely revamped my horrible linen closet, a space that has the double-edged virtue of being both capacious and very deep. It holds a lot of stuff; which translates to holding a lot of crap, since you can cram it all in. For a misguided while, I used plastic shoeboxes without their tops to hold surplus toiletries and stuff we don’t use everyday: a very big mistake. Tons of stuff in a crazy assortment of shapes and sizes got shoved into those boxes. We could never find anything. I hated looking at them.
Those little drawers from Target hold strictly curated collections -- dental things only, for instance – and it is a revelation to open one and see spare toothbrushes, dental floss and toothpaste, but no cold medicine, shampoo or sunblock. Another drawer holds Band-Aids, antibiotic ointment and skin lotions, but no thermometers or water balloons. I’m thinking maybe our cat can have her own drawer, too: cat brush, nail clipper, hairball remedy.
I find I have a real talent for thinking in rigid categories. (Maybe this is why I did so well in quantum mechanics in high school for one brief shining period in an otherwise dismal academic science career. Or maybe not.) I think sorting is the root of all effective organizing. Years ago I realized that a child’s room could look tidy even with toys spilled on the floor – as long as the floor was absolutely clear and the toys were all the same type. All Legos, all farm animals, all wooden blocks. What looks terrible is that mismatched welter of stuff: a jumble of dollhouse furniture, animals, blocks, an old phone or keyboard the kids like to play with.
Why people (by which I mean my husband and sons) can’t see how wrong this is, I don’t know. Jeff flapped on about how fun it was, when he was a kid, to paw through unsorted toys to find the things he really wanted, but I always found that rather frustrating. An early sign that Alex may take after me came when he was about 18 months. He picked up a wooden pounding toy – just the box – and starting looking around. Though he could not talk, I knew he was looking for the wooden balls and hammer.
I started labeling small boxes for the boys’ stuff, and it works as long as the main offenders of sorting, Jeff and Ned, cooperate. (November 2004)
"I intend to attack Patton and annihilate him -- before he does the same to me." -- Field Marshall Erwin Rommel
The e-mail peters out during Friday afternoon. Cubicles empty; the office grows hushed as the week dissolves into another weekend. "What are you doing this weekend?" a co-worker asks. "Got anything good planned?" He just got married. He has no kids. Maybe he wants kids.
"I intend to exhaust the kids this weekend," I tell him, "before they do the same to me."
Playgrounds and McDonalds were the main provisions of my weekends not long ago, when I'd buckle Alex and Ned into the double-stroller and leave around 10 in the morning, wheeling that bastard of a Mclaran up and down and over the paths of upper Central Park. I'd get back around 4, water bottles empty, granola gone, half-full cans of Pringles rolling around in the bottom basket of the stroller. The boys would be pink-cheeked in winter and fall, muddy and tired in spring and summer. "Bet you were tired too after those days, huh?" Aunt Julie once asked.
Strangely, no. The double on a 30-degree hill was straightforward work, which I could actually use on a Saturday after spending another workweek sitting on my brain in some office, waiting for the hush of Fridays.
These days, weekends aren't what they used to be. For about a year, Alex has been attending a recreation camp on Saturdays -- "Like school, without the homework," said one organizer. He scampers onto the bus at a quarter to nine, and returns all smiles about 3 p.m. Once I went to see what happens on these suddenly mysterious Saturdays, and I found him in some sort of cafeteria rolling a ball around with another special-needs boy and a counselor, and laughing his head off. Another time I found him on his back with his legs in the air, patiently waiting while a counselor strapped plastic roller skates on his feet. Then they strapped on a helmet. "You're getting him to wear a helmet!?" I said.
On Sundays, Alex also has a home "res-hab" nurse come in for a few hours. She often brings art projects for Alex, or toys to help him learn how to work a zipper. Sometimes they take walks. Jill and I split the time with Ned.
In fact most of the time on weekends while Alex is off wearing helmets in his new world, Jill and I still have Ned. After he breakfasts on oatmeal and Buzz Lightyear, I might take him to run a few errands, such as the bank. I'll take him to the ATM - careful to let him press the buttons only before I've slid in my card, or after I've taken it out. Maybe we'll hit a drug store; Ned is still appeased by a $4 keychain.
On pleasant mornings, I take Ned on a walk through Central Park. The paths seem easier to handle -- maybe too easy, as Ned asks, "Dad, are we going to go climb on rocks?" Most of these boulders are bigger than my first three New York City apartments combined, but Ned goes after them as if they're miniature El Capitans, regardless or water or moss or busted beer bottle. "Ned, let's go down and go this way..." He stands there. Then he goes in the other direction. I don't follow. His jacket starts to blend with the bushes between us. He turns back to see if I'm coming, and his face is a dot. then he comes. Pretty soon, I guess, Ned will have stuff of his own to do on the weekends: school friends, birthday parties. Places where he'll go wear a helmet without me knowing it. He comes back to me on the path, his jacket flashing through the trees as he breaks into a run. We have to get back by three, when Alex comes home. Sometimes I miss the stroller. Someday I'll miss having Monday be my favorite day of the week. (January 2005)
Melatonin is God's gift. -- father of autistic triplets.
The house I grew up in had a painting on the wall of Little Boy Blue. He was indeed asleep with his horn in a haystack, pink lips parted, eyelids gently shuttered. The horn across his chest. I think there was a sheep somewhere. I think of that painting as I come into the boys' room at bedtime and find them both kicking the wall.
When he wants to rile me, Alex sometimes kicks our living room wall that has neighbors on the other side. We don't share this bedroom wall with anyone, but still, it's bedtime. "Alex, Ned, bedtime. Settle down!"
"House! Frog!" says Alex, meaning his plastic toy house, and the rubber lizard with the tail he loves to chew. He raises one arm. "Water!" he adds.
"No," I reply. "Put your head down. You have to catch a school bus in the morning."
"Water!" says Ned.
Ned lays off kicking the wall, and kicks Alex, who kicks back. "No water. Head down, Ned. And I oughtta wake you up at 6:30, just like I do Alex. Alex has to get up a lot earlier than you do." Ned sleeps like a college student on summer break most mornings. "Would you like me to wake you at 6:30?" I ask him.
He grins. "Yes," he says. I'm exhausted. I hate grinning.
Both boys have stuffed things. Alex often grabs the stuffed Bert and Ernie; sometimes he grabs neither, and after we get the boys to sleep, I often go into the living room and find Bert on his side on the floor beside his couch, back-to me with his arms in front of him, as if sleeping off a bender. Ned likes "Bullie," a giant red Beanie Baby bull. Sometimes his teddy bear.
Some bedtimes, Ned sticks a binkie in his mouth, again mimicking Alex. Alex shouldn't have one but he has these needs. Ned looks ridiculous with a binkie, but "Why shouldn't Ned have one if Alex does?" Jill wants to know. "It's just easier to give in."
"Put your head down, Ned. Bedtime."
Alex keeps popping up like a "Pirates of the Caribbean" model I built as a kid, where this skeleton pirate bolts up out of pine coffin and stabs a treasure map. It was really cool. I cemented it together while Little Boy Blue looked down. Alex is looking for one of Jill's old black T shirts to cuddle. "Head down, Alex."
"Water!"
"Maybe if you didn't eat three hot dogs for dinner..." I say.
He looks right at me and throws the binkie away and starts to laugh, and I start to think how that gesture bodes ill for his life or mine in the years ahead, and I'm tired to the bones of my legs. My eyes feel like they got too close to Windex. We have a particularly rough bedtime on Sunday nights, when I'm sequestered with the boys in their bedroom while Jill gets some peace to watch "Desperate Housewives." I want to say right here that often the boys just fall asleep on the couch beside me during "Battlestar Galactica" on Friday nights, and "Galactica" starts an hour later than "Housewives." An hour later!
