Why, yes, that does ring a bell

When my son was little some friends of ours gave us the book Go the F*ck to Sleep.

I thought it was funny and charming, and it's got lovely illustrations. But I didn't fully appreciate the genius of it.

Because Jordan slept.

I would read to him, rock him and sing him a little song or two, and then put him in his crib. He would promptly stick his thumb in his mouth, put his little butt up in the air, and fall asleep. And then he slept.

My daughter, on the other hand. She's a sleep-wrecking lunatic.

She's never wanted to go to bed. And now she's gotten clever. It's not just screaming in protest.

No.

Now after stories, after her older brother is fast asleep, it is, "Mama! I'm hungweeee! I'm hungweee!" So I will get her a drinking yogurt and she'll take a couple sips and be all yeah, thanks, great. That was refreshing and now I'm done.

"Now I need another story."

(NO? DID YOU SAY NO?)

"I'm hot! I'm hot! I'M HOOOOOT! I need new pajamas!" We change pajamas.

"I need socks! Socks! Not these socks! I want to choose my own! There's only one pink one!"

(WHERE IS THE OTHER PINK SOCK THESE ARE THE ONLY SOCKS I CAN POSSIBLY WEAR!)

I talk her into one pink and one other color. We get back into bed.

"I'm scared of the dark!"

"Honey, that's why you have a nightlight."

"But it makes shadows and I'm scared of the shadows!"

Sometimes, I tell you, I am pretty sure I myself am not going to make it.

And then sometimes she will get up at night. After stringing bedtime out until 10:00 pm Friday night, she was up at 2:00 am. She had a cough. Then she needed milk. "MILKEEEEE!" Nick got her milk.

She needed...I don't know. Attention. She was just awake. And awake and awake. She wriggled. She hummed. Drummed her feet on me. Shoved her skull against Nick's. Patted my cheeks.

"You are killing me, India." I said this. "Please go to sleep. I love you but you're killing me."

To let Nick sleep, I took her back to her bed and crawled in with her. It was one thing and another. I think we fell asleep around 5:00 am. 

At some point that afternoon India looked at me and said, "Mama, remember last night? When I was killing you?"

Yes, my darling. Yes, I do.

Life is hard you know (oh whey oh) so strike a pose on a Cadillac

You know that now I'm a grownup and I have a house and children and responsibilities and such.

Which is not to say that I didn't have responsibilities before I met Nick, but your bills do not charge in at the crack of dawn regardless of what time you went to sleep all, "It's a STAY HOME day! What are we going to do?!?"

Nick and I do not go out all that often, and when we do it is usually rather civilized and there is no  mischief. In fact, I typically rely on Nick to be the voice of reason, pulling me back when I start doing things like offering young men relationship advice or getting mouthy with the cops.

Which brings me to Jordan's school's annual fundraiser. It's an auction. They encourage you to get drinks and bid. Drink! Bid!

It was a dress-up even and so we dressed up. Nick wore a suit and I wore a nice black dress and a black patent-leather boot.

Cropped to protect strangers who might have actually been wishing they'd run the other direction.

I complimented a woman on her very striking jump suit. It was cool. She was clearly searching for a return compliment and, after looking me up and down said, "Thanks. I like your...get-up!"

Sadly, I didn't think fast enough to whisper, "Thanks! I got it in prison."

I'd anticipated having a grown-up evening eating cheese with other parents without anyone grabbing our clothing and saying things like, "Scuuu-me! I need a snack!"

What I hadn't anticipated was hanging out with Victoria.

We met on the playground the first week of school and she immediately became one of my heart people. We have only once managed to get together without children; we had a couple quiet drinks and intense conversation.

When you first meet her, she's friendly in an understated way. She seems reserved. But she has a sparkle. She's traveled alone plenty and lived in other countries and some of her stories make you say, "Thank God nothing bad happened to you!"

Which is exactly the case with some of my stories. Which is why I am totally implanting little GPS chips in my children when they are old enough to go out on their own.

Anyway.

I saved her and a mutual friend seats at our table. When you checked in you each got a free drink ticket and then you could purchase others.

I said I assumed Nick had gotten a handful, and would she like another beer? And she said she herself had a handful so she was fine, thank you. Our other friend had gotten one. Victoria said, "I think she's judicious and knows her limits."

To which I raised my glass and responded, "Well, let's stick together then!"

I am not entirely clear on the number of glasses of wine. I do know that several is a good ballparkish estimation.

I know that we got and declined and invitation to a hot tub.

I also know that though she and I considered bidding together on a dresser with a million tiny drawers, at some point we realized that if we won it, 1. Only socks and underwear would fit in the drawers; and 2. We do not live together.

We abandoned the tiny-drawer dresser. (In retrospect, it was more like a card catalog.)

Another thing I am not clear on is what I may have said to some newly-met friends at the end of the event, except that I do know that I overshared cringingly and then strongarmed one of them into becoming my Facebook friend.

Where was Nick? I dunno. But I can tell you where Victoria was. Right there next to me, not reigning me in.

What remains strikingly in focus is the salsa dancing we did after midnight. The salsa dancing that Victoria suggested we do even after Nick said he was calling it an evening.

She is a spectacular dancer. And I'm a sketchy one even when I have two usable feet.

Somehow the mojito didn't even serve to improve things.

I have a little video of me trying to take our picture in a mirror. In the frame is of the bottom of our smiles and the tops of our water bottles.

Loud music is playing, and it's not really in focus, and other people probably think we're ridiculous. We are laughing and laughing.

This sums up the evening.

What about you, India?

There are nights that I pour myself a big glass of wine with dinner.

