FWIW Eileen also refers to him as her “little brother” and has said a bunch of times that she’s happy not to be the youngest anymore and that the number of boys and girls in our house is now even. But she also gets genuinely upset that Tayto “gets to” “go to bed” (be put into the crate after falling asleep on the couch) later than her “even though he’s zero years old.”

Tayto’s pre-adoption name was Zamboni and he was one of 12 puppies in the litter. Ten of them were black, and he and one other were brindle. Choosing him partly (largely) based on his beautiful fur colors felt problematic. But the good news is that all of them have been adopted! His mom was a lab (the rescue claims) and his father is an unknown scoundrel. The craziest thing I learned (from my friend Emily) is that puppies born in the same litter can ~and often do~ have different dads.

It’s called superfecundation! Nobody believes this when you first tell them. But it’s true!! “There are no limits.” It could be 12 dads! (“While the puppies may have different dads, each individual puppy will only have one father.”)

Alice asked me to stop randomly telling people this fact. “It’s embarrassing.”

When we picked Tayto up from the foster mom’s house, he was there with two of his siblings, who were also getting picked up that day. I asked the foster mom if he would miss them and she said no, it can be bad to adopt two puppies from the same litter because of something called littermate syndrome. (“One of the hardest things about owning littermates is the ‘waterfall’ descent as the dogs reach adolescence.”) There is a literally endless list of fascinating and insane things to learn about dogs and it’s crazy to think I didn’t give a shit about any of it until a couple months ago. Some people say littermate syndrome is a myth. I did feel pretty comfortable saying no though when Eileen asked if Tayto missed his mom. “No, we are his family now.”

“But why doesn’t he miss her?”

“He doesn’t remember her.”

r/puppy101 is full of people who don’t have kids getting their first puppy and being hit with the same thing that happens when you have a baby: You’ll never be free again and you did it to yourself! It’s called “puppy blues.” I had a few days of it when we first brought him home and it felt deeply familiar. You know, simultaneously being teary and overwhelmed about how hard things suddenly are, escaping from the puppy for a 10-minute errand to pick up pizza, getting to the pizza place and while you’re waiting looking at pictures of the puppy and wondering if there’s any little treat I could buy him while I’m out.

On the other hand, there are many things about puppies that are not at all comparable with things about babies. Like when I picked him up from his first day of Puppy Social at Crate Escape and the person at the door said, “Are you Tayto’s mom? YOU’RE NOT GETTING HIM BACK!” I LOVE to imagine the daycare director saying this when you pick up your 12-week-old on their first day.

Human daycares also don’t post babies’ names and faces on Instagram but it was the high point of my month that Tayto got both a post and a story. Nobody asked my permission, but once it happened I just wanted 20somethings to make more and more content about him.

His favorite treat is bully sticks. Those are bull penises. Look at the back of the bag and it’ll say Ingredients: Bull Pizzle. Their price has skyrocketed along with the price of beef generally, so Tayto gets like the equivalent of a coffee shop cold brew every single day, meanwhile look at Kevin and me making our cold brew at home and wondering if we can reuse the grounds.

Do NOT Google a picture of bully sticks before processing.

Or you can get a $16.99 bully braid, which is three dicks braided together. The longest ones you can buy from reputable outlets are about 12 inches long. We were in an Ocean State Job Lot and they were selling 24-inch bully sticks by the counter, but those have got to be glued.

I also got him a $20 bully stick holder, which keeps his precious self safe from choking on the final inch.

Last thing for now, his first week I thought he ate one of Eileen’s letter magnets. We took him to the emergency vet, a venture capital joint with a gigantic sparkling waiting room, a Keurig, and free poop bag dispensers. In the room we were put in, there was a gigantic black and white wall hanging of a hot young tattooed alternative girl vet cuddling a bulldog.

I told the hot young vet that I thought he ate a magnet. She said, “Do you know which letter it was, by chance?” They had to make him throw up. While we were waiting for that to happen, she brought me the bill on an iPad and said, “Let me know if you see any wrong with it because that would be my bad!”

The bill was $700 and pet insurance, which is like pre-Obamacare insurance with a waiting period, had not yet kicked in. I imagined being like “Oh ummmmm sorry, I do see something wrong with this, it’s $700???”

He threw up a bunch and guess what, he hadn’t eaten a magnet after all!

We went to the New Balance outlet store to get shoes for the kids and me and I asked if they had the things to measure the kids’ feet. The guy goes, “No! But you can do our 3D foot scanner!” I said, great, let’s do it. By the time this conversation had happened the kids had all run away from me into the depths of the store so I was just like, OK, well let’s do my feet! So I stepped on the thing. The guy plugged an iPad into it and about one second later said, “OK, I have your results! Your left foot is about a size and a half larger than your right and it is extra wide. Your right foot has a very high arch.”

I said, “Wow, so what kind of shoes would you recommend?” Zero matches came up on the iPad and he said I could get the 880, “but we don’t really sell women’s extra-wide shoes so you would have to buy one shoe from the men’s department.”

My feet (both) are just a normal size 8, as I knew before I came in. I bought some size 8 women’s running shoes and they’re fine!

*
Second story: I may have mentioned before that I really like Tony’s Chocolonely, particularly the White Chocolate Raspberry Popping Candy, which comes with a bright pink wrapper, and which certain other members of my family wrongly dislike because they think white chocolate is gross — “white chocolate isn’t chocolate, etc.” It’s very hard to find the white chocolate raspberry popping one in stores — it’s too good for the masses tbh — but for my birthday Kevin and the kids got me a few bars of it online. My birthday is in the summer and they arrived a little melted and we stuck them in the fridge, where they resolidified, a little bumpily.

Last month I went to Athens for work and I made a little plane treats backpack for myself, containing one of the white Chocolonely bars, a couple of books, and a New York Times Sunday print newspaper in a plastic bag. Going through security, this bag got flagged.

They go through everything — taking the newspaper out of the bag and going through it, unfolding every page of the New York Times Book Review, and they ghey get to the chocolate.

For the next 20 minutes, increasingly intense levels of security agents scanned the Tony’s Chocolonely bar with a special wand detector, then they brought it over to a faraway desk for a different examination. Then they bring it back over, take off their old gloves and throw them away, put new gloves on, chip the bar with a special tool, and slice it open in front of me, and spread pieces onto a card that is then put in a special machine.

They were very concerned about the chocolate’s shape. One guy goes, “I think this is just melted,” but the other one said to me very sternly, “Ma’am, where are you traveling today?” and I was like oh my God am I actually going to need to call a lawyer or something right now?

The sterner agent said to me, “I don’t think this is chocolate.”

Which I then almost got the giggles because the family joke haha is, you know, white chocolate isn’t chocolate. But also, I was increasingly concerned about being detained!?! Additionally, I became nervous that the “popping rocks” in the chocolate bar (pop candy, fizzy) might actually set off some sort of explosives detector.

Meanwhile, other people who were waiting for their own bags to be checked are standing near me and just keep murmuring to me, “They’re doing this with chocolate?” One woman said, “Do you think you would eat that now?”

Finally finally the chocolate passed its tests. The mean agent seemed totally disgusted and said, “Would you like me to wrap this back up for you?” and I said uhh…sure! He did a bad job and so I put the whole thing into the New York Times plastic bag and tied it up.

Here’s what it looked like after all that.

I did eat it by the way! And you know what it tasted GREAT! I showed this picture to a friend who knows more about drugs than I do and she said, “It does look like heroin.”

This is probably only the second funniest thing that has happened with Tony’s Chocolonely, the first being when they made woke Advent calendars that were missing chocolates on some days (to symbolize inequality) and parents complained and the company issued an apology (“We failed to consider the difficulties empty windows can cause for neurodivergent children and adults. We have more to learn in considering how we can make our products as inclusive as possible”).

This is Part II of III or maybe IV. I’ve turned on payments (i.e. Substack subscription) for the rest of the series because I ultimately couldn’t bear this all hanging out there and found myself more guarded in writing about it if I thought it was for entirely public consumption. I am also really mean about Facebook prolapse groups in Part III and don’t want that to be easily linkable. Substack doesn’t let me charge by the issue, but if you sign up for monthly subscriptions and then cancel once the last part’s out (or wait to subscribe until they’re all out so you can read them at once), you should be set.

Part II covers the following:
What was the matter with your vagina?
What did you do in the meantime? (info on pelvic floor PT, pessaries, things I found that worked)
Did your third pregnancy make the prolapse worse?
How did you choose your surgeon and which surgeon did you go with?
What kind of surgery did he recommend?
Tightening, hmm, was this also vagina cosmetic surgery?
How did the urodynamic testing go?

Read more

It took me a very long time, and some mental ~adjustment~, to get to this point. Two presidencies of time! The child whose birth maybe caused my prolapse is now 8, his older sister is 11, and his younger sister just turned 5. I’ve been a mom for a little more than a decade and for most of that time my pelvic floor was busted.

My official diagnosis was a prolapsed bladder — it’s a cystocele — plus stress urinary incontinence, which means I peed when I ran or jumped or coughed. I had to pee all the time, and I could always feel the bulge that was my bladder falling down from where it was supposed to be. Those things became 1000% part of my normal life. I got pregnant again in 2019 and had my third child in 2020; weirdly, this did not make the prolapse worse. Then we had the pandemic, as you might remember!

Through this all, my options were the same as I wrote to Emily back in January 2017: To do nothing; to do pelvic floor PT; to try a pessary; or to get surgery to fix the prolapse. But one thing changed a lot in that time: Myself! Me!

