Nick & Joe and My Visa Card

And some other kid--I'm probably going to get in trouble for this. Nick and Joe and...um...and...

I could look it up, but that would be cheating, right?

I just paid $353 for two tickets to the Jonas Brothers concert at the Allstate Arena on the 22nd. And as if that weren't enough, now I have to...

um...

go to the show.

I read a lot about the insanity of suburban parents who pay a thousand dollars for concert tickets for their middle-schoolers, and I usually agree with it. And while I'm inclined to point out that this ISN'T a thousand dollars, I know that's kind of a cheat, too. Just like looking up the third Jonas Brother's name. Because we all know that those parents with their matching SUVs and $750,000 houses who are buying those thousand dollar concert tickets have a heck of a lot more money than I do. Their thousand dollars is in a very real sense a lot less than my $353.

But here's the thing.

Today is my daughter's twelfth birthday. I suspect that her days of wonder are nearly over. I hope that I'm wrong, and I might be. She's a very different kind of person than I ever was, and she delights in things and people. But the world does tend to become more ordinary as we age, and it takes more and more to impress us.

I remember the first time my daughter saw a flag flapping on top of a building and recognized it from a picture. She stopped dead in the middle of the parking lot and said, "That's in my book." I remember the first time she saw a helicopter, and how long she was content to stand and watch a stick float down the creek, and her delight in suddenly finding a lone purple flower growing in the midst of a patch of hardscrabble grass. I remember the first time she tasted hot buttered toast, and the wonder in her voice as she said, "You took me to the BEACH?" when we got out of the car. I remember her first 3D movie (SpyKids 2) and how she unconsciously reached out to touch the bubbles in the movie theater.

My baby is twelve today. She likes to act casual now, and she favors ripped jeans and t-shirts. She's developing suspicious hints of alien curves ahead, and the Disney Princesses are gradually losing their place in her life. But she's not all grown up yet. She's not entirely jaded. I know exactly the look that will come over her face when she realizes that she's REALLY in the same room with Nick Jonas. And I'm willing to pay through the nose for it.

Update: Her reaction made it all worthwhile.

Day One

Okay, I know that Day One theoretically came nearly a month ago, when I left behind the 3+ hour daily commute, but in fact there were a lot of loose ends to wrap up. Yesterday, I finally sent off the last of the miscellaneous projects I had hanging over my head, and this morning I received my first paycheck from my new job. So as of today, finally, I have just one job and a regular income. And thank goodness, because there is a world of work to be done just to get started on that normal life you've been hearing so much about.

I started today dismantling my dining area and reformulating it into half dining area/half office space. I'm expecting this whole working from home thing to go much more smoothly with dedicated work space, and we really didn't need seating for six in the dining room when there are only two of us eating here.

Since I haven't exactly been the most dedicated housekeeper over the past two years, though, every little change requires a lot of extra steps. Taking the leaf out of my dining room table, for instance, means finding a new home for the stacks of paper that have long resided on the unused end of the table. Moving the table means a rude awakening about the previously unrecognized need to move it when I sweep and mop--it's got a big, solid oval base that I was under the mistaken impression sat flat on the floor. Apparently, it's raised JUST ENOUGH to suck in crumbs and dust and hide them from view until some poor unsuspecting woman rearranges the furniture.

So all in all, it's very slow going. But at least it's finally going. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I'm free to do something around my house on the weekend without thinking that there are other things I "really should be working on". And the "really should be" sensation has been a powerful negative force in my life for a long time, so I'm not at all sorry to see it go.

Kids These Days

So my daughter is having a friend over after school to kill fish.

In reality, I don't know where the problem originates--she says the experiment was the teacher's idea, but she and her friend hopped right on it. Her rationale is that we're going to buy fish (guess what she means by "we're going to buy"?) that would have been fed to larger fish, so they were going to die anyway.

So as I type this, my daughter and her friend are sitting at my kitchen table experimenting with what happens when you add salt to a fish's water. Or sugar. Or use tap water versus bottled water. And I'm surprised by it. You see, my daughter loves fish to an unreasonable degree. When she was a toddler, all she could talk about was getting a fish. We HAD a dog and a cat, but no...she wanted a "shish". And that never really changed. Her last fish died about a year and a half ago, and she's cried bitterly when every one died. She talks about getting more fish often, too.

All of which led me to...well...not expect her to cheerfully sit at my kitchen table and watch a bunch of fish die while she took notes. And I don't know how to feel about it. I certainly don't want her heartbroken over the fish, and I suppose it's better that she can conduct her assigned experiments without requiring counseling and all that. I really do. But I was pretty sure she was a person who would be bothered by watching fish die, and I'm not sure I wanted to be set straight on that.

