I am the mother of a teenager

My husband is kind of a badass.

There is a big place in my heart for the foiled marksman on the far right.
He's clearly a born pacifist. His strengths lie in the kitchen. He's an excellent cook 
👨🏻‍🍳🌈💚

It was going to be hard to top JP's 12th birthday party at the shooting range. Yes, of course a couple of parents/kids excused themselves from the expedition in the wake of our nation's disastrous relationship with firearms, but it was pretty cool to have an ex-marine treat the subject with the perfect amount of severity, calm, prowess and fun. The kids who didn't want to shoot met us after at a Korean BBQ place. Having been at the new school for less than a year, I knew neither the parents of JP's new friends nor the friends themselves, but I did know that all of them had phones, and I'd been told at various parent gatherings that it's really hard to get them interested in anything that doesn't involve a screen. Finally, the shadow of the unbelievably extravagant Penn Charter Bar/Bat Mitzvah parties loomed large. I could have sent an evite with cupcakes on it, but why would I do that when the opportunity to be a humiliating, over-sharing, hippy mom presented itself after a couple glasses of wine?

This was the "save the date" sent on April 15 at 9:12 pm:

🎬

Plans are a bit SKETCHY 

at the moment, 

BUT we are trying to suss out:

SATURDAY May 18th 

for a birthday party for JP.

♉️

Now….in the wake of all of these extravagant and fabulous 

bar/bat mitzvah parties, 

I’m asking that the bar 

go down a few notches.

🎈📌

📉⤵️🎢

🙏

JP has (shockingly) suggested meeting at an ICE RINK to skate ⛸

and then returning to our house in W. Mt. Airy  for food/chaos.  

(Hosting chaos is one of my hidden talents…

or maybe not-so-hidden) 

I’m not sure about procuring an ice rink in May, 

and what is the allure for JP in its procurement.

(I suspect he’s discovered ice to be 

an extremely successful venue for his 

comedic eschewing of grace and athleticism.)

Let me know if your kid/twins are 

available/interested

Happy Monday.✋

🍡🎂🎈

Liz (and TIM)

(I’m going to be celebrating finally having a reason 

for my prematurely grey hair…I’ll have a TEENAGER!)

🧓🏻

Here was the actual invite sent of May 2 at 10:19 pm:

🎈📌JP's 13th birthday...

SATURDAY MAY 18 2pm

We will be hosting JP’s birthday party AT OUR HOUSE

🙀

We have been thwarted 

at every turn on our quest for appropriate

13-year-old birthday entertainment:

Wissahickon Skate Club….closed for renovations.

The rec center rinks...no longer open on weekends

Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift both CANCELLED

Last year we went to a shooting range, so

for a hot minute. we got super-excited about ax throwing.

It turns out that these trendy ax-throwing places 

have age requirements

🙄

Bungee jumping off of the Ben Franklin bridge is passé; we did that when he turned 8.

We’ve moved onto 

a "sanctioned graffiti" party

JP is having a "Greg Brady moment.” 

Do you remember when Greg left the room with Bobby and Peter and moved into the attic, and he put up beaded curtains? 

(Yes, I’m making a Brady Bunch reference here.) 
JP is planning on moving into the basement, and he wants his walls to be covered with edgy graffiti.

I’m insane, 

but I’m not going to let a bunch of 13 year olds loose in my basement with spray paint.

We ARE going to give them masks and gloves and panels to spray paint OUTSIDE

The panels will then off-gas for the entire summer outside.

Come fall JP will have a hip boy cave.

If it’s hot and sunny I might take them (by force) to the Wissahickon for a swim or hike or something.

If it’s wretched out, I don’t know what we’ll do.

We will feed them, and we will have beverages for parents if they’d like a cold one at pick up time.

Liz Kinder/Tim McDonald

6950 Cresheim Road

267 235 5820

I think he actually wants beaded curtains now

🍡🎂🎈

Tim was in charge of the spray painting logistics. He bought and cut the panels. He lined the area in front of the garage with tarps. The goal was that the deck remain paint-free as would the organic vegetables growing adjacent to the spray paint grotto. Tim's Virgo attention to detail sealed off the area pretty well. Who knew that the kids were going to take off their masks, run out into the street, and spray paint their socks, legs and shoes? He did his best.

