Dispatches From Babyville

I almost had a baby at Ikea. That sounds like it could be a metaphor so let me clarify that I am speaking literally. I almost went into labor and delivery while waiting to pay for stylish Swedish lighting fixtures in Red Hook. And it’s not because I didn’t know I was having labor pains.

It’s because I am such an Ikea junky I could not pull myself away. Also, it’s my third baby. These sorts of things tend to happen with your third.

How does a person transform from a savvy shopper with self-restraint to a conspicuous consumer panting through contractions behind a cart filled with faux bear-skin rugs? Well, when you think about it, how does one not?

It started when Ikea opened in Brooklyn. There was a time New Yorkers had to schlep over to Elizabeth, New Jersey to obtain aesthetically-pleasing yet affordable furniture and enjoy the best meatballs outside of Stockholm for under $4. With the nearest Ikea in New Jersey, the world retained a semblance of order and balance. And then, one fateful day, the furniture wonder-shop opened its doors in Red Hook, oh-so-tantalizingly close. Not only was there plentiful parking, there was a free shuttle bus from the Slope, a cafe with views serving kids’ meals for just $2.49, and even free child-care, so my children could frolic in the ball pit while I compared kitchen cabinet knobs. And then there were the cinnamon buns. Yes, the smell of those cinnamon buns was the final nail in the coffin of my willpower. Or, I should say, the penultimate one. What truly killed my willpower was getting pregnant again.

At the end of my third pregnancy, two things happened at exactly the same time. First, a relentless nesting craze took hold of me, compelling me to organize the “Hoarders” level clutter in our apartment. Secondly, with my due date approaching, I began to consider where I’d put the baby. And the stark realization dawned on me that there was, in fact, nowhere to put the baby. We would be a family of five living in a one-bedroom apartment: there wasn’t enough room for my son’s Lego collection, much less a whole new human being and her baby gear.

Moving to a bigger place would have been great but we didn’t have the money. There was, however, a cheap way to get more livable space, and guzzle Lingonberry juice in the process.

“You know I hate going to Ikea,” David said, when I announced the plan for our Extreme Home Makeover, a plan that relied heavily on the phrase “maximize vertical space!”

“It’s like Vegas in there,” David went on, “No clocks so you can’t tell how long you’ve been inside and no cellphone reception so you’re cut off from the outside world — from your loved ones who’d tell you to stop buying crap you don’t need.”

“But we do need this crap,” I persuaded him, “This crap is the lynchpin between us and a happy life!”

“See?” he countered, “You’re already going overboard. Which proves my point that Ikea turns you into a crazy person.”

“Daddy’s right,” piped up my seven year-old Primo, “You start grabbing everything and throwing it in the cart, even if we don’t need it. Like the foot pillow with holes in it to keep your feet warm. That was really unnecessary.”

“So I guess you don’t want to play in the ball pit and eat cinnamon buns,” I said casually.

Even the kids can’t resist that Swedish siren song. And that’s how we ended up at Ikea – the first time.

Though it was still before noon, Smaland was completely filled up. Let me assure you that Hell hath no fury like two children who’ve been turned away from Smaland and forced to shop for closet shelving units instead. Yes, our first Ikea trip could have been made into a piece of scared-straight propaganda to get young people to use birth control.

“This is the worst day of my life!” whined Primo as we tried to find someone – anyone- to answer a pressing question about Pax wardrobes, “Just buy something and get this awful ordeal over with!”

“You LIED TO ME!” shrieked five year-old Seconda, “You told me we could watch a MOVIE and play in the BIG SHOE! And now I have to GO SHOPPING which I HATE more than ANYTHING in the WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD!”

“Oh come on, this will be so fun!” I chirped, buzzed on the smell of unfinished wood, “We can pretend that we live in these beautiful model rooms! We can play family!”

“We already ARE a family,” Primo lamented, “And it is no fun at all.”

By the time we made it into the warehouse, the children were beating each other senseless, both of them crammed into one shopping cart. This public humiliation tipped the balance on my chronic morning sickness, which really pissed me off.

“You people are RUINING this trip to Ikea!” I shrieked, understanding, but not caring, that I’d become one of those archetypal screaming mothers found in Ikeas the world over, “Now I’m gonna vomit and I won’t even be able to enjoy the freaking meatballs!”

By the time we lugged the furniture into our house (well, David lugged the furniture. I watched, clutching my barf bag), my nerves were so frazzled, I resolved never to enter Ikea again. Of course, without a twelve-step program, I didn’t stand a chance. Because as soon as we erected the first two Trofast units and separated the kids’ toy collections into the red and green buckets, I felt such a flood of satisfaction, I could hardly contain myself.

“We need more of these,” I said breathlessly.

The next month, and the next, and the next, I was back trolling the aisles for home furnishings, searching for the magic piece that would somehow metamorphose my one bedroom into a townhouse (or at least a one-plus) and thus solve all our problems, eliminate sibling rivalry, and quite possibly end war and world hunger, too. The fact that I never found it didn’t deter me from continuing to look; in fact it only made me look harder, and buy lots of crap in the process. Buyer beware: if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself trapped in a nasty Ikea cycle wherein you go to buy furniture to store your crap and by the time you leave, you’ve bought more crap to store and you’re right back where you started. Only poorer. And with less livable space.

“Well, that should do it,” I told David as I slammed the trunk down, having loaded just one more Trofast unit into the car. It was gestational week number 34 and Ikea trip number 10.

“You know how I know you’re lying?” David asked, “We’re at Ikea and your lips are moving.”

Like any great work of art, an apartment’s design is never finished, merely abandoned. And it became clear that I wouldn’t abandon this one until I was on my way to the hospital. Just three days shy of my due date, I somehow managed to convince David to go back to Ikea to solve the lighting deficiency in our living room. I don’t know why I say “somehow.” I know precisely how I did it; by promising him a conjugal visit in exchange for his labors, which offered the added benefit of jump-starting my labor.

“We can leave the kids with my grandmother so it will be almost like a date,” I persuaded him, “You know Ikea makes me amorous.”

Half an hour later, we were gliding into nesting nirvana on the escalator.

“What do you think about the name Stuva?” I asked David, “Am I crazy or is that kind of beautiful?”

“I think the fumes of this place are getting to you,” he replied, “To the extent that I’m worried about their effect on the fetus.”

By the time we reached the lighting area, I noticed something unusual was going on. The elated, out-of-body feeling I usually had while cruising through the model rooms was absent. I walked straight through the marketplace without so much as picking up a colander or box of votive candles. And there was also the fact that I was having contractions — big ones — every few minutes.

“Are you OK?” asked David when I bent over in the middle of the halogen lamps and started huffing and puffing.

“Just a little –“ I panted, “Con – trac – tion.”

He furrowed his brows: “Are you in labor?”

“Possibly,” I replied.

“Then maybe we should leave,” he suggested.

“No, no its OK,” I persuaded him, “The contraction’s over now. And I really want to get this lamp. We’re here already.”

A half hour later, David was dragging a large box to the register while I moaned behind the shopping cart.

“Are you trying to have the baby at Ikea?” David asked, “They don’t have epidurals here, you know.”

“Keep — going,” I panted, “We’re – almost – done.”

There were only three people ahead of us on line. And my water hadn’t even broken yet.

“Are you all right?” asked the cashier as she was ringing us up.