In 2017, I wrote, “I think the somewhat disheartening part of all of this is that there are so many factors that can be blamed, but one of them really might be ‘just getting older.’” I was 32 when I wrote that! I read it over now and I just want to slap myself! 32! I was so young. And I’m 40 now and that is also so young. Somehow in the span of the 8 years I got it together and realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being all “womp womp” about this, and also I was able to stop being bashfully accepting of it. Maybe when I was 32 I was too young to do it. (Regardless, it’s recommended that you not get the surgery until you’re done having kids, which makes sense, and at 32, I wasn’t done.)

Also, while pelvic floor PT was not unhelpful, you can’t Kegel your bladder back into place. I’m not saying Kegels are useless? (Unless…?) But. “Oh, well, if you just did one million Kegels a day for the rest of your life, you could move entire organs up literal centimeters!” is a concept that, the more I thought about it, felt way too similar to, e.g., breastfeeding pressure — an “if you want it enough, you can do it, just pump every two hours” thing that was in fact insane. Plus we don’t tell people to fix their broken arm by trying harder.

In the next parts of this, I will tell you about choosing a surgeon and all of those things and about the surgery itself (which I am so, so glad I had) and the recovery so far. But: I’ll only tell you about it if you want! I’m pausing here so you can unsubscribe now if you are one of the many people who signed up for my newsletter automatically via the recommendation from another Substack, assume it contains advice about writing books, and do not realize it is actually, for the near to mid term, about my vagina.

And the other thing is that I have to pick up the kids.

I was worried about the response to this piece from other journalists, but the response has been, actually, fantastic and extremely +1. There are SO SO many people out there, even and especially including people who absolutely need to read news for work, who also hate that national news is taking up so much space in their brains. We can do this differently. We can be informed citizens while living lives as whole, fulfilled human being with agency; we do not have to invite in this constant sense of lurking dread.1

If you are thinking about changing your own news habits, please leave a comment and tell me how.

For the last eight years, I’ve spent hours with my children while simultaneously also on my phone. If I read bad news while I’m with my kids, my reaction to their normal kid behaviors is disproportionate; I find myself snapping at them over things that normally wouldn’t bother me. Sometimes, it’s because the news I’m reading is very sad, bad news about kids who are far less fortunate than my own three. In the moment, I can’t fully wrap my head around that disconnect — the fact that some children are suffering or dying while my own children are safe and are not, in that moment, explicitly acknowledging how lucky they are. Instead what they’re doing is acting like human beings, but what I’m reading on my phone is bringing out the worst in me.

When the news is good, I’ve also ignored the kids, because I’m busy reading the good news and want to gloat, to read more and more of it, to read reactions to it — happy reactions, from people who agree with me; sad or unhinged reactions, from people who don’t agree. The kids get more time on the iPad, or another episode, or a dinner of snacks because I’m sucking the good news in, even after it stops feeling good.

I’ve read bedtime stories with a kid on one side, scanning my phone on the other side, messing up the words I’m reading aloud because I got distracted by the news.

It didn’t take the 2024 presidential election to make me realize this is a bad way to live. I already knew I should stop. Last week, though, I realized I had to stop, before I got sucked down, before more years passed, before I spent my entire adult life this way.

Because yes, right now I can say I’m doing this in large part for my kids. But more broadly, my news reading habits are affecting my human relationships. If I didn’t have kids, the habits would be the same.

I’m still a working journalist and a huge part of my job is to read and follow the news. I’ll still do both those things because I love them. But sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love a little less, and differently. Here are the things I’m changing:

I’ll read news, not other people’s reactions to news. I have resubscribed to print newspapers because they are finite; when you’re done, you’re done. Here, I’m taking a cue from Kelsey Richards, the “print princess” and “media literate hottie” who reads print newspapers on TikTok. “When you read print media, you give yourself that space to feel those emotions compared to if you read something online and then you immediately switch over to Instagram…and then you go on Twitter….and then you go on Facebook…and then a CNN notification comes up on your phone,” she told Slate last year. “With all those distractions, those emotions no longer belong to that blocked-out time period. They are now convoluting your schedule, your work, the fact that your mom just texted you that something’s going on with your grandparents — it’s just too much for your body to handle. Print media gives us the opportunity to sit down, and decide when we want to feel the emotions we want to feel, rather than letting some arbitrary algorithm decide how we should feel.”

It’s not even just print, though. Articles news outlets post online are still significantly more finite and finish-able than social media reactions to them.

I’ve spent the past few years reading tweets about articles, not full articles; reading screenshots of the bad part (highlighted); reading only the most outraging detail from a story. I get it: Pulling out the best bits is what makes for the best social media posts. But, too often, I never click through. I’m left with the outraging line and nothing else. And instead of coming up with my own reaction to the entire story, I just ingest reactions from other people.

These tweets rarely link to articles that I couldn’t have found on my own. They’re almost almost always articles from major news outlets. When I stopped seeking those outlets out myself — when I started letting the news just come to me on social media — I was the worse for it. I’m rebuilding my RSS reader so at least I have to scan the headlines myself.

I deleted Twitter, because it’s been the main place where I read other people’s reactions to news. (Follow me on Bluesky where I am now reading other people’s reactions to news in a decentralized non-Elon environment.)

I’m erecting barriers around online-news-reading times. I sometimes tell myself that I have to follow news outside the work day, for my job. This is rarely true, and I am not that kind of journalist. As I tell job applicants, there are not that many emergencies in innovation in news, and there are even fewer that happen before 9 or after 5 or 6 p.m. If being up-to-date with news is part of my job, let it stay inside work hours.

I’m switching to more monthly Substack subscriptions and unsubscribing from a bunch that I’m no longer excited to open. I’ve generally chosen annual subscriptions to save money, but that means I have long subscriptions to a bunch of Substacks I’ve gotten sick of. My criteria for paying for a Substack going forward is the same goal I have for coverage on our site and also for things I write for I’ll Be Right Back: Is it interesting? Is it surprising? If it’s become totally predictable AND/OR SCOLDY, it’s not worth paying for, even if the person is saying things I agree with. There is one parenting-adjacent Substack in particular that I unsubscribed from and I felt so free! Maybe you did too!

I’m researching new ways to teach kids about news. I do see reading the newspaper as a good habit, I’d love my kids to pick it up, and I realize they almost definitely won’t. They will get their news online. And YouTube is where most of their content-watching happens. I hold out hope that some kind of palatable media literacy can be taught via YouTube; that I can show my kids something that meets my standards in terms of lessons taught but also meets, or comes close enough to, their standards for entertainment.

In the meantime, I subscribed Alice (11) and Hugh (8) to The Week Junior, a news magazine for kids. If you’re thinking about this, note that it’s very center/opinion-free, which is exactly what I was going for, even though it means they chose a really way too flattering picture of Trump for the cover of last week’s edition.

Do my kids — who really like reading — run to read this? They sure do not. The only time they have voluntarily read more than a few pages of it was when we were in a church service they also didn’t want to be at. Will I possibly start paying them to read each issue? Strongly considering it!

I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d think about breastfeeding but I really was not prepared for how much my children would talk about, ask for, and fight over non-water drinks. Right now these are the main drinks of discussion in our household.

PRIME. Hugh (8) started mentioning PRIME about a year and a half ago, when he was in second grade. Every time we go to the grocery store now he says “Can I try PRIME?” and I always say no. I didn’t know what it was until I googled it — it’s an energy drink from a YouTube guy in a kind of metallic-y bottle? Can it taste good? He doesn’t know this but he’s getting a bottle in his Christmas stocking.

COKE. Coke seems cool still. Hugh has speech therapy each Sunday and at every session I allow him to have one (1) Coke Zero as a treat. This weekend when I took him to his eight-year-old checkup, the pediatrician asked him if he is eating healthy foods and he said, “Well. I drink a lot of Coke, and we’re going to Burger King after this.”

COFFEE. The coffee is Kevin’s and mine. I make cold brew at home and drink it out of a Contigo travel mug, the kind where you press a button on the side of the lid to make the coffee come out. (The model is the West Loop.) When you press the button a very tiny amount of coffee stays in the slurpy part of the lid. Eileen (4) has gotten super into drinking “the coffee from the cap” meaning she licks my coffee mug every morning. This week she and I both woke up very early all of the days (daylight savings time - her, sheer panic - me). I would do a small workout with her either playing or well let’s be real just eating a few pieces of morning Halloween candy near me and each time I put my coffee mug down she grabbed it to lick the cap. At a certain point this made me a lil snappy because if you’re not drinking alcohol this week there are just not that many treat drinks left for you.

WATER, BOTTLED. All the kids have Wirecutter’s recommended brand of water bottle (Takeya) but Alice had the nerve to ask for a HydroFlask for her 11th birthday this past week. “Specifically lavender or in a light color.” This was confusing to me because I thought based on seeing some teens on the street that Owala was the cool one for Cambridge and I said “Oh, do you not want an Owala?” and she said “Ugh.” Separately, Stanley does not really appear to be a thing for the teens of the People’s Republic. I really thought about buying her a Stanley and being like “This is the one you wanted, right?” when she opened it and then being like hahahahahah just kidding and giving her the one she wanted (and returning the Stanley obv), but it doesn’t feel like the time for pranks. The joke is on me anyway because all prestige water bottles cost like $75.

HOMEMADE SODA. Last year a parent brought homemade soda as snack for Hugh’s baseball practice. They carried it in a jug and gave it out in tiny paper cups, “Would you like some homemade soda?” Hugh’s verdict was “sour!”