I now understand that kids have shorter attention spans than I do. 97% of the adults in the world have a shorter attention span than do I if it involves any sort of art or craft. I could easily dye Easter eggs for a week straight and not get bored. I will never forget the day my mom brought home finger paints for my brother and me. She set us up outside on the picnic table. I was enraptured. The allure of the paint needs no explanation, but I rarely got to do things with my brother, 4 years my senior. We are very different humans, and he understandably had little interest in hanging out with his little sister. After 8 seconds he said, "I'm done with mine." He is an engineer who isn't fond of getting his hands dirty. He famously walked into the San Francisco apartment I shared with another potter and a florist and surveyed the trash-picked, polka-dot-painted furniture saying, "That is the sign of someone with WAY too much time on her hands." My response was, "Are you kidding me? Look at all the chairs in the world that don't have polka dots on them! We are SO BUSY!!!!!" He muttered, "That is a fundamentally different way of looking at the world." My 7th-grade-graffiti-party-throwing self remembered that crestfallen 5 year old who just wanted to finger-paint with purple paint all day with her older brother. I knew we needed a back up plan to the spray painting to ensure that 16 13-year-old kids would not be sitting around my house looking at their phones and eating Asian junk food. (JP is into anime, so I bought a bunch of crap at the Korean grocery store. It disappeared in seconds.)

May 17 10:32 pm

My final missive to the parents of JP's friends:

OK, My headcount is 16 🙀

including JP 

If I’ve forgotten your child, let me know.

Corbin  Grace A

Coleman Hadley

Eli M. Harper

Eli P.  Helena

Elijah Savanah

Mikey Bella

Mac Kate

Owen

I’ve done Martha Stewart proud; I almost have an even boy/girl split!

If Steel and a friend step in, it’ll be perfect!

Maybe we should have a couples dancing/"Doris Day tribute" portion of the party!!!!!

I’m sure they’d all LOVE that.

Here is my actual, ambitious plan:

We are going to prime and spray paint 8 panels for JP’s new room.

At Helena’s urging we will have individual panels for people to take home.  

(I like the DIY party favor idea; thank you Helena.)

If they get rammy, I might send them on an "Acme scavenger hunt."  

(Acme is 2 blocks away.)  

I’ll arm them with those annoying Monopoly coupons and make them find and purchase all of the “instant winner” and "$.42 off” products.  

If you have any spare monopoly coupons, send them my way.  

I will devise some sort of prize for 

speed, accuracy and creativity.

You can grab your kid anytime after 5; We will have beer/wine 

if you want to enjoy our probably-covered-with-spray-paint deck with us. 

JP is hoping that parents will hang around, 

so he can have an "inappropriate movie" portion of the festivities.  

(On my brother's 13th birthday, my mom didn’t have a plan for 9-year-old me,

so she brought me along with my brother and his friends to see Animal House in the theater.

Clearly this has had a lasting effect on me.)

Where is the toga emoji when I need it???

We are around all night, so pick up time is flexible.

Wish me luck.

Happy Friday.

Liz

The spray paint portion of the party was great. JP and his PC posse are aggressive champions of the non-binary gender issue and are emotional advocates for the FGBTQ community. (I've probably forgotten a letter in there; it seems to change all the time.) As you can see, the painted panels reflected this fixation. There were kids who had zero interest in spray painting at all, and even the ones who did finished in under an hour. I was right to devise a "Plan B." 

The scavenger hunt devolved into a Lord of the Flies situation. I was dumbfounded. Each member of the winning team would receive the prize: a jar of Nutella with JP's face taped onto it and a pack of Orbit gum. By far, the most aggressive female competitor was also allergic to tree nuts and thus had no use for a jar of Nutella, but she wanted to WIN. Her male competitive counterpart is a twin brother to JP's friend, Cate. JP has nothing against this guy, but they run in VERY different circles. Mac is a jock; JP is not, but Mac heard about the spray paint and wanted to go to JP's party. If their mom is anything like me, she will happily take advantage of any opportunity to get rid of both children with one car ride. Mac is a big fan of winning. Until I got to know Cate better and realized that she's tough, I wondered, after meeting her brother, if she'd ever gotten a toy or a boob or anything for the first few years of her life. Harper and Mac set the tone for the hunt.