“Yeah,” I said, as a contraction subsided, “But if I do end up having a baby here, is there a deal where I win a free nursery or something like that?”

There is not, for the record.

I guess the baby knew that because she wasn’t born that day. The hot-and-heavy contractions subsided, then started up a day later, and kept on waxing and waning until the day after my due date when I finally managed to coax the little tadpole out.

She’s known in these parts as Terza but you can call her Stuva. And her tiny corner of our apartment is impeccably organized.

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To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland (in and out of Ikea), visit her blog A Mom Amok at amomamok.blogspot.com.

My family lives by the Five Second Rule. But even my five and seven year-old understand that the Rule has its exceptions, that it works in some situations and not in others. For example, if we’re eating dinner at my grandmother’s house upstairs, as we frequently are, and my kids drop a cookie or a grape or a meatball, they’ll pick it up off the floor and pop it right into their mouth.

“I can eat this, even though it dropped on the floor,” reasons my five year-old daughter, “Because Nonnie’s floor is so clean.”

“I just scrub it dis morning,” confirms my grandmother in her thick Italian accent, “With Cholrox.”

As a matter of fact, the Five Second Rule is really the Ten-to-Fifteen Second Rule at my grandmother’s apartment. Hell, that piece of penne could sit on the floor for a good minute and I’d eat it without even dusting it off. I’d wager that Nonnie’s floor is more sterile than your standard tray of surgical instruments. That woman goes through more bleach in a month than I’ve gone through in the three years I’ve lived in my apartment.

In my apartment, the Five Second Rule is null and void.

Woe betide the child who drops a cookie on my kitchen floor.

“Throw it out!” I bark, “That cookie’s not worth it.”

Its not like our apartment would be featured on “How Clean Is Your House?”. We don’t have vermin. We wash our dishes and throw out our garbage. We even manage to take our shoes off at the door, most of the time. And bi-annually, I unearth the vacuum and the Swiffer and tell my husband, David, to man up and tackle the bathroom. You can’t eat off the floor and the beds are never made and you could probably fill a bowl with the dusty, desiccated Cheerios lying under the furniture, but its not like our house is condemned or requires an intervention or anything, though you’d think so from my grandmother’s reaction.

The state of my apartment is a cause of immeasurable shame for my grandmother — her mad wife locked in the attic – and she goes to great lengths to insure that the shame stays secret. If I mention that the super’s stopping by to fix something, she will be at my door in five minutes, in her mumu, irate.

“I’m gonna help you clean,” she grunts, “You can’t let him see you house like dis!”

We’ll spend the ten minutes it takes to make the apartment presentable (the upside of a tiny living space is that though it only makes a few minutes to make a colossal mess, it takes the same amount of time to set it right again). I’ll be feeling satisfied and ready to tackle my deadline, but when I suggest that the place looks pretty good, probably good enough to let in the super, she gasps audibly.

“You CRAZY?” she’ll sputter, getting red in the face, “Dis is a disgrace! Looka da dust behind de TV! Che disgrazia!”

When I suggest she calm down before she gives herself a heart attack, she’ll become even more chagrined.

“Please! How I gonna calm down with alla dis DUST? Hurry up and help me move de couch!”

Unlike Mommy Dearest, Nonnie is not just mad at the dirt, she’s mad at me too, for allowing the dirt entry.

But I have a good enough head on my shoulders to understand that as close as I am to being a slob, it’s at least as close as Nonnie is to being obsessive compulsive and this, combined with the fact that she’s related to me, makes her an unreliable judge. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past three decades, it’s to never give serious regard to the input of family.

Now, the input of people outside my family – that is altogether a different story.

A few weeks ago, one of my mommy friends came over with her two kids after school for an impromptu playdate. The kids entertained themselves by jumping on the bed and applying zombie tattoos while we sipped tea.

In the middle of our chatting, she offered this unexpected compliment: “I love coming over here because you’re not one of those moms who’s worried about making her house always look neat and tidy.”

My hackles were instantly up: “You mean, my place is a pigsty?”

“No, no,” she laughed, “I just mean, its very honest that things aren’t . . . perfect. It makes me feel better about my own house.”

She could tell her clarification was only making me more dejected, which made her rush to clarify even more: “I only mentioned it because I know you don’t get offended by this sort of thing.”

I stared at her blankly while she tried to illuminate the ways in which the compliment was indeed a compliment: “Plus, sometimes those people with their immaculate houses are the unhappiest people. Whereas, look at you, how happy you are!”

Happy is not the word I’d use to describe my emotional state at that particular moment. And she was wrong on another count – that I’m not the easily-offended-type. Of course, I take pains to foster the illusion that I’m brimming with self-acceptance, but in fact, I am desperate for the approbation of others and wildly sensitive, as are all people who hide behind self-deprecating humor. Now, I was heartily offended, and a chain reaction of defensiveness unleashed itself on my unsuspecting guest.

“Oh. My. God,” I reeled, “You’re right. I am such a slob!”

I walked over to the couch and started putting the pillows, which the kids had tossed to the floor, back in their rightful place. I fluffed them, for extra measure It what people do in sitcoms. Meanwhile, I rattled off a whole list of excuses:

“If I waited ‘til my house was in order to have people over, we’d never see anyone!” I told my friend, who hid behind her cup of chamomile and strategized about how best to beat a hasty retreat with her kids.

“And every spare second I have, I’m working or attending to the kids’ needs, which never, ever end,” I went on, “so when can I clean?”

“Oh, I know,” she agreed.

“Plus, as soon as I clean this dump up, the kids walk through and mess it up again!” I lamented, picking up stray Legos and discarded pajama pants and pairing shoes in the closet.

“Totally,” she nodded.

I continued on this over-zealous cleaning jag, ala Joan Crawford, for the rest of the playdate, which made my house look picture-perfect and my poor friend rue the day she’d ventured honesty with me.

When David returned home, he was alarmed. “What happened?” he asked, “Why does the house look like this?”

“Did you know its not just my grandmother who thinks we’re slobs but regular, mentally-balanced people, too?” I asked him, “We need to mend our ways. For the sake of the children. People will talk.”

David, who unlike me, is immune to guilt and the threat of public disgrace, was not perturbed: “We do the best we can. We’re not great at keeping house, but we’re not bad either. And we’re great at other things. Don’t worry about it.”

As is my habit, I did the exact opposite of what he suggested and fixated on the matter. While I couldn’t manage keeping the house in tip-top shape, I could manage not letting people visit until it was. But even that required too much energy to sustain and eventually I caved and consented to a last-minute visit from an old college friend and her toddler.

The house was not just in its usual state of casual disrepair but a real, authentic hovel. The kids’ room looked like the scene of a crime: all the drawers of the bureau open with clothes spilling out, the entire surface area of the floor covered with books left open and undressed dolls, some of which had lost their heads at the hands of my daughter. Milk cups were on their sides on the nightstand. Picture frames were crooked. It was like the sack of Rome.

“Your house,” said my college friend, laughing, “looks like a tornado hit it.”

“I know,” I agreed, walking out of the kids’ room, ”Just don’t tell my grandmother. And don’t let the baby eat anything off the floor.”

To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog A Mom Amok at amomamok.com.

