Friends of ours welcomed home a baby boy last week. Every day, they post his photos on their Facebook page. His sweet face pokes out of swaddling wrapped tight as a Tootsie Roll. His eyes are closed in most of the pictures taken the day he was born.   It's nearly 17 years since we brought home our baby daughter. How well I remember the intensity of her sleep. When she was very new her Rip Van Winkle slumber was a little scary.   Through the haze of my boomeranging hormones and sleeplessness, I paid attention to every sniffle, whimper, and yawn. Sometimes, I would place a finger under our …

Every year around this time, we ask the same question, incredulous that we are growing older as our children are growing up. "Where did the school year go?" We shake our heads and grope for an answer, knowing that we have none.    Test jitters and nights of cramming blur into a collage of school memories. Our children, more buoyant than we, leap into the lazy days of summer with a lighter step and an airy mind. Gone are the restrictions of assigned seating and tests with true or false answers. Our kids can occupy their days with barefoot walks on sun warmed grass, dips in the cool surf, …

This is final exams week at Sharon High School. The conditions are ripe for Finals Fever. You won't find this virus documented in any medical textbook, but parents are well acquainted with the signs.  Finals Fever manifests differently in different kids. Its onset may include some or all of following symptoms: An insatiable craving for M & Ms, Hershey’s Kisses, Cocoa Puffs, or any member of the food group that derives its non-nutritive value from chocolate. Non-gender specific PMS like moodiness resulting in explosive outbursts triggered by the question, "How do you think you did on your (…

A middle-aged woman stood at my elbow while I perused the shelves of current bestsellers at Barnes and Noble. She flipped through the pages of "Fifty Shades Darker" by E. L. James. I stifled my urge to warn her with the words I'd say to my daughter when she was a toddler waving her hands over the burners on the stove.  "Hot, very hot. Be careful!" I wanted to shout. Instead, I sheepishly inquired if the woman had read the first book in the series: "Fifty Shades of Grey." Before she could open her mouth to reply, I launched into my tirade of a book review. I don't know why I feel like it's my …

Watching Mick Jagger host "Saturday Night Live" a few weeks ago, I thought about how time has been good to him. It gifted him with age-defying musical appeal. It also gave him a face and body indistinguishable at age 68 from the young man he was when he first sang "Time is On My Side." Or is he in cahoots with the devil who persuaded time to look the other way when gazing upon this rock star?  Every morning, I coax time into giving me a break. I may not be as famous as Mick Jagger, but I want time on my side. I adjust my clock 10 minutes later than real time and set my alarm 20 minutes …

We sit on the floor of the den poking around in an entertainment center at my in-laws' apartment. The contents are low tech, yet they entertain, educate, and enthrall my high tech teenage daughter. The history housed by those cabinets is as compelling as any documentary on the History Channel. My mother-in-law is a keeper of scrapbooks and diaries. She and my father-in-law store their albums and journals on a low shelf that is an easier reach for those with younger knees and hips. Pulling out each volume, we meander through our family's story and our country’s history. As we flip through …

There is new word for a new fad among teenagers. Prom-posal.  High school kids are elevating the tradition of the prom invitation to new heights. Literally and figuratively. Some kids are hiring airplanes to fly banners in the sky to pop the question to their intended dates. This service goes for an all-inclusive fee of $600. Naturally, the cost does not include the price of the prom tickets.   Modeled after increasingly popular pumped up, public wedding proposals, prospective prom goers try to outdo each other with the most creative prom-posals. YouTube videos feature original prom asking …

You know how you think you remember the reason for celebrating a national holiday until someone asks you for an explanation? You mumble a vague answer. On a whim, you Google it and find out you're wrong. This happened to me with Mother's Day.  I've always thought greeting card companies and florists invented the holiday to cash in on the guilt fathers feel about under appreciating the goddesses who gave birth to their children. On Mother’s Day, I welcome cards, as well as no cooking, no housework, and no saying mean things to mom. This translates to a day of liberation from kitchen drudgery …

White knuckling the car door, I am holding on for my life. "Mom, stop doing that, you're freaking me out," she pleads.  My daughter is freaking me out by driving on the Maine Thruway acting as though she's driven it 100 times, when it is time Numero Uno. She inches closer to the white line. "Practice keeping the car in the center of the lane. Smack in the middle." Smack. Not my most inspired word choice given the circumstances. I keep one eye on the road and the other on our daughter, a student with five more lessons to go at her driving school. My third eye, the one I've grown expressly for …

Last week during spring vacation, many college-bound juniors joined the caravans of high school students trekking to big cities, quaint towns, and campuses in the middle of nowhere. Their mission: uncover the college of their dreams. Their parents' mission: cover up the college dreams we dream for them. We fall in love with a school; they fall out of love with it. When parents walk onto a college campus, they walk the wavy line between being cheerleaders and acting as undercover agents. The mission's success hinges in part on keeping our opinions to ourselves. My family visited a modest two …

