Do the Yak

The list of restrictions and cancellations grows almost hourly — Disneyworld, the Boston Marathon, sports, Broadway, concerts, schools, the entire country of Italy... Most if not all colleges have kicked out their students, and six states have closed elementary schools. Lincoln schools are closed, of course, and they just announced Boston schools will close as well, which is going to be a real problem for low-income kids with food insecurity, not to mention working parents. Reportedly the governor is being pressured to close schools statewide. Thursday night and Friday were... busy. Becky is in Israel and is not due to return until March 24. Needless to say, all parents (and many of the kids) in the program. are freaking out and want to leave early. There was a Zoom call Thursday night from the school in Israel saying they were working on it, but many parents are going ahead and booking flight themselves. I did the same, getting her on a Turkish Airlines flight on Wednesday — a 15-ho...

Becky in Florida mode (she's a lot more cheerful than her expression would indicate). We wake up around 9:30 or 10. The pool is bright blue in the sunshine. A little cereal, a little coffee... the girls are having a blast in the pool. Ben joins them. I jump in as well and we play Shark. Ben retires to the adjacent hot tub. I eventually get out and sit in the lounge chair and read for a bit ("Friday Nights" by Joanna Trollope). Then I sit on the screened porch and read the New York Times cover to cover. Now time for a little lunch -- I boil some hot dogs for me and the girls, Ben eats some cold chicken and pickles from the fridge. Then more lounge-chair time. This is one of the rare times I do nothing but stare at the sky, watching the clouds and trying to guess which layer will cover the sun and which will move away. I love when the cloud layer is just the right thickness so I can look directly at the sun and see a perfect, sharply edged circle of light. I get a lit...

A phrase from a Beck song... yeah, it's been a while. In the interest of updating this blog a bit more frequently, I'm trying to be less of a perfectionist (MUST! TAKE! PERFECT! PHOTO!) and just throw over whatever I've got, because perfection is for the gods, as I keep telling everyone. So. One of the highlights of this fall was getting new tires for my car. I researched various brands and features and finally settled on buying from National Tire Wholesale because they had the nicest floor display:   See, that wasn't so hard, was it Yak? Lather, rinse and repeat...

Funny how running out of toilet paper brings out the poet in some people. * * * Things I noticed about the kids this morning: 1. Sarah was sleeping with just the top sheet over her (never a comforter, even in winter), curled up on her front with her butt in the air and knees almost to her chin. This position was extremely cute when she was a baby in a one-piece sleeper and it still is. I hated to wake her, especially since she hates waking up. Starting at about three months, she's fallen asleep quickly and slept soundly for at least 10 hours at night -- lucky us.Which reminds me of something that happened around the time she had just started to sit up on her own. One night I heard her on the baby monitor uncharacteristically fussing after we'd put her in her crib -- not outright crying, but still. Finally she was quiet. An hour or two later I went in to check on her and found her sound asleep sitting up in her crib, leaning over with her forehead resting on the crib bars...

I was shocked to realize I hadn't posted during the entire month of August. What a twat, right? The random title of this post refers to the impending Hurricane Earl, which is supposed to brush Mass. tonight. A bit of wind and rain is all we're expecting in the Leafy Suburbs, however. Not like the last one that made landfall, Bob, on Aug. 19, 1991 (my 30th birthday, actually). It was a Monday; I had been visiting my mother in England and flew back Sunday afternoon with no inkling of the impending excitement. Monday morning I awoke to no wind but a torrential downpour and went to work at the paper to covering the storm and its effects, which mainly involved a lot of tree damage and downed power lines. The wind soon picked up quite a bit. The day's highlights included watching big long waves roll backwards out from land into Long Island Sound, and then trying to interview some hardy soul who had stayed in his oceanfront cottage. I knocked on the door and asked if he would ta...

