Walk This Way...I Think

I don't always deserve the confidence I walk with in New York. 

Once, while trying to get my mom to the airport, I hurried us onto not one, not two, but three trains going in the wrong direction because we were so deep in conversation. By the time we got to the last train, which would take her on her own from the subway to the terminal, she was so late we hardly had time to hug.

"Go!" I urged, pushing her toward the turnstile.

She looked back at me, bewildered.

"I don't know where the f*#$ I'm going!" she cried.

"The train only goes one way!"

On an outing during her most recent visit, I changed my mind twice at one above-ground intersection, trying to decide which way to cross a street. Oblivious to my uncertainty and trying to finish some thought or another, my mom mimicked my every move like a shadow so that a crowd of people stepped back to watch. I think they thought we were some sort of pop-up vaudeville act. They don't know that's just how we are.

Anyway, being in charge of logistics in Manhattan can be exhausting, but it's more exhausting if the people you are logisticating don't feel like they can trust your decisions.

Last Saturday, Tiffany and I led my mom and five other members of my family and friend-family from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side and back up the middle to join throngs of other people for photos in front of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Of course, they could have found the way themselves. But they were deferring to us as their hostesses.

"Do you think they can tell we have no idea where we're going?" I whispered to Tiffany as the group trailed behind us through an underground subway passage. 

"No," she said. "Walk confidently, and they never will."

This worked perfectly until we walked with confidence into an exit barricaded with a metal gate.

But I'll tell you what, you have never seen a U-Turn so masterfully executed.

Packing a Pumpkin

I packed a pumpkin in my carry-on for my friend-family's Thanksgiving in Florida this year. First, I packed my cowboy boots, and then I put in my jeans and my one nice outfit, and then I made a little hole in the layer between my running clothes and my pajamas, and I put the pumpkin in the hole.

"You know they have pumpkin in Florida?" my friend Teresa asked. "In cans?"

Yes, of course I know it's possible to buy pumpkin. It's the reason I left my sweet potatoes at home (also, a several-sweet-potato-sized hole proved difficult to find in my small wheelie bag, and Tiffany said if I insisted on making pumpkin and sweet potato pie from scratch, "You're on your own.").

Anyway, it didn't seem ridiculous at all to me to bring the pumpkin until we got to the airport and I began to wonder if the squash in my carry-on was going to look like a bomb in the security x-ray. After all, a pumpkin does look a little bomb-ish, if your bomb reference is from old cartoons: a ball with a sizzling wick on top. My pumpkin's stem didn't sizzle, but still...

Would my pumpkin be confiscated?

No.

Years ago, my friend-family slid down hills in turkey pans for fun. Now we are a little more mature. On Wednesday night, we went to the bar where everyone but me downed lemon drop and Fireball shots (when I kissed Tiffany she tasted like a piece of Big Red gum.). We danced and debated whether any of us could twerk and learned pretty quickly that I, at least, cannot.

When we got home at midnight, most of my friend-family went to bed, but I went to get the pumpkin out of my carry-on because I knew there wouldn't be time or oven space to bake it in a few hours. For a minute, I regretted the whole endeavor, but then Little Rebecca and Sam and Tiffany and I started slicing pumpkin and scraping out seeds and talking and laughing. Soon, Tiffany went to bed, and Little Rebecca and Sam and I moved on to sweet potatoes, checking the oven often enough to slow the baking process down even further.

I'm not sure our homemade sweet potato and pumpkin pies were any better than the canned kind. But, in my mind, you can't beat cooking from scratch. If all I had to do was wield a can-opener, I never would have stayed up until 2 a.m. with my friend-family, scooping soft sweet potato and pumpkin into bowls.

And if you don't stay up until 2 a.m., you don't learn certain things, like the fact that Little Rebecca, the former bald-headed baby, can twerk. Upside down against the wall, standing on her sticky pumpkin hands.

With a Little Luck

The first time I played horseshoes with Tiffany she got a shoe stuck in a tree. I've never seen someone aim so carefully and miss so completely. Her u-shaped piece of iron didn't make it even halfway to the pole across the way. Instead, it went straight up in the air, shooting through a leafy oak until it came back down to ring a sturdy branch.

