Failure!

Everyone whose ever cooked has a good failed meal story, right?

For my 94-year-old Godmother, Mimi–an amazing Italian cook who in her prime thought nothing of devoting days to preparing mouth-watering multi-course meals–it was the Thanksgiving turkey that never cooked. I think it happened back in the Seventies some time, but she’s still working through the horror of it all–a houseful of people and no matter how long she stalled everyone, the damn bird was still frozen in the middle.

Well, I don’t have 70-odd years of cooking to draw from, but tonight’s dinner was kind of a turkey for me. Apparently I was not able to adequately discern the proper slow cooker setting for galumpki cooking. (You’d think they’d just have a dial you turn towards “Galumpki.”) I lugged that damn huge hot and awkward (oh, and heavy) crock pot to Ellen’s, only for her to cut into one to reveal soft red meat. But here’s the thing. We love these little cabbage rolls so damn much, she and Maia each ate their way through one as we discussed the situation and came to grips with the fact that they were in fact raw.

Then there was some experimentation with the microwave to see if we could speedily finish the work that the slow cooker failed to do. But even after several blasts the meat was still freakishly red. I insisted they stop. It was just too painful for me.

I must have had it on the Warm setting all day instead of Cook. Or perhaps it was the Sicken Your Family with Raw Meat setting. At any rate, this only validates my hunch that having a functional legible digital screen which indicates what the hell is happening inside that pot all day is really quite necessary.

Ellen helpfully offered up that she had ravioli she could cook. Alas, not for me, Non Dairy Queen that I am. So everyone else ate that and I had some pot stickers. And finally some delicious strawberry rhubarb pie made by young urban derelicts at Mission Pie.

It’s nearly 9PM and we’re back home where for some reason I’m giving the crock pot a second chance and have it back on. This time at what I guess is a different setting.

I hang my head in shame.

Pink-Eyed Toddler, Wild-Eyed Mama

The next time you’re looking for a good way to express the concept of ‘nearly impossible’ you can say, “Why it’s just like giving a toddler eye drops!”

And for ‘utterly impossible’ tack onto that, “When you’ve only had 4 1/2 hours of sleep the night before!”

And for extra credit you can also say, “And the kid’s in a shopping cart in the Target parking lot because it’s there that you realize you should’ve given her the eye drops an hour ago!”

Fun! [She says while rifling through the medicine cabinet for any leftover C-section meds that might have mind-altering effects.]

What makes this ordeal truly Orwellian for me, is that with pink eye being as turbo-contagious as it is, I’m in solitary confinement with the Tasmanian Devil Patient. Well, me and wee Paigey, who I’ve been trying to keep out of Kate’s germ-infested “I-wanna-hug-my-sista” reach.

I mean, Paigey is already afflicted with a variety of her own wretched skin maladies. Despite all my dairy denial everything has flared up again in extremis. The last thing she needs is to add pink eye to the mix. Right now going cheek to cheek with Paige feels like cuddling up with a burlap sack. One that flakes on you. Hopefully the dermatologist tomorrow can proffer an easy, instant, non-steroidal cure.

See? Even when the going gets tough I’m a die-hard optimist.

That said, is it too late to get my old job back?

Nights 3 and 4: Polska Fiesta!

Come child. Touch the hem of my colorful striped dirndl skirt and I shall whisk you away to a land of Polish culinary delights! Come! Take hold of my hand or the cuff of my flowing peasant blouse, and let’s dance dance dance to the songs of Bobby Vinton, my long blond braids flying in the wind!

Okay so I’m not sure the dirndl skirt, peasant shirt and braids are really what those gals are rockin’ back in the old country, but I do think it’s what the Polish doll in my international dolls collection looked like. (Oh sure, my father tried to imbue his fervid obsession with collections onto me as a child. And if you don’t believe me come ’round on the next rainy day and I can show off not only my It’s a Small World-esque posse of dolls, but some old coins, stamps, and the business cards of Margaret Thatcher, Henry Winkler, and other long-deceased small-time Rhode Island dignitaries. I know, I know. Even more proof of my dazzling coolness that you knew nothing about.)