Still, I think of what a member of the Class of 1954 wrote in my alumni magazine. “When asked how it felt to be 92, a friend from the class of 1953 replied that it felt ‘like some kind of a mistake.’” 92 is not 39! Still. Back in October I and some other moms took Alice and many other 10-year-olds to the Taylor Swift movie and they were dancing in the back, a little self-conscious but only because they were still young. My oldest is 10, I have been a mom for a decade. This feels like some kind of a mistake.

Alice is moving swiftly through the eras. In October it was mostly 1989. “Style” is on, “Mom, is this your favorite Taylor Swift song?” “Yes, probably.” “It’s Juni’s dad’s favorite too.” Hmmmmmmmm. But she has moved on now. When I am in the car with the kids we take turns choosing a song. (Hugh: “Can I choose a podcast?”) Alice chose “No Body No Crime” and then I played them “Goodbye Earl” and Eileen screamed “I HATE THIS SONG.” Eileen only likes songs about birds, and Taylor Swift songs. She rotates through five songs: “Blackbird,” “Rock-In Robin,” “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen (all three introduced to her by her preschool teachers), “Getaway Car,” “New Romantics,” and what she calls “Nobody No Cry.” “HEY SIRI PLAY NOBODY NO CRY,” she screams in the car. The kids hate that Siri will only listen to my voice. They shout at her, we all shout at her. Then she plays a song and I always say in a calm voice “Thank you, Siri.”

Eileen wants the songs to be loud, right away. “Blackbird,” its gentle beginning and she’s shouting “I CAN’T HEAR IT!!! CAN YOU TURN IT LOUDER.” “It’s always quieter at the beginning,” I say, “and then it gets louder.”

I say “Hey Siri, play Fast Car.” “IS THAT BY TAYLOR SWIFT” Eileen shouts. “Yes, this is Taylor Swift,” I say. Siri says, “Here’s ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman” and Eileen shouts “I HATE THIS SONG” and I turn it up to drown her out, but then I keep thinking of the people fighting on Twitter about what the lyrics of “Fast Car” actually mean and posting NBER screenshots about class mobility and feel I cannot in good conscience play it so very loudly in my hybrid minivan, or maybe it’s not for me at all. I turn it down and Eileen says “Can we play some Halloween songs?”

[I’m typing this and Eileen is sitting next to me and she just goes “Here Mom” and hands me a big boogie.]

Driving to the grocery store today I chose “Closer to Fine.” Eileen hears not-Taylor-Swift come on and shouts “I HATE THIS SONG.”

Alice: “Oh, I like this song.”

“Do you know this song?”

“Yeah Mom. It’s from the Barbie movie.”

Nitwits Belmont closed during the pandemic. If you get lice now and want a professional comb-out you’ll have to go to Lice Aunties in Newton.

Not everyone gets the itch but if you do you’ll know. You won’t know-know because you’ll tell yourself you’re wrong but oh, come on, at least in retrospect. Lice went around preschool a couple weeks ago + now your kid is scratching her head again + it’s not the immediate itch you get when you just think about lice, it’s an itch that comes and goes even when you’re not thinking about lice. It’s lice! You have it.

I mean, I have it, and so does Alice.

I had noticed she was scratching her head a lot and after a couple days of ignoring it — because preschool already HAD lice and I’d already sprayed her head once with an easy, natural spray I bought on Amazon and obviously that had done the trick, it was no work but had so many 5-star reviews, so fine, everyone just settle down with all of your instructions about nit-picking, use the spray, never think about it again — Monday night when I was in bed I just, you know, started thinking about it. Around 11 PM I went downstairs and started rustling around in the bathroom cabinet for the comb that had come with our bottle of miracle lice spray. I combed my hair a little and seemed to see something small and brown, shaped like a teeny tiny sesame seed, caught in the teeth of the comb. I stood in there for awhile. I showed it to Kevin and then went back upstairs and fell into an extremely deep sleep induced by just not wanting to think about lice for a few hours. In the morning, I combed my hair again and this time found a very tiny thing with legs that moved when I put it on a Kleenex. I checked Alice’s head and saw shit in there besides the usual sand and glitter.

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She was SO HAPPY when she found out that she and I were staying home. I called in sick and found a lice removal place called Nitwits not far from us. It was 8 AM and when the woman answered the phone she sounded very sleepy but she was quickly all business. We made an appointment for noon.

In the meantime Alice and I had a couple free hours so we went to the playground. It was sunny and beautiful and unseasonably warm, and the playground was filled with babies and toddlers. For the first time in Alice’s life, the thought struck me that she was supposed to be in school and it was going to seem a little bit weird to others that she wasn't. Then again, maybe I was just extremely conscious of what everybody was going to be thinking of us for, you know, other reasons.

But Alice isn’t used to being out at the playground with me on a weekday either. “Mom, maybe these other kids are also here because they are having a home day because they also have bugs in their hair!” she said. Her voice was so loud, so clear. We stopped near the gate and I bent down and suggested that we not talk about the lice at the playground. Actually that wasn’t what I said. I said, in the sharp tone that I use when I want her to *REALLY LISTEN* to me but that she seems to just hear and react to as my 100% regular voice, “We can’t go to the playground if you’re going to talk about the lice. Do you hear me? You just can’t talk to other people about it.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it’s a little bit gross.”

“It’s not gross, Mom. It’s nice.”

We stayed away from other people and went on swings, probably swinging all the lice out of our hair, hopefully. We still had about an hour until our Nitwits appointment so I said that we could walk and get a donut. We walked along, no stroller, just one kid to worry about. It felt like we were playing hooky, and it was kind of pleasant.

“Mom, why is Katie allowed to wear princess dresses to school?” Katie (not actual name) is her best friend.

“Different families allow different things,” I said. We have this conversation once a day, at least. Today, though, it took on new levels. It was just us girls and we could have new, more complex mom-daughter conversations. I said more things about how different families have different rules and it's all fine.

“I wish that Katie and I could trade families,” she said.

“No! You can’t do that, because then I would miss you. It would be too sad.”

“It wouldn’t be sad, Mom. It would be exciting.”

Nitwits was an unmarked brick building in Belmont with white shades pulled down and no sign whatsoever, just a few pamphlets in a box on the door. It looked like a hair salon if you wanted nobody to know what your hair salon was or to be able to see what was going on inside. It looked like what it was, I suppose. Inside I felt a sense of relief like walking into a hotel room at the end of 24 hours of travel.

We went into a smaller private room — like where you go to get a bikini wax — with a woman named Karen who had clear sparkling blue eyes and was nice enough to act so happy when we arrived. In the room was a DVD player, for which Alice could choose DVDs including Moana and Frozen, and an iPad. The WiFi password was taped onto the wall. I wondered, if I didn’t have a child with me, if I would have the balls to just screw around on my phone for the entire time it took someone to comb lice out of my hair. Or crack open a book.

Because it takes a long fucking time to get lice combed out of your hair. I went first. Karen showed us an instructional DVD that was created by the woman who owns Nitwits. It was amazing. It was the only thing I wanted to watch at that moment. As if someone knew, just KNEW without me saying, all my concerns about lice and all the ways that lice made me feel as a mother and took each of those insecurities and just annihilated them, one by one, like a mind reader.

Some of the topics this DVD covered: When someone mentions lice and your head starts itching immediately, it’s called “delusional parasitosis.” Moms are more likely to get lice from their kids than dads because moms are shorter than dads and they get their kids closer to their heads; in addition, depending on how pissed you are about having lice, you might think other things about the fact that moms get lice more than dads.

The DVD referred several times to “mom life stress.” It said that there is, wrongly, a stigma attached to head lice. Head lice don’t cary disease. They’re very common in school-age kids. They spread via head-to-head contact. They can’t live on stuffed animals or pillows or clothes; they get cold and die. You don’t have to vacuum everything and put all your stuff in a bag. I loved the DVD. I wish you all could watch it. It would almost be worth getting lice just to watch it. I briefly considered stealing it, just because of the odd dream-like nature of it. It was narrated by a woman who sounded as if she were half-asleep, but very relaxing, sort of like one of those ASM videos, if I were into that. Was it perhaps even the person I had talked to on the phone that morning?

The one strange thing about the video was that it repeatedly stressed that there is AND SHOULD BE a stigma associated with body lice. Karen cut in at this point to tell me that I wouldn’t have body lice “unless you’ve been in a refugee camp.” The DVD also, at this point, showed a photo of a refugee camp. The sheet we took home with us said, “Head Lice do not deserve the stigma associated with them. The stigma IS appropriate for Body Lice, genetically distinct from Head Lice.” I began thinking about the many “Refugees Welcome” signs I have seen around Cambridge. I imagined coming into Nitwits with body lice and being turned away. Then Karen started dividing my hair into sections with her comb and drenching it with conditioner and sprinkling it with baking powder (for traction) and wiping what she found in it onto a paper towel.

The other good thing about treating lice is you can use as much paper towel as you want and you don’t have to feel like you’re wasting it. It’s necessary, because you have to wipe the comb onto the paper towel in order to be able to see the nits through the conditioner. 