"How did you do that?" I asked her, after I had removed my hands from my head and stopped laughing.

"I don't know," she said. "I held it just like you did and then I let go."

We weren't even dating at the time. Lucky for her, I wasn't looking for a permanent horseshoe partner.

Still, it turns out I found one.

Over Thanksgiving, the grown-up boy I used to play time machine with brought a set of shoes to keep us busy on the beach. When he and his mom ended up on one side with Tiffany and I on the other, I had a moment of preemptive competitive panic, visions of horseshoes being accidentally hurled into the ocean off to our left.

"You sure about your partner choice?" I called.

Tiffany glared at me.

"Remember to let go a little earlier than you did that one time," I whispered.

But it turns out the four of us were pretty evenly matched. We all hit the pole and we all missed it, and if Tiffany sometimes missed it more than the rest of us, well, a zero score is still a zero score. After we were tied for a while, we called sudden death. The first team to ring the pole would win. None of us had done so yet.

"Oh, so close!" we yelled back and forth until it was Tiffany's turn.

"Guys," she said, "I've got this."

And, would you believe it, she was right.

We all walked over to look down at the winning shoe in the sand as the sun began to dip into the water.

It was so lucky-looking and pretty that I had to take a picture. It felt like a sign of anything good to come, even if all that means is better hand-eye coordination. 

Playing Catch

I gave myself a blister throwing a frisbee with my brother Brandon and our best friend Zac in Miami a couple of weeks ago. 

I'm actually a pretty good frisbee thrower. But when you have an older brother, pretty good isn't good enough. You have to be:

"Wow!" Brandon said, "I didn't even have to move my hands for that one!"

Once you make a throw that good, you have to keep making throws that good, until you get a blister.

Of course, nobody can throw that well every time.

Soon my throws were sailing over Brandon's head and way to the right of Zac, near the couple making out under an umbrella.

Unlike me and Brandon, Zac has never been obsessed with being the best in ridiculous physical activities like frisbee. He understands, innately, that sometimes being the best means blisters, and so he sat down in the beach chair when Brandon and I headed into the water to practice our "diving catches."

"You're overthinking it!" Brandon yelled as he waded into the deep for the umpteenth time to retrieve one of my bad throws.

"That's because I'm having flashbacks to when we were little and you would say exactly that!" I screamed back. "I feel like I'm 7 years old again!"

Still, no matter how many bad throws I made, Brandon stayed across from me trying to catch them. There is no passage of time with siblings. You are always one throw away from the best throw ever.

And a blister.

Halloween: No Rush Orders

I was never huge on Halloween. Asking people for things still makes me uncomfortable, so I always felt a bit awkward about ringing the doorbells of even neighbors we knew and holding out my pumpkin-shaped bucket. Also, I watched a lot of "Unsolved Mysteries" with my brother and was terrified of ringing the doorbells of people I didn't know. 

I gave up the holiday much earlier than my friends, preferring to stay at home and pass out candy with my mom.

The 5-year-old daughter of our friends is another story altogether.

Julia loves Halloween. 

On one of our recent visits, Julia told Tiffany and me she was going to be a celebrity this year. She pointed to a picture of a girl in a silver-sequined dress on a well-worn page in her Halloween catalog (did you know there are Halloween costume catalogs?). 

"Cool!" I said, "I wore a dress just like that for prom one year."

Julia looked at my soccer shorts and tanktop and raised her eyebrows. I think she may have been slightly impressed.

I pointed at a cowgirl on another, much less well-worn page.

"I was a cowgirl once," I said. "Maybe I'll be a cowgirl again this year."

"I wish you had told me sooner," Julia said solemnly. "Then we both could have been cowgirls."

Now it was my turn to be impressed.

"We have plenty of time," I said, thinking I could make her a cowgirl in a couple of hours. A hat. Some boots. A bandana. Yee-haw. 

She shook her head and smiled at my ignorance of the time it takes to assemble a proper Halloween costume. There were shoes to consider, she explained. And make-up. And the perfect bag.

