The Montclair Public School system has a tradition of a year-end fundraiser where you toast your child’s class teacher at a classmates house or park. Everyone makes a donation to the party and often a dish and we all get together as a class and celebrate the end of the year. It’s a fun party, and even a little bit more fun when we don’t bring the kids and have cocktails with the teachers and let them know how much we appreciate all they’ve done.

This year I loved both my son’s teachers so much that I wanted to really let them know. On the way home from Toys R Us on route 46 I spied the Little Falls Trophy Shop and thought, that’s it! I pulled over and went inside. You would never believe the glistening, tiered monuments to victory you can get for $24.99! I ordered a golden loving cup for Conrad’s Kindergarten teacher,  Janis Vascimini and Lady Victory statuettes for Dashiell’s pre-k teachers, Ms. Macklin and Ms. Carter and they were ready the very next day. The plaques read their name and the underline said: The Greatest Teacher of All Time, Class 2009.

The women were floored and  Oscar-worthy speeches followed. If you’re stumped next year with how to show your teacher how much you’ve appreciated everything he or she has done, drop in on the Little Falls Trophy Shop for inspiration.

The other day I had a lovely conversation with Conrad’s kindergarten teacher, Janis, about downtime and how neccessary it is for all of us to have our daily fill. But the truth is, I’m not really into downtime, I like uptime. I’m on the go, on the phone, texting here, driving there. Am I dancing as fast as I can? Am I running to stand still?  You bet. Along with biting my nails, always thinking about what’s next is a habit I’m trying to break. But its tough work for me to slow down, though joining the Montclair Beach Club is especially good training for me to while away the day.

Janis is such a great teacher and she is filled with the the kind of gentle live-by-doing advice that she gently encouraged me to take off my Julie McCoy activities director cap for the summer so I can teach my kids to be bored. Conrad is enrolled in six weeks of camp this summer, though two of those weeks are only till 11:30. Janis told me that at her house, there are days when she turns to her kids and says, “Today is a boring day. We are going to be bored today.” And they are and they work it through until something really fun comes out of their boredom.

But maybe I’m not a strong enough to face boredom. I can just imagine the pout Conrad would deliver when I’d be making him his yogurt and honey nut Cherrios parfait and saying, today is a boring day. He’d come back with something like, “What you want me to bored so I have no friends and my brain will rot?!”

Yes, I do.

But I’m easily seduced so I took Janis’s advice and today I was going to cancel a week of camp to spend that time teaching myself, and Conrad and Dash how to be bored.

But we also didn’t have school on Friday or today and the fighting and the whining and the begging for TV was so intense,  at 7:30 in the morning, that I thought, they are never going to survive to see boring.

Conrad’s not the problem. At six-and-a-half he can occupy himself for hours with LEGO. He actually knows how to be bored and sometimes on the weekends when Dashiell naps in the late afternoon and he’s home from a playdate, I see him staring off into space creating his own downtime. He and I even had boring sick days together over the school year, and he was sick a lot.

But a bored three-year-old Dashiell is a destructive, hitting, mooning, spitting, secretly stepping or grabbing his brother’s most recent Lego creation naughty pants who needs to structure and distraction until its time for snack, lunch, dinner, tub and a story. So sorry Janis, camp is on—for the full four weeks. This summer I’m molding Dashiell into a type A kid just to save his brother’s ass. And come August, when Dash has no place to go, he can be bored with our babysitter while the rest of us are safely out of the way.

I need to evangelize about a product that has changed my life and the three men that live with me. It’s called Sarafem and it’s a very low dose of Prozac that you take for two weeks out of the month. Normally I’d never talk about needing to take a pill like this. I mean, I know it’s become normalized and everyone takes an anti-anything pill, but for a long time I felt shameful about needing a drug to chill me out. I felt I should be able to mange my problems on my own with good old-fashioned friends, exercise and Prosecco. But when the stress of shuttling the boys out to school in the morning made me want to pour vodka into my orange juice, I realized maybe I should take my doctor’s offer for a prescription to deal with my PMS mood swings. Yelling and sulking were becoming my default emotional states for two weeks out of the month and it was making everyone unhappy. We we’re stuck in an unfortunate routine of me telling the boys more than three times to get dressed, then resorting to raise my voice and having to hear Conrad deliver a classic zinger like: “When you yell at me in the morning it makes me fee yucky at school all day.” It would be 8:30 in the morning and we’d all be exhausted from the tension in the house.