The phrase “big pharma” came up several times in the three hours that we were there. (Also, the conditioner that they used, which cost $45 for a large bottle and we didn’t buy it, was promoted on the DVD as "vegan and gluten-free.") It was a little bit like when I used to listen to people talking about natural breastfeeding versus bad Big Formula and would just get sucked into a vortex of spiraling thoughts, each making less sense than the last. It seems different in this case because the shampoos maybe, actually, really are dangerous and don’t work (but am I just being brainwashed?) and it really is better for you to just comb your hair out — even though it’s so, so, so, much work — and it’s definitely better and healthier for your kid — although, I mean, where’s the science on it? It is breastfeeding versus formula all over again, except anyone can do the combing. I mean, maybe not everybody has time, though, and it’s kind of a luxury to just be combing out your hair (plus we paid $400) and — well, you see how my mind was going with this. And it could go and go and go because Alice was being freakishly patient, quietly reading books to herself and not asking me or Karen for anything. For the two hours it took to do my hair. The place had cast a spell on us, and I definitely went home and wrote a 5-star Yelp review, as requested. I did not, however, like it on Facebook, which was the other suggestion

Alice had WAY more lice than I did, by the way. “So, these are multi-generational,” Karen said, showing them to me on a paper towel.

After three hours, we stumbled out into the sun and the dreamlike nature of the day evaporated. We're doing the comb-outs at home ourselves now, every other day until we have had three nit-free comb-outs in a row. Alice loves the comb-outs because she gets to have candy and sit in front of the TV during them. Driving to school this morning, when we were almost there, she said, “I hate to say goodbye.”

“I miss you when you're at school, too,” I said.

“No, I hate to say goodbye to my candy at home.”

On Monday evening I could not let it go and I’ve been messing around with Midjourney, the AI-generated art, for work so I told the kids we could make their Valentines using that. We were working with some limitations: We only have a black and white printer so anything in color was out. Also limited: My patience, time before bedtime, certain people’s typing abilities, and our imaginations.

I’m not sure what I thought the kids would do with AI or why it would, like, let their creative juices flow. Alice wanted “Valentine’s Day corgi with hearts” which we eventually refined to “black and white pen drawing of cute corgi on Valentine’s Day with heart.” We learned that Midjourney is pretty good at corgis — it sometimes leaves off a leg or an ear but it usually doesn’t. But if you say “cute corgi with big eyes on Valentine’s Day” you may get a background of hearts with alien eyes.

Hugh wanted “Valentine’s Day wolf with heart.” We tried “holding heart” but that didn’t work because it gives the wolf either bear arms or human-esque hairy hands.

Or, in this case, tiny fur fingers just creeeeeping in.

I pointed these out to Hugh thinking he would think they were funny or, like, haha the limits of technology or whatever, but he just said, “Hey, can you get rid of those wolf fingers?”

Here’s the final product.

I printed them out 4 to a piece of printer paper and this morning I made the kids cut them apart. “Do we have to write people’s names on them?” Alice asked, and I said not if you don’t want to, and then when I was in the other room I heard her to say to Hugh, “This is so hard. We should just buy these next year.”

And to all you wonderful mamas, I didn’t forget about you on this special day

Valentine’s Day is a busy time of year for mothers, but don’t forget about an important person in the household — yourself! If someone did not send you a Valentine this year you don’t need to feel left out. I’ve got you…

…you can call me anytime, this is my number…

…and we’ll open up that can of treat to eat with our red fruits. 1VJent m m!

My white whale is an investigation into grow-an-animal companies. In a moment of maximum unhinge during the pandemic, I pitched this to a national publication and was rejected. Nearly three years later, I thought of it again and realized I had an outlet that would happily publish this AS A MULTI-PART SERIES and wouldn’t even hassle me with edits!

So. When I was four-ish maybe?, I got a frog in the mail. I have a semi-clear memory of one transparent (as in see-through) tadpole arriving dead in a bag of water — like, the bag was just plopped in our hot mailbox? My mom called the company (no internet complaints back in 1988) and the next tadpole we got was alive. I named it “Alviney” because I believed it was an albino (“alvino”) frog. The truth, as you’ll see, was more complicated.

GrowaFrog is not a fever dream. It is a 44-year-old company based in Brooksville, Florida. One of its many selling points is that its tadpoles are see-through. On its anti-dissection page, GrowaFrog asks, “WHY… and we do mean WHY ??? Dissect a frog when see thru organisms offer a far better lesson in Biology.”

The whole point is that the frogs are alive; still, “in the unlikely event that your frog experiences an unfortunate mishap we would understand your disappointment. To ensure your total satisfaction we offer a free frog at ANY point in time. There is no charge for a frog and shipping is just 8.95.”

If you want to see what a GrowaFrog looks like, don’t go to the website — it includes zero actual photos. Instead, it just shows crime-scene-like silhouettes of the tadpoles and frogs in the various habitats that are for sale.

Instead, check out this Facebook page, which is a celebration of GrowaFrogs that have lived for decades. They’re hardy enough that they qualify as an invasive species and are illegal in some states. (Tampa Bay Times headline, 2008: “Mail order tadpole swims into trouble.”)1

The Facebook page is also a good source of information if you have an elderly GrowaFrog in need of squeezin’:

[QUESTION] Good Morning, I am not sure that anyone still reads these posts. I had to contact Grow a Frog because one of our frogs, Gilly, seen below is having an issue with Frog Bloating. They told us what to do to help Gilly. They also suggested for us to check out this page for those with older frogs. We have two frogs, Gilly as seen above and Lilly, I will post her picture as well. My thirty-three year old son received as froglets twenty-six years ago. They have truly been such a join and a wonderful addition to our family. Has anyone of you had any issues with your frogs? This is the first for us. Please let us know. Thank you. I love all the pictures of your frogs.

OP also shared the response she got from the company.

Dear Growafrog Enthusiast,

Your husband is correct.2

It’s difficult to tell from the picture but if your frog is blowing up like a water balloon and I highly suspect it is you’re going to need to poke your frog to relieve swollen.

If you have access to a hypodermic needle or short needle

Gather your frog as best you can after lowering the water level ( if necessary ) and wrap your frog in ( lots ) of paper towels ‘like a burrito.’. Tear away a small ‘window’ in the paper towels so you can see your frog’s skin and ‘poke.’. Give your frog a firm yet gentle squeeze until the fluid ‘oozes’ out.

Repeat if needed

Let us know, please.

Best regards,

Gilly

Imagine if you could say “I’m feeling bloated” to your partner and they could just like — wrap you in a towel and ‘poke’ you firmly yet gently with a short needle until the fluid ‘oozed’ out, and then you went on to live for decades longer! Heyyyyy VCs, I have an idea for a perimenopause startup.

Coming soon

• Part II: “Ants didn’t work out and customer service was very helpful *****”

• Part III: “You grow them from a powder?”

and more

From the archives

• “Who would LOVE to have a crayfish as a pet?”

• “So I feel as if Caitlin told me awhile back that the crayfish were spontaneously reproducing?”

• “MOM, THE GRAYFISH DIED!”

A subtheme of the conversation among the six 40-ish people on this trip was along the lines of: Are we glad we are kind of old, or do we wish we were young? Do we miss our kids, or do we not? Should we have done more of this in our 20s, or is it better to do it now when we’re no longer so poor? Maybe going in our 60s will be even better, though what if one of us dies, etc.? Do we feel so free right now? Are we still young, we’ll look back at this and say we were so young, look how young we technically are still!

Anyway the revelation was this: Even if we wanted to be go back in time and be young again, we couldn’t be. “IT ISN’T A CHOICE,” I yelled at Kevin, geniusly. (See also the genius line from a New York Times parenting column by Alexandra Sacks a few years back, “If your goal is to ‘get your body back,’ you might want to ask why you’re putting so much pressure on yourself to perform the magic trick of going back in time.”)

When we got home I spent a bunch of time Googling things like “American move to Portugal with family” and “raise American kids Portugal.” I came across this Instagram account by some Americans who moved their family of seven to Portugal full-time. The mom, Leslie Stroud, has also done some blog posts about moving to Portugal and I could have read them endlessly. Excerpt:

All of the parents know each other as well and while I’ve been slowly invited into some text groups for classes, I am certainly not a part of the group. I have no idea what to do in these groups or even what they are talking about most of the time.

School schedules in Portugal are much more catered to working parents.  I have yet to find a couple where both parents don’t work, at least part-time, and school schedules are set to accommodate this.  The kids are gone SO long each day.  That’d been difficult for us all.  They leave around 8 am and return at 5:30 pm.  

They get 3 hours of breaks at school (two 30-minute breaks and a two-hour lunch break), so the overall school time is about the same as in the US, but they are gone from home much longer.  They’ve hated this, of course, as do we.  However, it’s just the way of life.

The long school hours were tempting but the “I don’t understand the text chain” part made my heart beat faster, as if I was having a little panic attack. Because I HAVE TO BE A BIG PART OF THE GROUP TEXT CHAIN AND I *KNOW* WHAT I AM DOING THERE. Like I know when to make a passive-aggressive comment for the sake and I know when to do the little “!!” reaction (almost never) and and I know when to start a separate smaller, mocking side chain with just 2-3 moms. The thought of being an expat and losing this highly specific cultural knowledge and ability was frankly stomach-churning.

In other words this isn’t going to become a Substack about how we uprooted our American family of five and moved to Portugal. However, the one other thing I will say about Portugal is people there have the infant carseats in the front passenger seat. I’m just noting this here so I can remember it one day when I’m writing the definitive piece on why so many American mothers are such assholes about carseats on social media.1

Speaking of being assholes about carseats

Perhaps you saw this by Julia Black. The headline is “Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution’” and it profiles Malcolm and Simone Collins, two “self-proclaimed pronatalists” who “fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization.”