"Maybe next year," she said kindly, turning back to her sequins.

Childless Adults

"So, how many kids are going to be there again?" I asked Tiffany as we packed on Thursday for a weekend in Cape Cod with some of our best friends and their children.

"Seven, I think," she said.

I considered the number in my head.

"Weren't there seven dogs at Thanksgiving last year?" I asked.

"I don't think it's the same thing," she said.

It's not.

First of all, at last year's Thanksgiving, humans outnumbered dogs 18-7. In Cape Cod, children outnumbered parents 7-6. When you count Tiffany and me, grown-ups outnumbered small people by one sleep-deprived body. But I'm not sure you should count us. Tiffany and I are not parents. We are childless adults. I have a new appreciation for what that means after this weekend. It means:

1) We can go to bed when we want.
2) We can wake up when we want.
3) We can leave when we want.

But we didn't want to do anything without the kids. So we went to bed late and got up early and didn't walk out the door without holding the hand of or carrying someone's child.

As non-parents, Tiffany and I are extra cautious. Whenever we left one child to attend to another, we made an official hand-off to a mom or dad:

"Molly, your son is sitting in your car in the driveway with headphones on. The keys may or may not be in there with him."

"John, does your daughter eat sand?"

"Darren, your son took his pants off. Again."

"Bobby, your daughter tried to pee in her bathing suit behind that tree. You might want to get a hose. And some soap."

"Teresa, your youngest is starting his 1,000th ascent of the hard wooden stairs."

"Megan, your youngest bit that one."

Releases of liability aside, the truth is, we had a blast. When Tiffany and I got back to the relative calm of Manhattan (we aren't in charge of anyone here), it felt weird to just hold each other's hand as we walked to dinner. When we came out of the restaurant, I saw a baby in a stroller and had to think for a second:

"Am I partially responsible for making that baby smile?"

And I was kind of sad that I wasn't, so I made a funny face at her anyway.

"C" is for Cookie...

"I bet Brandon hated you when you were little," Tiffany said the other night while we were eating our dessert on the couch.

She was looking at my plate, which I had balanced on my knees.

"Why?" I asked. Then I looked at her plate. "Ohhhhhh."

Tiffany only had one bite of her Peruvian cookie left. And by left, I mean, the bite on her plate was the only bite she had left in this country. Her aunt had brought the cookie over on her most recent trip and wouldn't be returning any time soon. I had my entire Peruvian cookie, plus most of the frozen banana we had split in two. I was eating the banana first because, although it was delicious, the Peruvian cookie was much better. I'm a big believer in self-deprivation, as you might have guessed by now. (And, yes, "hate" is a strong word, but my brother was bothered that I could make my Halloween candy last until Valentine's Day)

"I am slow," I agreed, proceeding to eat my banana slice by slice before moving onto my cookie. This I pulled apart and ate bite by bite, in between sips of milk.

"Come on," Tiffany groaned.

"I'm savoring!" I cried.

Soon I forgot my slow eating was driving her crazy, fascinated as I was by "So You Think You Can Dance" (for the record, I do not think I can).

When I ate my last bite, I felt a little sad, as I always do.

But I felt much worse when Tiffany yelled: "YES! I knew I could do it!" and then popped her remaining cookie morsel into her mouth.

Sunny Days

Tiffany and I went to visit my brother and some friends in Florida last weekend. As usual, I got too much sun (see here and here). I didn't realize just how much I'd gotten until Tiffany and I went into the bathroom to brush our teeth together before our early morning flight home.

When I looked up from applying toothpaste to my toothbrush, Tiffany was staring at my reflection in the mirror.

"What?" I asked.

"Your..." she tried to finish her sentence, but burst out laughing. "Your... look at your..."

"Oh my god, my lips!" I yelled, when I saw what she was talking about. They were huge. I looked like Goldie Hawn after her collagen injection in the movie First Wives Club.

"'Mustafa!'" I said to Tiffany in the mirror, puckering my mouth at her.

Soon we were both giggling, and that's how Brandon found us when he came out of his bedroom.

"What is going on... oh my god, your lips!" he cried.