The trick, I guess, is limiting their antics to a smaller and smaller area of the bedroom, then a smaller and smaller area of the bed, until they wind down. Alex keeps bolting up and slamming his head down onto the pillow until he finally miscalculates and bumps himself on the headboard. "If you'd calmed down like I told you to..." I say, rubbing his head. My big sister has a similar favorite saying: "It's your own fault!", and I guess I never understood where she got that until I had kids.
Most nights Jill joins in - and, in fact, does most of the work of getting them to sleep, in the form of singing. She can carry a tune with remarkable effectiveness in the minutes past 9 p.m., and her repertoire can generally make their eyelids heavy unless she tries a standard such as, say, "Dance to Your Daddy" and Alex greets the first bars with a hard shake of the head and a loud "Noooo!" Many nights we resort to the little silver cups of crushed melatonin. Alex has evolved to the point of actually drinking the water in which we try to dissolve the tablets. Ned tried it once, insisting without having tried it that he "loved menatowna!"
"I hate menatowna!" he says now.
I read him Pie-rats Ahoy, or What's Inside of Me?, a 1952 human anatomy book Jill bought ("Beneath the skin and muscle that cover your body are many parts called 'organs'..."). Inside five minutes, especially on a school night, Alex is asleep. Lucky boy. I confirm this by plucking the binkie from his lips. Around this time, we start thinking Ned is getting slighted in the Being Sung Asleep By Mommy Department, so she settles next to him to sing Gershwin, I think, or "You've Got A Friend In Me" from Toy Story. I sneak out.
A few minutes later, Jill emerges and gives me the thumb's up. I give her the beer can up. I get her wine. "I can occasionally put myself to sleep while I'm singing to the boys," she says. We begin our 45-minute evening, and try to imagine a time when we won't feel exhausted. (April 2005)
(Jill again provides this week's essay.)
"Cookie! Cookie! Cookie! Cookie! Cookie! Cookie! Cookie!"
"C?mon, you son of a bitch. MOVE IT!"
"Door? Door? Go to bed? Go to bed?"
How we reveal ourselves on vacation (which is pretty much the way we reveal ourselves at home) starts in the car on our way to Cape Cod. Ned is demanding, insistent. Jeff tense, distracted and dissatisfied, mad at someone whose face he'll never see. Alex trying to make sense of the world. Me: a paragon of sweetness and helpful service as I deal out cookies, sandwiches, driving advice, most of which is immediately rejected.
I like car trips, and not just because Jeff is doing all the driving. I like the sense of fun times about to unspool. The beach is waiting. There's music to sing along to (I brought the iPod accessory thing-y that plays it through a car stereo, and insisted on stopping for triple-A batteries to power it). When we're hungry, no crappy McDonalds for us: The latest sandwich (see below) is tightly wrapped in the cooler. Behind us: laundry, e-mail, bills, deadlines. In front of us: fried oysters, racks of brochures for outlet shopping and pirate adventures, driving back from the beach wearing a bathing suit in such low humidity that our hair is dry when we get home.
So I enjoyed the drive to the Cape even though my car job is the non-stop caterer in the front seat.
The first time the four of us went on vacation, Ned was just months old, Alex hadn't yet started school, and the open road stretched out for about 12 hours. That trip was memorable for Alex puking in the car and Ned being pretty calm in every situation: sitting on the beach with a friend of Jeff's he'd never met, and being rescued by a family in a restaurant when Jeff and I both had to clean up Alex after an accident so monumental I didn't think I could change him anywhere but the open air of the parking lot. For all Ned knew, he'd never see us again, and this nice Downeast family in the pie restaurant was now going to take care of him. He took it well. I never got my pie.
Last summer Ned had a series of tantrums. Jeff watched one of them from inside a pizza place, where all he could see was Ned's mouth, silent but open in the darkness.
It wasn't really clear then what kind of travelers we'd be, but now on our third trip, I think I'm getting the picture. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, but a lifetime of family vacations starts with one trip. Pile up enough road miles with your family, and the pattern starts to emerge.
Ned is either a bundle of nerves ("I'm afraid of the seaweed." "The sand will hurt me." "Will there be sharks?"), or just likes to present himself as unusually discerning. Alex is notable for being near impossible to pin down. Last summer he ate fried chicken from local roadside stands without a peep; this summer nothing but crackers, except for the fried oysters he decided to help himself to. Jeff is consistently crabby on the way there, a trait I first saw on our way to London years ago ("Why are we even doing this? Is this going to be any fun at all?"), and an enthusiastic planner of return trips on the way back.
I'm always interested in what we'll be eating. Notice I still remember some pie I didn't get to have at a really promising looking restaurant in Maine four years ago. Highlights of the Cape include the kale soup (I'm not in love with kale, but this has slices of linguica, a Portuguese sausage), fried oysters, soft-serve coffee ice cream and a new discovery: the very addicting dirt bombs from the Cottage Street Bakery in Orleans.
Ned doesn't sing much, but on the way back from the Cape he sang constantly: Jingle bell, jingle bell, all the, all the way... oh my god, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah HEY! (Repeat about 60 times.)
Alex didn't run away. We had strange weather over our five days. The ocean was refreshing on a hot day, confusingly icy on a cold day. We arrived in blazing heat, sleep-walked through the next day. We awoke to one day so perfect we went to Long Pond early. No one was there and the water was well-balanced between cool and warm. Alex enjoyed the water enormously. Ned was concerned about small fish. ("Will they bite me?") Alex was interested in having me hold him and walk him out a few feet so he could be cling to me and be fully wet, but not have to do any actual work.
Ned learned how to pop the trunk using the automatic panel on the rental car keys. He also pressed the red button just to see what it would do. Ned ate -- and liked -- fried oysters. Alex ate a couple, too, amazingly. Jeff thought they were slimy.
Vacation hours in the car don't seem to have increased Ned's tolerance for being strapped in. "We've been riding in the car ALL DAY!" he informed me recently. We'd been in the car for about 10 minutes.
Our new car sandwich (in case anyone's interested): a pressed Italian sandwich you make the night before by scooping out most of the insides of a crusty round Italian loaf and filling it with layers of black olive paste, roasted red peppers, salami, marinated artichoke hearts, provolone, fresh basil and parsley. You drizzle with balsamic vinegar just before serving so it doesn't get soggy, and you can find the complete recipe on Martha Stewart's Web site. (July 2005)
-Alex has done some interesting eating this summer. The other day offered a heat index of 106, so I ran him around playgrounds and walked him around sidewalks until he was downright grateful to come home and eat something new. I got a sense of what he wanted when I was finishing the second of two peaches and he kept coming over to the couch and touching the leftover pits. I dashed to the kitchen and came back with a slice of cold peach. I touched the peach, then touched his lips, and he giggled. He took a bite and giggled more as the peach was crushed between his teeth. Then he took on a serious, back-to-business expression, and ate the rest of the slice. He refused to eat another slice, and has refused since to eat another. This comes just days after he got up in the middle of the "Elmo Visits the Firehouse" DVD, ran into the kitchen, and demanded a glass of milk, which I gave him and which he drank. Elmo drinks a glass of milk when he visits the firehouse. I wish Elmo would eat a steak and salad.
-Alex is also beginning to communicate better without words, usually to Ned's inconvenience. For example, the other night I was home alone with the boys; they were in the living room watching something, and I was in the kitchen washing something. Suddenly I heard Alex screech, which he does when Ned bedevils him. I rushed in. Alex was sitting on a cushion in front of the TV. Ned was on the couch. "Ned, leave Alex alone!" I said. I returned to the kitchen. A few minutes went by, and Alex was screeching again. Again I dashed in. Again Ned was on the couch and Alex in front of the TV. Ned was in exactly the same position as a moment before.