So, even though I was really wearing one of my two postpartum outfits yesterday (the shorts I think, not the jeans) picture me if you will dressed in the delightful garb of a Polish lass, cookin’ up some of the food of my people.

Our dinner last night:

• Kielbasa
• Sauerkraut
• Dairy-free mashed potatoes
• Mini carrots for Kate (I blew her mind mentioning they didn’t exist when Mark and I were kids)
• Red pepper for Kate (something she recently tasted and wanted to daringly try again)
• Sprite (Mark’s soda pairing)

Last night at 5:15PM I was still waiting at the pharmacy for Kate’s pink eye prescription to be filled. By the time we walked in the door it was just before 6PM, but I stepped up, people! I did not decide that gettin’ a hot meal on the table when my hubbie got home (at 6:15-ish) was not possible! Nooooo! I stood by that stove and made sparks fly–while poor Paigey sat in her carseat bucket in a saturated diaper and waiting patiently for me to get everything on the stove. Bless that little crusty baby.

Nothing terribly interesting to report on the success or failure of this meal. Mark seemed to like it but thought that mashed potatoes made with Rice Dream aren’t really up to par with those made with milk. And all I can say to that is, duh.

Since my sister Ellen and I had plans to get together at her house tonight, I was fearful my five-dinners-in-a-row would be in jeopardy. Instead I decided to make some galumpki–cabbage rolls stuffed with ground beef, pork, and rice, with Campbell’s tomato soup on top–to take over for dinner.

These are something my Mom used to make us. You eat them with excessive amounts of ketchup, and though they’re far from gourmet, in that weird way that some people actually like gefilte fish, Ellen and I adore galumpki. Every time I make them I jolt her into an intense taste and smell memory. (Similar to the smell “memory” your house gets after you’ve cooked cabbage in it all day.)

Speaking of slow cooking, the galumpki [Bruno family spelling] will be a bit of an experiment. Last time I made them I put them in this fancy crock pot we got from Williams Sonoma with a wedding present gift certificate. At that time the digital read out was starting to fail, but I was able to discern using educated guesses and my keen powers of telepathy what setting I was putting it on.

This morning I realized that in the few months it’s been resting in the basement the remaining functionality of the digital screen has gone to hell. So I pressed a few of the extraordinarily un-intuitive buttons on the thing, genuflected, and walked away hoping that some sort of cooking was taking place.

I can say that my house is starting to smell like the cabbagey-smelling hallway of an old boarding house. So I think I did it right. In a couple hours after Kate wakes up from her nap and I’ve managed to lug her, Paige, and the forty-pound steaming hot crock pot over to Ellen’s, I’ll know for sure.

Cuteness

This morning Kate was shuffling through a stack of family photos my sister-in-law Lori recently sent.

Kate: “Cute cute cute!”

Me: [seeing that she's looking at a picture of John holding Gavin] “Who?”

Kate: “Uncle John! He is sooooo cute!”

Apparently she digs a man in uniform. And really, who can blame her?

Night #2: Le Menu

Okay so no gourmet feast tonight, but there were actually four children under the age of five here up until about a half hour before Mark got home. And I was the only person over age five.

• Spicy Tomato Burgers on Potato Buns
• Ore Ida Crinkle Cut French Fries
• Left Over Green Beans (Mark made these Sunday night)
• Left Over Orzo (Kate only–while waiting for her burger to cook)

Not to besmirch the merits of a burger, since a great burger is a great thing. But I feel the need to defend this dinner offering based on the fact that there are so many other things I could cook, but the damn dairy restriction seems to significantly whittle down my options. Just needed to make that disclaimer.

My round-up of tonight’s meal:

Prep stress level: Not bad considering at any moment toddlers could have been starting the curtains on fire in the other room.

Percentage of meal I did all by myself: Like last night 98%, since I asked Mark if he thought the burgers were cooked enough. (I needed to give them another 30 seconds.)

Orchestration of all elements: Good! I fretted a bit that the fries wouldn’t be ready with the burgers, but my project management skills must have somehow kicked in. I hit my deadlines, nailed my milestones, and took the critical path to getting everything on the table at once.