So far, they have three children: Octavian (3), Torsten (18 months), and Titan Invictus (baby). All were conceived via IVF with genetic screening. (Malcolm: “We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids.”) Malcolm ever so delightfully proposed to Simone on Reddit. In total, they say, they want 7 to 13 kids (I’m calling it now, they have 5 max). I came away from the article actually not completely clear about how much money they actually have or how they made it but the answer seems to be mainly a ton of family money, plus “together they write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds. Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the secretive retreat cofounded by [Peter] Thiel,” plus I found this crappy website that is weirdly missing a lot of prepositions from sentences like “I am fairly easy to spot because I decided only wear black after concluding that having just one color of clothing would be maximally efficient” and “I took on advisory roles at a number of companies, including a COO role at WOWTasty, which is one Vancouver’s largest online delivery companies,” but really, I think it’s mainly family money.

I combed the Insider piece for the most interesting-to-me parts, and they are:

• “Beneath their thick, black-rimmed glasses — hers round, his rectangular — the couple look, as they would put it, ‘biologically young.’” Or you could put in another way if you wanted.

• “Sitting around the breakfast table after the 6 a.m. day-care drop-off and ‘morning strategy walk’ the Collinses take every day, Malcolm read aloud a text message from his mother. She wanted to know how he and Simone planned to monetize their pronatalism ‘hobby.’ ‘Remember: Everything is transactional,’ she texted.” I got extremely stuck on the “6 a.m. day-care drop-off” because wow, I have never heard of a daycare that opened that early, but don’t get so distracted by that that you ignore the part about the text from the mom.

• If I’m understanding this correctly: They analyzed their embryos from a round of IVF using this tool, but it didn’t screen for enough things so they got the company to let them “access the raw genetic data for their own analysis,” they made a spreadsheet, analyzed the embryos and gave the embryos either red or green rankings for “risk factors” like “obesity” and “headaches,” tallied up a final score and chose the embryo with the most green cells in the spreadsheet: “With a large number of green columns and a score of 1.9, Embryo No. 3 — aka Titan Invictus (an experiment in nominative determinism) — was selected to become the Collinses’ third child.”

• “The Collinses themselves have been called ‘hipster eugenicists’ online, something Simone called ‘amazing’ when I brought it to her attention. Malcolm’s ‘going to want to make business cards that say ‘Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists,’ she said with a laugh. ‘It’s funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism,’ when they're just improving their own embryos, Simone added, after noting that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. ‘I’m not eliminating people. I mean, I’m eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me.’”

• “Pronatalist pet issues include everything from increasing housing development to changing laws around car-seat regulation (one study2 found that people would stop having children when they couldn’t fit any more car seats in their vehicle). During the coronavirus pandemic, the Collinses tried to raise money for a family-friendly ‘startup town’ they called Project Eureka, where all community rules would be ‘ultimately set — all disputes resolved’ by the Collinses.”

• I looked up Project Eureka’s childcare plan. Among other bullet points, “Eureka has both on call childcare for younger children and an ‘adaptive boarding school’ for older children when their parents are both indisposed. Granting both the children and the parents more freedom.” You can add yourself to the waitlist if you want but do note that “Eureka vets all incoming families the way a boarding school vets incoming students to ensure we are creating a safe environment for our children from weeding out individuals with dangerous criminal histories and ideological extremists.”

  • I think the other thing to note about Project Eureka is that it doesn’t exist. (…Yet?!)

• I haven’t quite pinned it down but there is a definite blood collection between Malcolm Collins and @deeptomcruise, I think they’re maybbe cousins.

• Guys, you gotta put your smoke detectors back up! This is like looking at pictures of my house where you can see peeling tile and ancient electrical sockets in the background, but at least I have the excuse of not being a billionaire!

And finally

The first story draft that I submitted was pretty much just 8,000 words of parents talking to me. Some of them included long-time subscribers to this newsletter. The women I spoke with were funny, smart, heartbreaking, and so thoughtful. Here are some bits that didn’t make it into the final version of the piece but that I loved. Thank you. (Oh, and here’s a picture of the blanket!)

“There is an entire industry built on targeting first-time moms in a really vulnerable state. I see it in my new moms group. They’re like, ‘Look at this mom in this one reel! She just put her baby in a sleep sack and her child just magically went to sleep.’ But you’re just seeing, like, the 15 seconds of the baby closing its eyes! You don’t know what happened in the 30 minutes before when she was, like, sobbing in the dark!” — mom of a 1-year-old

“I can’t remember her name. I didn’t check a reference. She came to our tiny apartment and, like, observed us doing a bedtime. I was almost manic. We had a pretty awkward Pretty Woman moment where she wouldn’t leave and it was because she needed me to pay her. It was all cash. She didn’t have a website. Who was this woman? We’ll never know! It was all just so weird.” — mom of a 5-year-old and a newborn, on hiring a sleep consultant

“My husband has a really low tolerance for our son crying, or being uncomfortable, or anything. So I take him to get his shots. I take him to get his glasses. I get him to take his little eyedrops. Um, so I have a higher tolerance with him crying. So because it was just me at night, because my husband worked late, I was the one that was able to sleep train him…

My husband had a rough childhood. He doesn’t have that many wonderful memories with his parents. But one of the main ones he really enjoyed was cuddling with his dad in bed. When he was scared, or in the early morning, he would go to his dad’s bed, and his dad would just open the covers and he’d crawl in and they would cuddle. He felt that he wasn’t able to create that memory with our son, because I wouldn’t let it happen.” — mom of a 4-year-old

“I have not had the bone-depleting exhaustion I had with my first child when I was breastfeeding, because my husband has been able to do half the middle-of-the-night feedings from birth.” — mom of a 5-year-old and a 1-year-old, who had a double mastectomy between her first and second children

“One of the things I still am trying to figure out is, like, you can’t call in tired.” — mom of an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old

“If I wake up early, I can still feel a self. But even then, you know, it gets nibbled away at. My daughter came in yesterday before her [OK to Wake] clock went off. And I was like, I’m writing, I’m not available. And then at bedtime yesterday, I said, ‘Remember, don’t come out until your wake-up clock turns on.’ And she said, ‘Well, I feel like you love writing more than you love me.’ And it’s just like, ah, you know, it just feels impossible.” — mom of a 6-year-old

“Sometimes I’m lying there for an hour, just waiting [for them to fall asleep]. I work, so I sometimes I have other things to do, or I’ve got to make their lunch, or do laundry — just, like, life admin activity — and it cuts into that time. And that sometimes is frustrating. I sometimes feel like I’d be okay with them sleeping with me if I could somehow get them to fall asleep without needing me. Just to have time for myself. In the daytime, even if they’re at school or daycare, I’m working. Nighttime, I’m with them. And there’s nothing for me.” — mom of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old

“If you think relentless exhaustion is part of the job, then you stop seeking options — because you’re like, ‘Well, this is it. This is what I signed up for. If we wanted to sleep, we shouldn’t have had kids.’ Someone will say, ‘I’m so tired. My two-year-old is still nursing three times a night.’ I would look at that with my lens and go, your child has a sleep association. They don’t know how to sleep without you. And so periodically, throughout the night, they need your assistance to navigate a light sleep cycle. And this is locking you and your toddler into a cycle of sleeplessness.

Their lens is, well, this is totally normal, and toddlers are going through regressions and growth spurts, and they need that closeness, and it’s part of how we help them develop emotionally. And if you were to not provide that service to them, they’d have an attachment disorder.

I’m claiming that as misinformation. I had to back out of those spaces online. The tired parent who says, ‘I’m really struggling’ instead of being given options and information to shine a light on the root issue, what they would be told are things like ‘Oh, hugs, Mama. It’s so hard. Try to get a manicure. A little self-care will help. Have you taken a long bath?’ And I’m like, no. A long bath is not the answer to this.” — Alexis Dubief, founder of Precious Little Sleep and author of the book Precious Little Sleep: The Complete Baby Sleep Guide for Modern Parents

“The sun always comes up. It’s much easier to deal with parenting when the sun is up.” — mom of a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a newborn.

Also, I am writing a feature for New York magazine about families and sleep. If you have thoughts and might want to talk to me for the piece, please fill this out.

I think often think of, I believe it was Jess Grose’s husband (can’t find the tweet but h/t) who said that waking up in the morning when you have small kids is like being shot out of a cannon.

I long resisted waking up before my kids, but then I realized that my weekday “routine” had come to consist of hiding under the covers for as long as possible, wallowing in dread, and then launching into instant yelling, all the while too blind to find “daytime pants.” After awhile you just start to wonder if there is a better way.

So a couple months ago, I resolved to start getting up way before everyone else. The kids are not allowed to come downstairs until seven, although they are often awake and banging around a little bit before then. I try to be up at 5, but I usually still end up lying in dread under the covers for a bit. I do my 15-minute Momma Strong workout — Courtney is the closest thing I have to a therapist, she’s a good one, I cry in at least two workouts a week and I’m always scrawling on our whiteboard lines of hers like “Does this build me up or tear me down?”1 Then I make lunches and fill out daycare Covid attestations and stuff.

I wouldn’t call it “me time” or something, though I did call it that once when Hugh came downstairs at six and I was lying on my exercise mat just kinda staring at my phone and I said “HUGH THIS IS ME TIME. I NEED THIS TIME TO BE PACKING LUNCHES.” But it is time when I am alone. I guess I would also be alone, kind of, if I were sleeping, but it turns out I need to be consciously aware of the fact that I am alone for there to be any benefit.