"Ned, what are you doing?"
"I'm watching TV."
I considered this.
"Have you moved off the couch?"
"No."
Back to the kitchen. A few minutes later, and again with the screeches. This time I noticed specifically that Ned's legs were positioned the same as last time.
"Alex!"
Thus it appears that Alex fully got the joke a few nights later when Ned was deep into "Sponge Bob" and Alex decided that that moment would be a splendid one to begin watching his tape of "Elmocize." He rose to put it in. "Alex, no!" I said. "Ned's watching 'Sponge Bob'!" Back I went to the kitchen (I like to spend a lot of time there when I'm home alone with my kids.) I popped my head back around the corner and caught Alex again about to insert the tape. "Alex, no." I hid around the corner a moment, and once again popped out. Alex was still sitting. He looked at me, and began to laugh.
-Alex has lost two front baby teeth. We wish we had them, but we think one went down with some chocolate. The other Alex might have left in Ned's arm.
-Underwear is all over our apartment, and I'm not responsible. The toilet seats are often up. The boys are learning toilet-training. Ned will soon get himself together on this -- he'd better, with pre-K and peer pressure looming. It also seems Alex has entered the potty track, though note that peer pressure doesn't mean much to the autistic. This is all I'm going to say about toilet training until it's time to talk about mine.
-The boys love to take out the trash. Ned often brings a toy, and spends most of this "chore" flinging his toy down the hall and running after it. Alex can almost take the trash out himself. He loves to dash down the hall, wrestle open the heavy door to the trash chute room, pull open the chute, and fling in the bag. I'd let him do it unescorted if it weren't for his habit of afterwards trying to run into other people's apartments.
-Ned won't eat his dinner, not on any night, no matter what Jill makes. "Have I had this?!" he demands over the pasta, spinach-and-potato casserole, Mexican goulash. "Yes you have!" Jill fires back. "Have I ever given you anything you haven't liked?" Apparently yes, but I nonetheless try to explain to her that I also used to like plain food when I was a kid. Tonight, I'm whipping up macaroni with butter and salt, and expect no trouble from Ned.
-We must fix the leak under the sink, and get a second twin bed for the boys' rooms. Details as they come in. (August 2005)
The book says "it's fun to have fun." Sponge Bob sings to archvillian Plankton about fun ("...'F' is for the friends you share it wi-iithhh...") "What do you do for fun?" my friend Jon asked way back when Alex was still in the hospital. It was a good question then. I didn't think it would also be a good question now.
For example, the other day we were crouched on the sidewalk on W. 72nd Street, trying to pick apart a grilled hot dog so Alex would eat it from a paper plate balanced on my knee. We happened to be in front of a bar. "Remember when we had that nice talk in there?" Jill asked me. (At least I assumed she was talking to me, and not to Alex or Ned.)
I did remember. We were poised to begin dating. I was sure that night, in the flicker of the table candle, that I'd never seen such a beautiful face as Jill's. I still-
"Alex don't drop it! Hot dogs aren't free!" Plankton, incidentally, has his own take on that song, and it more fits my mood these days. "'F' is for 'fire' that burns down the town!.."
That talk in the candlelight with the beautiful face was "pre-K" ("pre-kids"), before Jill and I gave up fun for some sort of perverse biological fulfillment. Pre-k: When Jill and I got places on time, hung up only our own coats unless we were being polite, could actually sit down through a meal, and everyone was happy we came, or at least not as obviously, at times, unhappy. No doubt the antics of autism add to this, well, fire, but probably everybody with little kids is in the same boat. My uncle used to tell the story of when my cousins were little, and he and my aunt would head to her mother's. My grandmother used to sit there and make my aunt cry, so the story goes, for reasons now best buried with some of the participants. That was around 1960, and I can see it: My grandmother's kitchen table, that same wallpaper, my uncle with black hair, my aunt's Kennedy-era doo, the boys who are now almost grandparents themselves shooting about. Maybe my grandmother did make my aunt cry. Maybe too my aunt was, for the first time in her life, more exhausted than she'd ever dreamed possible.
I theorize that people with kids who are about five years old are usually liked best only by other people with kids about five years old. "It's a kind of biological imperative," I babbled one night at dinner, liking how the syllables sounded around my pasta, while Jill chewed her salad and likely wished I'd just shut up and Ned took the delicious dish Jill had really just tossed together and set about tossing it apart. Alex had long since finished his hot dog, and sent the plastic plate clattering into the sink.
"Maybe it forces you into isolation, and in that isolation the family truly forms," I think I said.
"Have you made this for me before?" Ned fired at Jill. "Do I like it?"
Alex grabbed my arm. "Chocolate!" he demanded.
For fun last night, I assembled Ned's new bed, the fun stemming from what turned out to be the misbegotten idea that two beds would actually facilitate my sons' sleeping through the night.
Jill and I have about a 30-minute evening. I have time to gulp two glasses of wine before checking on the boys and finishing loading the dishwasher, brushing my teeth, anointing myself with the balms of middle age. Jill does all this, too, except maybe she gets in online time and one glass of wine. (I worry about Jill's drinking. I don't think she does it enough. It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.) In bed I read before shutting my eyes for a snooze before Alex/Ned leaps on us in the middle of the night. For fun the next morning, I go to work.
They'd better enjoy it, those two pink petals of youth, on this eve of Labor Day. For Alex heads to second grade and Ned to his own version of Pre-K in a few weeks, and both will find his days filled with a new adult. Mr. Yellow Bus will come a-honking once more at 7:30, and pretty soon every weekday morning mom and dad will come a-looming through the chill of dawn, looking for them both. Then the fun will begin. (August 2005)
For me, dad to an autistic son, New Orleans and Katrina confirmed what I believe we've all thought, usually to ourselves, about the disadvantaged: We'll help them when their city floods. I'm no fan of our government's "response" to Katrina, of course, but I think our attitude toward those who can't motor it out of town when a hurricane's coming has been fermenting for generations. Not to mention our attitude about maintaining levees.
Still. What was it like, I think as I watch Alex sleep in our New York apartment, to have an autistic child down there? In the heat and the sludge and the looters? Your home gone, right down to the "Elmo" tapes, most of your binkies, and the silken T shirts of Jill's that you sleep with every night? What would it have been like with Alex in the Superdome?
Dear Reader Cindy (not her real name) was in Mississippi, not Louisiana. She and her husband had quadruplets back in 2003, two of whom survived their early years to enjoy Katrina: James (not his real name, either), a 22-weeker (1 lb. 2 oz.), and "Helen" (23 weeks, 1 lb, 1 oz. ). James has a trach and limited vision; Helen was blinded by ROP Stage 5. Katrina didn't especially care.
"We're doing pretty good," Cindy writes. "I was one of the lucky ones that had minor damage to my house. A lot of my family members lost their homes and more. Unfortunately, I lost my job due to the storm: I worked at the President Casino as an assistant reservation manager for 10 years or so." What seems to bother her a lot is that she still has "a roof over my head at this time, and others do not. Bills keep rolling in and money keeps running out. But I'm very happy I have my family since all we have been through with them. If we made it through the NICU days with the babies, we can for sure get through this."
Good point. Rather than send cash (always in short supply, as here too the bills keep rolling in), Jill and I shipped three cartons of newborn supplies to the Mississippi chapter of the March of Dimes: corn starch, diapers, formula, blankets, tiny shirts, storybooks, and, I confess, a copy of Alex.
"Thank you so very much for the supplies," wrote back Lynda Buntyn of the Mississippi MOD chapter. "They could not have come at a better time. We got a call this morning from a local hospital that just delivered a 3-lb. preemie and two full-term babies to evacuee mothers who have nothing."
