Friday night lights

One of our neighbors works in ticket sales for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and he helped us out with tickets to the Bucs' preseason game against the Titans last Friday night. The only catch was Eric couldn't be too boisterous in his cheering for Tennessee. He gave us four tickets which meant we had to find people to go with us. We ended up inviting a guy that I met at a recent Wharton alumni happy hour here in Tampa and his partner and they were happy to join us.

Let me set the scene:

Most people probably know this but it turns out Buccaneers are Pirates! (Not those things the girl has to get for her date to the Homecoming dance.) The free Bucs schedule calendars that they handed out said Cannons Will Fire and it was true - they did. Eric was so startled he spilled some of his beer on his shoe.

Getting out of the house is not easy and we did not manage to pre-eat before rushing over to the stadium, so at the first break I went off in search of food. Our companions did a poor job of masking their horror but were good sports about accompanying me in search of reasonable, vegetarian sustenance.

I was trying to decide between a dinner of nachos, a soft pretzel or a Pizza Hut personal cheese pizza when one of them suggested we push on to the next set of food options, just to see. As it turned out, and I am not sure if he knew this or just got lucky, this was the vegetarian haven. I ordered a Sloppy Jane, a vegan sloppy joe made with tempeh, and a black bean burger. Eric would get to choose which one he wanted and I would eat the other. I also got two large beers to wash them down.

The presentation of the Sloppy Jane can be summed up in five short words: "cat vomit on a bun." This sandwich could double as a test of how imaginative you are. Anyone with any imagination at all would be incapable of raising it to their lips.

The black bean burger was dressed up pretty nicely with lettuce, onion, tomato and condiments and did not look at all disgusting. I believe Eric enjoyed it.

I went through a lot of my beer forcing down the Sloppy Garfield.

Sunset over our pond

While we were out celebrating my birthday our babysitter captured this sunset over our pond. This is the view from our pool and hot tub. This is definitely on the list of Florida goodness.

This same babysitter, who I like a lot, told me today: "I always thought I wanted to have children close together like this but taking care of these two at these ages is really challenging! It makes me think I might time things differently with my own kids."

Well, at least she still wants to have children.

Year of Sweetness

Eric took me out to celebrate my 34th year on Sunday. It was all top secret until the very last moment and I enjoyed the anticipation.

First stop was a cozy hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant with a fake brick wall painted up to about waist-high on the interior walls. The food was delicious and the house wine may as well have been coming out of a hose (in a good way).

Next stop was...the Seminole Hard Rock Casino. I'm not kidding. We've passed this place on the highway and always wondered about it. Now we know what is going on in there: lots and lots of gambling. It was the most crowded casino I have ever been to, and this was 7pm on a Sunday evening. A Ghostbusters slot machine game experience caught my eye and after finding an open one (it was popular!) I sat down, put in $20 and pressed some buttons. I got down to about $15 and then I won big: $12.85! I know when to cash out. I took my $7.85 and we high-tailed it back to the car.

The next stop was a super-sketchy drive-in movie theatre. Neither Eric nor I had ever been to a drive-in and it was something we have both wanted to do. In the era of home theatre systems and generally really large televisions, you can imagine what market segment remains interested in drive-ins: us and really scary people in pick-up trucks. Unphased by our viewing companions (our car doors lock, after all) we reclined our chairs, tuned in the radio signal for sound, dug into some brownie bites and shared red wine out of a white plastic coffee mug. It was divine. It was a double feature but after Dark Knight Rises we had had enough and headed home to relieve the babysitter and get some sleep.

When I turned 33 a lot of people told me it was my "Jesus year" I guess because that is the year that Jesus died and then came back, etc. Turning 34, I have decided that this is my Walter Payton year. In honor of his nickname I am declaring this a year of "sweetness."

A year in Florida

August 1 marked our first year in Florida. As Emerson says a lot these days: "Oh gosh!" (read: oh garsh!)

While a part of me welcomed the adventure of moving to a place as random as Florida, it has been no secret that I have struggled this past year to make Florida feel like home, or even a place that could one day feel like home.

I appreciate Florida a lot more now than I did a year ago. Having a wonderful home, albeit still largely unfurnished, helps a lot, especially since with the two little ones there are many days we don't even make it out of the house. But we swim in the pool, play tee ball in the yard, run laps around the house and play with water on the patio so we don't feel too cooped up. This is all Florida goodness.

While it is a lot better, there are still ways that life in Florida is not totally figured out. My professional identity is kind of homeless here and while I have moments of confidence that a fulfilling career is still within reach (without always traveling to work), I also spend more time than I would like to admit trying to remember that thing I was just going to tell you. It was really interesting. Just give me a minute.

And I am still waiting to make my first real friend here. Not for lack of trying. It seems I am too weird for some and not weird enough for others. But these things take time. More than a year, apparently.

I don't hate Florida. But I don't love it (yet?).

Let's give it another year. 

A few recent good ones

Here are a few of my favorite recent Emerson-isms. We are at the age where everything we say comes right back to us. For example, Emerson is now often heard saying: "Does that sound like fun to you?"

I don't know if I've been speaking in British lately but Emerson has started inserting "rather" in a very proper way. Would you like some yogurt Emerson? "Yes, I'd rather like that." I think he has thrown in "quite" here and there as well. Maybe Emerson is seeing too much of the Olympics with Eric while I am not around.

Just today I overheard Eric saying to Emerson: "Your brother is not a pinata," after Emerson said that perhaps he could hit his brother with a stick and candy would come out.