"Don't tell mom," I warned him, pointing my toothbrush at him.

Then we all laughed until I had to stop because the skin on my lips was cracking. It was easy to stop because leaving my brother makes me so sad.

But later we had to laugh again when Tiffany--my Greek/Peruvian sun goddess--realized how burnt her back was.

"You did a horrible job putting block on my back," she complained.

I looked at her, confused.

"Did I put sunscreen on your back?"

"Oh my god, no wonder!" she cried. "Nobody was looking out for me!"

"Mustafa," I answered. 

Candy-Coated Is Forever

It's official.

Tiffany and I are getting married.

Yes, yes, I know. It's been months since I proposed and put a ring on it. But that all seems a little flimsy now that Tiffany's cousin put a picture of us on hundreds of pink and white M&Ms and served them at an engagement party in our honor.

Forget all that stuff about melting (in your mouth, not your hands), nothing says forever like having your joint-likeness on pieces of candy-coated chocolates.

I didn't even know engagement parties existed until I became engaged. I'm not sure if that's because the few married friends I treasure didn't have engagement parties or if it's because the few married friends I have treasure me so little they didn't invite me to their engagement parties, but, in any case, I did not know what they were.

I knew about showers, bachelor/ette parties, and weddings.

At first, I was nervous about the engagement parties our families threw for us (we wanted to get married to throw a party for all of them!). It turns out they're wonderful. Mostly, when Tiffany and I tell people we're engaged, all anyone wants to know is when we're getting married. Never mind that it took eight years to get where we are.

But an engagement party is all about gathering to celebrate the incremental marital accomplishment of asking (and answering). We're lucky to have so many people we love and who love us back cheering us on.

Also, I feel especially grateful to have leftover bags of candy with our faces on it.

Coconutty

If you've never had an older brother, you probably can't understand how it is that I came to be stuck about 25 percent of the way up a palm tree on Saturday.

But perhaps you will enjoy the story anyway.

The simple answer is my brother and I were celebrating Mother's Day with our mom in Miami and we all wanted to drink some coconut water... you know, the kind they devote entire shelves to in grocery stores.

Brandon says he drinks the magic stuff a couple times a week, whenever he finds a tree low enough to shake down the fruit.

We thought we had found such a tree on one of our walks down the beach.

"Maybe you can climb up, Rebecca," Brandon said.

"I don't know," I hedged, shading my eyes as I peered up the branch-less trunk.

"Yeah, it may be a little too tall," he agreed.

If you have an older brother, my post could end here. You know Brandon's response is the answer to how I came to be stuck up the tree. If you don't have an older brother, here's what you missed:

If an older brother says you can't do something, that means you have to do it. Even if he's right. Over the almost 32 years Brandon and I have shared on the planet, this rule of siblinghood has caused me to be: much too far out in the ocean, accidentally upside down in the air on snow skis, and generally much tougher than I otherwise might have been.

On Saturday, it was obvious to us all as soon as I began my climb that I could not make it up the palm tree. What was apparently less obvious was that I also could not get down.

"Oh well," Brandon said, starting to walk away from the base of the tree.

"Help," I said.

But it was too late. I had already begun the painful slide down, scraping off what seemed like crucial parts of skin on my inner thighs, inner calves, and the tops of my feet.

But I didn't cry. And if you don't know why, you obviously don't have an older brother.

Fine Art

I'm very concerned about my carbon footprint.

If I'm not around to do it, I remind Tiffany to crawl under our desk and behind our TV to turn off our surge strips when we're not using all the things that are plugged into them. When our sink had a drip in one of our previous apartments, I kept a pitcher underneath it at all times and drank only that water. Sometimes I turn out the lights on Tiffany when she's still in a room.

But. I enabled an enormous waste of paper the other night when our friends Bobby and Teresa came over with their children, Julia, Peter, and Baby Sandro.

We didn't have time to pick up taste-treats or toys like we usually do. They had been waiting for us so long they were about to be kicked out of the Natural History Museum.

So when Tiffany and I got home, we ran around sweeping our clutter underneath things, looking for anything kid-friendly. I eyed a set of Left, Right, Center dice but decided they were too close to swallowable-size.