Taste: Mark rated it as “very good.” (Aw shucks.) He liked the little horseradish kick in the burgers, as did I, and said they had “excellent color.” I hadn’t even thought that was something the judges were looking at. Kate also seemed pleased with her un-spicy burger, and enjoyed making herself little sliders by sticking her cut-up meat between a bun she tore pieces off of. All this said, I should point out that neither Mark nor I touched the green beans that I reheated from the other night. I guess I don’t get points for trying to make a balanced meal if we eat an imbalanced one. The fact that they were leftovers made them more easy to ignore, I think. Plus Mark had a multi-course work lunch.

Familial groove from all eating together: Excellent! We sit there and talk about what we all did during the day just like the Cleavers! Just two nights into this new eating together routine–versus our previous one of feeding Kate, putting the kids to sleep, Mark cooking, us eating, me trying to pry myself off the couch to clean up but more often than not just falling asleep and Mark doing it even though he also cooked…. Wait, where am I? Let me put it this way: It’s 8:30PM now and instead of Mark and I just sitting down to eat, we’re already digesting! The kitchen is sparkling! And Mark is now using the living room rug as a work shop for a bunch of greasy bike parts. Uh, progress, right?

A solid dinner overall. But now watching Hillary Clinton speak on CNN is giving me indigestion. Oy.

Can She Do It?

Guess what? I made dinner tonight like a big girl!

It’s true. My dirty little secret is that Mark is our dinner-maker night after night. I know. I’m not working and there is really no excuse for this. Though the story that I have constructed around the situation is that “Mark likes to cook dinner” and “it helps him unwind after work” and “comparatively my food sucks.” The reality is that really only that last statement is consistently true.

After hearing me say “Mark likes the in-the-trenches daily dinner prep and I much prefer cooking for dinner parties (when I also don’t have children to tend to)”–hearing me say this perhaps a zillion times in different social situations where some small indication of our domestic set-up was revealed to someone–well, it’s really a wonder that I’m still here typing today and that Mark hasn’t strangled me.

I can’t believe it took him as long as it did to finally set the record straight over pillow talk one night and say, “Uh, I don’t always LOVE cooking dinner every night, you know. Sometimes I’d like to just come home and relax too. I mean, if you wanted to do it some time that would be great.”

At least, that’s what I think he said. I was too busy sticking my fingers in my ears and repeating “la la la la” loudly.

Sure one of my wedding vows was to always appreciate Mark’s dinner-cookin’. And I think I’ve upheld that, and without much effort or prodding. I do appreciate having a personal chef as I often refer to him. (My God, it’s a wonder I’m still alive.) I mean, my level of appreciation can’t rival my brother-in-law Roland’s who between bites nearly moans with grateful gastronomic delight. Me, I lick my fingertips, sop up gravy off my plate with my bread, and say at least once per meal how awesome the [INSERT ONE] [pork tenderloin with peach salsa] [pasta with homemade meat sauce] [chicken parm] [flank steak and baked potatoes] [chicken and corn chowder] [ziti bake] or myriad other meals are.

And he’s not only about dinner. At lunchtime Mark makes a world-class tuna salad, a mean grilled cheese (with tomato soup, bien sur), and other fabulous sandwiches, quesadillas and left-over reincarnations with a twist.

I won’t bore you with his mouth-watering breakfast and brunch offerings, mostly just because I don’t want to run the risk of someone breaking into our house to steal him. Suffice it to say his skills in the kitchen have little to no boundaries.

So last night, after preparing another knock-out meal for childhood friend Sydney and hubbie Tere, we cleaned up, hung out, went to bed, and halfway through the night when Paige woke up to nurse Mark could not manage to get back to sleep. Just kinda tossed and turned and watched the hours on the clock tick by until of course he fell fast asleep mere minutes before needing to wake up.

Inspired by his measly 4-hours of shut-eye, I went to the grocery store with a fierce determination to do right by my man and to wrangle us up some dinner tonight.