...after reading these personal ads . * * * Awesome weekend: the town garlic mustard pull on a beautiful Saturday morning... then an afternoon of fun with friends grilling, sipping beer and finding out that Ben is ridiculously good at Chuck-O ... then a date night seeing " The Secret in Their Eyes ," which was fabulous and which reminded me why I used to love to go to movies (still love to, just never do). The only slight flaw in a perfect evening was my cell phone buzzing repeatedly in my pocket -- tearful calls from Sarah missing us (combination of a new sitter and us having no lives and thus not having had any sitter for ages). On the other hand, we didn't go completely broke (the main reason we never see movies) because we skipped dinner due to the afternoon BBQ, and the sitter was a teenager who charged only $10 an hour. Yeah, only. Goddamn inflation. So then yesterday it was even more beautiful. We took the kids to Hebrew school and Ben asked around to see i...

Olympics -- we love 'em. The girls clamor for ice dancing (usually on too late) while Ben sucks in air through his teeth as he watches YouTube clips of horrifying ski-jumping crashes. * * * Sarah has a new talent that is driving rusted railroad spikes through my skull: she has learned to make a noise exactly like when you blow on a comb wrapped with tissue paper. OK so maybe (no, definitely) I'm oversensitive to noises, but this one takes the cake -- every time she starts, I yell within milliseconds. I thought it couldn't get worse... until she brought home a long skinny balloon and started trying to make a balloon animal out of it. This involves a lot of twisting and sque-e-e-eaking and OH MY GOD IT'S GOING TO POP AND MAKE MY EYEBALLS EXPLODE JUST BEFORE I HIT THE CEILING. A dark quiet room is what I need at all times... * * * Becky is going to be eight in two days. She is getting too big and too independent to curl up on my lap. This saddens me. She and her f...

Instead, I'm amusing myself with some new blogs: Yo Mama's Blog and Steam Me Up, Kid . Also today's post about the Big Three Boston-area furniture companies on Surviving Grady (Jordan's Furniture, Bernie and Phyl's, and bob's Furniture). They asked which was most annoying, and I commented thus: Isn't Bob the one whose commercials say, in most severe Boston accent, "You get the DRESSAH, the MIRRAH..." just so cheesy but without the unintentional camp of the others. I'll excuse Barry and Elliot because they have something of a brain between them, and I have a soft spot for Bernie and Phyl because I can go around saying "Quahliddy, com-fit and price ... that's NICE!" Becky is also amusing me. As I woke her from a sound sleep this morning at 6:45 (and don't get me started on predawn arisings), I tried to get her brain in gear by asking what she wants for her birthday (she turns eight in February -- jeez). After just a brief mo...

That sort of sums up the rest of our vacation. I'm ecstatic to report that the kids will now sleep as late as we do (or in Sarah's case, wake up earlier and read quietly). So Ben and I got to loll around in bed until 9:30 or even 10 on some of those mornings. There is no greater pleasure than a good night's sleep and a gradual awakening when it's not still dark out. What did we do when actually upright, you may ask? For the most part it involved sitting in front of the fire, playing Monopoly, watching DVDs, cooking and eating, seeing friends, and just hanging out. Somehow the time seemed to pass in a normal fashion. We also caught up on some stuff we'd been putting off while Ben was unemployed, like taking the cats to the vet for shots and getting a plumber to deal with the clogged drain in the kids' bathroom. Isn't that exciting?Buy we did get out a bit... we went to a fun potluck in central Mass. at the home of an old colleague of Ben's. There were m...

I entered this anecdote in a contest sponsored by hilarious  Let's Panic About Babies site, where they asked parents about an embarrassing parenting moment... There was the cheery night after Sarah spent her first two days of life in the hospital gazing around beatifically before she came home and promptly got hungry as hell while my milk still hadn't come in. Of course I nursed her (though no more than every two hours as per the helpful schedule sheet provided by the hospital) so she couldn't POSSIBLY be hungry with all that delicious colostrum, but for some reason she still screamed like a banshee for hours on end. Ben and I were psychotic with anxiety and sleep deprivation. In yet another attempt to cure this baby of its mysterious caterwauling, Ben decided to change her again. And when the wet baby wipe hit her butt at 2 a.m... well, as we described it later, she bobcatted (actually it was a puma we were thinking of, sort of like this ). Now the embarrassing part: in...