What would it have been like to lose our hospital in 1998 or 1999? To watch Alex's doctors and nurses fleeing town in their SUVs, their tires raising wakes on flooded, packed highways? To know that if Alex's bells went off, no ambulance, even no helicopter, would come? It can't compare, of course, but we did go through 9/11 and the Northeast blackout with Alex, and I can tell you that in such emergencies, special needs can become truly "special."
Oh well, no hurricanes come this far north, and what are the odds anything devastating is ever going to happen to New York City? Except next winter, maybe, when the fallout of Katrina and Rita jack up oil prices. To cheer Cindy, I told her to think of us next February, when the wind chill in New York will be 10-below and Mississippi will be getting mid-60s.
"You guys will definitely be thought about in February," Cindy replied. "I could not imagine being in that kind of weather!"
Ha ha. I also wrote back to the March of Dimes asking if they needed anything else, and saying I assumed none of the babies was named "Katrina."
"The list we received from the hospital includes onesies, blankets, baby shampoo, corn starch powder, baby towels, baby bath, and baby washcloths," Buntyn wrote. "And no, I don't think we will have very many babies named 'Katrina.'"
How about that? The night they arrived, those diapers that just a few days before had sat cozy in a Lexington Avenue CVS were catching Deep South wee-wee! We're shipping two more cartons, one of which Jill just got around to taking to the post office. Sorry they're late. I wish I could've told Jill that there was a rush. (October 2005)
I wasn't looking forward to this year's Thanksgiving for the same reason I hadn't looked forward to the past half dozen Thanksgivings: I'm not a Detroit Lion so I have the day off, and I've always had to spend it chasing my kids. But after this year, I have two suggestions for a successful Thanksgiving:
1. Drink more than you eat, and
2. Have it at Jill's cousin's house.
A few beers, a couple of glasses of red wine (really smooth), a glass of champagne, another beer, and after that I sort of remember swaying for a few minutes beside various half-empty glasses to make sure they were abandoned before I grabbed them and headed to another room. I believe the pious call these "heeltaps."
We went to the house of Jill's cousins, Carol and Sid. They live in New Jersey, in a house that makes me hum the "Sopranos" theme every time I pull in the driveway. We went to a pool party there just before 9/11 (no connection), and that remains one of the happiest days of recent years for me. I don't believe Carol and Sid have ever thrown a bad party.
Thanksgiving was about 20 people. Hors d'oeuvres included a bucket of iced shrimp. Like most who serve me cold shrimp and cocktail sauce, these are pretty nice people. When Alex was deep in the PICU, for instance, Sid said, "Well, if your travels with Alex ever bring you to central New Jersey, you know where you can stay." That was a bright lifeline during the Alex Medical Epic. Sid and Carol's own two kids are Ben and Jonah. Strapping boys, and, I believe, upstanding people. I hope Alex and Ned turn out like Ben and Jonah. I hope I can still turn out like Ben and Jonah.
Ned you can fire and forget at a party (particularly if his hero Jonah's around), but it's with concern I bring Alex to sprawling family events in homes filled with breakables. "There's nothing here he can break that matters!" Cousin Carol maintained. Bold attitude, and once again I wished Alex could live here, especially on four-day-long holiday weekends. Alex has been to this house, let's see, once since that 2001 pool party, and on this Thanksgiving he bolted directly for the door leading to the basement playroom.
All of us spent the early part of the party playing zone defense against Alex, one of us picking him up in escort as he flew from the basement to the master bedroom to the kitchen to the upstairs. Carol's dad lives with them, and needs home oxygen, just like Alex used to. Alex never failed to step carefully over the cannula tubing.
At one point Alex did get out the front door. Unsupervised, he dashed down the driveway, then hooked around the back of the house, ran up the stairs to the deck, and back in the patio door. And then he did it again, to make sure he knew the way. He also spent a lot of time under the eye of Jonah, who loves kids. There's a picture of Jonah holding Alex in the PICU, carefully angling his arm around the CPAP tubes. Jonah is pretty responsible. Last time I really saw him was four years ago, when he was about 14. At this Thanksgiving, he folded up the front of his T shirt and carried half a dozen beers from the basement fridge like a practiced pro; he also seemed honestly willing to take a stab at making his grandfather a martini. I think that's responsible; a lot of kids Jonah's age ignore their grandfather.
Then I found Alex and Jonah in Jonah's room, where there is a stereo, a computer, and shelves of books, in addition to the TV and VCR/DVD player. Alex was watching a "Mother Goose" tape. Jonah was on the floor, his pre-parent eyes glassy. "How do you STAND this?" Jonah asked me. Ah, youth. But I did note that this bored teenager wasn't at his computer or his books or his stereo. He was doing nothing except watching Alex watch "Mother Goose," because he knew that's where his responsibility was.
They love my boys here. Last year at the funeral of Jill's mom, Carol bit Ned's cheek, just like my Aunt Freda used to do to me. They also respect Alex; Carol even negotiated with Alex for a hug. The kicker, I think, is that last summer Carol and Sid let us use their Cape Cod house free right in the $1,500-a-week season! No small gesture when you realize they've got one son at Cornell and another who will probably also go a college that annually costs as much as I annually make.
So that's my recommendation for a successful Thanksgiving. And if you have to come next November, keep away from my shrimp, and watch your glass. (December 2005)
I took a few weeks off, but Alex and Ned did not. Here are the headlines:
-Alex is using a few sentences. The other night he got out of the bath and said, clearly, "It's so cold!" As I've always said, if the language would just emerge, the whole picture would change.
-Ned has been curious about death. "You're going to die Sunday," he told me the other night, walking home from the subway. "Ned," I fired back, "I didn't say I was going to die 'Sunday.' I said 'Someday'!" "Yeah," he replied, "yeah, Sunday."
-Alex is taking liquid stuff without a wrestling match. Luckily, these liquids include mango-flavored kids' vitamins, V8 Juice, and two white powders that help him poop. On the subject of the latter, Jill has played the cards with precision in getting Alex to realize that a toilet bowl isn't just a place to dump a pound of Aunt Julie and Uncle Rob's $11-a-bag crystal cat litter.
-Alex seems to also want to help empty and fill the dishwasher. Not sure how I know this, but he's been eagerly dumping liquids down the sink, such as glasses of water, full cartons of milk, and Jill's cups of tea. For some reason, I think this means he's ready to help fill the dishwasher.
-On Super Bowl Sunday, Alex dumped a pound of Aunt Julie and Uncle Rob's $11-a-bag crystal cat litter down their toilet. Don't tell Uncle Rob, who has admitted that this phenomenon has "never come up before."
-Ned is becoming a whiz at peeling shrimp and making meatballs. A few weeks ago he made something like three pounds of meatballs, and in fact we lent him out for the afternoon to a neighbor who needed to make five pounds of hamburger into meatballs. Does anyone know the going hourly rental rate for this? Also, under the kindly eye of a former special-ed teacher who we had over for a Christmas party, Alex has learned how to put the toppings on pizza. Both boys are sort of becoming prep chefs.
-Alex's sleep has gone to pieces again. He bounces up anywhere from 1:30 to 4, and is sometimes up chirping for one to two hours. We're working with time-release Melatonin, something called Quietude that dissolves as I look at it, and assorted other stuff to try to make sure we get a night of sleep once again and I don't keel over of a heart attack before age 50. On Sunday.