Restraint You Never Knew You Needed

The night before last, I put some vegetables in the microwave for four minutes and then went about dishing out the rest of dinner and pouring the drinks and all that. When I was done, there were still 49 seconds to go on the vegetables. Immediately, I started weighing my options. Would the vegetables be hot enough if I took them out after just three minutes? Did they really NEED that additional 49 seconds? And if so, was there something else productive that I could do during those 49 seconds?

You're probably thinking that by the time I was done analyzing all that, the 49 seconds were over, but it's not true. I think fast and time moves slowly when you're just waiting, and there were still 42 seconds remaining when I realized that I could just wait. It was hard. Not doing anything for 42 seconds was a significant act of will and it seemed like an eternity.

Things I Learned Today

Rolling down a hill in the snow is even more fun that rolling down a hill in the grass.


Bare trees look great against a foggy sky and have a very calming affect if you lie in the snow and look up at them.


When you work from home, no one notices if you duck out an hour early to take your kid sledding before it gets dark.

It Turns Out I Have Six Kinds of Tea

In my family, tea is not just a drink. It's a tradition, a medication, a tranquilizer, the focal point of family connection, the buffer between the workday and the evening and between a busy day and bedtime. My parents have tea every evening about the time normal people are eating dinner. If my sister or I has to drop over for something--to drop off a borrowed book or pick up some of the stray mail that still goes to our parents house or any of a hundred other possible meaningless little tasks, we time those visits for "tea time". When I was married, "Do you want some tea?" was a phrase that made my husband cringe; he knew it meant we'd be there for a while.

My family drinks regular tea, the kind that Salada and Lipton make in boxes of 100 tea bags, and I like that kind. But I also like Earl Grey, and Raspberry, and Lemon Spice, and Orange Spice, and...well, you get the idea.

The thing is, I don't really drink tea anymore, unless I'm at my mother's house. Or at least, I haven't in a long time. That doesn't make a lot of sense from a purely objective standpoint, but in my Pavlovian world tea isn't just a drink, it's a state of mind. There hasn't been much room for that state of mind in my life over the past couple of years. I can drink coffee while I'm getting ready for work. I can drink coke while I'm driving or water while I'm folding the laundry, but tea has a context. Tea is meant to be consumed slowly, over conversation or a novel. I can WRITE and drink tea, but I can't drink tea on a conference call or on the morning train. Or rather, I could, but it would be wasted.

As I've been wrapping up the last thing standing between me and having One Civilized Job over the past few days, I've been carving out pockets of time. Some of those pockets are for things like putting away the mountain of clean laundry that's been accumulating on my love seat, but others are for reading, writing, promoting my blogs, talking on the telephone, watching a movie...things I haven't done in a long time. So I had occasion to look to the left of the coffee in my kitchen cabinet this weekend, and here's what I found:


Orange Spice tea
Lemon Lift tea
Jasmine tea
Earl Grey tea (regular and decaf)
Raspberry Royale tea
Green tea


I even found a box of cherry vanilla tea, but I didn't count it because I haven't tasted it yet. I'm a little wary of it.

Apparently, I've had all these teas all along. I just haven't thought to drink them. How crazy is that? For two years, I've been too busy to HAVE A CUP OF TEA?

I'm making up for lost time, though. In the past 48 hours, I've had them all.

Well, except the cherry vanilla.

There's an Adolescent in My House

I knew it was coming. I mean, my daughter is going to be 12 in less than two weeks, and she's been in middle school since August. It isn't as if I woke up one morning and she was suddenly a pre-teen. Well, okay, it was kind of like that, but that morning wasn't this week.

This week, though, I got my first taste of that phase of pre-teen angst that all parents want to believe we're somehow magically going to avoid.

For the past two years, I've been working and commuting very long hours and my daughter hasn't been thrilled about it. On the weekends, since we've had to little time together, we've generally tried to do fun things and relax if I didn't have to work. Now that I'm working from home, though, things are changing a little bit. I'm asking awkward questions like "Is your homework done?" and "Why is there a string cheese wrapper on the living room floor?" And she's not taking it well.

The other night, I told her that I was disappointed by all the conflict, that I'd really been looking forward to being home with her more and we needed to figure out how to get past this right away.

She said, in all apparent sincerity, "Well...you could be less annoying."

The hardest thing about parenting is having the discipline not to laugh out loud when your kid says something that you REALLY CAN'T SANCTION, but that is...well...outrageously funny. I couldn't really continue the conversation right then, but a couple of hours later I asked her to explain in exactly what way I was annoying.

"Well," she said, "you say 'yada yada yada', and then...."

"Wait," I interrupted. "I DON'T say 'yada yada yada'. I need to know some actual things I'm saying that are annoying.

And she threw up her hands and said, "SEE? This is a perfect example!"