It was time to call in some drugs.

So I did, reluctantly. And I am here to evangelize about how I’ve become a better wife and mother through chemistry.

Sarafem has turned out to be a love letter to the men in my life. Since last week was father’s day, and I actually wrote this last week but was having too much fun with my kids to blog (kinda kidding there) I thought if you haven’t yet given your beloved a gift or he didn’t like that gadget, consider giving him a happier you. And don’t worry, this is not a Stepfordian lobotomy where I walk around the house saying, “That’s nice dear.” “More home made biscuits, dear.” “Would you like your blow job now dear?”

No, David can attest to the fact that it’s not like that at all. You don’t gain weight. Your sex drive doesn’t change. You sleep normally. You still get nuance, irony and can feel bitter, if you want too. But what’s gone is the dark spot on my heart. That insta-angry place I’d used to go to in zero-to-sixty after asking the boys for the third time to get dressed, or the face I’d make when David would say something like, “Gosh we’re low on groceries” and I’d take it as an insult that I can’t get anything done fast enough anymore. The everyday situations that could set off an anger tear are now buffered by an emotional cushion as fun as a bouncy castle.  My screaming switch that used to go all the way up to Spinal Tap 11 now only goes as has high as six. And I’m just so grateful to have figured out how to turn down the volume of my moods swings. So I offer it to you, if you’re experiencing anything similar. After all it’s summer, so consider getting a mother’s (little) helper.

Today Conrad came up to me and my babysitter Jessica and tattled, “When Dashiell was in the bathroom he called Jessica ‘the girl with the plunging boobies’.”

I couldn’t believe my ears! And then I realized she was wearing a tank that showed a fair amount of cleavage. Jess was having a rough day with guys. Earlier she had walked in the house on the verge of tears because her heart, as she said, “was breaking” but she didn’t want to start crying so she didn’t elaborate. I told Dashiell that it’s not nice to talk about anyone’s body parts—not their hair or nose or boobies—and when I said boobies he burst out laughing, but he did manage a coy apology to Jess.

I also apologized and marveled out loud about where he picked up word as mature as “plunging” and knew to pair it with boobies. He certainly hadn’t overheard me talking about any of my own clothes. The whole scenario dovetailed with what we’d been talking about with friends all weekend. It seems like our kids are growing up kind of without permission and we’re wondering what their threshold for drugs, sex and rock-n-roll will be. The  story that set off our debate (and was making the rounds at the Teacher Toasts in town) was about a local 11-year old boy who stole his father’s VW bug with a friend and the two got caught driving it by a meter maid who detained them until the police arrived. And according to some their parents didn’t do much about it.

After the boobie incident we decided to play Shoots and Ladders with the boys. Dashiell was getting the counting part but he wasn’t always clear on which direction to go in. Board games have been a problem since they involve rules and in some cases strategy but he was able to keep up and I thought gosh he’s three-and-a-half and so grown up. Then Conrad landed on a spot that gave him a ladder move all the way up the to the finish line and he won. We congratulated Conrad and Dashiell burst out into tears.  I was so grateful for his sobs. His outburst reminded me we have several years between now and the day he’ll try to steal our car.

Can I say that I think the endless stream of rainy days is harder on moms of boys (and our houses) than the moms of girls. Can I be that sexist? I think I can because it’s true. The other day a bunch of moms were over and we were in the kitchen chatting, drinking, eating olives and goat cheese and the kids were running around like Banshees. My furniture was pushed up against the wall, nerf guns were being negoiated, and there was lots of “Your Dead! No Your really dead!” We let them go at it because it was pouring and it was necessary  for a while. Then they started climbing the columns in the dining and we put an end to it and turned on the TV. It was just in time too, because after I was fluffing the throw pillows the living room couch, I spied this.

According to Dashiell, it’s a playdough “grenade” that had exploded into my dining room door, mere inches away from my silk-screened wallpaper.

I really hope the weekend is nice.

Conrad crawled into my bed in the middle of the night complaining of an upset stomach. It was the second night in a row and I suspected an appendicitis before the stomach bug because I just couldn’t imagine we’d be struck by another ailment. Conrad was an ox through the latter part of 2008. Then this spring he had: scarlet fever (for the third time in three years), lice, strep (over vacation), allergy-related pneumonia that kept him out of school for a week, and just the other day he had a huge tick on his ear for at least a night before we noticed.