When I was a kid, my mother made my sisters and I homemade Christmas stockings. Every December, these craft-tastic masterpieces still assume their positions of honor on the banister of my parents’ staircase, where their multitude of hand-sewed sequins shimmer, palpably emanating peace and joy and all those other elements of the Christmas spirit that aren’t usually my parents’ speed.

It’s obvious that my father conceptually engineered the stockings: his unique design sensibilities are writ large. Instead of adhering to the conventional sock silhouette, the felt of our stockings are cut in the shape of a chunky-heeled boot: Each one is personalized with our names, spelled out in my father’s trademark, much-lauded swirly letters. But it’s in the decorative detail that you see my mother’s hand and the painstaking hours she devoted to the project: underneath each name, an all-felt Christmas scene is affixed – a tall fir tree laden with balls and candy canes and tinsel, surrounded by all manner of Rockwell-era Christmas toys like rocking horses and tricycles, teddy bears and baby dolls. The whole lot of it is slathered in sequins, each one sewed on by hand.

What makes the stockings so impressive, and precious, is that my mother is not a naturally crafty person (at least not in the arts-and-crafts sense): she doesn’t knit or paint or do origami or even arrange flowers in a pleasing way. So, the stockings were clearly a labor of love. I can just see her in bell bottoms and a bowl cut, so overcome by affection for her tiny, tow-headed kids, so driven by a desire to bind us together in tradition, that she unearthed her old Home Ec sewing basket and set about making Christmas history.

Now, fast forward a few decades and you’ll find my own kids celebrating Christmas with stockings I purchased at the 99 cent store. While generic, these velour, furry-cuffed stockings did the job of holding loot quite nicely and there were never any complaints. But last year, when my husband David and I unpacked the Christmas stuff, the stockings had gone missing and it occurred to me that instead of replacing crap with more crap, I could give the gift that lasts a lifetime. I could fashion homemade stockings for the children. If my mother could do it, then certainly, so could I. Better, probably. Mainly, of course, my stockings would be in honor of my mother, an homage to her initial creation, but if they just so happened to surpass hers in creativity, devotion and skill, well, there was nothing I could do about it. Once I realized I could compete with my mother’s accomplishment, it was a done deal. I bought a tonnage of felt and sequins and got to work.

“Children, I have an announcement!” I exclaimed the day before Christmas Eve, “I am making you homemade, personalized Christmas stockings! Just like the ones Nana made for me!”

My six year-old son, known in these parts as Primo, made a vague grunting noise to indicate he’d heard me. His four year-old sister, Seconda, was too busy jamming Play Doh in the bottom of Legos to reply.

“They will be one-of-a-kind!” I gushed, “Irreplaceable! You will keep them your whole lives and hand them down to your children!”

Nothing.

“Isn’t that wonderful??” I pressed, through slightly gritted teeth.

“Oh. Great. Thanks.” replied Primo flatly, not even looking up from the Legos.

After working until midnight that night, I had cut the felt for both stockings, the letters for Seconda’s name and the shape of the evergreen trees that would serve as the centerpiece for the heartwarming Christmas scene on the front. This took me about five hours, and I hadn’t even threaded a needle yet. I realized that to meet my goal — attaching faux-fur trim, affixing the kids’ names, trimmed trees. loads of presents under the trees AND (the tiebreaker) a simple night-scape of shooting stars, moons and candy canes — I’d probably have to work from that moment until New Year’s. There was no way I’d be done in time for Santa.

So on Christmas Eve, I brought the work-sack full of felt to my parent’s place and basically turned the apartment into a Stocking-Manufacturing Sweat Shop. While my mother and father cooked, I barked orders at the rest of the crew – my sister was appointed head of Cutting, David was Official Threader, my cousins were freelance seamstresses. All of these laborers were as unskilled as I was however and it was a real case of the blind leading the blind: stitches dropped, wrinkled felt, crooked names and just sloppy craftsmanship in general. But when my grandmother finally got sprung from her duties preparing the Christmas lasagna, I roped her into the operation and the whole sewing machine kicked into turbo drive.

Nonnie worked as a seamstress in swimsuit factories for nigh on forty years and she knows her way around a needle and thread. The woman is a professional.

“So I want to put sequins on the perimeter of the tree,” I started telling her.

“Ok ok ok,” she interrupted, “I know wat you talkin’ about.”

She slipped on her reading glasses, positioned the thimble in place and what followed can only be described as a Christmas miracle. In the time it took me to knot the end of the thread, she’d already sewed on five letters. I am not exaggerating. It was like having a contest between sometime who was sewing with their fingers and someone who was sewing with their toes.

You know how, when you’re little, you believe that a few elves in Santa’s workshop make all the toys for all the kids in the world, and it’s a plausible scenario because the elves are magical? Well, if those elves have skills like my grandmother, I totally buy it again. Watching Nonnie dart the needle in and out of the felt, through sequins, over fur, her hands a pale blur, I believed.

And that’s when I revisited the 1970s scene of my mother making stockings for my sisters and I. All these years, I’d envisioned her doing it all by herself, sitting cross-legged in a polyester pantsuit. But now I’d discovered her secret weapon: her mother. I’m sure my mother started the project and oversaw the operation, but there was no doubt in my mind that Nonnie, stocking elf, had finished the job. It takes a village to raise a child, but to make their homemade Christmas stockings, all it takes is one super-skilled great-grandmother.

By the time I went back to my apartment on Christmas Eve, I had just a few finishing touches to add before sewing the stockings closed. Of course, these finishing touches took me four hours. I collapsed in a heap at 2am, having hung the finished stockings on the doorknob of the kids’ bedroom, where they glittered gleefully, catching the light from the Christmas tree. You could hear them singing the words “Labor of love!” to the tune of Silent Night. I felt magnificent.

The next morning when the kids woke at the crack of dawn, all bushy-tailed to see Santa’s offerings, I was significantly less magnificent. It took a preternatural amount of self control not to scream stuff like “WHO IS GOING TO CLEAN UP ALL THIS DAMN WRAPPING PAPER, HUH?” as they tore their presents open. But as an antidote to crankiness, I just looked at my kids’ twinkling eyes, all aglow with the magic of Christmas — and when that wore off, I gazed lovingly at my other masterful creations – so much less loud and demanding. There the stockings hung, the white fur so puffy and inviting, the felt trees so symmetrical, the adorable presents lined up in adorable rows underneath.

These stockings would outlast me, serving as a reminder to my children of my love for them, a love so great it caused me to overcome incompetence, laziness and a natural aversion to needles. Sure, my children didn’t appreciate them in the slightest now, but one day, when they had kids of their own, they’d smooth down the distressed edges of the felt trees I’d pricked my fingertips sewing on, and they’d say to themselves – or, dare I dream?, out loud – “You are a great mother, maybe even the best that ever lived.” Then they’d think, “And if she could do it, so could I. Better, probably.” And so, a legacy continues.

To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, tune in to her blog, A Mom Amok, amomamok.blogspot.com.

My son was born on Thanksgiving, which meant that he was a newborn in the coldest weather New York has to offer. This concerned me. Since I was the first of my friends to have a baby, my go-to resource for parenting guidance was my grandmother and she has a thing about children and cold. Specifically, drafts.

I thought this obsession was unique to my grandmother until I stayed with some of her relatives one summer in Italy, and every evening at dusk, they’d patrol the house, slamming windows shut against the summer breeze. They had no air conditioning, incidentally. Once the perimeter had been secured and all chance of relief from heat eradicated, the Italians could relax. That’s when I started worrying that we’d asphyxiate in our sleep.

