As nightmares go, the NYC bedbug epidemic is top on my list and now that New York Magazine has run this excellent article on the Upper East Side’s secret service exterminators, I love New Jersey suburbs more than ever before. Granted, I’m not so naive to think that we will remain bedbug free, they will come here with all the other migrating families. But for now I am glad to feel safe and unbitten in Montclair.

I have a friend who is so obsessed and fearful of her home in Dobbs Ferry being infested she has laid down some very strict rules that after reading the article now sound like common sense:

She won’t allow anyone who lives in NYC, SF or LA to spend the night at her home. These cities all have bedbug epidemics.

She won’t stay in a hotel in any of these cities.

She won’t ride the subway.

She won’t shop at estate sales, ever. Bedbugs can live in wood. They can burrow into your phone and you have to painstakingly steam clean, chuck or burn everything in order to get rid of them.

“Everything had to go. Margaret recalls a “special company wearing what looked like hazmat suits.” The men removed everything that couldn’t be dry-cleaned—rugs, books, luggage, paintings, shoes, toys, computers, even radios. Only simple, hard-surfaced items, like china and silverware (which even bedbugs can’t burrow into), remained in the apartment.”

Other things you should know but people don’t tell you or talk about:

Bed bugs have an odor (how freaked out are you now!)

Pest Away, a firm mentioned in the peice, receives between 50 and 75 calls about bedbugs from the Upper East Side every week—and that’s just one firm.

Bedbugs tend to bite in threes—either in a line or in a triangle. In the article is says, “In exterminator jargon, this pattern is known as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” They have been known to leave triangular shaped bites on victim’s foreheads.

And now for some service: The number one way to turn a problem into an infestation:

If you have them in your mattress get rid of your mattress. Don’t move to the couch. If you move to the couch, they will move to your couch and infest your whole apartment. According to my friend, “they just want to stay with the food source.”

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.

Last week I heard an interview with Mary Schmich, the Chicago Tribune columnist who wrote the famous “Wear Sunscreen” graduation speech, on The Takeaway. John Hockenberry asked her if she had any advice for today’s graduates and she said, “No becasue I think advice is a form of nostalgia.”

She is so right. I think of all the times I’ve given advice, particularly about weddings more than babies even. It’s just as much about remembering what it was like to try on all those dresses as much as to tell a my friend that by beyond having fun, trying on lots of dresses you get to really figure out what you want your wedding to be—which is what I did.

And whenever I hear a friend is pregnant it’s so easy to slip right back to those first months when I’d prepare for a stroll by wrapping the baby in a polka dot blanket from pine cone hill and stashing gripe water in my baby bag for my occasionally colicky Conrad to prevent any new mom, new baby, new to the park freakouts. I also always give them as gifts too, which makes me think presents can be a form of advice. (See my my mother’s day post).

It’s funny Schmich didn’t want to give advice but she still did because now I’ll always think, why am I telling this person what I’m telling them, is it for me to remember or for them to learn? I guess it will be both.

David, my darling husband is a long-standing member of the Husband Hall of Fame but yesterday he went all out for Mother’s Day and deserves a special honorable mention. Honey, you are the real thing!

The morning started with adorable gifts from the boys: a floral collage from Dash and a Jonathan Adler inspired pinch pot from Conrad.

Then David gave me an Internet radio because I’m home alone during the day and I rely on music and talk radio for company. For some reason we don’t get good reception at the house, but now my new Logitech SqueezeBox is like having a bunch of musical and intellectual co-workers with me all day. I love it. I really do. David kept saying an appliance isn’t romantic, but a big black music-making appliance that makes me feel wistful listening to Taylor Swift is swoon-worthy.

Yet I think he might be feeling the need to make up for something or maybe I’m just acting so miserable he’s at a loss as to how to make me happy, because he gave me a series of gifts to make me realize that everything is going to be alright.

He gave me a gift card to go shopping for new spring clothes so I can feel like I’m pretty and pulled together even though I’m just working up in my attic and not an office. And maybe also so I’ll stop asking him to tell me if my butt looks okay in everything I wear. Tickets to the Shins next Sunday so we can feel a little less old. And hold on…a cleaning woman to come every week for a year! We actually had a fairly intense discussion Saturday morning about whether one should really be grossed out if cereal bowls with milk are still on the kitchen table when we practically stumble into the house at 10:30 at night. That Friday, I rushed out for the day to take Conrad to the doctor, got the okay that he could go to school, met with the nurse about how to administer his nebulizer, then caught up with friends to go to the Glenfield House Tour Fundraiser (where you check out some of the larger, extravagantly decorated homes in town, snickering is optional), picked up the kids, went to playdate, then bought beer and drove around trying to find a bakery open at 5pm for a dinner party at a friend’s house. Gave up and then went over to my friend’s with the kids had a lovely night and headed home way past everyone’s bedtime to stare down the cereal bowls, unmade beds and general house mess.