In order to pepper the mostly-Penn-Charter party with JP's old GWCS crew, I made the 4 guys from GWCS team captains. In hindsight, this was a flawed idea because all of the team leaders were then male. The teams had 4 distinct personalities: the super-competitive, Machiavellian, lie, cheat, steal team with both Harper and Mac on it captained by Owen, the marksman in the above, shooting range photo who inflicted an impressive number of head wounds on his target; (who was incidentally the victim of one of our worst parenting mistakes...ever, but that's another story) the hardworking, athletic, healthily competitive but ethical team captained by Owen's twin brother, Cole, the cook and shooting range pacifist. My money would have gone on Cole's team. He's a leader; he knows his way around the grocery store, and he and all of his teammates could (and did) run at an 8-minute-mile pace. There was the all-girl team who had no interest in the hunt lead by captain Eli who has a hard time speaking to girls; and there was the super-mature-kid team who were in it because they were at the party, and a trip to Acme might mean more junk food. Massive Michael, who, because of his life trajectory and his physical size, is essentially a full-grown man was the mature team's captain. 

These were my favorites of the "little JP's." I wonder how long those little pictures are going to stay on the plate and the doll's head.

The objective points were based on: finding all 8 of the little JP's around the house. Purchasing all of the crap at ACME with the $20 I gave each team and the 5 coupons. And getting back the fastest. My favorite of JP's new friends said to me, "Wait a minute; are you just making us do your grocery shopping????" As my dad would say, there are no flies on that girl. It wasn't exactly my shopping, but I do like to hold corporations to it when they offer weird free things. Finding items in the grocery store that I would never normally purchase is not easy for me. My grocery store navigation skills suck; I suspect that they move everything regularly to keep me there longer, and I'm demoralized the whole time because I know that the concept of my holding Acme's feet to the fire by taking advantage of all of the monopoly coupons for mint Oreo cookies and generic canned corn is completely without merit. But it was a perfect use of the time of a bunch of screen-obsessed 13 year olds. The subjective "points" were judged by JP. Each team had to use their change to buy him a little weird Acme gift, and each team had to come up with a clever name.

One of the mature team's coupons was for $.50 off an antacid. I thought it was like TUMS, and I'd give them to my mom. It turned out to be a $24 product, so that team had an impossible task from the get go. Another team could not get their heads around the "little present for JP." Instead of buying a toy up front for a quarter or a candy bar, they bought him a $7 greeting card. They didn't have enough money, so a stranger lent it to them. That was definitely not my intention. Mac, son of TWO lawyers, was standing on the counter in our kitchen arguing passionately that the greeting card purchased by the athletic/ethical team was, in fact, homophobic. It was too loud for me to follow his logic, but I'd definitely choose him to litigate on my behalf. His team, meanwhile, had briefly stolen my "little JP answer key" in desperation when the top placed 2 teams were frantically searching for the same, last little JP.

This was the "little JP" that flummoxed everyone

Notice the name on the sauce :)

The Machiavellian team won. I suspect because their 4th member was Helena, JP's favorite. It was rigged from the start! They all went to watch a movie in the basement and eat more crap. Coleman, the ethical, athletic team leader isn't a fan of sitting on a couch on a gorgeous day watching a movie. As I was gardening, he was circling around on his bike. He was clearly a little upset. He asked me, "Honestly, Liz, which team would YOU have chosen to win?" I told him that the other team should have been disqualified, and I really liked the name his team had come up with which was: "Acme? More like ACNE!" I think Coleman was satisfied with that answer, so, in the end, a good time was had by all.

Birthday parties: Two kids down, one to go...

I'm the ridiculous, dorky friend who hangs out with a group of girls who are all mean to her. I bewilderingly keep coming back for more. Except that I'm not; I'm the mom of one of the girls. My almost 12-year-old daughter wrecked me this weekend. She was an ingrate and a bully. Her birthday is Halloween, but she opts for a summer sleepover. (We celebrate her existence for 2 months out of the year rather than just a day.) October is nuts, so I've obliged her, but it's always been fraught. The most successful year, Tim and I had a scheduling snafu. I'd gone through the exhausting, group-text-machinations of picking a date that worked for everyone. Those group texts can be sticky. The hierarchy of the friendships becomes obvious as the date will change to ensure certain girls can be there whereas other's inability to attend won't matter. It turned out that Tim and I couldn't be at the party I'd created, so I left my Goddaughter, Hope to deal with it. That was perfect except for the ensuing week of bad behavior resulting from sleep deprivation and a drastic sugar overdose.

This year Nanny was leaving her beautiful Ocean City, NJ bayside home for 2 weeks in September. Steel picked a Saturday and invited exactly 2 more girls than could fit into our fetid Minivan. When exactly 2 girls couldn't make it, and they were the two girls I've found to be the most contentious; I was feeling blessed. Hurricane Dorian brought cold and rain on Friday, so the sunny, 80-degree Saturday and Sunday felt miraculous. We have entered the "Mom, you know nothing, and you are annoying and embarrassing." phase, so our conversations about the challenge of inviting 2 groups of girls who don't know each other were completely ignored. Steel had 2 friends from her old public school and 4 from the new private school.