For the record, it’s not that I can’t cook. I mean, I used to have a somewhat limited but solid repertoire. But somewhere between us dating, moving in together, and getting hitched those skills, well, atrophied. I can bake with the best of them, but always found savory foods more challenging. First there’s timing everything to finish all at once, then there’s the nasty handling raw chicken or having your fingertips smell like garlic the next day. (I’m such a princess.)

And frankly I just don’t seem to have the basics of seasoning and discerning meat done-ness down pat. I’m a dyed in the wool recipe follower, which is why the precision of baking suits me to a T. To me hearing that you cook something “until it’s done” and not for, say, 11 minutes, is arcane and maddening. My brain doesn’t understand what to do with that directive, so before it short circuits I tend to flee and ask Mark to take over.

And that did happen a little bit tonight too, but I think I still get 98% credit for cooking this:

• Roasted chicken
• Oven roasted potatoes and carrots
• Corn on the cob
• Sippy cup of milk or beer (age dependent)

Not bad, eh? And the thing was, it WASN’T bad! Mark complimented me on it, though at this rate he’s likely choking down raw chicken just to reinforce this behavior in me.

Kate even said twice, “Thanks for cooking this, Mama!” (Though maybe it was Mark throwing his voice.) She asked for more chicken a few times too, but did turn her nose at the roasted carrots in lieu of “crunchy baby carrots.” The roasted carrots had “brown on them.”

At any rate, the culinary merit of the meal aside, the whole dinner experience was, as Mark and I would say, exceedingly pleasant. I gave Kate a refresher course on table-setting, served everything up hot not long after Mark got home, and we all talked about our days like a nice little nuclear family as we ate. For her part, Paige happily did judo kicks in her bouncy seat while waiting for my breasts to be freed up for her dining pleasure.

So here’s the thing. Even if I can’t dice mirepoix in perfectly symmetrical micro cubes like Mark, and wouldn’t likely take on anything that required mirepoix in the first place, I decided tonight I want to humbly try to bang out some dinners around here. Five nights in a row of me-cooked dinners is my self-imposed challenge. At the end of the week I’ll either determine that I can contribute more regularly to our dinner-makin’, take it over altogether (not my hypothesis), or just really amp up on my appreciation of all Mark’s hard work.

No promises of gastronomic rapture. The goal is to make some healthy balanced meals that both Mark and Kate would be willing to eat. And that don’t use Hamburger Helper.

Can I do it? Tune in to hear tomorrow’s menu, and Mark and Kate’s review.

Heed My Words

To any parents who are planning to move their child from a crib to a Big Girl or Big Boy bed:

In order to glamorize many of the wonderful attributes of big beds versus cribs, such as the existence of pillows, do not–I repeat do not–incorporate pillow fluffing into your child’s bedtime ritual.

Why, you ask?

Well, depending on the child’s tenacity in the excuses-to-stay-up arena, this could turn into a task you are called upon to do several times at nap time and night time.

And if you can imagine such a thing, the requests–annoying as they are in and of themselves–are made exceedingly more malodorous due to the way they are typically expressed.

“FLUFF MY PILLOW, MAMA! Fluff. My. PILLOOOOOOW!”

Unless of course, you enjoy feeling more like your child’s indentured servant than you perhaps already do. Then by all means, develop a robust and complex pillow fluffing tradition.

Signed,
Kate’s Personal Pillow Fluffer

Turns out, we have a baby

It was bound to happen. Four months into her existence with us, it finally feels like we have a baby. Which is to say, we’re incredibly sleep deprived.

Today I took off Paige’s socks and put them in the diaper pail. (God knows where the dirty diaper will turn up.) And in the car this morning I had to do a panicked check to make sure both girls were there and strapped in, not forgotten on the sidewalk. I’m not sure, but I think I brushed my teeth.

This afternoon when Kate cruelly refused to nap, I had her play the “Mama is your baby who you have to put to sleep in your bed” game. Hey, it wasn’t what I’d call a legitimate nap, but it did afford me a few horizontal minutes, even if the blankets were wrenched off repeatedly to rearrange the teddy bear that Mama-Kate wedged under my arm.