"Where are the crayons we bought?" I shrieked. "And paper! Lots of paper!"

Tiffany surfaced from somewhere deep in the closet with a plastic baggy of crayons. The box apparently had been destroyed when Peter and Julia last visited.

They're such good kids they don't need to be entertained, really. But when Peter started throwing our stability ball around the apartment, King-Kong style, we pulled out the crayons and a stack of brand-new printer paper.

"Can I have another piece?" Peter asked after a few swipes of blue.

I handed him one.

"And me too, please," Julia called, sing-song style, as she taped an abstract-style rainbow to our bathroom door.

"Maybe they should use the back of the paper," Tiffany whispered to me as I went for more sheets.

I gave her a half-hearted nod.

But when I suggested as much to Julia, she pointed out that when we hang the pictures on our walls, only one side can be seen.

And since she was exactly right, I kept passing out paper, without a second-thought, until all of our doors were covered in crayon-drawings.

Next time I'll be prepared, though. I'll tell Julia I have a better idea:

Reversible art.

Parent-speak

After three-months of living with small children, I understand kids perfectly well (dinosaurs have nine teeth no matter what I say; the letter P can be called any other letter of the alphabet depending on our mood; it is always a good time to sit down on the floor and roll a ball back and forth). It's parents who can be difficult to follow sometimes. Here's a conversation I had this weekend when our friends Meg and John, parents of Lily (2-years) and Stella (2-months), came to town:

Me (to Lily who had spent the previous five minutes looking for cracks in the wooden floor at her father's suggestion): Ooooh, Lily, let's go look out the window and see what we can see!

Lily: Okay! Let's find a school bus!

Me: Hmmm, there aren't many school buses at night. How about something else that's yellow... taxis!

John: Oh, really great idea, Rebo.

Me (brightly): I know...(then picking up on excessive amount of sarcasm) wait... what?

John: Taking a two-year-old to the window??

Me: But it's closed. And it's locked. And I'm holding her.

John: Still.

Me (narrowing my eyes, considering whether to point out that he and his wife decided to drive their small children to New York post-Hurricane Sandy and pre-walloping nor'easter in the middle of a gas shortage.... considering, considering, considering. Being the bigger person. Temporarily.): Fine. Lily, let's go back to looking at the floor.

First-World Refugees

After Hurricane Sandy, Tiffany and I were displaced from the basement of our friends, where we were already displaced, to the spare bedroom of other family friends who took me in during another time I was displaced (aka, graduate school). Weary of living out of boxes and bags-which we've been doing since we moved from San Francisco in August and will continue to do until we move into our Manhattan apartment in 27 days-I stubbornly refused to pack anything but work clothes. Of course, then I was unable to go to work, so I have been wearing the same "casual" outfit for days.

On the day of the storm, we filled up our car with gas, bought a bunch of bottled water, and then plopped down in front of the TV to "use the electricity while we've got it!" by having a Glee marathon. Along with my mom, whose weekend visit was extended by the storm, we took turns charging our cell phones in the car even though they were rendered virtually useless by the power outages all around us.

Every time the lights flickered, we gasped, collectively, and when they came back on we looked around and congratulated ourselves for being lucky.

When the power did finally go out, for a 12-hour period the day after the storm, we huddled around the fireplace, reading until we couldn't see anymore. After our electricity was restored, we shut off all the lights and stayed right where we were by the fire, Glee be damned.

My Bestie

I only have a handful of friends in New York.

Ok, fine... I only have a handful of friends. Period.

Anyway, one of my New York friends, Jen, sticks out like a sore thumb from my handful.

The only thing Jen and I have in common is a common friend, Teresa. And it is only because of our love and respect for Teresa that Jen and I initially stayed in the same room together long enough to develop a mutual affection.

Jen is fashionable. I'm... not. She's loud. I'm less loud bordering on quiet. She likes to talk politics. I do not. Oh yeah, and speaking of politics. We don't have those in common either.

I try to avoid political conversations with Jen, but the other night, she wouldn't let me, so we took Teresa's living room hostage and went at it despite the fact that everyone else in the living room was either a sleeping newborn or trying to watch Modern Family.