I'd warned the girls and their parents that I would be regularly taking their phones from them. I'd learned over the summer that I have to be clear about my screen-time expectations. In August, Steel had 4 friends over to swim in the Wissahickon Creek. While I was making 1 gluten free, 1 vegetarian and 3 normal lunches, 🙄🔫 all 5 girls were on their phones being wretched. 3 would laugh at something and ignore the pleas from the 2 others to see what they were laughing at. All 5 of them were mocking one of their classmate's posts of herself singing in the bathtub.  I was terrified to see multiple posts by this young, gorgeous, vulnerable girl being way-too-sexy on instagram and wondering whether I should tell her parents. I was more traumatized about the "mean girl" stuff and my paralysis to explicitly address it. After multiple "Come on guys; put the phones down," I had to raise my voice and say, "GIVE ME YOUR PHONES NOW!"


Steel lost her phone the morning of her party. Tim had caught her on it in her bed that morning. Phones are not allowed in bedrooms nor are they allowed without asking. Most of her friends played with theirs in the car on the way to the shore; I put on a "Modern Love" and a "Moth Radio Hour" podcast for myself and focused on driving. Steel and her new PC friends were talking about boys and kids at school. I pleaded, "BE NICE; only talk about people you like; don't bother with the ones you don't" I also proposed, "Why don't you talk about something else or explain to the other girls who you are talking about and what they are like, so they can follow???"  I should have gotten an air horn and blown it periodically with no explanation.

Marissa (public school) exclaimed, "I feel so RICH!" when she first surveyed the water from Nanny's deck. Even the posh private school girls were impressed by Nanny's home. All of this glee was lost on me. From the second we walked in the door, I was mentally calculating undoing anything that we did, anxious about leaving the place as we'd found it. I immediately established a "keep track of your towel, hang it up and re-use it" policy. I mentally coronated myself "Towel Nazi." I'd gotten groceries, picked produce from the garden and packed up the minivan for the trip; however, I didn't demand that anyone help me carry the food and the cooler up or help me put anything away. When will I learn to shout, "THERE ISN'T MAID SERVICE HERE!" like my mother in law? I asked Steel to open windows, turn on fans, and sort out the sleeping situations upstairs, but no one listens to that dorky hanger on, do they?

When the parents were dropping their kids off in Philly, trying to model good behavior, I introduced a PC dad to a GWCS mom as "Doug." We talked for a bit, and she said, "Nice to meet you, Doug." to which he responded, "My name is Brad." I was mortified. I mumbled something like, "Oh geez! I'm so sorry. Doug is Grace Tindall's dad!" Maybe I'd met Doug and Brad on the same day? They are both tall, but Doug is black and Brad is not. Would I have gotten those two confused? In the car, this conundrum was driving me almost as crazy as the middle school gossip. I had a revelation when we arrived. As I was serving Doug/Brad's daughter her gluten free mattress innards, (That's what all of that gf food seems like.) I said, "I think I know why I messed up your dad's name!" All the girls turned. Humiliating mom/idiot tagalong then said, "When I was in 3rd grade, I had a crush on a 4th grade boy, and his name was Brad Douglas!" Steel interrupted and scoffed, "MOM! Why are you telling Caroline that you confused HER DAD with a guy you had a crush on????? That's SO EMBARASSING!" I said, "Steel! It's not the crush part it's the Brad/Doug part; it's been driving me crazy!" Steel sneered, "Mom! You're just making it worse!" in her practiced, pretentious, Heathers voice, She also mumbled under her breath, "Actually I'M making it worse." I reddened like the fat kid getting teased about eating her lunch.

The "I feel rich" girl inadvertently locked herself in one of the bathrooms. I am terrible with mechanical, moving parts, so her ineptitude created a deeper nook in my heart in which she now sits. The locks are confusing, and it's a pocket door. She shouted for a while, but no one heard her. Finally she thought to shriek into the crack under the door, and we rushed over. Tools in hand, I called my mother in law to ask her if this had happened before. The girls were shoving chips and granola bars under the door and into the screen from the deck as if she'd been in there for a week and was faint from hunger. I was worried we'd have to call a locksmith. Steel noticed, looking through the screen, that Marissa hadn't properly unlocked the latch. Marissa turned it at Steel's coaching, and the door slid open.  All of the food they'd brought festered on Nan's newly-polished bathroom floor. I told Steel to clean up Nan's bathroom before they left. It was as if I'd asked her to go do volunteer work at a soup kitchen in lieu of rides on the boardwalk.