A lot of the parents I’ve talked to so far for this piece have talked about something like this. It’s either the “revenge bedtime procrastination” thing, staying up really really late after the kids are asleep, or it’s my “revenge early rising” thing. I’m not sure why revenge has to be part of it but it’s an integral part.

I go to sleep early, I’m getting a lot of sleep, but my brain is nonetheless not good right now.

Like I gave Ruth, our hamster, a whole ton of bedding and she’s built herself an elaborate burrow with a little tunnel that goes from her food dish through a hidey toy and in to bed. I have also been super delinquent in changing her cage and I mentioned to Alice that I needed to clean it.

“Mom, don’t! You’ll destroy her home that she made!”

I was like, “She can rebuild it!” and then almost started to cry. I probably won’t change her cage for another couple months or so.

Also, Cambridge Public Schools are going masks-optional on Monday and when I told the kids that starting Monday they could decide what they wanted to do, Alice said she might wear a mask “half of the days of the week.”

Then she said, “I’m going to save a mask, so that I can talk to my kids about the Covid of 2019 one day. Like you did with polio.”

There was a lot going on there but unfortunately this tweet came to mind immediately:

It’s not great, having this immediate fear that your children’s futures are gonna be dark. And my fear basically feels like a luxury item, self-indulgent, not even the real thing.

Obviously my second thought was “Haha wait how old do you think I am?”

Well, old enough to be making barks. Barks n’ brittles. The white moms of the internet “crack” food genre.

“This recipe has a lot of different names. The one that I see the most is Christmas Crack. Definitely an odd name but it makes sense after you try this ‘candy.’ You won’t want to stop eating it. It’s deliciously addictive!  In a good way, not a bad way,” per Making Memories With Your Kids.

Come on now, let’s just call these recipes what they are, which is: Sweet/salty, broken into jagged pieces, made with a lot of butter.

The two recipes below also have other things in common, like: Easy, sheet pan, everyone loves, sturdy enough to throw in your bag when the apocalypse comes.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Brittle

This is adapted from Shauna Sever’s Midwest Made. Browning the butter takes only a couple minutes more and makes it seem all sophisticated (I think I could get away with selling this in Cambridge as “savory cookies”), but you can also just use regular melted butter.

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled or browned and cooled

• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

• 1 cup (200 g) granulated sugar

• 1 teaspoon fine sea salt

• 2 cups (256 g) all-purpose flour

• 1 cup (170 g) chocolate chips

Position a rack to the center of the oven and preheat it to 350°F. Have a 12x17" sheet pan ready.

In a large bowl, whisk together the melted or browned butter and vanilla. Add the sugar and salt and continue to whisk until the mixture thickens and appears pastelike. Switch to a wooden spoon or spatula and mix in the flour. Stir in the chocolate chips. Press the mixture into the ungreased pan in a thin, even layer. I leave out the nuts that this recipe originally calls for, and I’ve never been able to get it to spread across the entire pan; I just press it out as thin as I can.

Bake for 23 to 25 minutes, or until light golden brown (the edges will be a bit darker than the center), rotating the pan 180 degrees every 7 to 8 minutes during baking. Let cool, then break into pieces.

Graham Cracker shan’t-be-calling-it-Christmas-Crack Toffee

There are a lot of versions of this recipe on the internet. Around the holidays, I made like 8 different pans of it, ostensibly to give away as gifts, and settled on this one as the best.

• A box of graham crackers

• 2 sticks butter (salted is fine, possibly better)

• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar

• 1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

• Toasted pecans (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350°F and line a 12x17" sheet pan with parchment paper. Put as many full graham cracker “sheets” as you can fit across the pan, it’s usually like 13-14 and then I break some into quarters to line the bottom edge.

Combine the butter and sugars in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring, for 4 to 5 minutes. It’s cooked enough when it’s light caramel brown and bubbly and thick, but you’re not heating it all the way to a hard toffee here. The internet recipes vary widely and wrongly here; just listen to me on this. Pull it off the heat and, working quickly2, pour the bubbling butter/sugar mixture evenly across the graham crackers, using a spatula to spread it.

Bake for 8 minutes.

Pull the sheet out of the oven and scatter the chocolate chips across the crackers, then use an offset spatula to spread the melted chocolate evenly.

If you’re using toasted pecans here, which I am probably not, you can now sprinkle those across the top of the chocolate. I also like to crush some sea salt flakes and sprinkle those across it too.

Chill it, then break it into those jagged pieces. You can keep it in the freezer and eat it straight out of there, if you like.

On March 15, 2020, I tweeted that I would send this newsletter out daily during the pandemic. Against all odds, I stuck to my goal and this is issue #764 of I’ll Be Right Back.

Circa March 2021, a more innocent phase of the pandemic.

A picture of a baby came up in my Instagram recommendations and I tapped it and I thought at first it was not a real baby. It was an account by a Swiss mother and all the hashtags were #neonataleprogerie. The baby had an extremely rare genetic syndrome called Wiedemann-Rautenstrauch syndrome. Since the day that I tapped, at least 75% of the recommendations in my Instagram account have been posts from the mothers of children with severe illnesses or rare genetic disorders. I mean my grid is like: Blueberry coffee cake, laundry room with four washing machines, baby in hospital bed, baby with feeding tube lying on a Boppy, Mason jar puddings, stillborn baby, stillborn baby. I try not to click on them. I can’t think of an acceptable sentence to write about this. I don’t know what part of my brain Instagram’s algorithm accessed to think that this is what I want.

But I did click on one of them by a mom whose baby who had congestive heart failure and then got a heart transplant and is now three, although as she notes often, a heart transplant is not a cure. She is a totally engrossing writer and such an amazing advocate for organ donation. I ended up scrolling all the way down to the very beginning of her feed and reading from the bottom up.

Scrolling through a stranger’s heartbreak and suffering to get my mind off being pissed about daycare’s Covid policies, is that what I am doing? With her son now at a relatively stable point, she is writing fewer posts about his health, more about her older daughter and her new baby and more about Disney World, a place she loves. As she’s made this transition, she’s lost followers. She started getting mean comments complaining that since she had the third, healthy baby she doesn’t do as many medical posts anymore.

“If you want to watch a car accident, go elsewhere,” she wrote. And in another post a year later: “I know some people started following our family to watch our world burn and many have left when our journey stopped being so bumpy. I appreciate those who have been happy for us as we have now made it to the other side of the journey. I don’t know how long our journey will stay smooth, but I will always be willing to share our truth.”

Alice asked why people like watching scary movies or sad movies, I was going to throw off some random and not very thoughtful answer because I never watch movies, and Kevin said “Some people say it’s because it gives them a safe way to experience emotions without actually having something bad happen in their life.”

And now I’m just wondering if this is, like, a decision that Instagram made.

From Katherine Heiny’s Early Morning Riser (Knopf, 2021).

The era where I made fun of learning pods on the South Shore, July 2020. Remember pods?

Spotted at Biden rally in Davis Square, Somerville, June 6, 2020.

February 24, 2021. Tweet deleted within hours.

She is the founder of Winnie, an app that helps you find daycare. For instance, it told me that there is a Bright Horizons a couple blocks from our house.

Roche Brothers, Marshfield, July 4, 2021.

Received December 2020.

“Hey Mom, do you have a little coat that would fit Monkey?”

“I do, actually!”

[pause] “Do you have a different little coat?”

[at Wegmans] “Mom, can we get those dog crackers that are for people?”

…

“See, there they are.”

And we’re coming up on two years of kids’ books that make me cry.

If you’d settle for just some of this, and it’s the buying-things part only, well then allow me to tell you about The Post Lady.

Because if you really want to up your kids’ Instagram clothing game, Hanna Andersson will absolutely not cut it. Polarn O. Pyret can now be found at the Chestnut Hill Mall in Newton, Massachusetts, next to a Lululemon, so no thank you. You are going to need to buy your Scandi kids’ clothing directly from the source.

Also you are going to need an intermediary. That intermediary is The Post Lady. For £29.95 per year (USD $40.70), she will sell you a UK shipping address. You shop your American heart out on the European children’s clothing internet, have it shipped to your The Post Lady address, and then she repackages all your things for you into one “cost-effective” package and ships it to you in the U.S. It’s clearly a giant waste of money and bad for the earth, but the American heart wants what the American heart wants and what the American heart — your kind of American heart — wants is, oh my God!

I signed up for The Post Lady when I needed (wanted) to buy Alice this specific coat with penguins on it for her sixth birthday from the precious UK brand Frugi. That was two years ago, and I realized pretty quickly that I was not and never would be rich enough to buy my kids European clothes, but I forgot about the Post Lady subscription and it auto-renewed by accident and … well, here we are at the Advent calendars.

It started with this tweet back in October.

Do you remember October? It was a pretty okay month, school and daycare were open, we were all like “oh Halloween’s gonna be pretty normal this year.” As I type this, I can’t even remember if October was when Delta was. Maybe we didn’t feel great? Better than we do now, though. What I know for sure is in October I had the brain space and the childcare to seize on Kathryn’s tweet, get really excited about Christmas, and decide to take advantage of my extant Post Lady membership to order a bunch of chocolate and Advent calendars and other stuff from the UK for Christmas.

A bunch of other moms went in on the order with me and here’s one of the three 20-kilogram boxes that arrived at my house one day in late November.1

I was staggering around with these giant boxes trying to divvy up everyone’s orders before it was time to go pick up the kids. Kevin came down to refill his coffee and I was like “DON’T ASK. DON’T ASK AND DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT!”