I sip it with my fish sticks/mac and cheese/pasta with butter no sauce! and NOT touching the broccoli. Now, I know that you drink white with fish, but I like red, and really, what doesn't go with fish sticks? 

So if it is one of those glass of wine nights, it accompanies me upstairs to the bath.

In full glamor mode, I sip that wine while sitting on the bathmat next to my kids while they splash around in the tub. Sometimes I sit on the closed toilet seat. This helps me pretend I'm at an outdoor cafe in Paris. The noise from the savages in the bath? Tourists on the Champs-Élysées.

One night a while ago they kept taking big mouthfuls of water and squirting them at each other. I was all, "You guys, the water's all soapy! It's bad for your tummy. Please! Stop!"

Not deterred. Then I had an epiphany.

"India! Jordan! That water is full of butt germs! You're putting all that super yucky butt germ water in your mouths!"

This only served to make it ALL THE MORE AWESOME. "Want some butt germ water, India?" Squirt!

I hesitated to share this, because maybe you will judge my parenting.

Just to be clear: she's drinking butt-germ bathwater, not wine.

We came, we saw, we stapled

I spent the summer after my sophomore year of college in Rome, living with my friend Kassie's family and working at the American Embassy.

(And here I will mention that Kassie was the instigator of Spring Break in Tunisia, a trip for which we were ill equipped and yet convinced Leigh to join.)

My sophomore year of college had been significantly better than my freshman year, which is not to say it was good for me. It was more in the way that I imagine being waterboarded is more fun than being beaten with a lead pipe.

This is not to say that there weren't people that I really liked. But leaving was a relief.

And then I fell in love with Rome. I felt good for the first time in two years. I wanted to stay forever and never, ever go back "home".

But as I was enrolled and had the obligation of a shared apartment lined up for fall semester, I did go home, determined to return to Rome spring semester. My dad said absolutely not. I spoke French and should go to France. Or, since I'd just taken a year of Japanese, perhaps I should go to Japan. I spoke basically no Italian and it made no sense.

I can now admit he had a point. But I wasn't trying to make sense. I was just trying to be happy again.

And we didn't yet know Leigh. We wouldn't meet her for another eight months. But that's getting ahead of the story.

Kassie's dad had gotten us summer jobs at Immigration and Naturalization Services. We put together refugee files.

We were temporary employees with menial tasks, seated together in a large room with about eight Italian woman who were permanent employees.

I didn't speak any Italian in the beginning, and so initially I thought that they were all mad at each other. Later, when I could understand a bit, I realized they were just discussing things like the purchase of new lipstick or what they had done over the weekend.

Kassie and I had grown up in embassies, and we were used to thinking more than was currently required of us, and so we didn't take our jobs of matching pieces of paper and stapling photos and compiling files all that seriously.

Which is not to say we did a bad job. We were both high-quality filers, staplers, and document compilers. It was more that we giggled a lot and didn't behave with appropriate decorum. Eventually it was decided that we were best seated apart.

Anyway, one day Fireman Bob, the man in charge of fire safety for the embassy, came in to inspect our office.

(I'm sure Fireman Bob had a real name. In my recollection he was generally called Fireman Bob, but the truth is, maybe that's just how we referred to him.)

He walked in and said, "Who is in charge here?"

And Kassie stood up and said, "I am! I'm in charge!"

We all looked at her, eyebrows lifted. Except Fireman Bob, who strode towards her to explain his mission.

At which point she had to say, "Ah, I'm just kidding. I'm...really not in charge."

And in the world of random, the following year we were at a stand looking at postcards, and Kassie picked up one of the Spanish steps. There was a single person descending. It was Fireman Bob.

Ready, steady, boot!

This may come as some surprise to you, but I rely on my speed a great deal.

This is chiefly because I do not excel at time management. So to be on time, I tend to wind up running at least part of the way to wherever it is I need to go.

And then I arrive all out of breath and sweaty and immediately need to remove a dramatic amount of clothing.

Nick knows. This is how I showed up for our first date. And he says, hand to God, that he looked at me in the Tabard's low light and said to himself, "Someday I'm going to marry that sweaty orange chick."

But I digress.

Basically, when I am walking, I have two speeds: Very fast. And stopped.

And then of course I run when I am late. That varies from a jog to all-out sprint. I have done this in a variety of footwear. It is not necessarily graceful.

I'm not one of these people who sees three seconds to go on the crosswalk and slows down thinking there's not enough time. No. I think, hey, if I run, I'll definitely make it. Obviously, having children has curbed this habit. (Curbed. Ha!)

Even in the boot, I clomp like the wind.

I wheel my son's scooter and helmet to school with me in the afternoon and I see people look at the scooter and then my boot and I want to be all, "This isn't mine. That's not how I got it."

Yah, so, I just saw my podiatrist. I was on time, like on the minute, but if I didn't have a hurty food I'd have been a few minutes early because I'd have run those last few blocks.

But then I suppose if I didn't have a hurty foot I wouldn't have to see him.

He asked how it was all going and I said my boot foot is doing great but my achilles on my other foot is sore. And that I've been worrying that when this foot is done, I'm going to have to just switch the boot to the other one.

And he said, "You take it easy when you're walking, right?"

The younger me would probably have totally lied, but I confessed that I walk really fast. Like, fast enough that people comment on it. Especially with the boot. They're all impressed.

I'm not saying it's Olympic-level boot walking, but I do think you'd agree.

(Also, if you feel like you need more attention, get a boot. In that regard, it's like having a puppy, but not as cute and nobody's trying to pet it.)

He said to slow it down. Take it easy. Smell the roses. Two or three more weeks.

I will try so very hard.

Also! What do you say? "Ready, steady, go!" or "Ready, set, go!"?