hi all,

I’ve never done this before but I need help. I am working on a story about how changes in your life affect your sex life and I am looking for women who have experienced the following: illness, such as MS, and had it affect their sex life for better or worse. I’m also looking for a woman who has experienced job loss, either they have lost a job or their partner and it has caused a shift in their romantic life.

I’m working hard till June 21 so hopefully I’ll be able to blog a bit during then but deadlines always trump posts.

Thank you in advance!

Francesca

Maybe your kids are like mine and complain that when you tell them not to kick a soccer ball into your tree peony, they whine “Sometimes it’s like you care more about the flowers than us.” Frankly, sometimes I do. I can even tell you exactly when I cared more about my flowers than my children. It was last Thursday.

It was evening, the boys were playing outside and I had just coerced Conrad to put the soccer ball down and do his homework before we kicked it around so we could have more time to play. Dashiell was wrapped up in an imaginary game of Star Wars and slaying an imaginary Rancor with his real light saber (actually its a pool noodle with duct tape). While helping Conrad use a number grid to count by tens, I could hear Dashiell’s “Hasiwaki Yas” the international ninja/Jedi/badass language for “take this and that” but I didn’t pay attention because I was amazed to find that I actually understood Conrad’s math homework and that much to my surprise, he did too. We finished the math problems and I told him to put the assignment into his backpack, Conrad turned towards the house stopped short and screamed.

I looked over in his direction and I could see the head of one of my prize allium on the driveway. Immediately, I knew what had gone down, but I didn’t want to know, I couldn’t believe it was true. “Conrad, you need to tell me how bad it is before I see for myself.”

“It’s pretty bad mom. Pretty bad,” he said. (more…)

Okay maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, but I certainly was when I met a woman at bootcamp on Friday who told me she works at a dialysis clinic in East Orange where most of the patients are elderly and have  bed bugs crawling on their wheelchairs. She said sometimes its so bad she is afraid to  push them up to the machines. She now undresses outside and inspects all her clothes before she brings her uniforms into her house.

Then on Saturday, driving back from long Island, David and I were stuck in a traffic and we saw an exterminator truck on Northern Boulevard in Locust Valley advertising: Bed Bug Specialists.

Chewie got a hair cut, well actually he was shaved like a lamb and he is so cold that I had to buy him this beatnick inspired tee. David has been calling him The Skipper and making lots of references to Burgess Meredith. He really just looks like a small pig with a dogs head. Naturally, since I’m his mother, I think he’s still beautiful, but even the groomer had to tell me to stop laughing at him.

My dad was discharged from the hospital on Friday and my parents insisted they could manage by themselves, in fact my dad sounded so chipper on the phone that morning I couldn’t argue.

I had the whole day to myself because dad conveniently had has his heart attack during spring break. David took the kids to visit his family in Rockport and I spent time with my parents at the hospital. Now they didn’t need me and David and the boys would not be home until Saturday afternoon. I had nearly two days all to myself.

I should have been excited, but to be honest I was a little panicked. I hadn’t been alone for a weekend since…I didn’t know. It must have been before Dashiell was born and traveled to LA for a story but even then I was with friends from work, or maybe it was when I went on that press trip to St. Barths, but then I was with a pack of other reporters. Either way it was at least five years since I had been alone—completely alone for nearly two days. (more…)

While walking Chewie and Asta today I bumped into a neighbor walking his dog. We let everyone sniff everyone and everything and then he said without any conversation preceding, “You know there are a lot of really good dog foods on the market now for obese dogs.”

Excuse me? Are you saying my dog is fat? Do you see his manly, macho, king-of-the-jungle like mane?

Chewie is 13 that’s 91 to me and you. We’ve taken him off the wet food that caused him to bulk up considerably and he’s now on a vegetarian diet of sweet potato and salmon. His osteoarthritis keeps him from going on long walks now that his back knee tends to buckle under him. But I didn’t feel like explaining all this to the helpful neighbor. What I really wanted to say is, “You know there are all kind of barbers in town and you don’t have to wear your hair in that puffy, comb over way.” But I didn’t, I just nodded and said, “He’s actually really fluffy under all that fat.”

I was writing up a pitch about effective discipline strategies and I remembered that in addition to the wooden spoons that my mother would use to slap me on my inner thigh and the belts that snapped across my cousins behinds, throughout my childhood it was not unheard for someone to be hit with a vegetable.

The most memorable time was when my uncle chased my cousin with an zucchini. She must have done something really bad, probably cursed at him or something and he became so enraged he chased her up their spiral staircase with it in his hand. My cousins and I watched in astonishment as he double-skipped the stairs with a green vegetable big enough to win a prize at a country fair. He was a big man and they had a spiral staircase. I’m still not sure what he had planned on doing with the zucchini. Beat her with it? I doubt he even knew but grabbing the vegetable off the kitchen counter sent an indelible message: Be afraid. His anger knows no bounds.

But he can’t be singled out. Once when my brother, Andre and I were having dinner at my grandparents house, my grandfather was feeding their poodle, Truffy, broccoli from the table. He was a little hard of hearing and my grandmother kept saying, “Mike stop feeding the dog. Stop feeding the dog Mike.” But he didn’t hear her so instead she just took a head of celery and whacked on his bald head. Andre choked on his soup. We knew better to laugh but it was funny. Grandpa look up annoyed and turned to my grandmother who was still holding the celery and asked, “What you do that for?”

I was talking to my mother on the phone and I were going over these stories and she said, “Oh yeah, its nothing, don’t you remember Grandma Connie used to spank you with an ear of corn?”

Uh no.

Check out the April issue of Parents that features my latest story, Every I Learned About Being A Mom. They also ran this cute pic!

My kids live in MiniBoden. The clothes are cool and more important, durable. The knees don’t wear out on the pants as quickly as most and the sizes are roomy enough that they can actually wear a shirt for a year. So even though I should be madly writing a story at this very moment, I could not help but click on the email announcing Boden’s new line, Johnnie B, for teen boys and girls.

Abecrombie is so agressively “hot” and Hollister is so transparently marketed that I’ve never looked forward to having to shop there with the boys. Boden on the other hand is adorable for moms and seemingly cool enough for kids. This tee resonated with me, as did the rest of the pre-washed cozy polos, cargo shorts and jeans. 

There’s another one that says “Let’s start a band” that I doubt many 14-year-olds would wear, but maybe I’m wrong and they’d wear a tee about wanting to be a rockstar before wearing a tee that made their mothers feel like weren’t about to overdose.

Boden’s photography has always been able to capture how you hope your kids will live and play, not just dress. The clothes seem beside the point which is obviously the key to their allure. Given how much I’ve been thinking about Conrad as a teenager lately its reassuring to know that even if he’s still struggling with his intense feelings, he’ll be able to look cool while brooding.

David and I spent much of the storm googling “French Drain” and “water absorbing plants” because our backyard flooded this weekend and water was coming up through the basement floor through small fissures that drenched a rug and some old boxes. We wanted to feel cozy and dry inside but I know inside we both kept wondering how much the storm would end up costing us.

Sunday we headed out to Home Depot for waterproof paint and other leak stopping stuff and we saw all the trees that had crashed into people’s sunrooms and garages and we realized it could have been so much worse. Even the kids stopped complaining about not being able to go outside.