That night while we were watching TV, we ate a little bit of the supposedly famously better British milk chocolate and both came to the conclusion that it was, like … okay. I’m eating a Kit Kat Santa going no no I really think this is much, much better, but my heart wasn’t in it.

Kevin: “Why did you order so many of these Crunchie bars? I really don’t like them.”

I bought one Cadbury Dairy Milk Advent calendar for each child. On December 10 or so, we noticed that the December 24 door on Alice’s calendar had been opened and the chocolate inside it eaten.

Hugh was the obvious and really only possible culprit, Eileen is too little. It doesn’t add up, though. He had trouble opening the doors on his own Advent calendar and usually asked me to do it for him. He can’t reliably read the number 24 and doesn’t know its significance. He doesn’t really care about chocolate. As Alice began her questioning he seemed truly baffled, before offering a theory.

“I think the Grinch slithered in under the door,” he said.

None of us, except for Alice, had the heart to investigate further. If I took Ativan I would say it was me, I went downstairs in the middle of the night and ate it in a trance. But I don’t take Ativan. And anyway I had my own stash of British chocolate if I wanted it, which, it turned out, I didn’t really.

Kevin and I agreed that our favorite kind of chocolate is Tony’s Chocolonely, which you can buy here in the U.S. at a lot of places. Their whole thing is being very ethical (but I like it just because it’s very good). They have an Advent calendar that is in fact only sold in the U.K., and that I did not buy because I didn’t think my kids would appreciate it.

This year, it turns out, Tony’s Chocolonely did an Advent calendar prank that fell so flat it made international news.

I had tried to order rapid tests from the UK, by the way. They’re free to residents there — but maybe they sell them cheap, too, I thought?

But no, it turns out: They don’t sell them at all. An American couldn’t buy them even if she wanted to.

It’s possibly strange considering I love reading and writing and I spent hours and hours, as a kid, telling stories out loud to myself. It was a compulsion, I had to do it.1 But that was for me, children. I have no desire to keep up a constant stream of entertaining background noise for you.

So yeah, they found a machine to do it for them. Alice and Hugh are super super into podcasts, which they’ve come to consider the next best thing to TV because it’s still kind of like a screen. (“Mom, can we listen to a podcast ON YOUR PHONE?” No.) Here’s what we listen to:

Pinna. Pinna is a streaming audio service for kids. It’s $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year but they often have 50% off deals. My kids’ favorite thing on it is “Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest,” which is a really extremely good fairy tale podcast. The guy who hosts it, Adam Gidwitz, is great and truly talented for talking to kids in a non-condescending way (Google Adam Gidwitz and one of the top results Google suggests is “Is Adam Gidwitz married?” which I’ve wondered too.)

The reason I know he’s good at talking to kids is that the conceit of each episode of “Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest” is that it’s being told in a classroom (before Covid, live in a classroom; now, on Zoom). Some of the kids’ questions and comments are incorporated into each story. I gotta warn you though that the kids are ~extremely precocious~, because — I learned by reading the show notes — the school he works with is Brooklyn Friends. After you listen to an episode of “Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest,” you’re going to google tuition at Brooklyn Friends and you’re going to learn that it is $51,080 per year and you’re going to have the episode “The Strange Red Fox” on in the car for your kids and this is going to happen:

Adam Gidwitz: So the gardener pretty much had the most important job in the whole kingdom. You can probably understand why he was stressed and distracted. [cuts from telling the story to talking to the kids] Do any of your parents have jobs that kind of make them stressed sometimes?

Kid 1: Yeah. My mom’s a musician.

Kid 2: My mom’s a psychologist.

Kid 3: My mom sometimes has projects due because she’s a set designer.

Adam Gidwitz: Uh-huh, and does she ever get stressed before they’re due?

Kid 3: Not really. She just has to keep working and working and working.

Laura Hazard Owen [hissing from the front seat] Oh, she’s a set designer! Oh, she never really gets stressed! HEY KID, now tell us which bank your dad works at!

Alice: Mom, can you please stop talking so we can hear the story?

Circle Round. It’s a WBUR story podcast. We pay $51,080 annually for it. There are 132 episodes and 3/4 of them are “feisty girl outwits bad thing but in some different culture.” It’s pretty good. We had tickets once to a Circle Round live show when my mom was visiting, but Hugh suddenly started mysteriously limping so Kevin and had to take him to the doctor and when I told my mom she’d have to take Alice to the Circle Round show, the look on her face.

Wow in the World. I invite you to listen to one or two episodes and guess what you think the hosts look like, then google them and I guarantee it’s exactly how you imagined it.

Reading Bug Adventures. The key thing to know about this podcast is the episodes are extremely long, like 90 minutes-plus. It’s run by a children’s bookstore in California and sponsored by various children’s book publishers. It’s hosted by one of the store’s co-owners and you can tell that all her life she dreamed of being a singer but she wasn’t quite good enough to do it professionally so now she incorporates many minutes of her singing into each episode of the podcast, like sometimes rapping about mummies.

Kids Short Stories Podcast. Nothing worse!!! Hugh was obsessed for awhile. He broke his femur in March (this is unrelated to the limping incident I mentioned previously) and was in a spica cast for six weeks (it was horrible) and so for a time, we were letting him listen to pretty much unlimited Kids Short Stories Podcast, despite how truly intolerable it is to everyone else in the family, even Alice. I think we now all associate it with the darkness of that time, and even Hugh doesn’t really ask to listen to it anymore.

So imagine that there was a pretty dumb guy who was terrible at telling stories but he loved doing it. Like, a kid says “tell me a story!” and he enthusiastically tells the worst story you’ve ever heard, uses professional recording equipment to blast it into your home, and then tells a new one either three times a week or every single weekday if you pay for the premium package (we don’t). Now that I’ve heard dozens and dozens of these, I can safely assert that he doesn’t that he doesn’t write down or maybe even outline the stories before he records them, which he may think adds an element of realism — like, this story truly is being told to you live right now! Listen to this guy who has absolutely no idea where it’s going or how it’ll wrap up! — and it all seems harmless until suddenly he’s doing science episodes and you hear, from the other room — where you’ve banished your child with the iPad because you cannot stand to have Kids Short Stories Podcast playing in the same room where you are — this:

One day, Malachi was about to go play outside. He was so excited cause it was a beautiful day, the sun was out and it wasn’t too hot. And it wasn’t too cold. He put on his shoes and a nice little jacket because it was a little chilly because it was fall. Do you guys know what fall is? Yeah. It’s the season that’s right after summer. So when it’s really hot outside, that’s summer time, and in the fall is when it starts to cool down and not be so hot anymore. And so he put on his favorite jacket and went outside. He was so excited. HEY WAIT A SECOND. He ran outside and as he looked around everything looked very different. Something had happened. “Oh no,” Malachi said. “Something happened to the trees! The trees are not green anymore! All the leaves have been painted all these colors! Some are yellow and red and brown and … oh no. This is terrible. I don’t know … what in the world is going on, but something is wrong. I gotta call The Sci Guy! Let’s go!”

And so Malachi ran back inside and asked his parents to call The Sci Guy. And they called him and he answered. “Yes! Mr. Sci Guy! Are you there?” “Oh. Hey there Malachi. How are you doing?” “Well,” Malachi said, “I was doing great but I was going outside to play and something happened! It’s terrible! Someone went outside and painted all the leaves in the backyard and they’re not green anymore! I don’t know if there’s a bad guy or what’s going on but I thought you would know, so can you come over here and help me paint all these leaves back?” “Hahahahahaha.” Sci Guy laughed. “Oh Malachi. I would love to come over and show you exactly what happened. I’m pretty sure I know but let me come over and double-check just in case.”

And so Malachi, just like that he felt so much better. He just felt so much better knowing that Jim the Sci Guy was coming over. Because that would make everything better. One thing that was pretty cool about the Sci Guy is he had a teleporter. Yeah. Do you know what a teleporter is? Yeah, it’s so cool. It can send people places so that … I think Mr. Sci Guy lived really far away but somehow he could just poof! He could just appear in places so fast. It was great. Because whenever we had a science problem he was always there. And so just like that [poorly done knocking sound effect] Malachi and his parents raced over to the front door and sure enough there he was. Mr. Jim the Sci Guy here to help you with your science problems!

“Oh good, Sci Guy, I’m so glad you’re here. Can you come to the back yard? You have to see this. It’s crazy.”

“Yeah. Let’s go!’'

And so Malachi and Mr. Sci Guy walked to the back yard. They started to look everywhere and Malachi, he was very nervous. He said, “Sci Guy, do you see everything all the leaves have been painted! I really remember like just the other day everything was green and I don’t know how this happened.”

“All right Mr. Malachi. Let’s take a deep breath and calm down. All right. So. I know it looks like someone painted all these leaves, but actually it’s not paint. Let’s go take a closer look.” So Sci Guy pulled one of the branches down close so that they could get a closer look. “Do you see what I see?” “Uh … what are you looking at?” “Well, I don’t see any paint on these leaves. So. Hmm. What do you think happened?” “Uh, I don’t know!” Malachi said. “Um … can they like change colors like camouflage?”

“Well, you’re getting closer!” Sci Guy said. “You see, leaves, they’re actually this color.” So they were looking at a leaf that was bright yellow. And Sci Guy said, “You see this yellow color? That’s actually the real true color of this leaf!”

“Waaaaaait a second, Sci Guy,” Malachi said. “You’re trickin’ me. These leaves are always green.”

