“I want to watch Daniel Tiger.”
“Let Daddy watch sports for a minute first, it’s Sunday.”
“Oh it’s Sunday, that means CBS Sunday Morning is on. Let’s all watch it together!”
“Yeah! We can…in 3 hours.”

Star Wars is a very big deal at our house. I’m not exactly sure why, but from what I remember it started as a joke when my daughter was just a few weeks old. She would make those adorable, frightening newborn squeaks and strange breathing sounds that they tend to do when they’re still getting all that pesky amniotic fluid out of their little lungs, and it sounded just like Darth Vader breathing through his mask. We would use it as a party trick when people came over to meet her. “Look, she said her first word, the Darth Vader noise!” After that, friends and relatives started buying her lots of Darth Vader toys, because what’s funnier than an adorable little baby cuddling with the Evil Dark Lord of the Sith? That, plus my husband’s favorite joke at the time was saying, “I am your father,” to her in a Darth Vader voice about twenty times a day. So I guess it was fate. Now that she’s four years old, her favorite bedtime story is not so much a story but reading chapters from her huge Star Wars dictionary. She has yet to see the movie, but knows that Anakin is from the planet Tatooine and that Hoth is covered with ice. The other night I thought to myself, “Maybe we should be teaching her about real planets,” but then she told me she couldn’t put her pajamas on because she was “in carbonite,” and I realized it was far too late for that. A couple of weeks ago, I handed her an individually wrapped Lifesaver from the candy bowl in the pediatrician’s office after she was very patient while waiting for her brother to finish up with his doctor’s appointment. I was surprised that she didn’t act excited, and instead of eating it in a hurry she quietly put it in her coat pocket. I immediately forgot about it, until this morning when she was leaving for school and saw her take it out of her pocket and examine it thoughtfully. How had she not eaten that yet? I had never seen such monk-like restraint from a kid with candy in their hand. But it all made sense when she asked, “Mommy? How do you use this lightsaber?”

Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything. Like the first time your child notices a little person and happily shouts, “Look, it’s a small grown up!”

 

I guess you aren’t technically supposed to listen to gangsta rap around your kids, but my 4 year-old’s hilarious reaction when I told her the guy rapping was named “ice cube” made me not care at all.

This whole fake earth friendly “clean spoons / dirty spoons” system in fancy coffee shops has got to stop. It’s gross. It’s not like I’m a germaphobe or anything, I mean I live in New York City, there’s just a huge, pointless icky factor to the whole thing. I won’t call out anyone specifically, but let’s call them Red Bottle. Hey Red Bottle, giving us a tiny wooden stick to stir our coffee with like civilized human beings would probably use just as much energy or whatever than washing all those spoons all the time. And TRUE STORY, once at Smorgasburg they were handing out ice cream samples on tiny silver spoons with the same not at all adorable “dirty / clean” system, and the lady in front of me ACCIDENTALLY TOOK ONE OF THE DIRTY SPOONS AND STARTED EATING HER ICE CREAM WITH IT. I’ve replayed that moment time and time again in my head. It was like I was watching her do it in slow motion, and couldn’t get the words, “Stop, that has someone’s old ice cream backwash on it!” out of my mouth fast enough. By the time I fully understood what I was seeing, it was too late. I felt that I had failed mankind in some way. So Red Bottle, I implore you as a trendsetter in the coffee world, just get the little sticks already. You can even chop down your own outsourced organic tree to do it. Sure, there will still be those grime-filled crevices you can see between the subway elevator and the glass that has never been cleaned, and toilets that flush automatically while you’re sitting on them, but the power to eliminate just a tiny bit of the world’s grossness lies in your hands. Use it.

Life is hard. Bills. Trying to feed your kids nutritious foods. Getting them into good schools. Showering in a rush and accidentally shaving only one leg and now your bodily feng shui is way off. So many emojis to keep track of. The eternal question of how to awaken your spirituality and consciousness to fulfill your life’s purpose. The fact that your ringtone has been set to Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” for the past two years, and you can never remember to change it, and what started as a joke has morphed into this endless montage of weird looks from strangers on elevators and in doctor’s office waiting rooms. You’re really only writing this as a reminder to yourself to change it, but most likely as soon as you’re finished you’ll think to yourself, “Ok, blog post done. What else was I going to do while the baby is asleep? Right, better go load the dishwasher.” Or maybe I’m the only one with this particular problem.

My kids love temporary tattoos, so I always have a supply in my desk drawer. While I was giving my daughter a bath, she was making a decision about which one she wanted me to put on her when she got out.

“Mommy, why doesn’t your tattoo wash off?”

“Because it’s a real tattoo.”

“I want a real tattoo!”

“Well, you have to be a lot older. And the best way to do it is if you really like something, think about it for five more years. Then if you still like it after five years it might be safe to get. Because it will be there FOREVER.”

“Oh, I already thought of something! I want to get a lion, because I love lions. So in five years I can get a lion tattoo!”

“Well, by older I mean that you have to be 18. That’s what the law says. But if you still want a lion when you’re 18, that means you’ll have been thinking about it for 14 years! That’s a long time.”

Suddenly my husband appeared behind us, scowling. “Ok, that’s enough.”

People looooove to talk about how New York isn’t what it used to be. And in some ways it’s not (AHEM Liquiteria). But nobody ever seems to talk about these little blocks in the West Village that have remained almost completely unchanged for the past 20 years. Every time I walk by my old college apartment on Thompson Street by Generation Records, I can’t help but notice that it feels exactly the same. It’s kind of nice. Maybe one day they’ll buy my Tom Petty “Wildflowers” CD.

I believe in looking at the bright side of bad situations. For example, the L train sucks. There’s no getting around it. But you can’t tell me it’s not a little bit funny when it gets so crowded it has to skip Bedford Avenue and everyone’s face on the platform looks like a crying celebrity montage as you speed by them.

My son talked in his sleep for the first time last night, and it was all about farts. As a result of my “mom diet” (either shoveling pizza into my mouth as fast as I can before one of my kids takes it from me, or going too many hours having only eaten a handful of probably pre-chewed turkey one of them lovingly discarded into my hand), my stomach frequently makes weird gurgling noises at night while I’m nursing my toddler to sleep. Every time this happens my son looks up at me and says “toot!” with a happy gleam in his eye, because he thinks it was a fart. He does the same thing when a chair squeaks, or an almost-empty ketchup bottle makes a farting noise. But last night when he said it, he was completely asleep in my arms and I was in the middle of carrying him to his crib. He didn’t open his eyes or anything, but must have somehow heard my stomach gurgle, took his little mouth off the boob for a second and whispered, “toot.” After getting my laughter under control I decided to play along, so I whispered to him, “Was that a toot? Was that your toot?” And again without waking up he said, “Sister’s toot.” That’s some serious dedication to discussing toots.