Obviously, my grandmother’s people in the Old Country are mad as hatters, and for all I know, they’re still using leeches to treat a fever. Me, I’m no hard-core crazy, I’m just highly susceptible to Mommy Guilt and I’ve got a grandmother who knows how to lay it on.

At the inaugural meeting of my new moms’ group, I showed up looking like an Arctic explorer and wowed the crowd by removing layer after layer of clothing from my infant son for a good ten minutes. It took a helluva lot of acerbic wit to convince the moms that I was cool despite my octogenarian tendencies.
Over the years, thanks to the counter influence of these mom friends, my views on most parenting issues have become more modern. But when it comes to dressing kids for the cold, I can’t shake the draft fixation. It’s a powerful and persistent pocket of insanity.

Luckily my son, known in these parts as Primo, couldn’t care less how many layers I toss at him. The kid, now 6, starts wearing long johns in November and doesn’t take them off ‘til we see butterflies in the spring. He’s also has the croup half a dozen times, scarlet fever, rotavirus and roseola. So you see how well that worked out.

My four year-old daughter, however, presents some stumbling blocks. Seconda, who makes it exceedingly clear that she is second only in birth order, is not terribly compliant to begin with, and especially not when clothes are concerned. I say “clothes” but I really mean “costumes,” because Sec doesn’t so much get dressed as dressed up.

As a rule, I happily hand over all creative control of Seconda’s ensembles to Sec herself. My mother exercised an aggressive veto power over my outfits – “That clashes!” “You’re mixing prints!” “You look like a hobo!” – and because I am still scarred from her scathing Project-Runway-type critique, I resolved to let Seconda, for now, wear whatever the hell she wants, as long as it doesn’t harm her or others. The problem is, she doesn’t usually know what she wants until she’s pulled half her clothes out of the drawers and had a full-fledged diva fit. Consequently, her morning wardrobe selection is a messy, maddening time-consuming process which most people would have to take a benzo to get through. It’s like the Devil Wears Prada every morning in our apartment.

“This has a zipper and I DON’T LIKE ZIPPERS!”

“No, no no, green is the worst!”

“Too tight!”

“Too loose!”

“I want it to come ALL the way down to the FLOOR!”

“Cinderella would never wear this!”

“Get this dreadful thing off of me! I LOOK LIKE A BOY!”

Once the temperature drops in the fall, the war zone of her closet becomes even more treacherous because if there is one thing you can rely on with Sec’s wardrobe choices, it is that she never, ever, wears anything weather-appropriate.

Our lowest point was the day in November she woke up and asked for her tortellini. I told her we didn’t have time to make tortellini for breakfast.

“Not to eat,” she sighed, “To wear.”

After years of practice, I’ve learned that the first step in troubleshooting these kinds of misunderstandings is: Caffinate.

“You want to wear tortellini?” I asked, sipping from my mug, “The pasta?”

“Not the pasta!” she exclaimed, “The kind of tortellini a mermaid wears!”

Clearly, this was a job too big for coffee. These are the moments when I wish I could appeal to my kid’s rationality and just say, “Honey, you know I love it when you get all creative, but can we put a pin in this? Save the loco for later?”

Regrettably, children never want to save the loco for later. They always want the loco now.

“Do you mean a tail?” I inquired.

“You’re not LISTENING to me!” she cried, “I said, TOR.TELL.LINI. What you wear on top of the tail.”

Instantly, the image of tri-colored tortellini strung on a piece of fishwire and tied around the neck of a green-haired sea-woman popped into my mind. But where had Seconda got this hare-brained idea? That was weird, and kind of unhygienic, even for Montessori. Also, I didn’t think I could whip it up in fifteen minutes . . .  unless I didn’t cook the tortellini and just strung them frozen. That could work.

Thankfully, Seconda spared me by offering some helpful information.

“I wore it yesterday!” she cried, “My pink tortellini! Did you wash it?”

I beelined to the hamper and began flinging dirty laundry into the hallway, in search of pink.

“NOT THAT!” Seconda shrieked when I held up pink tulle skirts and pink striped dresses, “THE TORTELLINI! WHY WON”T YOU GIVE MY ——–”

Then, suddenly, Sec emitted a shriek of delight: “THERE it is!” she exclaimed, running over to the pile of dirty clothes and tugging on a fuchsia string that poked out of the top. She stood, grinning, a pink string bikini clasped to her heart.

“Ahhhh,” I murmured, “A bikini.”

I was flooded with relief that now, we might be only minorly late, and that I would not have to improvise jewelry out of stuffed pasta. Then I realized Seconda was stripping down and putting on the pink string bikini.

“Honey, you can’t wear that to school,” I started, gingerly.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, its OK,” she assured me.

Instantly, I regretted not tossing the infernal bikini in the trash when I found it in a bag of hand-me-downs. Sec’s wardrobe is pretty hand-me-down heavy, which is part of what makes it so great for costuming, with all sorts of crazy, wonderful items – crushed velvet jumpers and straw hats and dresses featuring actual bells and whistles — thrown in. But you do find some head-scratchers, and when I saw that pink string bikini, I thought “For a four year old? Is that strictly necessary?”

However, since I am a borderline hoarder, I did not toss the bikini. And now I was sorry.

“It’s too cold outside,” I explained, “Much too cold.”

“I’m not cold,” she insisted.

“You will be,” I insisted back.

“I won’t, I promise!”

I would like to be able to shrug my shoulders, as other parents do, and say, “All right. It’s your choice. I’ll have your jacket if you get cold.” I’ve seen children in the dead of winter on the playground who’ve opted to shed their outerwear and experiment with frostbite, and whose parents stand on the sidelines, holding the jacket patiently, allowing their children to learn from their own mistakes. I get it and hey, I can get libertarian, too: I give Sec license to walk around barefoot on the playground and cover her hair in dirt from next to a tree that dogs use as a bathroom. But I have zero flexibility when it comes to bundling. That morning, I explained why to my daughter:

“If you wear that bikini to school, you will get very, very cold and if you get very, very cold, you may get sick, and if you get sick, who will be the one up all night, taking your temperature and wondering if we should go to the emergency room and having an ulcer? ME. And I don’t like doing that. So it’s out of the question.”

She screwed her face up so that all the features squished together in the middle. That’s her I-am-royally-pissed look.

“HOWEVER—” I went on, “if you want to wear it under your regular clothes, you totally can. No problem.”

“But then you won’t be able to see it!” she pouted.

Then her face lit up, a real Eureka moment and she shrieked: “Wait a second! Wait A SECOND! I have a great idea! What if I wear it ON TOP of my clothes?”
Was it the arrangement I would have chosen? No. Was I totally comfortable when Sec took off her down jacket and revealed to her preschool class that she was wearing a miniscule pink bikini bottom over polka dot leggings, and a skimpy bikini top over her sateen poodle pajama shirt? Not really. Did I feel a twinge of regret when I realized she’d be sporting the bikini-on-top outfit for the next 7-10 days, including at birthday parties and bedtime? Sure I did.
But I will tell you one thing: my daughter didn’t catch a single chill in that get-up. That outfit provided one hundred percent draft protection. And I, for one, will always feel a peculiar affection for tortellini.