-Ned loved shredding the Times for Toast's box. We started using newspaper, torn into inch-thick strips, in the cat's box after she had surgery a few years back and the vet said it would be a perfectly effectively idea and much cheaper than, say, $11-a-bag crystal cat litter. Aunt Julie bought the shredder, a small blue plastic elephant that doubled as a pencil sharpener and that you operated with a two-inch-long crank. We still had to tear the Times into inch-thick strips, but then Ned - and soon, I too - eagerly fed the strips into the shredder and wound the crank. Wound and wound the crank. (I bet nobody in Little Blue Plastic Elephant Shredder/Pencil Sharpener School even told this poor toy that it would actually have to work for a living.) I wound the crank a little too much, I guess, because soon the blades wouldn't even shred the thin Help Wanteds. Maybe the blades just got dull. "Run some sandpaper through it," Jill suggested. I doubt Toast would like sandpaper.
-Alex loves to play the piano at Aunt Julie's. He actually tried to pound out a little tune last night. Ned probably ought to not quit his day job as a prep chef, by the way, to become an accompanist.
-Ned is solidifying his position in after school. He attends a play program from 3 p.m. to 6, and though he seemed shy with the idea at first, it's now like dynamiting him out of there in time to the subway home for dinner.
-Ned is studying the human reproductive system in kindergarten as a classmate's mother prepares to have a baby. "You got married and mommy got married 12 years ago?" he said the other night. "Twelve years is a long time. When you got married, I was in mommy's uterus and Alex was in mommy's uterus." Where did you learn that word, Ned? "In school," he said. "I was in mommy's uterus and Alex was in mommy's uterus. Mommy has a big uterus- Oh look!" he said, pointing at a health club through the windows of an office building. "Exercising!" (February 2006)
(Jill again contributes this week's essay.)
I feel summer winding down. Brown-tipped leaves are falling. Ned's teacher sent a list of things he'll need for 1st grade. I've come to the end of a long laundry list of minor medical things to take care of, and now I'm ready to make a new list for fall. When you were a kid, "new list for fall" meant things like "notebooks" and whatever sneakers were cool. Now it means "mammogram" and "jeans that make don't make my butt look big." While I will have to get a mammogram, I intend this list to be a little less depressing than my summer list, which had things like "second and third opinions on periodontal surgery" and "have weird lump from back of leg removed."
We had our first head lice scare, which started my cell phone ringing just as I was about to pay for some back-to-school purchases for the suspected host (Ned) and ended with a trip to the midtown creepy-crawly salon (not its real name), where we were told that Ned had a couple of excema flakes on his scalp but no lice.
Ned had his first run-in with a bully, at day camp, where he also lost his backpack, a baseball cap, a beach towel (all marked with his name), numerous bottles of water, a bottle of sunblock and, most dramatically, a toenail. He came limping in one afternoon with Jeff and announced pathetically, "Mommy, your little hurt boy is home." The toenail was still attached, but we knew it would be coming off in a day or two. It hung on by a few shreds, and we had to clip it off with snippers. Ned insisted on keeping it in a little round box by his bed.
Alex came home from summer school one day saying, "Computer! Computer" Another day, after a long romp in the park he turned to Jeff and snapped, "Sleepy!," as if Jeff had been preventing him from going to bed (he hadn't).
Dirty secret: the bottom of my purse, which, watered by sweating bottles of cold water, turned into a kind of Manhattan mulch, composed of little scraps of newspaper, shopping lists, paper, coupons, and a yellow water balloon filled with water, now shrunk to the size of a key lime. I gave the water balloon to Ned, who grabbed it and held it in front of another child. "Want me to hit you with it?" he asked.
This was the summer Alex decided to make fashion choices. T-shirts have to be solid color, preferably dark, preferably black. Mysteriously. he still consents to wearing a striped T-shirt he acquired early in the summer. If forced to wear a T-shirt with a saying or a pattern on it (usually for bed time), he reverses them.
We survived a three-day heat wave, with temperatures in the triple digits. On the second day, I took Ned to camp crosstown from where we live, forgot to bring water, and came close to fainting while sitting on a park bench waiting for a bus. Tottered across the street to the bus stop and onto an air-conditioned bus, leaned my head against the window sill, and panted quietly all the way home.
The heat wave was also marked by a string of really inspired (I don't mind admitting) cold menus for hot days, starring things like Italian rice-stuffed tomatoes, tomato and feta cheese tart, roast green peppers, and spectacular nectarine-blueberry cobbler. Unfortunately, I had to turn on the oven to make some of these, but that's summer cooking for you. You have divine produce and fabulous things to eat, but you have to suffer to have them. I got to a point where I simply could not make a bad potato salad (hint: cook small redskin potatoes in advance and refrigerate; use plenty of fresh dill, parsley and chopped scallions), and we nearly always had Tupperware containers of watermelon chunks.
I am on my third box of snack-size plastic bags, which I use for various items in Ned's lunch. It would be easier to pack certain things in hard plastic containers, but Ned never brings them home. (See: "lost his backpack.") I became a real whiz at packing delicious, inventive lunches (spread a thin layer of cream cheese on both sides of the bread so the raspberry jam doesn't soak through) and both Jeff and I decorated brilliant lunch bags. (See last December: "lost cute truck-shaped lunch box.") Ned turned to me one day and said, "Mommy, when I go back to school, I want to have the school lunch."
I am on my fourth pair of sunglasses, and I pinball between getting the $5 pairs on the street (they'll only be lost) and spending more (the $5 pairs fall apart within a couple of weeks).
I never thought I'd have to learn so many different words for dental sub-specialists, having escaped orthodonture when I was a kid, but this summer I went to my dentist, a periodontist (the gum guy) and an endodontist (the inside-of-the-tooth guy - ugh, root canal). At the end of the second visit I asked the endodontist if I could chew on that side and he said, No, I'm going to have Jeff pop on a crown for you, and then you can chew.
Jeff? I thought, thinking of my husband, who once said when I asked him if he could build book shelves, "Don't know! Never tried!" But he meant my dentist, whose first name is also Jeff, but who I always think of as Dr. Yeres.
The date finally arrived for a dental appointment I'd been dreading all summer, an appointment for a third opinion on whether I needed gum surgery. I woke up weepy and anxious. After two periodontists had told me sternly I'd need painful, expensive surgery, this dentist told me my gums looked pretty good; I was doing a "fantastic job" brushing my bottom teeth; and that I should schedule a deep cleaning (what people who hang around periodontists too much have) if I really felt worried.
I was so stupefied by this and the combination of lingering humidity and not enough breakfast that I stumbled onto Lexington Avenue to contemplate the end of summer, the end of the end of my gum problems, and the realization that a ton of back-to-school shopping awaited me (notebooks, backpacks, blue jeans and shoes for the boys in bigger sizes than last year's), and a mound of produce at its peak, about to rot if not made into pies, relishes, side dishes, condiments and on and on and on. (August 2006)
Alex and Ned each made one big statement during our trip this year to Cape Cod. Ned made his on the first day, as we drove deeper onto Route 6, the Cape's main artery. Ned aimed his face at the seafood shanties and mini-golf courses that were whizzing by, and said: "I love you, Cape Cod!"
Alex made his on the last day, as we drove closer and closer to where Route 6 merges into MASS 25, I-95, and the real world. "Beach!" Alex demanded from the back seat. "Beach!"
This was our third trip to the Cape, where Jill spent a few childhood summers and where her mother once owned a house in Wellfleet (a quiet town off season, and one that features mushrooming property values, some stunningly good pizza, and the house of Jill's cousin).
Since Jill's mom died, the Cape seems to have taken on a growing emotional importance for Jill. "You should buy a place here," I told her on our night out (she'd secured babysitting). I was only half-kidding, I guess, as the prices of Cape real estate have gone the way of all prices of real estate you can stand on and smell salt air. "We should move here," I added.