I gave Steel $140 for the boardwalk.  I took 3 of the girls' phone numbers and texted them every 40 minutes or so to make sure all 7 girls were together and alive. I cleaned up from the afternoon strawberry/potato chip/ quesadilla/root beer explosion. Unfortunately I "cleaned" by just finishing everything off and then feeling like like a pig. Tim and I are attempting a "detox September;" I should have just had a drink or two. Instead I hung up towels, tidied, read a sad article about Prince in the New Yorker, and made salad for everyone. Steel texted from Caroline's phone, "Hey this is Steel. We are down to our last tickets, and we got 184 tickets. I already had to pay $55 of my own money, so we can't get food here." I responded, "Just head back I'll order pizza for everyone."

Pizza and movie were uneventful although Steel was LIVID that I wouldn't allow soda, cake or popsicles on Nan's couch. It seemed they were all going to pass out by midnight; Everyone was tired. They went upstairs, but none of the sleeping arrangements had been sorted. A drama involving every shred of bedding in the house ensued because the girls wanted to all be in one room rather than using the existing beds in the two rooms. The kind, easy-going girl who never makes a fuss (also the gluten-free, Celiac-inflicted girl who couldn't eat the ice cream cake because it had Oreos in it which made me feel awful) was planning on sleeping on the floor, but all of the blankets had been taken. Steel had no interest in ameliorating this situation, so Caroline came to me. I ended up grabbing a mattress off of the top bunk in the other room, putting it on the floor for her and finding some bedding the vultures hadn't discovered. Caroline's situation went from the worst to the best. Steel started to whine about needing a mattress as well, but her complaint morphed into: "It's WAY too hot up here; we need to go for a midnight swim." Of course it was hot. She'd not put up the shades, opened all the windows, and turned on the fans. She caterwauled down about the fans telling me THEY DIDN'T WORK. I trudged up and flicked the fan switch on.

Nevertheless, in the windowless, fan-less bedding melee, all of them were overheated, so I agreed to the midnight swim. It was beautiful, and I was impressed by their fearlessness. We had discovered in a harrowing, initial swim that Marissa is not a strong swimmer. (I was this close to using my junior lifeguard skills and grabbing her under the chin and swimming her to the dock. It was a good reminder that, frivolity aside, these girls' lives were in my hands) At midnight, she had no qualms about asking for a life jacket and the floatee; her not giving a damn what anyone thinks is so refreshing. All of my towel-economizing plans went out the window. EVERY towel in nan's house was wet and on the floor somewhere. After the swim they were loud, but they were finally all talking together. I went up at 1:30 to tell them it was too late, and they were keeping me up.  They dutifully crashed.

My aunt is an entertaining genius...she's got towels numbered up to 23. "Pick a number and STICK WITH IT!

I woke at 9 still pissed that Steel had been such a lazy ingrate, but she gave me a hug and said with a slight Valley girl intonation, "We're hungry. Can you make sure you sift the pancake mix?" I had made coffee, washed the fruit and was embarking on my gluten free pancake odyssey. "Steel, you can make the rest of the pancakes however you want." (Wow! the lame girl is standing up for herself!) Emboldened, I agreed to drive them to Starbucks, but I did not offer to pay for Starbuck's. (Next time I'll be queuing up Youtube videos about "How to make your own organic frappuccino's at home;" They must exist.) They swam again, and Steel was pissed when "Towel Nazi" reared up and said, "New towels are OFF LIMITS."

I drove them to the shops downtown to get them out of the way of my cleaning up breakfast, linen organizing, towel laundering and floor cleaning. I got a run in, but a shower wasn't in the cards for me. They returned wanting me to take them out to some trendy ice cream place that's also pretending to be performance art. I refused and gave them the rest of the cake and popsicles. I was relieved when Steel begrudgingly agreed we had food and I'd spent enough money already, but asking her to take 2 trips down with recycling and then requiring that she help with lowering the shades and closing the windows was too much. She threw herself onto the couch and bawled at me. At some point she inexplicably hurt her hand and was weeping. Her friends rushed to her aid; I was unsympathetic. She was careless with the shades and broke a vase. To get everyone out of my way, I asked them all to write nan a thank you note and to take their stuff to the car.