For more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyville, visit her blog, A Mom Amok, at amomamok.blogspot.com.

One summer in my early twenties, I dated this i-banker who wore designer shoes, owned a gorgeous two bedroom in Chelsea and drove a red convertible. After a few weeks, he floated the idea of us going on a weekend getaway somewhere – the Hamptons maybe?

“You know what would be fun?” I replied, “If we drove ‘til we got tired, pulled over at a Motel 6, ate pizza and read Tolstoy all weekend. Doesn’t have to be Tolstoy. But pizza, for sure.”

He laughed. I hadn’t been kidding. We never did take that weekend trip.

A year or two later, I found myself at an EconoLodge off the interstate eating Dominos in bed and reading The Sound and the Fury alongside a tall, tattooed Southerner with wire-rimmed glasses. Turns out, it was his dream vacation, too. Which is convenient now that he’s my husband and we have two kids, little-to-none disposable income and a desperate need to escape the confines of our apartment.

I’m not saying the motel trips are what they used to be (Tolstoy was the first thing to go) but with a few adjustments, we’ve made the Middle of Nowhere Overnight Getaway into something the whole family can get behind.

Young children are a colossal pain to travel with, but the upside is that they are entertained by the smallest things, and a little change in scenery goes a long way for them. I learned this the summer we went to San Francisco and the highlight of the trip was this worm the kids played with for an hour in Golden Gate Park. Wormy is what they remember from that expensive and exhausting vacation, not the Japanese Tea Garden or the newly-renovated science museum that we were on our way to visit when we stumbled upon the most charming worm in the USA. Every place has a Wormy equivalent, no matter how unexciting it is, so it doesn’t matter where you go.

As long as the hotel in that unexciting place has two-room suites.

By that, I mean accommodations where the bedroom is separated from the living room, and its fold-out sofa, by a door. I have found it’s important to get this specific because the term “suite” is open to various interpretations, like the word “bedroom” and “dining area” in New York real estate. This became clear the time we stayed at a Marriott in Virginia which used the word “suite” to refer to the mini kitchen in the corner of our single, undivided room.

I don’t need a kitchen. In fact, it’s the last thing I need when I’m on vacation. What I need is a heavy divider separating the space where my children sleep from the space where I sleep. Doesn’t have to be a door necessarily – a steel curtain or large boulder would work just as well. It’s not that David and I have any exciting plans in the bedroom, apart from sleep, which I find to be the most exciting thing ever, and which only happens when we disappear after the kids are tucked in. If the kids see us, they torture us. Hell, they torture us anyway, but at least, when we have a separate bedchamber, we can refuel in between grueling runs back to their bedside.

Plus, it is nearly guaranteed that Titanic will be playing on the hotel TV, and though I’m not particularly fond of the flick, it is precisely what I want to view in the Middle of Nowhere in a borrowed bed. And listening to the gasps and shrieks which indicate my kids are being permanently scarred detracts from my enjoyment..

Two-room suites are the solution to all our travel problems. So imagine my delight when a Mommy friend mentioned that she’d recently stayed with her kids at a business hotel in the Middle of Nowhere, New Jersey, which had an indoor swimming pool and great weekend rates.

“Does it have suites?” I asked her, my heart skipping a beat, “A bedroom separated from the living room with a door?”

“Yeah,” she said, “and they’re about $100 a night.”

A few weeks later, David and I strapped our six year-old, affectionately known as Primo and our four year-old, Seconda, into the backseat, and were off to the Middle of Nowhere, New Jersey to embark on the following itinerary:

• 2-2:30pm: Take inventory of free stuff

“They gave us shampoo! To keep forever!” shouts Seconda from the bathroom, “SO MUCH SHAMPOO!!!”

“Mommy, come quick – there’s a coffee maker” yells Primo, “And they give you your own coffee! And sugar! And SPLENDA! Did you ever try it? It must be SPLENDID!”

The enthusiasm is contagious. “There are tea bags too,” I exclaim. “Herbal tea bags, so you can drink them! We can have a TEA PARTY!”

Once we discover everything we’ve been gifted in the room, I call the front desk to see if there is more stuff they can give us for free. I don’t even need anything; I just want to continue the high. Getting extra shampoo bottles and sewing kits is my closest approximation of what it feels like to roll around on a huge pile of cash, like people do in the movies.

“Do you have a DVD player you can send to the room?” I ask.

“No.”

“What about free wireless?”

“No.”

“Do you have a hairbrush? Or toothpaste?”

“No.”

“Can we have a few extra blankets?”

“We’ll bring them right up.” I hang up and tell David, “OK, we’ve got everything. Let’s hit the pool.”

• 2:30-4:30pm: “Swim”

Nothing says vacation like not having to bring your own towels to the pool. We spend a good two hours splashing around: Seconda inciting widespread panic as she cannon-balls herself into the deep end without warning, and Primo training for the Olympics in water treading.

“I think you’ve got this covered,” I assure David before dropping myself into the hot tub.

• 4:30-5pm: Explore hiding places

It is a little-known fact that hotel rooms are ideal sites for Hide and Seek, what with all the empty wardrobes, empty under-the-sink cabinets, and empty spaces under beds, coffee tables and armchairs. The kids can never play Hide and Seek in our place because every square inch is crammed full of crap and the trouble it takes to carve out a space for their little bodies just isn’t worth it.

• 5- 5:03pm: Check for bedbugs

“We should inspect the bed,” I tell David, “For bedbugs.”

“Ok,” he says, “how?”

“Weeeell,” I ponder, “you just pull off the sheets . . . “

He does so. “And look for smears of blood. Human blood. And bugs. Or bug feces.”

“I don’t see any bugs, bug feces or blood, human or otherwise.”

“Although I think, to be effective, we need a black light?”

“Great. I’ll just run back to the car and get ours, the one we borrow from the FBI,” David says, “Can we be done now?”

• 5:03-6pm: Wreak havoc in the lobby

I can’t in good conscience feed the kids Dominoes. Big Anthony’s Pizza, however, will do quite nicely. The children get their kicks by experimenting with the half-dozen seating options in the lobby – leather couch, velvet couch, armchair, bench, coffee table, plant stand – while I turn a blind eye in order to pore over the pizza menu. For once, we have all the time in the world to fully weigh all pizza options – is today the day we try mushrooms? Finally say “yes” to anchovies? When I notice Seconda pulling the leaves off a plant and hiding the evidence in her leggings, I decide to beat a hasty retreat and wait for Big Anthony’s in our room.

• 6-6:30pm: Ice, ice, baby

I don’t know why hotels don’t highlight the unlimited access they provide to ice machines as a major amenity (All you can chew ice chips! Ice machine guaranteed on every floor!). My kids find this the single-most exciting aspect of a hotel stay, and I, too, can not help but thrill at the gratifying sound of an ice machine surrendering its bounty to my empty bucket. A girl could keep champagne chilled all night long! Could keep a twisted ankle from getting swollen! Could enable a little boy’s ice-crunching habit! The possibilities are endless.

• 6:30-8pm: Suck it, crappy hotel TV

Hotel television offers a great many delights, but not to the under-18 crowd. Of course, we don’t go to the Middle of Nowhere to watch TV! We go to watch Youtube, on my Iphone. Clips from The Little Mermaid sequel, Thunder Cats episodes, Charlie Bit My Finger – sure, why not? Eat a bucket of ice chips while you’re at it. there’s plenty.