I’m amazed that Mark is functioning intelligently at his office. I can only hope that he’s locked himself in a bathroom stall to catch a few Zs.

Speaking of which, I hereby award the Co-Parenting Merit Badge to my charming and sleepy husband. In some dumb show we were watching last night a woman said. “Marry someone who loves you a little more than you love them.” Poppycock. Marry someone who is willing to do his share of middle-of-the-night baby soothing when he could be tucked in complaining that he needs his sleep for work, and pointing out that he’s not lactating anyway. (Don’t get any big ideas, sweetheart.)

Of course, I brought this all upon myself when I was in the midst of one of my Hallmark Moments of Parental Gratitude yesterday. Something or other made me express to Mark how thankful I am that the girls are happy and healthy. And I think I might have foolishly tacked onto that something about “I’ll take all the sleep deprivation in the world as long as yadda yadda yadda…” I don’t even want to type the sentiment for fear it will reinforce it.

Who knew I could be so powerful that by mere mention I could bring something on?

I intend to spend the remainer of the day–assuming I’m coherent enough to do so–chanting incantations that pair “healthy happy children” with “good sleepers.”

Wish me luck. Or at least a good long stretch of sleep tonight.

Three is a Magic Number

Okay, so I was a bit off when I projected that, in my recent spate of connecting with people I’ve long fallen out of touch with, it would be Miss Vermette, my crotchety second grade teacher, who’d be the next person I’d stumble across. In fact, the person is Randy Williams, a hilarious fabulous fellow from my junior year abroad program. And Randy’s nothing like Miss Vermette!

So at Kenyon I was an English major. Which is kind of what one does at Kenyon. Go to “the hill” and read the books, and write the papers. And as such, the canonical junior year abroad program was to some British university an hour’s train ride from London, the name of which I can’t even begin to remember.

Getting into this program was something only a select few of us lit junkies had the privilege of doing. I remember when I got in (see how I casually mention how totally smart and cool I was then?) random people I didn’t even know would come up to me on Middle Path (don’t even ask) and congratulate me.

So wasn’t everyone shocked and dismayed when I decided to blow off the hallowed halls of lit-dom to craft a junior year program that included–mon Dieu!–France. This, as an English major, was a wild act of rebellion. But heck, I decided to do the other half of the year in London, just to make my homies happy. Oh, and to do the necessary coursework to fulfill my major’s requirements and, er, graduate.

What’s funny is, no one ever said no to that other program, so by being accepted into it I made it onto all these mailing lists and never was removed from them. Last year I even got an invitation for a reunion of all the Blah-Dee-Blah U attendees. (I didn’t go to that either.)

Okay, so my France program took place in Nantes for the summer, then there was a super weird and random artist’s stage in Rodez (rural southern Nowheresville), and then the fall semester in none other than Gay Paree. The program was a joint one between Kenyon and Earlham College which is somewhere in Indiana. (I’m scraping off rust flack from my brain to remember all this, mind you.)

Earlham hosted an orientation weekend for the 20? students going, since a prof from there was heading up the trip that year. So the Kenyon students drove over to this guy’s house where we all camped out for a night (or two?) and essentially set ground rules, did trust falls, and were awoken from our sleeping bags at an ungodly hour by the prof blasting classical music and announcing in his horrendous French accent, “Bon matin! Nous commencons la jour!” If you’ve never heard the French language, read that sentence in English while jutting your jaw forward and over-enunciating each syllable and you’ll have nailed his accent.

The culture clash between the Kenyon and Earlham kids was grave. The Kenyonites were hopelessly white entitled kids who saw college as four years of boarding school after boarding school. We were apolitical, somewhat lazy, and as painful as it is to admit, likely preppie. The Earlham kids on the other hand were groovy, diverse, socially aware individuals. You know–crunchy.

We were all probably a bit horrified by each other, and they probably had better reason to fear us than the other way around. To wit: Since so many of us were staying with this professor he asked that no one showered–a request my friend Melissa’s sense of hygiene just could not oblige. So while the Earlham posse was following the “if it’s yellow let it mellow” adage with their bathroom usage, Melissa sashayed past a line of people waiting to pee, toweling dry her hair after a nice long hot shower. Utterly obnoxious, but I’ll bet we found it hilarious at the time.