"I'm fiscally conservative!" I hissed at one point, trying to rebut her argument that I was disagreeing with everything she agreed with just to be stubborn. I instantly thought of all the ways I am not fiscally conservative and hoped she wouldn't.
"Freezing your leftover pizza does not make you fiscally conservative," Jen spat. "It makes you weird."
"I'm personally fiscally conservative!"

She scoffed.

"Whatever!" I shouted. "Binders of women?"

I mean, seriously. What kind of person doesn't believe in leftovers?





Sent from my iPhone

On Coloring

I'll tell you what: Having kids is tough.

Well, technically, Tiffany and I don't have kids (I know I've been away from the blog a long time, but still, three weeks would be a pretty aggressive gestation period for a human being). But we are living with two of them now--and their parents--until we find a place of our own in New York.

When I say tough, I mean that having children around is so much fun I don't have time to do any of the things I should be doing when I'm not at work--like writing this blog, going for a run, or finding an apartment where we wouldn't have kids to play with anymore.

I came upstairs in my running clothes the other day, and Peter, our friends' 2-year-old, was lying on the floor on his stomach in the kitchen, coloring.

"Come on, Rebo," he said, using the nickname his mom and a few other soccer teammates gave me in college. "Color."

He had just learned to call someone to him by waving his hand toward himself, and he scooped his entire arm through the air to indicate that I should come closer.

"Maybe later," I said. "I'm going for a run real quick."

Peter stared at me.

I stared at Peter.

And then, in that amazing ability children have, he forgave me for the words I had just uttered, and scooped his arm through the air again as if I hadn't spoken at all.

"No," he said, matter-of-factly. "Color."

He patted the floor next to him and held up a purple crayon.

I took it.

Road Trip: Blogged (Day Two)

After two days on the road with Tiffany's dad, I know one thing for sure: I like his style. Of course, I've known for seven years that I like Gary's style--well before I consented to his company on our cross-country road trip. But now I like it even more. He's all about maximum efficiency.

When we stop for gas, Gary comes back from the station with his fists full of napkins for "just in case." Never mind the fact that I packed just-in-case napkins (and toilet paper, tissues and paper towels). I say, the more the merrier. Gary and I could make full sets of bedding with our paper products. Who knows... we just might need to some day. It goes without saying we'd make one for Tiffany as well.

Gary also cleans our windshield at every stop even if we've killed no bugs in the brief span of time between fill-ups. This is especially helpful. Although we have plenty of windshield-wiper fluid, our windshield wipers are absolutely useless because we haven't turned them on in six years (I blame the state of California).

At one of our stops this morning, Gary finished with the windshield and then paced back a few yards from the front of the car.

"Hmmm," he said to himself. "I guess I don't need to do the headlights."

I thought he was joking, so I laughed. When he didn't laugh, I immediately agreed the headlights did not need to be scrubbed.

Anyway, Gary is so efficient that he volunteered to wake up at 3 a.m. today to take the first shift driving.

"I'm still on East Coast time, girls," he said boldly.

I only had one request. I asked him if he'd carry me to the car in my pajamas and place me on a pallet on the floorboards the way my parents used to do when I was little.

I guess he thought I was joking because he laughed, and I had to walk to the car a few hours later.

Bag Lady

I hate purses.

They fall off my shoulder and, because I don't use any one purse regularly, I can never find anything in them. Usually Tiffany and I share a purse and she carries it because she likes purses. She likes funky purses and classy purses and sophisticated purses and colorful purses. Normally, it's not a problem to share. But there's a certain sharing limit. Like, she'll draw the line at my water bottle.

"It's not a backpack, Rebecca," she reminds me.

Anyway, on our recent trip to New York, I took my own bag. You couldn't call it a purse. It's a satchel, really, and as soon as our friend Teresa saw it, she gasped in horror.

"What is this?" she cried.

"A bag," I said.

She touched it gingerly with two fingers.

"Did it used to be this color?" she asked, flipping the inside flap over.