"We'd be happy one week of the year," she replied, "and miserable the rest of the time." There'd be lots more driving than in New York, it's true, and probably winter weather like that which sank the Edmund Fitzgerald. But still, Jill and this year's trip won me over to the Cape, and not just because two forecast days of rain turned into but one afternoon of drizzle (the latter spent largely in the superb children's section of the Wellfleet Public Library, where Alex took every wooden block and stuff animal and several board books off the shelves, and Ned attached himself to older boys for some sort of Lego-based action game). This year, my enjoyment of the Cape went up proportionally to how much easier the boys were to handle. The scales tipped so much that I began calling Cape Cod "the Cape."
Alex played on the beach, with little bolting. I accidentally left his Topomax home -- I'd packed it meticulously in a Zip-Loc bag with two metal cups and our vitamins, and then left the bag home -- and we had to burn a vacation hour in a pharmacy. The dirt bombs (ask Jill) were disappointing. Ned faced the sea, shaped pistols out of his index fingers and thumbs, and shot the breakers. Our rental car soon turned into a rolling vacation home: saltine bags, jeans and shorts and shoes scattered as if by explosion, an inner-tube blocking any hope of my seeing out the back window, sand in all crevices, swim trunks spread on the dashboard to dry in the sun. As is becoming typical of our annual visits to Skaget Beach, we supplemented our growing line of Skaget Boys Wear with two mint-condition T shirts that had washed up in the weeds.
With Ned, casting a tennis ball into the surf, watching it wash back to the sand; building a dam of sand with Ned, rushing with him to repair the breeches from the flow of the tidal pool, knowing all our work was doomed to mush; Alex finding one beach too cold, and proclaiming, "Sad. Sad. Very VERY sad!"
"Are you cold, Ned?" I asked him in the surf.
"Yes," he said. "But I like it." What happened to last year's Ned, who was scared of seaweed? "I'm still scared of seaweed," he said. Last year Ned told me that eating lobster "wasn't nice." This year, he cracked one with me, and didn't seem bothered by conscience so much as by the lack of salt on his claw meat. Later, he would pick up the shell of a lobster claw - left over from a beach clambake, I guess -- to take back to his first-grade class in New York to show them authentic nature. (Ned and Alex were supposed to write nightly homework journals about each day on the Cape, but that idea held up as well as a sand dam.)
Jill took Alex and the car while Ned and I were doing our dam, and in a while (there is no measure of time on these beaches) she returned, and Alex was carting a big orange ring festooned with Big Bird. "It was a dollar!" Jill said. Alex had wanted an inner tube since the previous day at the swimming pond, where a little boy kept taunting him with a tube: "This is mine! I got one!" Alex should've bit that kid. Later, Alex experimented with his inner tube in the surf, holding it down and feeling the power of the waves coming up his arms.
On our last morning, we stopped at a beach. Somewhere off Bermuda, a hurricane flogged the Atlantic, sending nine-foot breakers here for my boys to see. Ned's tennis ball was carried down the beach by the tide, and I walked down to get it. I turned around, and there were the forms of Ned and Alex, dark and silvery in the spray. Jill sat on the beach near them.
"When you got back," she said later, "did you notice that I'd taken off my watch? I looked up, and there were the boys, and I thought I was going to have to go in for you. You were nowhere in sight."
I was in sight. I was on the Cape. (September 2006)
Flyboys (Inspired by True Events)
LaGuardia to Myrtle Beach is 90 minutes in the air, which doesn't include some two hours in the airport checking in, going through security, and hunting for my kids.
"Where's Alex?" I ask Jill as the Spirit Air lady tags our suitcases. Our heads spin, spin, and spin again. No Alex anywhere, just mobs of harried strangers and their bags. Jill dashes off with Ned. I dash to a luggage x-ray and find an official-looking guy in a tie and white shirt; on his shoulder tab is "TSA," which I guess means "Time to Search for Alex." His mouth opens a little when I say the word "autistic." He guides me to a cop, who pulls out a walkie-talkie and relays my description that I can suddenly see in white print at the end of a heartbreaking TV movie: brown hair, brown eyes, blue jeans, dark blue hoodie, black-and-white checkered sneakers. The cop's radio crackles.
I head back inside the terminal, and see the man in the white shirt escorting Alex back to us. "He was over by the escalator," the man says.
"Up the stairs!" Alex says.
In the weeks before our trip, I had all sorts of visions of Alex and Ned on their first airplane ride. Most of these visions hinged either on Ned's swinging feet and the back of the seat in front of him (occupied by an air marshal who hates kids), and unceasing screeches or cries of "batroom batroom!" Particularly vivid in my mind was Alex and his love of opening doors, and the sweet, inviting, big lever on the plane's emergency exit.
Ned's been through metal detectors, but would Alex wig out? What will both boys think of taking off their shoes? "Why do we have to take off our shoes?" Ned asks. I tell him I don't actually know. He's been told in school that you can't bring water on a plane because bad men have tried to make a bomb with bottles of water. But it's Jill who's first in my family to run afoul of security measures, when she tries to smuggle a can of V8 juice onto the plane in her carryon. She tries to argue with the security officer, and loses both the argument and the juice.
We have brought many books and magazines for the boys, as well as markers and writing pads. By the time we're taxiing, months spent on school buses are paying off for Alex. He flips through a toy magazine and pulls the window shade up and down, up and down, up and down. Alex has the window seat for the take-off, and Ned has it for landing. I'm on the aisle. Jill sits across the aisle, and contributes to caring for our sons on their very first flight by reading the Style section of The Times.
"Ned, no kicking the seat!"
Jill tries to speak to me from across the aisle. "My ears have popped," I tell her. "Your lips are moving, but there's no sound. It's wonderful!"
"Can you hear this: ------!" she says.
I tell her that for some reason the Fs and Ks came through fine. "May I remind you," I add, "that you're already in trouble with the TSA for a violation with a V8?"
"Are you writing about this?" she demands.
Next to Jill, a mom reads to her own little girl a magazine that appears to stimulate reasoning. Beside me, Ned studies a Bionicals catalog. "Why does the airplane go 'ding?'" he keeps asking.
Jill and I switch seats for the landing in Myrtle Beach. Beyond Jill, I see Alex about to bite Ned for the window view. Next to me now, the mom tries to get her little girl to sit down and leave the window shade alone. A flight attendant helps her by saying: "This is a $20-million aircraft. Those shades have to stay up! They're not a toy!" Who wouldn't love to fly with kids these days?
All I'll say about our time at Myrtle Beach itself is that the conference was great and that Alex slept like crap, frequently darting down the hall and play with the ice machine. We're going to hone this process of living with the kids in one hotel room, and points to remember for the future are:
1. Listen to Jill more.
2. Rent a car.
3. Listen to Jill more.
4. Work harder in advance to find a local babysitter.
5. Listen to Jill more.
On the way home, in Myrtle Beach Airport, Ned pauses at the display of knives, box cutters, scissors, and other implements forbidden on aircraft. "Hey," he announces, "my dad has all of these!" On the flight home, Alex munches Goldfish and leafs through another toy catalog. I also write with him ("I am on a plane; I see clouds and sky; I see the wing"). Ned finds a baby nearby to whom he can appear wise. "Baaaa-BE! Baaaa-BE!" Ned says.
"Can I have your straw?" Ned asks me a few minutes later, meaning the swizzle stick from my $239 (round-trip) plastic cup of Diet Coke. Ned uses it to paint his tray-table with ginger ale. Alex switches to the smashed saltines given to us aplenty the day before in the hotel restaurant, where the waitress had a son with Down's Syndrome. Alex dumps crumbs all over his own tray-table, assuring that when he returns it to its original and upright locked position Spirit Air will have to do about $239 (round-trip) worth of vacuuming.