[awkward pause]

“You’re right! Like — during — most of the year they are green. But they’re green because they have something living inside them.”

“WHAT! There’s something living inside this leaf?”

“Um, kind of. [swallows] So you see, I brought my science gear and I have a special … uh … some special headphones that when we put them on we can talk to different creatures that don’t talk like us. And so, would you like to talk to this tree right here?”

“HAHAHA. WAIT was that a joke or are you serious?” Malachi said.

“Oh I’m very serious. You see we can put these headphones on and then we can talk to the tree, and I bet he can teach us all about these leaves, but they’re — it’s actually pretty cool.”

And so both of them, Malachi and the Sci Guy, both put on these special headphones and. “I don’t hear anything,” Malachi said. “Well, first we have to knock on the tree and kinda wake up and tell him that we’re here. Mr. Tree, hello, are you there?”

“WHY HELLO THERE!”

“WHAT!” Malachi couldn’t believe it the tree was actually talking.

“Can I help you on this beautiful fall day?”

“Oh. Hey there Mr. Tree,” said the Sci Guy. “You see, Malachi here, he had a really important question for you, because he got pretty — kinda worried, because your leaves changed color overnight. And he’s, you know, he was worried that, you know, someone was painting your leaves, which, that’s not good. And I knew that you would be really good at explaining how all this works. Do you mind telling us what happened?”

“Oh! hahaha. Of course I can! You see Malachi, my leaves are like a special, uh, grocery man that gets all my groceries and my food.”

“Your what? Your leaves are like grocery man?”

“Uh, kind of. You see, my leaves work very hard for me because they have something inside them called chloroplasts.”

“What’s a chloroplast? I’ve never heard of that before.”

“Uh. You see, a chloroplast is a really special thing that turns sunlight, water, and air into food so that I can eat it.”

[GASP] “Your leaves make you the food? Wow. I didn’t know that,” Malachi said.

“Yes. And can you guess what color a chloroplast is?”

“Um … well … it’s probably either yellow or green, but I’m gonna guess green,” Malachi said.

“You got it! You see, chloroplasts, they have the job inside the leaves, while it’s nice and warm during spring and summer time, they do all the hard work to collect the food. And then when fall comes, their job is over. So that I can rest during the winter. And when their job is done, their green goes away! Because the chloroplasts are not — working anymore.”

[GASP] “And that’s why leaves change color? Because the chloroplasts stopped working? Is there something wrong?”

“Oh, no no no. Remember, I am a tree that needs lots and lots of sleep. Because I’m very busy during [guy sighs heavily like he can’t believe he’s still doing this either] the summer creating oxygen. But that’s another story. And so … when it’s winter and it’s time to go to sleep, the chloroplasts, their jobs are done, and then guess what.”

[GASP] “WHAT!” Malachi said.

“The chloroplasts, they come back! In the spring. In my new leaves. And they help make my food yummy again.”

“WOW! What is, what’s the food called?”

“It’s called chlorophyl! It is delicious. It tastes like sugar.”

“Ooh! I like sugar!” Malachi said. “Wow. Mr. Tree. Thank you so much for explaining it to me, and telling me that the leaves, they change color in the fall and it’s not because something’s wrong but it sounds like they’re just getting ready for a big, long sleep during the winter.”

“Exactly. It’s good seeing you, Sci Guy! We should hang out again sometime. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”

“Oh, yeah, Mr. Tree … it’s been a … long time, but yeah we should hang out some time, maybe we could, uh, go eat some dinner together sometime.”

“THAT WOULD BE GREAT! All right, well, I gotta get back to, you know, making oxygen and getting ready for my sleep. I’ll see you guys later! Bye!”

“Wow, Mr. Sci Guy. That was so cool!” Malachi said.

“All right Malachi. I’ve got to get back to the lab. I’ll see you next time.” And just like that the Sci Guy was gone. He had solved this amazing mystery and Malachi learned a lot about trees. What an awesome discovery! We’ll see you next time on Kids Short Stories. Bye!

Bonus, sometimes the stories are Christian.

More importantly we had six weeks of the older children being in school before everything shut down. It was the real old-fashioned kind of school, too, where they were there all day every weekday from roughly 8 to 6. You know, the kind of school I used to worry was too much school and was bad for them and felt sort of guilty that they were there so much, either in all-day daycare or in school + afterschool, and that they weren’t maybe getting enough unstructured time at home! Hahahahaha! What a quaint concern!

(When this is over, will we go back to that kind of guilt? I propose that we not.)

So yeah, she’s not quite a pandemic baby but she came of baby age in the pandemic. Almost every person she sees is wearing a mask. She has been in daycare since September and all of her teachers wear masks all day. She absolutely recognizes people she knows even though she’s never seen their mouths. If a stranger in a mask smiles at her she sometimes cries and they’re like “It’s because I’m wearing a mask!” and I can either choose to say or not “Nope, it’s because you’re a stranger,” but yeah it’s definitely because they’re a stranger.1 We just wouldn’t be very far at this point if she were scared of everyone who wore a mask.

Haha, “very far.” Like we’ve made so much progress otherwise! We have not! Everything is always the same! The first year with Alice and Hugh shot by. All those Instagram posts with the baby’s first birthday where the mom is like “And just like that she’s 1”? I would never say that about this year. When people ask me her age, my first instinct is always that she’s a month or two older than she actually is, because time moves so slowly these days, and because every day is the same. If you come visit us on a given morning at, say, 6 AM — PLEASE DO, I MISS YOU ALL SO MUCH — you’ll find Eileen and me sitting on the kitchen floor. I sit in what I have come to think of as my hidey corner, it’s the corner between the dishwasher and the cupboard and I couldn’t figure out why I kept gravitating there until I realized that when I’m in that precise spot the older kids can’t see me from the other room. Lots of phone checking goes on there. It’s me with my coffee in my hidey corner, Eileen crawling around and eating Cheerios off a little foot stool.

The sun comes up one minute earlier every day now, I guess. And she throws the Cheerios ever more nimbly.

And she is learning to talk. Or, as one of her teachers put it, she is “finding her words,” which I love so much because it suggests that the words were always there in her and are just now bubbling up to the surface.

[Alice wailing] “Mom, I drew a pig at school and everybody laughed at me! I think even my teacher laughed!”

“I would never laugh at you! I’m sure the pig was great! Show me how you draw a pig.”

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MY TOP 4 POSTS OF 2020

#4. HOME SKELETON

#3. WATER EXPLORATION STATION

#2. MAKE YOUR OWN CHOCOLATE

#1. HAVE A BABY

And you know, it was convenient to be anti–Elf on the Shelf when my kids were still too young to respond to threats. As usual in all of raising kids, it’s really easy to be fervently anti-something that’s of no use or value to you or your family at that specific moment in time. (Never needed formula? Breast is best!) But this year has had a way of wearing childrearing opinions down, dulling them into vaguely held sentiments at best (unless it is your opinion about whether schools should be open in which case you are hyperaware, punchy, and vigilant, but also to tired to yell about it anymore).

Is it good for kids to be outside? Probably, but don’t kill yourself. Screentime?!?!?!?!? Fine as it turns out, bummer we wasted all that time reading articles about it. Should you give babies pouches? God, why not? Is the baby eating a bead? Well, as long as it’s a Perler bead.* (“Mom, is it okay for Eileen to eat a bead? Because she did.”) How does anyone even have the energy to have a strong opinion about any little thing at this point? (Seriously, has 2020 finally put an end to the breastfeeding guilt people? Or maybe they’re just too busy talking about how they won’t get the vaccine to care about formula shaming anymore?)

This is to say, we’re not getting Elf on the Shelf but it turned out that I had no problem introducing the notion of an all-seeing figure into my children’s lives when it became useful to me. For maybe the first few days of December it was “We need to be kind and caring to each other because that’s the spirit of Christmas and kindness helps make Santa’s magic work,” now it’s “HEY! SANTA IS WATCHING!” or, recently, “I swear to God I’m gonna throw one present away every time you whine.” These threats are entirely empty and Alice and Hugh 99% know this but that remaining 1% is just enough for them to begrudgingly stop doing the thing they were doing for a moment or two. The yelling also feels good on the parental level, “almost erotic how good” is right.

However, the yelling is coinciding with — please let’s not say causing — an uptick in violent statements from Hugh, who is four and I know it’s the age (“What’s your favorite animal?” “All predators”) but it is noteworthy. I recently overheard him and Alice recreating a scene in which Kevin had made them clean up their rooms; one of Hugh’s contributions was “Clean up your room or I’ll kill you.” We were listening to a story about Santa where someone threatens to ruin Christmas; Hugh: “If you’re bad Santa will punch you in the face.”

Alice: “Mom, can Santa read your mind?”

Me: “NO NO Santa can’t read your mind. The only person who knows what you are thinking is you and thoughts don’t really count. I mean, they are important but you can think whatever you want as long as you…” [trails off] “Nobody can read minds.”

Happy holidays everyone, I hope you find occasional joy and peace over the next couple weeks. I’m grateful to you for subscribing, reading, and writing back to me, and the next time some asshole starts a Substack, just remember we were here first. Here’s to 2021.

*Maybe you aren’t familiar with Perler beads because you didn’t buy 5 pounds of them from Goodwill so that your seven-year-old would have something to do with her hands during remote school other than tying tiny strands of fake cobwebs tightly around every pole-like surface in the room. It’s okay, all you really need to know is that they’re so tiny they pass right through a baby.