"Ohhhh, wow!" I said. "I don't even remember that!"

Teresa refused to let me out of her house with my bag. So she ran upstairs and got one of her extra purses, a blue leather number. Tiffany loved the purse at first sight.

"You carry it," I told her. "I'm good with mine."

"Absolutely not," Teresa said.

I took the purse. I put it over my shoulder and dug through it at various times throughout the day to find my hotel room key, my sunglasses, my eye drops and, yes, my water bottle. All of that was annoying. But the purse was great looking. It looked funky and classy and sophisticated and colorful ALL AT ONCE.

It looked, as soon as my friend Zac saw me when he arrived,

"absolutely nothing like you, Rebecca."

I'll Say a Little Prayer For...

You know how competitive I am when it comes to children's affection.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, Tiffany and I made a quick trip to New York to see family and friends, including our old college buddies, Teresa and Bobby, and their two children, Peter, 2, and Julia, 4.

Even though we've spent time with both kids on several occasions now, at these tender ages I always feel I really have to make a strong No-Longer-First-First-Impression. That's why this time I made sure I was the one who handed Peter and Julia the Cookie Monster cupcakes we picked out for them at the bakery. And why, much to Teresa's horror, I didn't correct Peter when he held a teacup upside down and dumped pretend water all over a doll while demonstrating how he would feed his future baby brother or sister.

"That's so nice," I cooed.

Early in our relationship, Julia called me by name (okay, by my college soccer nickname, which is a syllable shorter) but seemed incapable of remembering Tiffany's.

"Mommy, remember when Rebo and That One came to visit?" Teresa told us she would say.

But this time Tiffany had me beat. Bad.

After our first night, Teresa broke the news that Peter had included only Tiffany in his evening prayer, right after his mommy, his daddy, his sister and the Berenstain Bears.

I Just Called To Say...

My brother and I called our almost 88-year-old grandmother on three-way for the first time a few weeks ago. One member of our five-member nuclear family was out of the country, so it felt like a little more solid way of staying in touch.

It took a while to explain that we were both on the phone and then, all of a sudden, Nana got it:

"Am I on a conference call?" she asked, incredulous. "I've never been on a conference call!"

"You are on a conference call!" I said, talking through my grin. "A family conference call."

"I have never in my life been on a conference call!"

"Well, I've never actually used the three-way button on my phone..." I began, trying to share with her that I was experiencing a first too.

"Never!" Nana shrieked. "Oh my goodness, I love you both so much."

We didn't get to say much to each other on the call. Every time Brandon or I began to speak about something in our day, Nana would let loose with an "Oh my goodness, I never! I love you both so much!"

So we just kept saying we loved her that much too.

Which really was the whole point in the first place.

The Easter Bunny Lives!

Tiffany and I didn't do anything for Easter this year.

It's really a family holiday, after all, and we were by ourselves. Last year, Tiffany's mom was in town visiting. We woke up to a candy and coin trail and had to hunt for our baskets, which contained copious amounts of junk food (Patty knows the way to my heart... chocolate bunnies).

Anyway, this year, our only family connections were made through a round of phone calls. Patty in particular was horrified that we hadn't Easter-ed it up.

"What did you get in your basket?" she asked Tiffany.

"I didn't get a basket," Tiffany pouted. "My easter bunny sucks."

I glared at her.

"What did Rebecca get?" Patty asked.

"She didn't get a basket either. Her bunny is just as bad as mine."

"Wait," I whispered, scurrying into the kitchen. I stood on my tiptoes to reach into our top cabinet, underneath the extra turkey pans we'd bought when we made our practice and real Thanksgiving turkeys. I dashed back to the living room, waving the Easter egg dye kit I'd bought the year before for Patty.

"Oh, the Easter bunny did come," Tiffany laughed. "He brought year-old egg dye!"

To celebrate Easter, Tiffany and I went for a trail run. As we came huffing back down the hill to our car, Tiffany stopped in her tracks and pointed.

A gigantic hare was sitting on its haunches a few yards ahead of us. He twitched his ears in our direction.

"I guess it's Easter after all," Tiffany whispered.

And it really did feel that way.