Our drive to New Jersey on Friday was punctuated by frog-choking downpours, mostly on the Mass. Pike. On Sunday in New Jersey, there was another FCD, but fortunately it held off until everyone was back at Ben's brother's house having brunch. An hour earlier, and dozens of people would have been drenched, standing outside at the cemetery for the unveiling ceremony for Ben's aunt, who died last September just 22 days after being diagnosed with stomach and liver cancer. Unveilings are apparently a uniquely American Jewish custom. Traditionally, family members bury the deceased within 24 hours and sit shiva (mourn) for seven days (shiva means seven in Hebrew). Some think the unveiling evolved as another life-cycle occasion to bring together geopgraphically scattered members of an extended family. Or if you're more cynical, you might see it as a way of saying "It's been a year, let's move on." In any case, it was very moving for the adults and sort of so...

I cracked up reading Amalah's review of kiddie books and had to leave her a comment listing my own faves: " Go Dog Go " -- love the utopian party-in-a-tree ending and the iconoclastic fuck-your-hats attitude interwoven throughout. " One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish " -- the best Seuss. I always hated "Cat in the Asshat" -- he's an egotistical jerk and I would NOT like to have a beer with him, which is a requirement for protagonists of books I read aloud to my preshus offspring. " Polka Bats and Octopus Slacks " -- works on so many levels, including mine. Drugs were probably involved in the creation of this book. " Kat Kong ," " Dogzilla " and anything else by Dav Pilkey (including the Captain Underpants series for the more sophisticated reader) " The Velveteen Rabbit " -- Never had it as a kid myself; I read it for the first time when I was in my 30s. SOB SOB SOB SOB OMFG SOB!! More powerful a...

We returned Monday from four days in Nantucket, and it was one of my top 5 vacations ever. I have to write it down so I'll remember it, but if it's too boring to read, just go to Mimi Smartypants' latest , which is even excellenter than usual. We left Friday morning for Hyannis and barely made the 11:00 ferry (who knew you STILL had to stand in line to get printed tickets when you had purchased them beforehand online?). The house that D1 and . rented in Sconset was absolutely beautiful -- a spacious living room with a strip of backyard and then the bluff dropping to the wide-open sea. We were in an adjacent guest cabin, while K, her 9-year-old daughter J, and D2 were in the main house as well (K, D, D2 and I all worked at the same place at various times). The kids loved battling the waves and then eating ice cream at Sconset Beach even though the water was pretty cold thanks to the worst June weather ever. Then we had a barbecue and cocktails in the front yard that evenin...

Funny coincidence the other night... out of the blue, Sarah asked me what tampons were (she had seen a tampon machine in a public restroom and it registered for the first tine, I guess). I'd talked about menstruation before, but we hadn't discussed a Lady's Way of Dealing With Aunt Flo. I described the reason for needing tampons and, warming up, began discussing the tampon's structure and function. I went into our bathroom to get one to dissect for her edification. Then just as I was reaching the high point of the story (pantomiming insertion fully clothed), there was a perfectly timed howl from elsewhere. Rolling my eyes I waited to see what Drama Queen was overreacting to now, when into the bathroom she rushed... dripping blood from her face, arms and hands. Yes, with her impeccable talent Becky had managed to give herself a whopping nosebleed by somehow bumping her nose with her own knee, and then dashing in, deus ex machina -like, to inadvertently illustrate my...

An almost-perfect summer Saturday: Going to the dump (oddly satisfying) Scoring some books at the library, including some classics for Sarah ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Misty of Chincoteague"). Grocery shopping -- pleasurable because I had no kids with me, so I got to use the boop-boop scanner thingy MYSELF! Wheeee! A quick swim at the local pond, though the rumble of thunder caused the only imperfection to the day, because it meant everybody had to get out of the water and leave, which was disappointing for the kids but a good timing in terms of having enough time for... Chopping and marinating for that evening's barbecue featuring my former editor Peter, his wife and 7-year-old daughter, who became instant best friends with Becky, which was extra nice because Sarah usually monopolizes "new kids." And finally... eating steak and burgers, drinkin' Buds, talking, listening to music, watching the kids enjoy each other's company. Ther...

