Skipping Town

Thursday, needing a good activity to kill some time before lunch, I decided the girls should finger-paint together. They’d done a tiny bit of fingerpainting once before and loved it, and this time I went all out—preparing a seat for Greta at the table, spreading out a huge sheet of paper, pouring paints into Tupperware lids. The girls loved it. Greta just liked grabbing handfuls of paint and squeezing the paint in her fingers. Lucia did some actual fingerpainting, but she, too, was more interested in getting as much paint on her hands as possible. It quickly became about as messy as I’d expected it to be, but then I realized I had no exit strategy—a paint-covered table, paint-covered chairs, paint-covered girls, their paint-covered clothes, and just me, trying to figure out how on earth to get us back to zero and get lunch made before, oh, six o’clock. I ended up wiping them down as best I could with a cloth and then taking them upstairs for a bath. There is still paint...

It’s our last week in New York. Last week, Andrew drove the girls and me to PA and then took the train back to New York, leaving us to spend the week with Mom and Dad. Though it was a fun week for Lucia (The hose! Watering flowers! The playground! Bubbles! Chalk and Pop-Pop’s stones-and-squares game!), it turned out not to be the relaxing getaway I’d assumed it would be. I’d unwisely taken on a very large freelance editing project, which would have been fine—but Greta got sick mid-week and threw everything into an uproar. She had a high-ish fever, which I managed with Motrin, and a trip to a local pediatrician to rule out an ear infection (there was some ambiguous ear pulling) revealed an eye infection instead. She was uncomfortable, and teething, and unable to either settle herself to go to sleep or to stay asleep. She slept with me most of the week, which was great for her but not so great for my own sleep. By the time Andrew returned, I had past the point of zombie-land and was...

Before Lucia was born, I got an offer in the mail to get a three-year subscription to Parenting magazine for $12. I bought it; I didn’t have any other parent-themed magazines, so I thought, why not. But now I wish I’d kept that $12 and used it to buy three cupcakes at Crumbs, a delicious bakery on the UWS. Parenting , like the equally hideous Family Circle , which my parents, for some reason, still subscribe to after what must be twenty-odd years, caters to the lowest-common-denominator of parents (i.e., moms), the ones who seek out articles that promise that you’ll LOVE YOUR BODY—NAKED! and who seek you-go-girl marriage advice at a newsstand. These magazines are so desperate to produce content month after month after month that they resort to absurdity cloaked as earnestness, going on faith that readers won’t pick up on the fact that the suggestions are completely insane—so insane that, in a different venue, they’d seem clearly tongue-in-cheek. My dad recently shared a tip he’d read ...