• 8pm: Bedtime

One bath, several chapters of Harry Potter and countless screams of “SHE’S PUSHING/ KICKING/ PUNCHING ME!” and “I”LL STAB YOU IN THE HEART YOU EVIL BROTHER!” later, the children are asleep, though not in the same room. When they really won’t stop threatening each other with bodily harm, we discover a third bedroom in the suite – the antechamber to the bathroom which has doors leading to the living room, bathroom and the bedroom. There is a very cozy patch of carpet under the sink with Seconda’s name on it, and plenty of blankets to pad it with. David and I watch Leonardo Di Caprio go down with the ship, again. Bliss.

Three bedrooms, one swimming pool and unlimited ice chips, for $100 bucks a pop. Who needs the Hamptons?

A week later, back in the Big Apple, I surveyed my empty fridge, full sink and pair of children throwing Legos at each other, and gave David a pathetic look which clearly said “Calgon, take me away.”

“Its OK,” he said, “We’ll always have South Jersey.”

 

For more of Nicole’s adventures in the Middle of Nowhere and beyond, visit her blog, A Mom Amok at amomamok.blogspot.com.

I’m not much of a fan of historical fiction. Details about how women laced their corsets in Victorian England or what kind of muskets soldiers used in the Revolutionary War typically bore me to tears. But now that most of my reading is done at my children’s bedtime, my standards and tastes have, well, shifted. Now that I spend my nights reading Junie B. Jones and Snow White: A Castle Mystery, a well-wrought piece of literature like Little House on the Prairie is a welcome relief, even if it does include a step-by-step, ten-page description of how to make a stone hearth. Yes, that Ingalls Wilder minx has got me hooked, big time.

Admittedly, it was a slow start. It took a full 50 pages to push beyond Flat-Out Dull, then we moved into Potentially Appealing to People with Very Low Expectations but after the pack of wolves rolled into the prairie, at the book’s mid-way point, it’s been an Old-School Page Turner. Now, I am so deeply invested in the fate of the Ingalls that I have been jumping ahead to the next paragraph while reading out loud to my 5 year-old, Giovanni, and sometimes reading ahead after he goes to sleep.

My husband once caught me doing this: “Don’t tell me you’re reading ahead without him?”

“I can’t help it! It’s been four days since Pa left for Independence Town to trade furs and he’s still not back yet! And there’s a panther on the loose! A panther! Did you know those were indigenous to the US?”

Reading Little House on the Prairie is like eating a really good apple. It’s not the most flashy or fancy or complicated fruit around, but the simple wholesome goodness of a nice, crisp apple will knock your socks off: so much so that you’ll find yourself tasting mangoes and kiwis and feeling like they just try too hard.

While I enjoy the lyrical language, the well-drawn characters, and the compelling conflicts, the thing I really love about the book is how grateful it makes me that I live in the 21st century.

Being a pioneer person sucked. It didn’t suck a little like when your favorite Thai place around the corner closes down. It sucked big-time, like when you and your whole family get ague and die of malaria.

It delights me to no end to discover all the things they didn’t have back then, that are totally indispensable for life on earth. I’m not talking about little perks like color-safe conditioner or the internet. I’m talking about nails. The kind you hit with a hammer. Now, if you’re like me, and can’t hang a picture without the intervention of a handyman, you may live a perfectly undisturbed life without nails. But when you recall that these poor pioneer schmucks had to make their own houses, you’ll understand how having a plentiful supply of nails would be convenient. For most people, the lack of ironware would be a deal-breaker. I, for one, would call a family meeting amidst the tumbleweeds and say, “Well, kids, we gave it the old college try, but I guess we’ll just have to remain homeless, sleep in the dirt, get frostbite and be eaten alive by wolves. What other choice do we have? I mean, we can’t very well make nails, for crying out loud!”

But Pa Ingalls did just that, felling trees with his ax, hauling the logs back to his barren homestead and carving thousands of tiny pointy pegs out of wood to use as nail substitutes.

I don’t even have enough energy to make a salad with pre-washed spinach.

Not only did pioneer people have to build their own houses, they had to build wells. This didn’t seem like a big deal to me until I read in painstaking detail for 20 pages just what one must do to build a well. And let me tell you, those pages should be incorporated into a Scared-Straight program somewhere. Having to make a well – the weeks of digging, the building of a pulley to get rid of the dirt, the avoiding of fatal invisible gases which lurk deep in the earth – would be more of a deterrent to a life of crime for me than prison. After all, they have running water in prison. And you don’t have to eat bean soup and prairie chicken night after night after night.

Giovanni and I agreed that if we ever had the terrible misfortune of being pioneers, we’d do without a well. We’d get our water by walking two miles to the creek every time. We’d drink less. We’d be stinking and foul from lack of baths. That, or we’d mooch off a more ambitious neighbor: “Hey, you don’t mind if we take a few buckets of this swell well water and wash our hair, right? Here, we brought you a prairie chicken.”

The only reason, as far as I can tell, that these pathologically stoic people didn’t off themselves right from the start was that there was tobacco, coffee and liquor.

Of course, these details, while deliciously awful to me, don’t mean much to Giovanni since for all he knows, I did build our apartment building with homemade nails, using my head as a hammer. But there was one part of our historical fiction foray which was meaningful to him, and that was the Christmas chapter. As December 25th nears, Laura and Mary twist their long braids and worry, like any child, about whether Santa will come. In their case, its not a matter of whether they’ve been good enough (these kids cook and clean more than a pair of Cinderellas) but whether the man in red will be able to cross the high creek.

“Don’t they know Santa has flying reindeer?” asked Giovanni.

“I know, right?” I said, thinking that these pioneer kids had zero freaking imagination and no television to blame.

In nothing short of a Christmas miracle, their bachelor neighbor hikes 20 miles in the snow without an overcoat to the nearest town where he picks up the girls’ presents from Santa. And those presents are:

A tin cup of their very own

A tiny heart-shaped cake made with white flour

A real penny

And the children are so overcome with gratitude, so beside themselves with joy, that they can hardly speak. Do they dare to bite into their heart-shaped cake? They do not. Before they even think about eating it, they’ll use it as a play-thing, since all they’ve had to play with for the better part of a year has been – you guessed it – prairie chickens.

Giovanni looked depressed at the whole pathetic situation: “That’s all they got?”

“To them it was riches beyond imagining!” I exclaimed, “You see, some children are so unfortunate they don’t even have a tin cup of their own, they have to share it with their mother who drinks black coffee out of that thing. And by the way, have you ever even drank out of a tin cup? It makes everything taste TINNY. You’d hate it.”

“I’m so glad we don’t live in pioneer times.” he shuddered.

“You and me both,” I agreed.

I luxuriate in the assurance that living in New York – where if you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere – means I choose the hard route, unlike those lily-livered suburbanites, who don’t have to circle the block for two hours to park or carry their groceries and double stroller up three flights of stairs. I enjoy using the term “living the life of Riley” derisively, to refer to other people. But now I know that I’m the one living on Easy Street. And it didn’t even take me working for the Peace Corps to realize it. It just took a children’s book.