"We're going down?" Ned asks at the top of his voice.
"'Descending,' Ned. People like to hear the word 'descending.'"
Soon, there's a billion-dollar view of the Manhattan skyline out the window. I'd love to share it with my sons, but Alex continues his doctoral study of Go, Dog, Go! in the window seat, and Ned studies the instructions for an emergency landing in water. "What's this?" Ned points to the drawing of the yellow oxygen mask. "It's an oxygen mask," I tell him. "The air's much thinner 'upstairs.' Remember we said 'upstairs' in our flying talk?"
"Okay," he replies, "so push the oxygen button! Push it! Push it!"
I reach across the aisle and clasp Jill's hand. I tell her it was a good trip. "You should have listened to me more," she says.
What?
"You should have listened to me more."
What?
Her lips press together until they're white. "Hey," I say, "I got you to do it twice. That's not too bad after 13 years of marriage."
"I'm so TIRED!" she says just before we land. (October 2006)
"Alex, Ned, let's go!" I call from the kitchen, as I fish utensils out of the drawer and squeeze lemon into the water. "Time for dinner! Let's go!" Ned appears, and it's time for the first chore. "Ned, go get Alex." In a few moments, usually, they both appear. I hand one of the waters to Ned ("Two hands, please!"), but that's not really the main act here.
"Alex," I say, handing him a bundle of knives, forks, and spoons, "take these to mommy at the table. To mommy, At the table!" Off he goes. When he returns with Ned, I give him Ned's water for dinner, and I give Alex's water to Ned, so they must switch off.
Homework, bath, and teeth-brushing aside, chores for Alex started with clean-up, which remains one of his quickest-executed skills (second only to strewing toys around the living room in the first place), and has since come to include other stuff. At least a few times every evening, for instance, I'll stop him over a pair of his socks or his daytime T shirt and shorts in a little pile and say, "Dirty laundry, please." He will scoop up the clothes and dash to our room, where the hamper is. "And come right back!" I add, feeling like Rick talking to his Russian bartender as the latter takes the drunk girl home in Casablanca. If Alex isn't back in a moment, it's maybe because he's paused to jump on our bed and borrow under the blankets, and I have to go fetch him.
Ned is an old hand at chores, but new to tasks is Alex, and the advantage is plain: to involve him and get him to be part of the family. It's a surer way than getting him to eat dinner at the table with us, which he was sort of dabbling at for a while before he slid off again to munch his chicken nuggets by the TV. Alex has also been at some chores for a while, such as turning off all lights as we leave the house and busing dinner and other dishes to the sink or kitchen counter after meals. To this list we've recently added wiping the toilet seat after his visits (when appropriate), and shaking the pillows from their pillowcases when we strip the beds. I also now make him get out and count the frozen nuggets he'll have for dinner, and I make him tear off the tinfoil.
The notion of getting Alex more into chores started with a Passover dinner. We had set the table for about 10 guests, and Alex circled the table and arranged all the coffee cups so the handles were all pointing in the same direction. Surely there's talent here? I also thought that given his fixation with puzzles, Alex would be a joy to load a dishwasher with. That hasn't taken off, however.
Alex is good in general with handles. "Alex, turn the bath water on for Ned." Ned takes Alex's hand. "Alex," he says, "turn the water on for my bath..." For some reason Ned, to whom may eventually fall most of the care for Alex, can't turn on a bathtub tap. Ned has, however, taken to the idea of helping teach Alex do such things as hang up coats. Ned doesn't actually take Alex's hand for this, nor does he figure out where the collar loop is on the inside the coat, nor does he teach Alex to hang the hoodie by draping the top of the hood over the hook. Then again, hanging up coats is a little more theory than practice with Ned, anyway. We'll work on that.
Another job Alex excels at is trash, specifically opening the chute for me in the garbage room. He's sort of taken to this one over Ned; he beat Ned to the chute the other night, and Ned howled for 15 minutes. My boys will always be like this, right?
Which brings us to the best reason to teach Alex chores: to train him for the day when I don't have to do them anymore. (March 2007)
I took a month off, sort of, through September, though it didn't helped re-fill my tank. My publisher, as far as I know, hasn't even opened the envelope containing the manuscript for Alex 2. The first book continues sinking on Amazon. There are no talks slated for this fall. I finally saw the DVD of one of my lectures from last fall and thought I made Al Gore look lifelike. And I like Al Gore. I'm tired and bitter. Jill and I have upload problems with our podcast, which I try to cram online before we leave. Nobody listens to the podcasts anyway, and even if they do it's hardly made a difference over the year we've been doing them. Early this fall I also bagged the idea of a one-man stage show on life with autism because, as I said, "theater work is just not for me." I also had to give up the idea when I realized that I'd trade just about every theatrical experience I've ever had for one really good episode of "Star Trek."
I think, in the words of one friend, "OFI," with the "O" standing for "oh," the "I" for "it," and the "F" for a word you can imagine. I need my tank filled, and the brand of gas I need is called "Skaket."
Skakat is the name of a shallow beach on Cape Cod, where we're headed for a week in the summer house of Jill's cousin. This is no longer summer, of course, but the time of year when the beaches are empty of all but the poor vacationers.
It's a quiet house, back from the road, padded with sloping pines and tucked onto a hill of sandy soil. It has a back porch where Jill and I sit at night on vacation after the kids are asleep. We look at the stars and listen to the crickets and the dings of the buoy somewhere nearby. No streetlights shine through the window at night; there is no need for earplugs, and no e-mail except for at the local public library. And soon after we arrive I'm asking myself, Where is my cell phone?
We watch crabs scuttle and bury themselves in tidal pools. I buy postcards for the boys to send to my boss, who as usual was terrific about me getting as much of the work off as possible, as well as the time. On the beaches, I don't wear a watch. I lose track of what hour it is, and of what I'd be doing at that hour on a normal workday. On the way down one of the dunes, Ned does say, "I have a question. Is the Footprints book the only book you've published? Would you come to my school on author day? You're an author."
Somewhere back there, yes, I sort of am.
Ned gets a potato-pellet gun, and learns to play War from a babysitter and a deck of Mohegan Sun Casino playing cards left by some rich and previous vacationer. I no longer take a vacation without employing a babysitter and a deck of playing cards. "Remember, Ned," I say, "the joker is the 6 of spades."
"That's a vacation deck of cards!" says Jill.
Alex runs across the sand until he's a dot (luckily the swim shirt we've brought for him is bright red). He tries to scamper up the dunes, unwilling or unable to read the signs proclaiming beach erosion. He walks the dunes on his wild lone, directionless. I think Alex is like me, though from him I can't get an answer about what he likes about the sea. I ask Ned if he likes to be here, on the end of the world. "I do like it," he replies. "I sort of become like you."
The days melt in an unbelievably warm stretch. It becomes harder to remember that we have cats and voicemail. "It's hard to believe that when we go back, everything will still be there," says Jill.
One thing that isn't there on Thursday evening that was there on Thursday morning is Alex's pink and orange Big Bird inner tube. The stiff land breeze twirled it like a big plastic doughnut into the surf, where I assumed it would wash back to the beach. It didn't. "Dad!" says Ned. "If I tell you to run after it, run after it!"
"Pink!" said Alex, holding an arm outstretched toward the sea, as something he loved bounced on the ocean until it shrank to a dot. "Hope Big Bird can swim!" I said to Jill.