That would be the weather. Apparently we're on track to have this be the gloomiest month of June on record . I don't mind the constant cloud cover (which I actually like in the winter, when the sunlight is a slanting, squint-making mockery). It's this endless drizzle. Ultimatum to weather gods: stop constantly sprinkling on the toilet seat of my life! Wipe it up, zip and get the hell out of my stall! It's supposed to be summer, not Irish spring. Feh. Weather: sucky (see above). Home life: chaotic, more so than usual. Welcome to Zoo Dubrawvsky, which opened on Sunday, packed with laughter and love, joy, tears and extra beer, starring the four of us plus Ben's nephew's family, who are staying with us for a week while the floors are refinished on their new house they bought on Monday two hours after selling their old one. It's actually lots of fun because the girls -- our two, plus their three-year old Maya and their 11-month-old, who mostly sits and stares an...

I suddenly realized (after waking up in a state of tension at 2:00 a.m.) that coming up are: My dad's 80th birthday party -- still trying to find a caterer who won't charge us a breathtakingly high amount An exam in microbiology next Tuesday, and I've barely picked up the textbook since the last one, never mind started writing the take-home portion Passover next week. We're definitely having a seder here, so much planning/shopping/cooking to do, though two segments of Ben's family are still seeing who wins the guilt-trip war over the location of the other seder (nephew's house in Mass. or brother's house in New Jersey). We are not going to Jersey. No way. A weekend chock-full of kiddie activities that would be totally unmanageable were it not for Google's blessed invention of color-coded online calendars. I want to have Google's baby. Saturday morning synagogue -- it's our turn to supply post-service food, and Ben and Sarah will be away on an ove...

As the bad economic news kept washing over us, I felt a vague sense of anxiety (OK, let's put some brakes on spending somehow), but it remained generalized until yesterday, when Ben came out of a "reorg" meeting at his job. Yup, he got laid off. My first reaction was: been there, done that, got the T-shirt -- his multimedia company dying in 2002, both of us looking to escape the South in 2005, his last job in 2007... So between those career -careening episodes, house buying/selling/renting/moving, having babies, etc., etc., we have the life-upheaval thing down pat. My second reaction was controlled panic: "OK, we'll have to sell the house, but please God let's be able to stay local so the kids' lives won't be wrecked, let's just have a quick yet intense look at ZipRealty to see what's on the market in town that's wicked cheap, shall we?" My third reaction was back to #1: we know the drill. Practicalities. Switch to health insurance f...

I had a couple of posts started but they kept appearing in Hindi, for God's sake. Much investigation revealed that deep in the bowels on this blog, SOMEHOW a setting got turned on that said "enable transliteration." So now we're good to go, but I couldn't recover the bits I'd written before, so there will be blatherings about the inauguration etc. as soon as I recover my equilibrium as well as the digestive-tract health of the entire family (three of us dwelt in the House of Heaves earlier this week, and I'm now at home with Sarah, the last to succumb). More soon.

See Dozer. Dozer is a stuffed dog. See Dozer drink. Dozer is having a martini at my father's house. See children. See children smile. The children are my nephew Jack, Sarah and Becky. See children unfazed by boozy dog. Dozer is friendly. "Hit me again, bartender," says Dozer. Yesterday the girls and I attended a show at the local library of Celtic music, storytelling and dancing. Sort of a mini Family Von Trapp -- a jolly bearded fellow, his wisp o' a wife and their kids, an 11-year-old girl who danced beautifully and an 8-year-old boy who played a drum but looked like he wished he was almost anywhere else. I learned a lot, including the difference between Irish and Scots bagpipes (apparently playing the Irish version must be done in a seated position while also doing the chicken dance with one arm) as well as the dances themselves. I never knew the fingers above the heads were meant to symbolize a stag's horns; I always figured they were just trying to look like ...