As you’d imagine, the wacky fun of a foreign adventure in which we were forbidden to speak English and were packed together on buses in enriching field trip after enriching field trip  eventually brought us all together. Or at least many of us. Shucks, us kids learned from each other! I don’t know that the Earlham women went so far as to start shaving their armpits by semester’s end, but they were certainly making better stock investments. (Kidding! Wow, wait. I’m still obnoxious!)

But all this blather and chatter and rememberage really is to say that Person Number Three who has woven his way into the game of Kristen Bruno, This is Your Life!, is Randy. Randy who served, by sheer virtue of how fucking funny and sweet and delightful and sassy he is, as a nearly immediate bridge between the two groups. Maybe he wasn’t even an Earlham student, and was a paid actor tasked with bringing us together. At any rate, I remember driving back to Ohio from that orientation excited to have many a milk-out-the-nose laughing session with him in France.

Which it turns out we did. Except substitute wine for milk.

And now, Randy who I never dreamed would crop up in my life again other than in photo albums, posts a little note to THIS VERY BLOG the other day. A little, “Is that you?” kinda note. And yes, by gum, it IS me. So the commenting here thing first off means there are now seven of you reading this. And that his memory is far better than mine since he was able to successfully cyber-stalk me by not only remembering my name, but also that I’m an e-n Kristen. Whereas nearly twenty years after having graduated I’m proud that I remember where I went to college.

To make it all the more fun, Randy lives in the Bay Area. Just blocks away from my sister, Ellen.

See? That’s just the kind of guy he is! You reconnect with him and think, wouldn’t it be great to not only exchange email but to actually see him again, and there he goes making it easy to do so. So a lunch or coffee or night of heavy drinking awaits us soon. Joy!

Funny that in a recent one of my life-analysis phone calls with Mark’s Aunt Terry I mentioned that I was ‘taking resumes’ for new friends. Not that I don’t adore the existing set mind you. (Last thing I want to do is offend my six long-time readers.) It was just that with my new at-home status it seemed I was more available to support a larger friendship infrastructure. (Clearly I still need to learn to talk like I’m not at work.)

And what’s cool is that instead of making new friends–which I have done a bit of recently, sure–I’ve managed to recycle some old ones. How cool is that?

My friends from Earlham would be so proud.

Sleep Walking at Target

So Paigey is starting to laugh! I discovered this the other day when I was doing the old baby routine of big inhale followed by lunge for the cheek or neck and kiss kiss kiss. That one evidently just slays her.

Her laugh is this kind of slow staccato haaa-haaa-haaa. Hopefully it’ll soften and lighten up a bit over time so she doesn’t suffer some horrible Seinfeldian fate. (“So I was out with this really attractive woman the other night. We’re having this great conversation over dinner, but then I said something funny and…”)

Anyway, yesterday while peppering her with a skillion Obsessive Maternal Cheek Kisses and trying to elicit more laughs from her I realized that her cheeks were as sweet and soft as–as normal baby cheeks! No dry leathery skin! No stinky yeast funk rising up from her neck! No scratch scabs criss-crossing her face! All this and no zits too!

Woo hoo! The I-can’t-eat-anything-I-want-to diet seems to be paying off. Even tonight as we were sitting on the couch in the sweet post-kid-bedtime lull, Mark said, “So it’s kind of like Paige is finally our soft sweet baby.”

I’m thrilled. And of course, now I want to eat her.

Though Miss Sweet Cheeks did get me up a couple times last night. Enough to leave me feeling somewhat zombie-like this morning as I showered, dressed and fed her, and bustled Kate off to school (usually Mark’s gig, but he had his every-decade-or-so dentist appointment today).

Usually when Kate goes to school it’s like I’m playing Beat the Clock to see how much I can cram into five toddler-free hours. Achiever that I am, what I can accomplish is generally quite impressive. Though not today.