Alex's sleep was ragged; he was up two or three times each night, used to streetlamps and no buoys. He also poured a whole bottle of detergent into the washing machine (thinking he was helping, I suppose; after all, he didn't dump it on the couch). With trepidation and a ready mop I ran a couple loads of clothes, adding no soap. There were a few extra suds, but nothing else. Alex spots a tape of ElmoPalooza! in a thrift shop, and tortures us with it for a few days. Ned insists on hearing every playing of "American Pie," which for some reason a local FM station is airing over and over. Ned also complains that he's lonely - the playgrounds are empty, with all the Cape Cod kids in school - and so on Friday we hit the Hyannis Mall for about $50 worth of skee-ball. Alex watches the balls come down the slot when I put in the money. Ned wins a 99-cent cap gun.
One last time this year I walk the cold surf, letting the hiss and foam bury my feet in shifting sand. I bend down to pick up the glassy rocks to skip into the sea and occasionally get a mouthful of water, and lick the salt off my lips. (October 2007)
This is one of the last years I'll be able to write about what I'm going to give the boys with little danger that they'll read it ahead of time, or at least understand what they read. (They don't spend much time on this site, anyway. Ned prefers to play Bionicles online, and Alex is enthralled by building and re-building the Mouse Trap game [see below]).
Some gifts I've already given. Before the holidays I gave Alex a realistic toy Sally Brown to go with his new video of "A Charlie Brown Christmas. She came with a little mailbox and a tiny version of her Christmas list that appears on the top of the screen as she dictates it to Charlie Brown ("Dear Santa, did you have a good summer? How is your wife? I have been extra good this year, and have a long list of presents ..."). For Alex I also bought a Mutts book, Just Like Heaven (Jill's suggestion), in which the cat Mutts takes a nap outdoors and wakes up after fog rolls in. He strolls around and believes himself in heaven. "Alex is like Mutts," Jill says, meaning I guess that he makes do with what comes along.
For Hanukkah, I gave Alex a realistic little school bus; it's one of the short ones, like special-needs kids ride, the kind he rides. At the same shop I picked him up a foot-long NYPC car. The hood and the doors open, but not the back doors so he won't be able to take downtown any of the tiny Legos Ned leaves around. This gift did, however, serve a tactical purpose on the night Jill's family came over and Alex was, well, Alex, again this year refusing to cast himself into family chit-chat or a sit-down dinner. As he kept trying and trying to switch grandpa's Jets game over to "Elmocize," I decided it was the moment for that cop car, which sure enough carried Alex right away from the TV. It wasn't until almost our dessert that he'd pried the tires off and opened the doors and in general left the new toy under the footrest looking like a cop car in the South Bronx in about 1978. Alex pulled himself together, again this year, for the feeding frenzy of presents. The construction of one of these presents, a Mouse Trap game, quickly took him over Alex. The day after our Hanukkah celebration, he was up at 5:30 a.m. trying to build a better mousetrap. He continues to try, like all of us.
Ned's homerun gift from me this year is not to be. I wanted to get him a phaser, the pistol from the original "Star Trek." They were in many stores last year to commemorate the show's 40th anniversary, but this year the only ones I could find were on eBay; I prefer to have my gifts in hand this late in December. Would've been fun, though ("Ned, Starfleet force is used only as a last resort. Set to 'kill'"). I guess I should mention here it was going to be a toy phaser. On this subject, I did get Ned a "Star Trek" card game, which I can't figure out how to play despite having some idea of what "anti-matter" is. Ned unwrapped this Hanukkah gift just before his nightly reading time, and it came in handy. Now he can spell "crew," "Enterprise," and "To boldly go where no man has gone before." Last Christmas I gave Ned a model of a Klingon battlecruiser, except at that time he'd never seen "Star Trek." "I love it! What is it?" he asked. I pledged to myself that as God was my witness, that would never happen again.
For his birthday, I bought Ned a fisherman's friend, an all-in-one tool with a scaling knife, hook and weight scale, and other do-dads that will come in handy for cutting his fingers next August in Uncle Lee's boat. "He can also take all his stuff apart and see how it works," added Uncle Lee, with whom I used to spend Christmas afternoons driving around looking for pinball machines. "That's what I liked to do." Uncle Lee and Aunt Diane got Ned a rod and reel, to go with the creel from Ned's last birthday. Soon Ned will see that "creel" is almost spelled like "reel." Getting presents does benefit his education.
The new homerun gift is a bound "Enemy Ace," several editions of a comic book about a WWI German fighter pilot. This teaches him history and that there are two sides in war, and it dovetails with his new love of the game "Dogfight." "Hope he enjoys it!" the clerk at the comic book store said as he handed back my AmEx. "Oh, I will!" I replied. Ned's gift to me - and he doesn't even have to stick a crowbar in his piggy bank - is that I'll get to read it with him.
The NICU; the spit-up; the crying and the diapers and all that crap. If I have to live with all that being over forever, I can take comfort in my sons entering that magic age for a dad, when they're too young to want much of their own stuff and old enough so they can love the stuff that I'd like to own once more. This applies as well to my final gifts for them this year: model kits, probably little Battle of Britain Spitfires. Because Ned wants to do a model again, because Alex loves to snap things together, and mostly because I'll be stuck home with both of them on Christmas afternoon. (December 2007)
(Jill again contributes this week's essay.)
Our house is filled with unfinished projects. One day I'm all fired up about some essay or theme or knitting thing. Then something much more exciting comes along (another essay or cookbook idea or project) and the original thing gets swept away, and then one day I'm cleaning up and I find this thing which magically seems very enticing all over again.
This is a busy time of year for Jeff, so when I came across something from last spring, something that had me convinced at the time I'd be rich and famous (or at least have a published book), all my interest in the project was renewed and I showed it to Jeff. "Look," I said, "remember this? That kids' book idea? I still like this! I forgot all about it!"
Jeff grabbed it and said, "Can I use this on my site? I'm too busy to come up with something right now." I said okay. He said, "You're not going to stiff me like last time, are you?" I promised not to.
I think it's kind of a weird thing to put up as an essay, because it's really a book project. And it's for kids. And it really needs pictures. I was thinking originally photographs, since my neighbor is a photographer, and between us we have four adorable children who could be the subjects of the book. I was thinking the book would be called Poor You. It would have facing pages with text and a photo on each page. I think from the text you can figure out the pictures - a scowling, unhappy child on the left-hand page, and a much more cheerful child, wearing a discreet little crown, on the right.
What do you think? All comments welcome.
Poor you. You have to set the table. Don't you wish you were a prince? Prince Ned is overseeing final preparations for this evening's banquet.
Alas, alack. You have to feed the cat. If only you were royalty. Princess Camille is making sure the royal livestock are well tended.
Accursed fate. You have to walk the dog. If you were a princess, they'd never work you to the bone so cruelly. Prince Alex is visiting the royal hounds.
Woe is you. You have to take out the garbage. If only your parents were King and Queen. Prince Ned is bringing kindling to the peasants to keep them warm in winter.
Ah, misfortune is yours. You have to empty the wastepaper baskets. Princess Juiszelle is taking a walk in the royal gardens to examine the blossoms.
Oh, how terrible is your fate. You have to clean your room and put away your toys. Princess Camille is taking inventory of her jewels and making sure the servants haven't misplaced her tiara.
Horrors. You have to help put away groceries. The ship from the Far East has arrived, and Prince Ned is unpacking the royal stores of spices and sugar and painted toys.
Oh, what misery. You have to help your little sister get dressed. Princess Camille is helping her sister get ready for a royal elocution lesson.
What an unlucky star you were born under. You have to do your homework. Prince Alex is studying the subjects that will make him a fit ruler of the land.
If some of the names sound familiar, it's because they are. Alex and Ned you already know; Camille and Juiszelle are our neighbors and frequent playdates. They would make excellent princesses, just as Ned and Alex would make perfect little princes strolling around the royal grounds, cheerfully doing whatever needs doing. At least in my dreams. (February 2008)
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