Except for the age-appropriate narcissism, I love this posse of girls, and I was thrilled that they were all constantly exclaiming that they were having SO MUCH FUN. I've written about risk-averse, no-nonsense Marissa. Marissa was having a blast; she hasn't gotten a lot of "marauding around with a group of friends" time in her life. Her mom personally experienced not one, but 2 school shootings: one in high school, the other in college. Mom understandably errs on over-protective parenting as opposed to my laissez-faire.  Madge is the other GWCS girl. She has a bi-polar, sometimes-off-the-deep-end dad. She often takes care of her younger half siblings, so she's worldly, mature and self-aware. Madge also has a keen sense of social mores and decorum. She and Marissa came back from the Boardwalk a few steps ahead of the rest. Madge exclaimed to me in shock, "It was so AWKWARD; the other girls didn't even speak to us!" By the end of the weekend it was Madge, not Steel, who was the clique-buster. She is responsible for all of the girls' finally connecting. She's effervescent and fun, and I adore her. Penelope is probably the biggest clique-promoter; she's fond of a conspiratorial whisper, but her parent-is-annoyed-better-respond-now radar is top notch. I'd be calling for Steel, and Penelope would hear me and take it on. 'STEEL!!!! YOUR MOTHER IS CALLING YOU!!!!" Penelope is clever, charming, theatrical and writes beautifully. She adores her little brother and speaks of him often which is incredibly endearing. Celiac Caroline is a deer-like dear. She's meek; but she knows what's right and what's wrong; and she rules by example. Her voice is comically high, and she says funny grandmother-type words like "golly!" It's delightful. She is the least likely to stand up for herself, but she has a revered, Buddah-like status with the group. Ava, I know the least, but I found her to be earnest. She is self-absorbed and needing attention, but the way she succeeds in getting it is by telling intimate stories. Her mom had heart disease, and she told us all about it. I think she opened the door for all of the girls to share stories, so I like her. Corinne is the vegetarian hooligan. She's the one (besides Steel) who mutters sarcastic comments under her breath. I don't think she's necessarily directing them towards me, but I enjoy them. She is the most intrepid and devil-may-care of the posse, but she's smart, and she is always a good time. She's earned a special place in my heart because she is so sweet to Toby. She greets her with warmth and hugs both in school and at the house. My favorite memory of Corinne was at their 5th grade graduation. Most girls were teetering around in ridiculous high heels-not Corinne. She's TINY, but she wore knee socks and combat boots and strutted across the stage confronting the very-tall head of the middle school with an aggressive, succinct, Fuhrer-like handshake.

I remember being their age. I was kind. I wonder now whether I was opportunistically kind. Ambitious, I knew then that editor of the yearbook and captain of the teams were elected positions. People who were nice to everyone got elected. It worked; my prep school applications were impressive. I'd heard about "karma" from my hippy 6th grade teacher, and it had made sense to me. (Mr. Williamson also made us listen to the groovy, George Harrison track, "Within you, Without you" for an entire period, and he had us learn Malvina Reynold's "Little Boxes" by heart.)  I sometimes resented being kind and letting the mean girls get their way. (not unlike this weekend) A part of me respects Steel for always watching out for number 1, but another part of me worries because I don't know that path. My mom taught me to be helpful; I need to work on this parenting skill. Tim has it down, but I do not. Eliciting my being helpful, though, can't have been hard. I have manic energy. If I'm not doing something helpful/productive, I'm doing something unproductive like over-eating or over-drinking. I have known this about myself for a long time.

I just came across this comic written right after 9/11 by one of my college friends. The comic ends with the line, "There is nothing better than when you and your friends hate the same people; it's like love" She is right. I'm embarrassed to admit that I love the mirth and intimacy I get with girlfriends while mocking other people. What is it about picking people apart that brings girls/women together? Why am I hard on Steel and her friends about it if I do it too?

The worst part of the weekend is that I've realized that my 3rd grade crush was Brad Dickman not Brad Douglas, so again I don't know why Brad and Doug are in the same place in my brain.

I'm lying. The worst part of the weekend was going to bed on that Sunday night at the reasonable hour of 9:30 and finding myself weeping because I'd allowed my daughter to hurt my feelings. I'd told her calmly before bed that, because of her behavior, this was to be her last big birthday party- even though she's only 12. (JP had them through the age of 13.) She didn't make a fuss. Either she was too tired; or she knows she was despicable to me; or she doesn't actually enjoy being the hostess and won't miss it anyway. Parenting is so fucking hard.

2019 First day of school picture
It is crazy how huge Steel looks. She's got at least 3 inches on her older brother.