Here’s a video of my reading for the Listen to Your Mother show last spring:

After two days of exhausting airplane travel due to canceled flights and delays on the tarmac, we finally got back to New York in time to eat a quick dinner, go to bed, wake up and start the new school year! After two days as a second grader Huck’s one and only complaint is that the school day is much too short.  Here he is in all his jazzy jet-lagged glory:

(We had to cancel the annual last-day-of-summer Chuck E Cheese extravaganza due to still being on an airplane, and so I promised a first-day-of-school Chuck E Cheese dinner just the three of us.  I really am a remarkable mother.)

Our dear friends Dan and Michele got married last weekend in Chicago and we were among the honored guests who came from near and far to witness the blessed event.  Along the way we got to reconnect with a whole lot of friends from over the years, play in Lake Michigan, take a private trolley tour around Chicago’s beautiful Loop, eat some amazing food (much of it made by the bride herself), make new friends, sing old songs, and experience that little miracle of life called Love.  Dan’s an old friend of ours from way, way back, as the picture below reveals, and to be a part of his wedding meant the world to us.  Troy got himself Internet-ordained and did the officiating, and Dan asked us to surprise Michele and sing the Johnny Cash/June Carter duet “Jackson” at the backyard reception. And though singing in front of people may be my biggest fear, the looks on the newlyweds’ happy faces as they sang along made it quite worth it.  None of us ever thought Dan would get married, perfectly content as he was to live his days alongside the beautiful Michele for the last 18 years.  But everyone at the wedding could see that this secret sweetie was where he belonged: with his wife!

Happy Married Life, Dan and Michele, and thanks for the best weekend ever.

1989 and 2012

(All they’ve ever done when they’re together is laugh like this.)

Because we had a special wedding to attend in Chicago over Labor Day weekend, and because Jeni, Nathan, Noah and Lily live a few hours away from Chicago, and because we really really really love those Tacketts, we decided to go stay with them for once in our lives! The last time we visited their Illinois home Huck was a two year old, so we were long overdue.  Obviously we had a fantastic time, and Troy and I even got to go away just the two of us and leave Huck where he belonged: in Jeni’s hands.  Not sure who had more fun.  Thank you, Tacketts, for all the food, drink, driveway tennis, pharmacy visits, great conversation, ipad usage, roller skating, putt-putt and Les Miz singalongs.

My only complaint?  For the first time all year we don’t have our next get together planned.

(Well, that and the fact that our flight home was 21 hours late.)

Fifteen years ago today I started my first ever New York job, temping at a temp agency, while Troy and my Aunt Dottie (whose New Jersey home we had been staying in for a few weeks) packed up our dogs and belongings and moved us into our three month Inwood sublet.  I remember excitedly getting on the D train followed by the A train for my first ever commute home as a New Yorker, and when I walked into our hot little one bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive, Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” was playing on the old fashioned CD player.  That apartment, which fell into our laps thanks to a friend of a friend, would be the reason we’d fall in love with Fort Tryon Park and the neighborhood right below it that would become our home sweet home for so many happy years.

Now here we are preparing to leave this city in about ten months, making today an extra special August 26th.  We celebrate with a relaxing Sunday afternoon at home as we rest our tired bodies from yesterday’s very fun end-of-the-summer beach day with good friends.  (So what if Troy’s tan Crocs disappeared and he had to walk barefoot the rest of the day? That’s New York!)  The relatively easy access to the Atlantic Ocean will be among the list of THINGS WE’LL MISS, but the many dear friends who make everything more fun will be at the very top.

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Our family has become quite the card playing trio, thanks to having a quick learner on our hands who takes after his card shark mother.  Many a summer evening has been spent out on our building’s back patio playing Spit or Trash or Sleeping Queens after dinner, and I’m already prepared for that moment in a few months when we realize it’s too dark and cold for such an activity.  Way before Huck was born, Troy and I loved to play Spades with various friends across the country, and I’m happy to say that our child has now learned the 2 and 3 person version of our favorite game ever.  And not only that: he beats both of us consistently.  (Though he’s generally a non-competitive good sport, a 7 year old regularly winning never hurts the family harmony.)  I’ve had one physical ailment after another this summer and several visits to the doctor, pharmacist and physical therapist, and that can bring a person down.  In the midst of this mostly fun and energetic summer, simply playing cards with my two favorite people has been my highlight.

“You know what they always say: the only two ways to get to know someone are to live with him or play cards with him.” – FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E.L. Konigsburg, 1967.

Yesterday at the beach Huck said in a very teenagery voice: “I just wish that for one day you would only take seven pictures of me.”  Well, that’s ridiculous.  But here are my favorite seven pics from Coney Island yesterday.  (If you ever want to see more let me know.  I took 95.)

The one and only good thing about the New York City school year going so late into June is that we don’t have to start thinking about ending summer until Labor Day!  So while I am completely enjoying all the First Day of School pictures from the rest of the country, I am happy to say that at 10:45 this morning Huck and I are still in our pajamas trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our day.  Oh, don’t get me wrong: it won’t be non-stop fun.  There’ll be a few hours spent at the church while I do some work and Huck entertains himself, and most likely I’ll drag him around town to run errands.  There will probably be a grumpy mood and several arguments and more than a little boredom.  But there will also probably be a popsicle and a trip to the playground and some Phineas and Ferb and no bedtime in sight.

And THAT’S summertime!

There are moments in every mother’s life when she knows she’s given her child too much information.  For me this happened yesterday while waiting for the podiatrist to diagnose my plantar fasciitis.  Sitting next to me in the little examination room Huck asked, “Where is it on your foot?”  Thinking that surely he’s heard me complain enough about how much my heel hurts these days I replied with confusion, “Where is what?  The pain?”  He shook his head and answered, “No, the yeast infection.”

And in walked the doctor, proving that life is a comedy.

There’s nothing quite like a day at the ocean, and our favorite place here in New York is far, far away at Far Rockaway Beach.  We had planned to spend last Friday there and after getting the news of Gaylyn’s passing early that morning I wasn’t sure we should still go.  Troy insisted that we do; he feels great peace and happiness there and so what better way to spend the day?  While playing in the water he had a lot of childhood memories with his dad wash over him, including visits to the Gulf of Mexico a over a thousand miles away.  And until the dramatic shark sighting wherein all the lifeguards stood on their chairs blowing their whistles frantically with their arms literally over their heads in a stereotypical shark fin position, causing us swimmers to run to the safety of the sand, it was non-stop fun in the water.  Here’s to lifelong ocean memories for Huck.

And in honor of the passing of time and the cycle of life and all that, here are two pictures of Father and Son on Beach Showing Muscles …