New York moms are used to carrying around so much kid junk that they can be walking around with an entire scooter hanging off their shoulder like it ain’t no thang.

Every time we read this my daughter says, “It’s our family! The big horse is daddy, the little horse is me, and my brother is peeking out from behind the barn. The pig is mommy when she was a tiny baby.”

My toddler’s favorite word is “whoa.” He says it about 850 times a day, and has three variations that he uses depending on the situation. Sometimes it’s a one-syllable “whoa,” like for when he’s just climbed on the back of the couch for the first time, but you can tell he knew he would eventually. Cool, but not a huge deal. Then there’s “whoa-uh!” This he reserves for little surprises like when I give him a bigger apple slice than usual. “Whoa-uh! Big!” But my favorite is the 3-syllable version he uses when he’s extra excited. Imagine Christopher Walken saying it. “UhhWHOAuh!” It’s really all he says right now except for a long, drawn-out “Hiiiiiiieeeeeee,” both in a raspy vocal fry. So basically I hang out with a very friendly, surprised, mini Christopher Walken all day.

My husband is a very patient, understanding father who tries his best to take our children’s feelings into account when making decisions about their lives. Except when it comes to putting ketchup on certain meat products. I first suspected his prejudice one day when my daughter came in from the kitchen where he was cooking and innocently asked, “Mommy, why does this family never put ketchup on steak in this house ever and that’s final?” I was packing her lunch for school this morning and asked her, “Do you want mustard on your salami sandwich today?” She clearly didn’t think her father could hear, and whispered, “ketchup.” Before she could even get the word out he walked in quickly and said in a very serious yet disappointed tone, “NO. We do not put ketchup on salami. You know that.” I had a vision of our future. “I love your new tattoo sweetie, you did such a great job designing that. But…what’s that? That red stuff in the corner of your mouth? I can’t believe you would disappoint us like this after all we’ve done for you. You better have been eating french fries, that’s all I have to say.”

My daughter doesn’t always have tantrums, but when she does it’s because I told her we’re walking to the L train, but she thinks we should take the M train two stops and transfer to the L instead. Which is actually a very good point. And the other night she randomly asked, “Mommy, does the E train run down the east side or the west side?” like she was trying to get to Marquee before they started charging a cover. Can she go ahead and start working for the MTA?

To be completely honest, I’m a little worried about ALL of the presidential candidates. Bernie has good ideas, but have you ever seen the before and after pictures of a president on their first day in office compared to their last day? Every one of them look like they aged 30 years in just 4 years. He just doesn’t have any spare youth to go throwing around like that. Hillary is kind of a robot and talks exactly like Rhapsody in White’s handler in the movie Best in Show. Trump is clearly an angry, unnecessarily loud, racist potato. Ted Cruz’s slogan is “Choose Cruz.” When I was in the 5th grade, literally everyone who was running in our pretend class election had a better slogan than that. It’s not looking good.

My daughter always pretends she’s a policeman, and has a shiny badge made out of a scrap of reflective bubble wrap that she tapes on her clothes. I asked her what kind of police work she was doing. “Giving people tickets! Here you go mommy,” she said happily. She tore a scrap of paper from a little notebook she was carrying around. I said, “Oh no, what did I do to get a ticket?” She replied, “Nothing, this ticket is to go to a show!” Then later she was giving a ticket to her little brother. “Here you go, this is your train ticket.” I’m never telling her that policemen don’t give out the fun kind of tickets. Never.

Life with small children is exactly the same as life without small children, with all the same responsibilities and problems to solve. The only difference is…ok imagine you have to do all these things while simultaneously commanding an army of monkeys. How big is an army? Like 100 people or so? That sounds about right. So literally 100 monkeys in tiny army uniforms. So cute. And I think it’s fair to say that 1 child = approx. 1.75 armies of monkeys. I believe that’s the most scientifically accurate estimate. And when you have to get one of them to school in 3 ft. of snow the average goes up by 30%. So multiply 1.75 x 30% and that will give you the average number of armies of monkeys each child represents during the winter months. And to think when I was in high school I thought I would never need algebra in real life!

Here is my obligatory snow picture. That’s our clothesline there on the left. I’ve never used it, but all our neighbors are obsessed with theirs. Someone had clothes out this morning and they were all dirty and frozen looking. I don’t understand. They could just hang up their clothes inside.

My daughter asked me on the train ride home, “Mommy, are you a bad guy?” The paranoia had never crept in faster. “Why would you say that, sweetie?”
“Because when you wear your big black sunglasses you look like a bad guy. And your black Darth Vader looking coat.”
“Oh. Well I just think that stuff looks cool. Are you a bad guy when you have on your sunglasses?”
She took her little sunglasses out of her backpack and slowly put them on. “Yeahhhhh, I feel like a bad guy. When we get off the train let’s walk down the street like bad guys!”
No one will ever mess with us.