I can't start my day without breakfast. I need the nutritional fuel to wake up my body, and the coffee to jolt my gray matter into working order. My daughter could set her digital clock by my 6:30 a.m. bagel, raisin toast or English muffin. So, how come it takes an early morning vigil by the front door to get my daughter to eat breakfast? It's the last item on her morning to do list. Without my motherly intervention, it would be the first one she skips.     My daughter's typical morning before school looks like this: 1. Pull together an outfit, study the results in the mirror, and start over …

In honor of the 100th birthday of the Girl Scouts, I'm coming clean. I was a bad Girl Scout. My best friend and I dreamed up our grand plan to become Girl Scouts in the third grade because we wanted to wear the cute uniforms and sell thin mint cookies. Helping little old ladies across the street and promising to serve our country: not so much. The adorable green berets held irresistible appeal. We pestered our moms to start a troop so we could join it.   You couldn't have picked two more unlikely Girl Scout leaders. My mom's knowledge of nature reached as far as the potted plants on the …

What would your younger parent self say to your older parent self, if the two could time travel to talk to each other? You can arrange a meeting of your young mom and older mom minds without a time machine. All you need is a computer, email, and an Internet connection to a website called FutureMe.org. This website is the electronic version of a time capsule in written form. Take the adorable stories you wrote in your child's baby book, or would have written if you weren't bleary eyed from lack of sleep, and send them from yourself in young motherhood to yourself in grandmotherhood. Write …

First, there was the Harry Potter phenomenon. Then came "Twilight" with Team Edward and Team Jacob. And now readers are hot for "The Hunger Games." That is, everyone except our daughter. She is engrossed in one of the great American novels of the 20th century: "The Great Gatsby." Suzanne Collins, author of "The Hunger Games," is no F. Scott Fitzgerald. In writing craft, Collins ranks a few rungs above Stephenie Meyer's sentimental blood lust in "Twilight" but several below J.K. Rowling's wizardry with words. "You do realize those books were written for teenagers," our daughter says to my …

This week, I am honing in on our household nocturnal routines.  March 5 to March 11 is designated as National Sleep Awareness Week. My husband, daughter and I could pose for a portrait of the all-American sleep- deprived family.    I have begun to sleep with a pillow over my head to muffle the sound of my husband's snoring. As if recurrent insomnia wasn't cause enough for my ever-present sleeplessness. My bed partner robs me of REM sleep with a cacophonous concert playing through his nose and mouth. He is unaware of his nightly noises until I nudge him in the side and tell him to roll over. …

The time genie has heard your wish for more hours in the day.  Unfortunately, she won't be granting that wish, but she can offer you an additional day this month. Today is Leap Day. The day is already shaping up to be an enlightening one for me, because I now understand why we have it.  I'm blushing to admit that I never took the time to understand the reasons for Leap Year. What with an extra 24 hours on my hands this week, I used a few of them to do the research.       The earth takes 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds to revolve around the sun. Our calendar is based on a year…

During grade school, my fair complexion exposed my emotions without my consent. Whenever the teacher called on me, I blushed. When we were asked to read aloud from our history books and my turn came around, my cheeks flushed pink. When I walked onstage to receive my award for "good citizenship" in the second grade, my face flashed red as a stoplight.     A funny childhood friend who happened to be a dark-skinned African American kid razzed me about my unpredictable skin tones. Laughing, he'd point at me while saying, "You're blushing, pale face!" On cue, my cheeks changed from rose petal pink…

Somewhere in my attic, held together by flabby rubber bands and stored in broken-down shoe boxes, reside the letters of my youth. They tell the story of my family's visit to relatives in California through the letters that crossed the country between me and my best friend back home when we were in the sixth grade. There are letters from old beaus, whose names are as faint in my memory as the ink on the paper. There are the notes written in my Aunt Dotty's Palmer Method script that she sent along with checks to mark all the major events of my life. My Aunt Dotty is gone, but her generous …

What do long-time married women want on Valentine's Day? Heart shaped boxes of candy wrapped in red velvet ribbons? Teddy bears hugging satin hearts? Long-stemmed roses delivered to the door?  The companies who make the chocolate, manufacture the novelties, and import the flowers promote these products as expressions of love. In the 20 years my husband and I have been married, he has learned this much: Confections of affection, snugly trinkets, and flowers may say "I love you" to some but not to me.     After feasting on too many pieces of Godiva, I dip myself in a hard shell of guilt. Give …

The parent class we took at the Sharon Driving School switched on our GPS. Not the kind you find in a car. We don't have one of those. The GPS I'm referring to is Good Parent Supervision. A teenager requires GPS to travel the road from novice to safe driver. A half-hour prior to the parent class, my daughter faced a question regarding a rule of the road while driving us to her SAT tutoring session. As in standardized test questions, there was only one right answer. She got it wrong.  I did what I said I would never do. I raised my voice with her during driving practice. In parenting, …