I think the cleaning woman jackpot is way of saying he’s sorry that he after a long day he made me feel like keeping the house tidy is something that’s more in my domain than his. David doesn’t think that. I think he rolled his eyes simply because he was surprised to see that I actually felt comfortable leaving a mess; but he benefits too, by giving me the housekeeper he’s also very generously putting the kibosh on my feeling entitled to complain about housework. I appreciate his strategic mind.

I met my parents and our amazing cousin, Ronny for brunch. Ronny is so inspiring, she wrote her doctorate in resilience in older women and is so great to be around. Then when I came home, we flew kites in Edgemont park that David made with leftover cellophane from Easter egg baskets and went out to Egans with friends. It was really just perfect. Then in the middle of dinner Dashiell started acting really bratty. He came and sat on my lap to calm down. It worked for a while until he projectile vomited all over the dinner table. I hustled him out of the restaurant back door and just as I was leaving and well-dressed child-free couple were walking in, they kindly held the door for me and right then Dash vomited all over my face, neck, hair and chest. Vomit was dripping from eyebrows. But it was fine, really. He got home without getting sick again and we both felt better after we bathed and I thought maybe I will take David up on the cleaning woman.

The other night I was talking to a friend who is going through a terrible divorce. She sat across from me at my kitchen table and confessed that early on she knew there would be trouble but convinced herself she could fix things it somehow (hey, we’ve all been there). Then one Saturday morning, she heard an episode of This American Life about breakups that featured Howard Markmam, the psychologist at University of Denver who figured out that by studying couple’s facial expressions while arguing, he could predict the likelihood of them staying together. Markham and his colleagues looked at a variety of facial clues such as eye-rolling, sighing, and tone of voice to determine if a person’s true motive was driven by malice or by love. My friend said her soon-to-be ex husband exhibited facial cues that were more malicious than loving, (confirming her suspicions) and because of them and a variety ways he’s chosen to be unkind, now they are splitting up.

All this got me thinking about how husbandblogger and I fight. I’ll admit, I’m definitely an eye-roller. But husbandblogger does something I don’t think Dr. Markham has studied: just when I’m about to make a really important point, or I’m coming around to kissing and making up he has no qualms about farting. Sometimes it’s a small fart and other times it’s as loud as a Whoopi-cushion fart. And I know it should make me laugh but it actually makes me even angier. I think, “How can you fart on my big important point.” Or, “How can you fart if you want me to come up and kiss you?” So I want to ask Dr. Markham, can our marriage survive the use of gas?

My heart is all afflutter. Today’s Mom’s Daily Dose has a really funny riff on all the blogs that talk about poop. What a thrill for me to read. I started my own category: grosser than gross because I wanted to come clean about those shocking moments when everything goes to crap—literally. And now I know I’m not alone.

The other morning after successfully sleep training babyblogger I brought him into my bed to snuggle while I gave him a bottle. He was in a happy, smiling mood and after the bottle I let him sit on my belly and gurgled at him. He gurgled back and then threw up in my face.

In a daze trying to sleep train babyblogger,  preschoolblogger wakes up and needs to use the loo. I lead him to the bathroom and help him take off his nighttime diaper. I notice he’s made a small poop and I dispose of it and help him wipe himself and send him back to bed. Afterwards, I use the bathroom and notice it still smells, but am too tired to deal. The next moring I wake up and there is a poop the size of a stapler on the floor clearly, that was the main event from the night before.

Its amazing to me that these three fairly gross things could happen to me in one day.

7:53 am. Babyblogger crawls into the kitchen and reaches for the dog food before I can stop him. I see him put a soggy old piece of kibble in his mouth so I run over and shove my finger into his mouth and in doing so almost bang his head against a kitchen cabinet. If I kept groping for it in his mouth his head would have tipped backover and hurt himself so I backed off and he ate the dog food. (more…)

The other day I made a terrible mistake. After pre-K-blogger pooped on the potty I accidentally flushed it. And as soon as the water rushed in to whisk his poop away, he freaked out, “I wanted to flush my poop. I wanted to flush.” It was made all the more worse because I copped to my mistake and he carried on with his rant for about 7 minutes. Tired of the pre-K-blogger antics, fatherblogger cut off a piece of chocolate cake I had recently baked and plopped it in the toilet. ” pre-K-blogger, come quick, I think some poop floated back.” And sure enough we all went to see and there was a perfectly triangular piece of cake (with vanilla frosting) in the toilet. pre-K-blogger flushed happily and the whining stopped.