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You can read more of Nicole’s adventures in her Little House in the Slope on her blog A Mom Amok, amomamok.blogspot.com

I’m a big, fat liar. An inadvertent one, to be fair, but five year-olds don’t make these subtle distinctions. My son thinks I’m a big, fat liar because I promised him a tornado would never hit New York and shortly thereafter we watched one whirl past his bedroom window. I can explain the concept of freak meteorological phenomena ‘til I’m blue in the face but it doesn’t change the fact that I now have about as much credibility as those wackos who still argue the earth is flat.

The Brooklyn cyclone, as wild as it was, wouldn’t have been that big a deal for our family except for one thing. My son just so happens to be terrified of tornadoes. It’s not the most common fear for a city kid, but then again, it’s not the least common either. Everybody’s scared of something, I like to tell him. Some kids are scared of dogs, others are scared of fire; some kids are scared of freight elevators and men with mustaches and those hand-dryers in bathrooms that blow air at you like they’re trying to rip your epidermis off.

“Everybody’s scared of something,” I reminded Giovanni, “And the great thing about what you’re scared of is that it’ll never happen in New York.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, his brow furrowed.

“I’m positive,” I replied, “You get tornados in flat places, like Kansas or — “ I actually didn’t know where else you get tornados since the totality of my information was derived from The Wizard of Oz, “Or places like Kansas, “ I ventured, “Arkansas? No, maybe I’m thinking of Oklahoma.”

Giovanni looked skeptical.

“Places with prairies,” I continued assertively, “New York is neither flat nor does it boast many prairies, ergo, it cannot have a tornado.”

Now, if you’re either some sort of meteorological savant, or from the Mid-West, you’ll probably be quick to point out how flawed my theory is. But remember please, I’m a native New Yorker, with a self-obsessed sense of geography and this is the best I can do. It’s not particularly a point of pride for me to speak authoritatively about things I’ve only been exposed to through fictional movies from seventy-five years ago, but I’ve got a kid that asks a lot of questions and my response has got to work according to a “best guess” strategy, otherwise I’d be glued to Wikipedia.

“You promise?” Giovanni asked.

Like most modern parents, I am concerned with earning the trust of my kids, so I try not to make promises I can’t keep. But this one seemed pretty safe, like promising that the Boogieman wasn’t real.

“I promise.”

Just goes to show how much my word of honor counts for, because despite my promise, Giovanni kept right on worrying about the possibility of a twister in Park Slope. He’d bring it up almost every time there was a rainstorm: so it was not surprising when I picked him up from school one gray afternoon in late September and he asked, “Is there going to be a tornado today?”

I raised my eyebrows and said, “We’ve been over and over this, honey. There are no such things are tornados in New York. It’s just a little overcast.”

By the time we walked home, after my daughter’s ballet class, the sky had graduated from a little overcast to a foreboding gray. Still, it’d been threatening to rain all day with nary a drop and, as I reassured Giovanni, a little rain did not a thunderstorm make, so instead of heading straight home, we stopped at a playground close to home, where I instructed the children to exhaust themselves.

Giovanni consented to the fun begrudgingly but kept looking at the sky like a workaholic who won’t stop checking his Blackberry during dinner. And, just as he’d worried, the sky kept getting darker and darker until it was positively apocalyptic and Giovanni had to put his foot down:

“The sky is too dark,” he said, “We have to go home now.”

I sighed and went to find his sister who was bounding across the playground, throwing herself down the spiral slide headfirst, as unconcerned with the state of the sky as her brother was fixated on it. The only question she had about the lightening was, “Can I ride it?”

“Let’s just give it a few more minutes ‘til your sister’s tired out a bit,” I reasoned. “Look, we’re a block away from home, It’s not even raining yet.”

As if on cue, a clap of thunder sounded, followed by a flash of lightening. It was as if the sky was announcing “This is the final boarding call for flight MORON, to ANYWHERE BUT HERE.”

“I want to go home NOW!” Giovanni yelled,

Getting my hands on Stella required that I mount the playground apparatus and suffer the indignity of running up the slide and leaping across the shaky drawbridge, always ten steps behind her, because she is a speed demon, with particular emphasis on the demon part.

“This is NOT GOOD LISTENING!” I shrieked at her, over the thunder.

Meanwhile Giovanni was yelling prophecies like Nostradamus: “LISTEN TO ME! THERE IS GOING TO BE A TORNADO!”

“For the last time,” I yelled, ”There are NO TORNADOES IN PARK SLOPE!”

I finally caught Stella, stuffed her in the stroller and speed-walked home, just as it started to rain. As we rushed through our front door, I patted Giovanni on the head and said, patronizingly, “See that? Safe and sound.”

But Giovanni had already run to the window

“Mommy,” he said, his voice breathless, “come look.”

The sky was no longer a charming shade of Gotham-City-Gray, it was Crap-Is-Going-Seriously-Wrong Black. Flashes of lightening split the darkness over and over and a spectacular surround-sound thunder boomed.

Then, suddenly, we couldn’t see the neon lights of the stores across the street anymore, or the cars down below or anything. The very air in front of the window grew dense and dark. I’m no meteorologist or anything but when it looks like you can scoop a handful of air into your hands and made a ball of doom with it, it’s probably a pretty bad sign. Then, the black cloud which consumed the street began to howl so loudly that I got flat-out freaked-out. I closed the blinds, took the kids in the other room and distracted them with an impromptu tea party.

About a half hour later, David came home from work and told us that on his walk from the train he’d seen trees that had been uprooted, crushing cars, and that a man was blown down the stairs of the subway and was carried out on a stretcher.

“What was it?” I asked.

“T-o-r-n-a-d-o,” he spelled out.

“No. Freaking. Way.” I replied.

“What does that spell?” Giovanni asked.

“Are you kidding me?” I said, laughing at the insanity of it all.

“Taaar,” Giovanni ventured, “taar-ney-doo? What’s a tarneydoo?”

Then his eyes grew big, “Tornado? Does it spell tornado?”

“Umm.” I stammered, “Ummm.”

“That was really a tornado? Really?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” I answered, “I mean, I think they have to analyze the high-velocity …“

But he was not about to be dazzled and disoriented by my invented jibber-jabber, “You lied, Mommy,” he said, very matter-of-factly, “You said we can’t have tornadoes in New York.”

“I know I did, honey, but . . . but . . .” For once, I was at a loss for words.

“Mommy didn’t lie,” came David to the rescue, “There never had been a tornado in New York before. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. And, you know what else? Sometimes even Mommies make mistakes.”

But Giovanni didn’t look upset. In fact, he looked relieved.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he reassured us, “I feel better. I saw a real live tornado and it wasn’t so bad after all. Nobody’s house got picked up and blown away.”

“This is true,” I said, shooting David the “are-you-getting-this?” look.

We had a pleasant evening and the kids were A-OK, no problems going to sleep or off to school the next day. But when I went to tuck Giovanni in the next night, he said he had a question.

“Sure,” I said, “Shoot.”

“Are there volcanoes in New York?”

“That is a very good question,” I replied, flipping through my brain’s exceedingly slim volcano index – Vesuvius, Bali Ha-i, was Mount Fuji volcanic or was it just a regular mountain? — Then I took a deep breath and said: “I’m gonna have to get back to you on that.”

To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog A Mom Amok at http://amomamok.blogspot.com.