This morning when he was sitting on the toilet, feeling sick to his stomach I realized it wasn’t an appendicitis, just a virus. Being mother-of-the-year my first thought was: Shit, I need to get work done today. Conrad also seemed exhausted by the idea of being sick again. He looked up at me and said: “I hate this, there’s a new choice today at school and now I have swine flu.” (Thanks NPR).

He didn’t have H1N1, but there was no getting around it: Conrad couldn’t go to school and I had to rethink my day and my deadlines. The first day of an illness I usually take off rather than have my sitter come because she happens to have a delicate immune system herself and I’ll just end up losing more time if she gets sick and can’t come. I wasn’t always this flexible. Once last year when were still living in Brooklyn and I was working at Self, Conrad threw up on the way to school and I just wiped his ski jacket off, sent him into class with a kiss and waited for the phone call at my desk, but it never came.

The sad thing is I may take the day, but I’m not actually present with him. I’m more like an escape artist, I sit with him for five or ten minutes and then disappear of twenty minutes at a time. I have to. It’s the only way I can send a few key emails to quiet that whispering “I’m fucked!” voice in my head. But since Conrad is Conrad, I know he notices. How ironic that his sick days make me miss working in an office? I miss getting to leave early because one of my kids is sick. It may have screwed up my day but everyone would cut you some slack and meeting one of the boys at a 2:45 doctor appointment could turn into a stolen moment to spend an afternoon with them, even if it was in a taxi cab on the way home. Also my sudden presence let them know I’d made time for them, they were sick and it was important enough for me to be there.

My mother once told me she loved it when I would get sick because she’d give me drugs to help me sleep and the house would get quiet and she’d have a day to herself. (My mother often shares maternal advice with me and forgets that I’m the person she’s talking about). I do remember her being very nice to me whenever I had a fever which is probably I was always trying to catch one. But while my mom was freed by my sudden lethargy, Conrad’s illnesses just make me anxious. But I knew that if he sensed it, he wouldn’t feel better so today I really tried to put work aside and say yes to his requests to read him Captain Underpants (which is top notch potty humor) and play Uno, instead of my usual, “Sure, right after I send this email.” Hopefully, I’ll have finally got the sick day routine right—though I do hope I won’t have to use it again anytime soon.

The other morning Conrad came bounding into our bedroom at 6am and said, “Mom! Dad! You’ve got to see this there’s an enormous bird in our yard! Come Quick!”

I just laid there in the bed thinking it is much to early for me to drag my butt out of bed to see a bird that I suspected was just a big crow. David, God bless him went downstairs to look. An hour later I was awake and pouring him a bowl of Panda Puffs. “What color was it?”

“Black.”

So it was a crow, I thought, but I didn’t say anything because he was still really excited about it.

Later that morning I was driving to yoga and there in my neighbor’s yard was an enormous ugly big black bird. “Holy crap. That’s Conrad’s black bird!”

Conrad’s bird was a very large and unattractive turkey vulture.  I was late to class, but I pulled over, parked the car and starting snapping photos with my phone trying not to get to close to scare it away. There was a terrible rotting stench and I thought gosh this bird stinks until I realized it was eating a dead raccoon which made my stomach turn and I had to head back the car. I was so proud of Conrad. There was a huge bird in the yard and I was wrong, I wanted to bust in on his classroom and tell him I’d seen his bird but I knew it had to wait until later.

That evening, while serving him his chicken nuggets I told him about my big ugly bird sighting. “Did your bird look like this?” I asked and I whipped out the photos. He was thrilled to see the pictures and then he turned to me and said, “I told you it was a big black bird and I know you thought all I saw was a crow.”

“You’re right Con, I did think it was just a crow and I’m sorry I didn’t get out of bed fast enough to see it.”

“I know what I crow looks like mom.”

“I know you do.”

And that’s when it hit me. Conrad is six-and-a-half, he while he can’t read fluently, he understands the world in a way that I haven’t appreciated until just now. I’m used to him being four and saying, “look a big bird!”, and that big bird being a crow and me knowing it would be a crow. There’s no more nodding along with his discoveries anymore because what he’s learning now will very likely surprise me. Italians think of birds as omens, often bad ones, and though I am superstitious, I don’t think this bird is a bad sign. Quite the contrary, I’m very grateful. The turkey vulture showed me that I need to pay attention, be honest and listen to Conrad or I risk thinking that I know where he’s coming from when I don’t have any idea at all.

I took down my “spoiled in suburbia” post until I figure out what the hell I’m trying to say.

Up next: clarity!