A Life In The Day

And May You Stay Forever Young

In four hours my baby is turning 10. She's so tall and smart and funny and beautiful. She's nothing at all like the child I thought I would have and she's so much more than I thought she'd be.

It's gone by so fast and it makes me sad to think that I only have eight more before she'll leave the nest. I'm asking myself if I hugged her enough and laughed with her enough and did I spend enough time crying with her? Have I been the best mother I could have been or did I waste too much time and miss too many moments?

She talks about boys now and loves to sit on the phone with her girlfriends giggling over clothes and classes and cliques. She dresses herself without asking my opinion most days and offers me advice on my wardrobe. She can brush her own hair all the way down to the back ends even though it's long and hard to reach and she puts in her own ponytails and barrettes. She wants to wear makeup.

It's only been a little while since she spent all day curled in my arms sleeping peacefully to just the sound of my heartbeat. Just days ago she toddled her first steps toward me with a mostly gummy grin. It was only yesterday that she learned to use the potty all by herself and mere hours since she started her first day of school.

She has her own cell phone now and is begging to be allowed to stay home by herself and I worry that she's growing up too fast. Then she comes into my room to crawl in bed with me in the middle of the night because she had a nightmare. She's half child and half teenager, stuck in the middle and fighting a tug-of-war between wanting to grow up and the desire to stay my baby forever. It's a battle that I know I won't win but I'm still pulling as hard as I can because I'm just not ready to let go yet.

My baby is turning 10 in less than four hours now. The big double digit birthday. Tonight I'll wake her up at 12:36, the exact moment she came into this world, and I'll eat a piece of cake with her curled up in on her bed in the dark and tell her the story about the night she was born. Tomorrow we'll celebrate with McDonald's and this weekend she'll have a sleepover with her friends.

Tomorrow night after she's gone to sleep I will celebrate myself. I will pour myself a glass of wine and reminisce about the last decade while celebrating my tenth anniversary in the most time-honored profession known to man. And I will cry because my little angel is one more year closer to spreading her wings and soaring.

Just Another Manic Monday Tuesday

Things have been so good for me recently that I haven't been writing. Besides last week's discussion of the perfect family bathroom of course. For me writing is really the panacea for all that ails me. I can bitch, moan, whine and spew about everything that pisses me off to the entire world or, what I usually do, I can immerse myself in a meaningless topic for an hour to the amusement of myself and others thereby releasing tension and forgetting that I want someone, or several someones, to meet an unfortunate fate. I've been too happy lately. With no venom to spit out at the world and nothing but an absent-minded grin to share I've been quiet. Too quiet.

The truth is that the happier I am the more I want to write and the less I know what to say because to talk about the good things would likely jinx them. I just realized today that now really is the best time to jinx things though. Is the trick to see how long you can go before the other shoe drops or is it to let go of the shoe yourself and see what happens? As an experiment to see if shoes can float I'm dropping the shoe, jinxing myself and sharing my bliss.

At The Fireplace While We Watch The Chestnuts Pop

You may have noticed that I spend an inordinate amount of time writing about things related to bathrooms. I've discussed falling shower curtains, messy public bathrooms, flushing clogged milk ducts (which is not actually a bathroom thing but has the words flush and clog so close enough right?) and most recently anorexic single-ply. Why? Because my life revolves around bathrooms. So does yours it's just that you either haven't realized it yet or you just don't want to talk about it.

We Got Department Stores And Toilet Paper

In a world where men and women with substantial IQ's have gone above and beyond the old single ply toilet paper to invent not just the double, but also the triple ply and have climbed atop the proverbial throne bearing rolls with super-absorbent ridges, decorative embossments and even quilting it is still possible to find penny pinchers in purchasing departments digging through the dredges in order to fill public bathrooms with what I can only refer to as anorexic half ply. You are no doubt familiar with the various types of toilet paper from low to high end but I can hear mumbling to yourself, "anorexic half-ply?" while you begin to calculate the ridiculosity of this concept but rest assured that each and every one of you really knows what I'm referring to.

Runaway Train Never Coming Back

I started my new job on Monday and besides being completely exhausted from getting up at 5am every morning it seems to be working out all right. PK is frustrated with the early rising and has been a bit bitter about me working in the city but I think she'll forgive me eventually. We're really only leaving the house 15 minutes earlier than we used to but switching back to that from being home for a month is a bit of a toll. Still, we do what we must and carry on right?

I was kind of looking forward to taking the train because I imagined that it would give me time to myself for thoughtful introspection and all that blahdy-blah-blah stuff. I figured I'd have almost 3 hours for reading each day which would make me a calmer and possibly saner person. Plus, no road rage! And those things have happened, but what I didn't figure in what the anxiety that would replace all the other stuff.