It’s our third summer at the Montclair Beach Club and we’ve noticed that the snack bar staff seems a taking a little while longer than usual to get their act together. The other day, while waiting for over 30 minutes for an order of mini hot dogs we let our hanger get the best of us and started to think of funny ways to mess with the 16-year-olds slaving away at the grill. Our best idea: leave funny initials with our food orders. See, when you place an order you don’t give your name, you just give your intials: FC or DM or CM etc…and when your order is up they holler them out from the snack bar for everyone to hear. The staff is new and doesn’t know our initials yet and the older kids are super sweet but I highly doubt they remember our initials from last summer so we gave it a go. Needless to say there are few things that are as much fun as hearing a kid yell out: P.P…Pee…Pee?…PP!

We also got a kick out of leaving:

AU

FU (adults only!)

PU

BS (adults only!)

and ET (kid’s fave after PP)

We are now stumped for more initials. Given that this joke can’t last if you can think of any other ones please don’t hesitate to post them here.

Too Much? Friday I bought a really big sun hat. It’s so big that it covers my shoulders and I will probably feel self-conscious the first time I wear it to the beach or the Montclair Beach Club. But could you have resisted? I think not. You can’t see it in the photo but the brim is pleated, its so chic and high time I move on to serious sun protection so maybe now I’ll be able to look my age–and not five to eight years older.

Too little. Sunday I was invited to a “Welcome Newcomer’s Gathering” at my church. I’ve started to go to a low key Episcopalian church around the corner from our house with the boys. In the fall, Conrad was asking a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer so we attended a service before Thanksgiving and followed everyone along to coffee hour where they asked if any kids wanted to be in the Christmas Pageant. Conrad took one look at the sheep costume (imagine a full body suit of my Patagonia above) and signed himself up. Once your kid is wearing a sheep suit on Christmas Eve, you have committed. Anyway, they had a newcomer’s gathering at the rectory from 4-6 on Sunday. I got there at 4:15 and I was the only newcomer to show. I met six other active parishioners and chatted for a while over a glass of chardonnay. My minister, Andrew, commented that our gathering was very cozy and I told them that my birthday in October 9th but they don’t have to get me anything, this party was enough. We all laughed, but I did feel badly that their turnout was less than they had expected.

Never Enough: I took the boys to Rockport Thursday because I was invited to speak about my book at my college reunion. The book is coming out next spring and called The Happiest Child, published though Weldon Owen and Parenting. It’s been a busy couple of days and David left yesterday for Dubai. I called my mom Thursday after we drove up. Then I didn’t call her. She called me tonight. As soon as I heard her voice I knew I was in the doghouse. I had meant to call her, I even had a question: Do you think its okay for the child of one of your friends to eat food off your plate without asking, like take the tomato off your sandwich? (She didn’t.) Anyway I didn’t call her before she called me. We talked for about twenty minutes or so and she said, “I told Christine (David’s mom) I hadn’t spoken to you since Thursday and she said she was going to have to talk to you”…I apologized but reminded her I had called Thursday and it had only been a couple of days and I usually call her everyday or every other day. “You think you call me a lot but you really don’t, Chess,”  was all she said. My mother called her mother everyday. Calling my mom is kind of like how I blog. I do it when I have a funny story, or I just know I’ll feel better after I do. But for my mom, that’s not nearly enough.

This is not a sad post. These are the photos the boys took during the reception for Tony at the Rockport Art Association. I gave them them the phone when most everyone had left.

I know our littlest dog is good, deep down in her heart there is goodness. But a casual observer would say she is bad from the stream of chewed, gnawed, and shredded toys and accessories in our house. When she is bored she makes her own kind of fun and I respect this in her, it means that she can entertain herself. What mother doesn’t love a child that can entertain herself? My issue is that she entertains herself with my things.
Friday…Conrad found a trail of foam that lead to the sun room…

and right up to my couch where she had chewed an enormous hole.

Saturday we were rushing out the door to get to the beach club and I couldn’t find my sunglasses, but someone else did.

Sunday speaks for itself…

This was not staged. I walked into the living room and she had this water pistol in her paws.

David’s dad’s funeral was just a week ago. Today we went to the beach club, our local pool, it was packed with kids and parents and slurpees and hot as hell. I got there at 9 am with the boys to make sure we got a good table for our dinner with friends tonight. Everyone came with their cooler and chips and we drank super sour vodka tonics and went swimming and then during dinner I started talking with friends about how strange it is that a week ago I was at a funeral and how our lives are now forever changed by Tony’s death and there is no traditional ritual beyond last weekend that lets other people, friends and strangers know that we have experienced a deep loss. I wish we could hang a funeral drape over our door. Or that I was regulated to a black wardrobe like Queen Victoria or I’d have to strap on an armband of a certain color and design that said, it was my father in law who has died, and my life has changed in that way where I’m grieving for others even more than myself.

But there is nothing that precedes our sadness and in some ways its easier to not be wearing it literally on my sleeve but by not saying anything and by not wearing anything different feels disingenuous because everything in our lives has be drained of its color. I sat at the beach club in a blue and white lattice printed tankini, but my life is not nearly as ship shape as the pattern suggests. And I want everyone to know, without me having to tell them, that we are no longer the same. We are hurting and broken and sad I cannot figure out if we need taco sauce or salsa in the supermarket.  I’m seriously scattered. Field trip dates are scrambled. I think I forgot to take Dash to a playdate Friday. Even today, I was signaling to go into the beach club and maybe, probably, I was going a little slow. The car behind me was annoyed and  honked right up my tail and all I wanted to do was get out of the car and tell that driver,  don’t honk at me today–I’m lucky to have packed the cooler with the fruit salad and beer and pork loin and pokemon cards. Don’t honk at me you asshole, you have no idea why I need to go slow.