Every American mother worth her weight in Merona clothing certainly starts most errand outings at Target. Of course half the fun of Targe-ay has historically been my latte stop at the embedded Starbucks. Alas, this morning I tried to satisfy myself with one of their fairly crummy blueberry muffins, with hopes that they aren’t made with any butter. Somehow it didn’t give me the kick I was needing.

At one point after I’d ticked all the things I needed off my list, and after Paige had fallen asleep in the shopping cart, I realized that for some Godforsaken amount of time I’d just been kind of sleepwalking around the store–leaning into the shopping cart like it was some kind of walker and mindlessly making my way up and down the aisles. I have no idea how long I’d been doing this, but when it dawned on my that I should “wake up” and get out of the store I could barely shake myself into action. Getting to the check-out area seemed an epic moon walk away. But as I looked around at the other shopping Mamas I realized I wasn’t alone.

How many other women find themselves wandering the aisles aimlessly at Target, basking in the upbeat merchandising, browsing anonymously in a low-impact with slight feeling-of-accomplishment way? It’s like airplane sleeping–you’re kinda asleep but you can still hear the flight attendants walking through the plane asking everyone, “Pasta or chicken? Pasta or chicken?” 

I’m telling you women like me are EVERYWHERE. Targets around the country are packed with us, haplessly sleep walking until the older kid needs to get picked up from school, and racking up couple-hundred-dollar tabs for non-essential items. If we all didn’t come by our exhaustion honestly and I didn’t love the company as ardently as I do, I’d think Target was pumping some kinda mind-control chemical out through the air ducts.

Outside the store–once I finally swam through a Jello-like haze to get there–I stopped at the nursery to look for a plant for the great one-dollar plant stand I got at a yard sale this weekend. (Plant stand = $1, Fern = $20. Bargain? You decide.)

A woman around my age and her mother walked past me. Glancing down at my cart I heard the older woman say, “Oh look at that fern. Do you remember when I was trying to grow those?”

For some reason it totally reminded me of my mother. She was an avid gardener and I don’t remember if she went through a fern-growing phase, but it’s the kind of thing I could just picture her saying. “Oh those gerananiums. I tried and tried to grow them in that side garden we had.”

The thought came at me in that gut-punching kind of way that you never expect. It’s like when Mother’s Day approaches and you gear yourself up for being all sad that your mother’s not alive and then a few days later you realize that you never even had a Big Sad Moment that day. Then you hear some mom talking to her daughter about her fern-growin’ and you want to sit on the floor at the Target nursery and cry.

There must be something in the air around here–or maybe it’s my mother herself–but Kate has gotten on this kick of saying “I’m calling your Mama,” whenever I unwittingly leave one of the phones in her reach. “What you Mama’s name again?” she’ll ask. “Vicki? I’m calling Vicki. Hello Kristen’s Mama! This is Kate! How are you? Okay, you talk to my Mama now.” Then she hands the phone to me.

The first time this happened Mark was listening from the kitchen and walked into Paige’s room where Kate and I were. His face was all red and covered with tears. Oddly, I wasn’t crying. I was too busy thinking about what I’d say if I really could talk to my mother on the phone. In Kate’s game I’ve said something like, “Hi Mom. I’m here with Kate and Paige and we’re thinking about you!” Then Kate is off busying herself with another toy, or grabs the phone back and starts dialing Tokyo.

The whole thing also has me wondering why Kate asks me about my mother, but hasn’t ever thought to ask where she is, or why she hasn’t met her. Of course I’m avoiding telling her about death until she’s at least 25.

Yesterday when we were in the park having a PB&J picnic, a mother was coercing her kids to get in their stroller. “Come on, Lucy, we have to go home! Grandma’s coming over for lunch.” How jealous-making is that? First off their grandma is alive, secondly she lives close enough to come over for lunch.

It’s not fair. I miss my Mama.

Hi Mom. I have two beautiful daughters now, Kate and Paige. I know you would just love them. Paigey’s had a skin thing but it’s so much better now. And Kate loves school and is such a good big sister. And even though we’re sometimes tired or impatient I think Mark and I are doing a pretty good job with them. And I really really really wish you could come over for lunch some day.