NYC Moms

The Dog Run Is Like the Playground

 Okay, okay.  I was warned.  A dog is a lot of work.  It is like having another kid, people said.  Especially when you live in the city.  And, admittedly, it has been a lot of work.  But he is a sweet guy and I love having him.  But no, it is not like when I had a dog as a kid.  Then you could let the dog out the door and expect he'll show up again sometime later all exercised and hungry.  Of course, I don't think anyone does that anymore, even in the suburbs, but at least there you have a yard.  Here, if you want your puppy to get real off-the-leash exercise, you have to take him to the dog run.  That was the part of puppy ownership I was not fully prepared for.  It's like before you were pregnant and you'd walk right by the playground without a second glance.  Then you got the baby itch and you'd look longing over the fence your eyes all wide, you might even have uttered "awww, look how cute."  Then you had that baby and the next thing you knew the playground was your second home and you started to learn that not all of those babies or toddlers or preschoolers are as cute as they look from the other side of the fence.  That's what the dog run is beginning to look like for me.  

Year End Blues

  June is nearly here.  The weather has gotten hot and the school calendar is FULL.  Things are about to be busy, busy busy as they always are at this time of year.  With kids in school June always feels slightly like a heady roll down a very steep hill to me.  It seems like it will be great fun when you lie down at the top of the hill but as you pick up speed you begin to realize that you've lost any semblance of control and the hill is really running the show.

This year our June is jammed with field trips and class plays, dance performances, publishing parties and potlucks as well as two half days off sandwiched between the mysterious "Chancellor's Day" a full day off in the middle of the week.  To top it off my daughter is graduating from fifth grade and moving on to middle school.  So that adds a ceremony and a party to the calendar.  She also has designs on organizing a sleepover.  Put it all together and I find myself caught somewhere between "When will summer be here?" (which is usually what I spend June thinking) and "Wait! Wait! I'm not ready!!" 

So while I'll be packing lunches for field trips and pulling costumes together for performances and signing up for potluck food, taking photos and shooting video of all these moments the whole thing will be laced with a certain bittersweet awareness that life is again moving forward as it does with children.  They grow, they learn, they develop and change just as they should.  It always seems to happen just slightly before I'm ready for it.  

Sometimes Parents Do Know Best

 Never in a million years did I think I'd find myself siding with NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.  For most of our overlapping tenure - mine as a parent, his as the "leader" of the NYC public schools I have whole-heartedly disagreed with him.  His non-stance on class sizes astounds me, his celebration of standardized testing confounds me and his infatuation with charter schools dumbfounds me.  Don't get me started on the simplest things like snow days.  But a recent NY Times article has me agreeing, shockingly, with Mr. Klein.

It seems layoffs of some 8,500 public school teachers are planned for this year (see what I mean about class size reduction? - maybe Goldman Sachs could fund reduced class sizes - sorry - I digress).  It seems Mr Klein has suggested eschewing the "last in, first out" method of deciding who gets laid off - meaning the most recent hires will be the first laid off, in favor of a performance based system of evaluation and lay off. 

Frankly I could not agree more!  

Theirs, Mine and Ours

 Last week through the good fortune of being a member of this blog community, I received two tickets to the premiere of the new Cirque du Soleil show "Ovo".  The premiere also happened to fall on the day after our wedding anniversary and as it happens my husband and I had celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary as recent transplants to NYC at the Cirque du Soleil show "Quidam".  So I was beyond thrilled to be going again.  But I found myself torn.  It was only two tickets.  Do I try to purchase two more tickets and take the kids?  We'd have to sit separately but we'd all see the show.  Or do I take just one of the kids?  Or just get a sitter and call it "date night"?  As luck would have it the night of the premiere also coincided with the annual school square dance - an event I had loved for years - but had, well, honestly, between you and me, grown mildly tired of in year six.  

So it was all quite a quandary for me as a mom who over thinks everything.  Of course when I found out I won the tickets, no one was home to talk the thing over with.  Finally, over dinner I took the dilemma to the family.  Of course, the choice was clear.  The kids would not hear of missing the famed square dance. And dear hubby had only tolerated the sweaty, loud night in the school gym for for all these years because the rest of us loved it.  So, it was solved.  Hire the sitter to take the kids to the dance and have a real date night with my husband and a gentle walk down memory lane, to boot.  

Living With The Costanzas

Spring break has arrived in NYC and along with it a bickering old married couple has come to stay at my house.  No, not my in-laws, not my own parents but my own two darling children.  And they are darling - to me anyway - and often they get along beautifully, inventing funny, creative games, laughing big belly laughs at some inside joke, or creating their own "smoothie cafe" in the kitchen complete with menus and order pads.  Those times of sibling civility are tremendous - and, like a good parent, I praise them profusely.  "I love how you guys are working so well together."  "It makes me smile when you guys have so much fun together."  "Isn't this great what the two of you came up with using your imaginations?!"  All that great supportive parenting stuff.  I just wish it worked - like really worked - like totally eliminated all bickering.  Because the bickering, when it is happens, is enough to drive me to drink - which could explain my increasing desire for just one chilly beer while making dinner in the evening.