I used to complain constantly about what a pain it was to live in a walk-up with two small children. But since moving into an elevator building, I have come to see that the pain in my behind was from the kids and not the stairs. As it turns out, it’s still a three-ring circus whenever we enter or exit our house, although for entirely different reasons. In fact, the elevator, which I’d counted on as a cure-all, has created problems of its own.

Don’t get me wrong: I love our elevator more than it is reasonable to love a steel box. But while it has liberated me from the physical burden of being a pack mule, it has saddled me with a mental strain. Walking up stairs is simple, one foot in front of the other, but riding an elevator, like any other situation in which you must share a confined space with strangers, requires your behavior to adhere to certain unspoken rules. Of course, there are always individuals who shrug off these conventions: on the subway these are the people that eat stinky, messy food or tell detailed stories about their sexual exploits or sing to the music on their headphones at full voice   On the elevator, these people are my children.

It works like this: as soon as the doors close on the elevator, a signal is released in my 3 and 5 year-old’s brains to say something odd, inappropriate or just really god-awful loud.

This might just be the uncouth sound of a bodily function, or the announcement of future body functions, as in, “I NEED TO DO A HUMONGOS POOP!”

But usually the off-putting words are spoken directly to our fellow passengers. The best case scenario is that Giovanni, my sociable son, will be friendly, super-friendly, so friendly it is almost an assault, like the time we stumbled upon a pretty middle-school girl in the elevator after-school.

“What’s your name?” Giovanni asked, instantly interested.

She was busy looking at her cell phone and didn’t hear him.

“What’s your name? What’s your name?” he repeated.

“GIRL!” shouted Stella, “Say your name, girl!” My kids have a serious good cop/ bad cop thing going on.

“Lauren,” she mumbled, staring at the elevator doors.

With this, Giovanni fired forth a barrage of questions, leaving nary an opportunity for her to answer: “How old are you? What school do you go to? Where’s your mother? What’s the number you live in?”

This last question, it was clear, was the most pressing, and he asked her again “What’s your number?”

“SAY YOUR NUMBER GIRL!” Stella shrieked.  .

Lauren, clearly wishing she’d taken the stairs, asked me, the official Crazy-English translator: “What do they mean?”

“What apartment number do you live in?’ I explained.

“Oh,” she answered as she stepped out on the 3rd floor:”3B.”

The doors closed again and Giovanni announced: “I am going to write that girl a letter and bring it to her house!”

I tried to dissuade him. I tried to distract him. But at the end of the day I walked him over to 3B and helped him slide an anonymous letter which read “her is a pictr av the sun. you r nis,” under her door, if that was, in fact, her real apartment number.

As elevator behavior goes, friendly advances from a five year-old, no matter how persistent, are generally beyond reproof. Where I get into trouble is with my daughter.

Stella looks like she just stepped off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: pale yellow hair, rosy cheeks – the whole nine yards. But when she opens her mouth, it’s a different story.

“What beautiful eyes!” people on the elevator often exclaim.

“I don’t like you!” she snaps back with venom, “Go away!”

This response usually works to paralyze her appreciators, but if they persist in making conversation, she’ll pull out the big guns: “You can’t talk to me!” “This is my elevator and you can’t be in it!” “You’re annoying!”

It’s not that she’s cranky or upset. In fact, she’s at her happiest when she is berating and scolding others in a small box from which there is no escape. I know this because of the grin which spreads over her impish face afterwards.

I’ve come to accept the fact that my daughter is, at present, just really, regularly unfriendly.  Ok, hostile. Ok, more belligerent than a drunk who’s been cut off.

This is shocking to me because I’m a people person. When I board an elevator (and I’m not doing damage control for Stella) I make light, palatable, diverting small talk, the conversational equivalent of muzak. I’m as amiable as a Southerner except I know when to stop talking. Yet, as with so much in parenting, this friendliness has caused a backlash in my daughter.

I’ve grown so accustomed to Stella’s gnarly, snarly elevator bit that when I see children who are perfectly nice to others for no reason whatsoever, I can’t help but conclude that they are either cuckoo for cocoa puffs or under the influence of Children’s Benadryl or a similar mind-altering substance.

One morning last week, I was rushing Stel off to school and we got on a crowded elevator. Among the many riders was a brother and sister, about Stella’s age, with their pregnant mother. I smiled at the children. The children smiled at me. The children smiled at Stella. Stella growled at them like a rabid dog. Then she informed me, “Betsy doesn’t like them!”

Betsy is Stella’s imaginary sister, and frankly she’s a bad influence. Where Stella is mischievous, Betsy is nefarious. Betsy has a lot of opinions about things and they all fall under the “I hate it” category. I am currently filing paperwork to have Betsy excommunicated from the family.

The little girl on the elevator had a nicely-maintained black bob and was wearing an adorable flower-print sundress, making me have second thoughts about how I’d allowed Stella to dress herself for school in pink penguin pajamas. She had been wearing a fetching frock this morning, but only because she’d put that on to sleep. She’s like an infant with her days and nights switched, only with wardrobe. But I’ve learned to pick my battles with this iron-willed child, and the battle at hand was over Stella’s habit of saying “Go away! I hate you!” to each and every person she encountered. She was under strict instructions not to direct the word “hate’ at anyone, period.

So now, I stood in the elevator, holding my breath and hoping we could make it to the lobby without an incident. But Stella said nothing, Instead it was the girl who spoke, turning to her brother and saying: “I love you, Jack.”

And little Jack said, “I love you too, Pearl.”

Everyone on the elevator, including me, oohed and ahhed. Who wouldn’t? It made your uterus hurt, it was so cute.

Encouraged by the response, Pearl went on: “I love Jack and I love my Daddy and I love my Mama!” she said, flinging her arms around her mother’s legs. Then she put her hand on her mother’s pregnant midsection and said, “Hello little baby! Hello! I’m your sister!”

Stella squinted her eyes and cocked her head, which I knew from experience did not bode well.

“Do you have a baby in your belly?” she asked the mother, innocently enough.

“Yes, I do,” the moms replied with a smile.

“Oh,” Stel answered thoughtfully: “I hate that baby.”

Every passenger on the elevator, including but not limited to Pearl, Jack, the mother, me, and probably the in-utero baby – gasped audibly.

“Stella!” I exclaimed.

To make matters worse, my daughter broke into a huge grin which stretched from one blond pigtail to the other.

Thankfully, at just that moment, the doors of the elevator opened and I bounded through them, exclaiming, “Sorry! So sorry!” over my shoulder.

Wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last time I have to make a hasty exit after a doozie like that. Though I’m inclined to make a big show of being shocked and aghast – you know the show I mean, where you exclaim loudly, “I don’t know WHERE you learned to talk like THAT! You know BETTER!” in defense of your parenting skills — I’ve learned it only fans the flame of bad behavior, so I try, whenever possible, to just let the mortification roll over me and subside, before reminding my daughter that it is not kind to tell a mother that you despise her fetus.

But it does make me remember fondly the days when we lived in a walk-up, where the only people who suffered in the freak-show of my family getting in and out of the house, was me. And so I’ve decided that until the reigning Mean Queen of the Elevator can soften that razor-sharp tongue of hers, we’re hoofing it up the stairs. Not only it is rehabilitating, it’s good for the glutes.

To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland – in and out of the elevator – visit her blog at amomamok.blogspot.com