I came across these photos of Elizabeth Taylor at weight loss spa on Vanity Fair. Here are my faves.

The piece says she lost 22 pounds, she did a lot of driving around in golf carts (she didn’t have running shoes) and swapped liquor for cranberry juice. I’m inspired!

This Spring, I spent many evenings on the phone with my mom or texting David’s mom while making dinner and drinking in the kitchen. Some nights I’d move on to a chocolate covered pretzels, Girl Scout cookies or handpacked ice cream. As a result, I’m nowhere ready to wear a tankini or even a coverup and our pool, the Montclair Beach Club, opens next week. Every year I try to whip myself into shape knowing I’ll have to spend the next three months socializing in swimwear. But it was hard winter and even harder spring—my dad had heart surgery and my family lost two very important people. David’s father, Tony, and Joyce, my mother’s best friend, surrogate mother to me, both lost their battles with cancer.

I’m thinking of writing “Joyce Copelan, RIP, March 11^th” down one thigh; “Tony Moore, RIP, May 17^th” down the other, and “Bill Castagnoli  ICU Spring 2011” across my ass to make it clear that I needed easier comforts this winter than salad and squats and to seek out forgiveness, mostly my own, for not being prepared for the inevitable.

David and I are very close with my next door neighbors Molly and Sean and our kids are equally close with their kids Logan and Stella. Every morning Molly opens her kitchen and I let the dogs out and we chat through her kitchen window. And every evening at 5:00 my kids or her kids come knocking and everyone plays on the lawns and shares bikes, swords and guns. Sugar, shovels, wine, babysitting is all shared between our two houses.

So I wasn’t really thinking about anything the other day when they were away for Easter and I needed forsythia for my centerpiece. I have two bushes that are okay, bright but not stellar.  Molly has about five huge forsythia bushes, that I happen to know she hates because when she was a kid her mom made her weed Saturday mornings so she has a general disdain for gardening (except that she loves tulips). As I said I wasn’t really thinking much of anything when I went next door with a scissors and started to snip snip and snip away at her bright bountiful flowers. I had a sizable bushel in my arm when all of a sudden Sean, her husband pulls up on his bike and sees me red–or in this case–yellow handed with a large and guilty bouquet of forsythia.

Sean looked at me half-joking half-incredulous and said, “So this is what you do when you think we are not home?” Despite all the love, I wanted to die. He exacted the perfect punishment: he pulled out his phone and shot me with scissors and stolen flowers in hand.

His text read: I pull in and see our neighbor stealing from us….

All I could do was admit my crime and send her the photo of my haul. It was so pretty, even she admitted it was worth getting caught.

While researching the Happiest Kid book for Parenting this fall, I attended a workshop at Teacher’s College that included a class on how to use the world as the classroom. We talked a lot about family field trips and when it comes to museums, I learned, that I was doing it all wrong.  I am notorious for pushing my family to see one painting, sculpture garden or installation too many that causes my children collapse into tears and husband to give me the “I told you so” hairy eyeball. You would not believe the acoustics at the Met. Some of those galleries really know how to amplify a temper tantrum.

Since that workshop we’ve had two extremely successful trips at museums this year (see the pics).  You may already do all this, but it changed our visits so much I had to share.

Pick an exhibit on a topic they learning about right now: Timeliness is key. Museums are places to reinforce what a child already knows, it’s not a place to learn about something brand new. There is too much competing for their attention and they just get tired—fast. Conrad had finished a pop art unit in his art class where he created his own Wahrol-like drawing, so on Sunday we took the boys to see the new modern expressionism show at MoMA. As soon as he saw the soup cans he said, “See it’s an ordinary thing, painted lots of times.” For a moment it felt like I was in that scene from BabyBoom where a precocious toddler compares the sky to Cezanne, but Con is 8 and I was so proud, I didn’t care.

Limit what you see: The more specific you can be about what you are going to see the more interested your kids will be. I learned that short, strategic trips are much more fun than my wandering tiring ones. Dashy is currently fascinated with knights so we made a trip to see Arms and Armor at the Met. It took about an hour and everyone was happy and interested the whole time.

Reduce the gift shop splurge to a postcard: In previous years, after making my kids walk through all those galleries, I felt they had earned a tube of plastic Dinosaurs or a paint set from the gift shop. But those toys only made them remember the gift shop, not the actual museum. Now that our visits are more efficient, the trip becomes their gift and they get to pick out one post card as a souvenir of what they liked most. We have quite a zany collection going and it’s much more meaningful to all of us.

Invite cool friends you don’t get to see often: The trip has a aura of glam if you can meet up with friends you haven’t seen in a while. We did MoMA with old friends Tiffany and Brian who the boys think are pretty much the most famous, funniest and awesome people on earth (us too).  So that helps.

PS: And let them take pictures

Just in time for the Superbowl ad buzz comes an spot for Volkswagon that my kids love almost as much as Star Wars itself.

Watch the ad here.

They haven’t asked for a Volkswagon yet, but if they do, its okay, I like the ad enough to live with the request.