Parenting the Neighbors

We have new upstairs neighbors, not brand new but new enough that their antics are not something I've grown accustom too and well, frankly, I'm hoping I won't have to.  Because in these five short months I have come to know things about this new couple that I had hoped to spend my entire life never knowing about anyone.  Of course, it is partly the structure of our building that is to blame.  We live in a loft with an exposed beam ceiling.  In an old building like ours, exposed beams really means inadequate sound-proofing between floors.  This, in turn, means we can hear the murmur of phone conversations and the occasional "shoot-em-up" soundtrack from a movie.  And if the upstairs neighbor decides to rock out to a little hip hop, we can break to the music.        

But mostly in our five years here this kind of proximity hasn't mattered much. Neighbors have come and gone.  First there was a young couple, then two different single guys and all of them were relatively unobtrusive noise-wise, the aforementioned Friday afternoon rap session and the occasional argument with a soon-to-be ex-girlfriend not withstanding.  But with all of these neighbors, only once have we felt the need to climb the stairs and ask that the noise be lowered.  That was a 4 am wedding after-party. Overall, I think we are fairly noise-tolerant and well, most people are fairly respectful of living together on this tiny island.

Life's Twists

He began with no preamble, a five-year-old with a gentle lisp.  I didn't hear him at first, he touched my leg for attention.  I leaned down to his level.  The schoolyard was cold, the kids were lining up to go back to class from recess. 

"My friend, Harris, died," he said looking up at me with his earnest blue eyes, the green crust of an old cold around his left nostril.  "My brother's friend and my mom's friend and my dad's friend and my sister's friend died, not yesterday, but the other day," he went on.  

I couldn't be sure what I'd heard, did he mean it?  I squatted on my heels and took his hand.  "What sweetie?"

Snow Day - but wait, where's the snow?!

I love snow days!  I love waking up in the city that doesn't sleep to find the streets muffled with big piles of fluffy white stuff.  I love letting my kids sleep in - when they will - and catching a few extra hours of shut eye myself in the middle of the week.  And I love taking my kids to this crazy steep hill in Riverside Park for sled runs until we are cold, wet and exhausted from trying to climb that crazy hill.  So, I'm all for this unexpected day off and the requisite fun we will have.  But what happened to the surprise?!  

There's just something about School Chancellor Joel Klein calling school off at 11 am on a 40-degree, sunny, perfectly dry Tuesday morning that takes a little of the thrill out of the serendipitous-ness of a snow day.  And while I feel confident the snow will come, right now, as I write at 2 am (don't ask - but if you are a mom you don't need to!) the snow has yet to really fall.  A smattering of flakes are fluttering from the sky and the ground is wet but so far it is more like rain than snow.  Of course, the weather reports have all promised that the real storm won't begin until tomorrow afternoon which could result in a disaster trying to get everyone home tomorrow if they don't call school now.  Still it took away a little of the heady joy of the "snow day" announcement by calling it so early, kind of like finding all your Christmas presents before Christmas morning then having to fake it on the big day.

Family Friends

 We've finally done it.  After ten years of awkward brunches and uneven dinner parties, of backyard bbqs ending in tears and trips to the country cut short by endless whining we have finally found them - true "family" friends.  We have found another family with kids that match ours exactly:  gender, age and interests and . . . drumroll please, we like the parents, too!!

It was dumb luck, really how it came about.  We've known them casually for a few years through other friends at the kids' school but this year it matched up just right.  The girls in class together, the boys in class together and fast friends the lot of them.  Then we happened to be at the same holiday party on Christmas, made dinner plans and had great fun.  Great fun was had again on New Year's then the kids talked us into a two-day sleepover adventure first at one house and then the other - which is any parent's dream - a night out with no babysitter!  And the greatest thing was the kids were still having fun when they said goodbye on Sunday afternoon.

Tired of Tiger - and his wife

C'mon already with the Tiger Woods story.  So he's fallen from grace the spoiled little golfer who from age 3 was prancing around a course like a little prince.  Sure, he's an amazing golfer, no question and he works at his game, but let's face it people, he's always been a little smug about who his is and what his talents are. 

Oh, and his trophy wife - boo hoo for her the former nanny who married the philandering athlete.  But seriously would she have given Tiger the time of day if he wasn't a multi-millionaire known around the world by a single moniker?  So, I have a hard time conjuring sympathy for the woman who, given a couple different circumstances, might very well be the cocktail waitress who'd meet a famous athlete and end up in a 31-month affair.   To quote a now almost trite Kanye West song, "Now I ain't saying she's a gold digger . . . ."