And finally my favorite one: in just the last few days Emerson has pretty much potty trained himself. He decided he was done with diapers and has been using the potty for all of his business with only a couple accidents. How great! So the other evening he is on the potty and we are expecting the evening poo but it hasn't arrived yet. I am reluctant to take him up for bath until he has pooed, and I think he can tell that I am wanting things to move along. He says to me:

"Mom. Put your hand on my head and push down really hard. Then that will make the poo come out!"

I laugh and, to be a sport, put my hand on his head and give it little gentle pressure.

"No!" he says. "Like this!" and puts his hands on top of mine, pushes down really hard and grunts.

It didn't work, but we did have a good laugh.

The hipster cure

In my ongoing quest to meet interesting people and do interesting things, we accepted a dinner invitation from a gay couple, one member of which I met at a Wharton alumni happy hour a few weeks ago. He suggested a spot for dinner that I had not heard of and it turned out to be a fabulous funky hipster type place with organic hamburgers and a band where the lead singer also played a washboard with her really long fingernails.

The dinner was made especially entertaining by the fact that Eric and I were both teetering on the edge of what turned out to be just moderate food poisoning, but we didn't know that at the time. As we were standing waiting for our dates to arrive, we both confessed to having eaten week-old Mexican left-overs for lunch and experiencing waves of nausea all afternoon, and then agreed that we would try to stick it out but we would warn them that there was a chance of abrupt departure. As it turned out, a beer and a polenta with buffalo mozzarella and tomato pepper relish appetizer was all we needed and we even managed to stay up long enough to have a drink on the patio with the steam-punk statue figure things that were all over, one of which appears to be waiting tables in the photo above.

I have not yet made a final ruling on if there are enough interesting people in Tampa to make it worth living here, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Where's that playground

We spent the better portion of this past week in Lancaster, PA visiting Muz (my grandmother) and my aunts Barbara and Penney. The kids had a great time exploring Muz's house, enjoying the hotel, and seeing new scenery from their carseats, but it was a deviation from our normal schedule of spending many hours per day at playgrounds around house.

The third morning in PA as we were turning into Muz's neighborhood, Emerson says from the back seat:

"I'm just trying to figure out how to get to the playground."

List of things I have just recently learned

Lifelong learning is my middle name. Here's some recent evidence that it is happening. In the past week I have learned that:  

Two people using pool skimmers in just the right way can get a very large turtle out of your neighbor's pool. The skimmers will then be needed to get the surprisingly large amount of turtle poop out of the pool.

You can get certified in Dog CPR and First Aid.

You can use something called neem oil on your tomato plants as an organic pesticide/fungicide/miticide AND as a natural bug spray on your skin (though I am not yet clear on if this should happen at different levels of concentration).

Dabbing vinegar on the mosquito bites you get in spite of wearing a suffocating amount of citronella and other natural herbs and oils instead of DEET makes them stop itching. 

The tomato plants will probably still die from the leaf miners that are munching swirly designs into all of their leaves even as I write this.

There's a red light traffic camera at the corner of Waters and Sheldon in Tampa. The fee for running a red light even though you would swear that they altered the photograph because you NEVER run red lights is $158. Boo.

Good job hookers

The grabbers have become the hookers, and Emerson congratulated them often during lunch today. Each time they helped him eat a pea or a blueberry he would gleefully proclaim: Thanks hookers! Good job hookers!

From one to the other

Emerson was holding a balloon in his carseat on the way to the playground today. I overheard this exchange:

"It's mine! No it's mine mine mine said the other hand."

Too hot

Yesterday was a hot one here, like it was in most of the country. We were out in the yard playing tee ball for all of about 15 minutes when Emerson suddenly stopped playing and said,

"Dad, let's go inside. I will drink water and then I will feel better."

We are the 2% (No relation to the 1%)

I read in The Week this week that 98% of US households have a TV. We are not one of them.

The cable guy was here today because we moved the router to a different part of the house. We get internet service from the cable company but, having no TV, we do not get cable. The cable guy, a chunky fellow who I'm pretty sure had been in a dunk tank full of cologne before coming into our home, was more than a little weirded out that we didn't have a TV.

"Whoa," he said several times. "I've only seen this once before with family that was homeschooling their children and I was there hooking up their cable for the first time. It was crazy; these kids were so excited to get just 13 channels that their dad was giving them because they had been so good."

Sometimes it is fun to be the weirdest part of someone's day.

The Grabbers

We had some friends over on Saturday who have a daughter just a few months younger than Emerson. At one point they were vying for a small shovel which she was holding and Emerson was getting frustrated that his attempts to take it away from her had been foiled.

"These are the grabbers!" he suddenly proclaimed, opening and closing his little fists again and again in her direction. "Give them the shovel!"

Makes you wonder which he sees more often

The other day we were driving behind an SUV with a large dog hanging out the window. Emerson shouted out, excited:

"Hey Mom! Look at that goat driving that car!"

Undergrads say the darndest things

In addition to teaching a class this summer, Eric has four undergrad students who are doing research under his tutelage.

While instructing one of them in how to properly centrifuge a bunch of test tube things, the student asked if he had to put the cover on.

Eric explained that when the tubes spin they make the sound like when you blow over the top of a glass bottle but times 50,000 or some other ridiculously large number. If you don't cover them, he said, it sounds like a demon.

"How do you know what a demon sounds like?" the student replied.

It's a good question. And it became the first entry on the lab's Quote Sheet.

Now, I may not have an out of the house workplace right now, but I also hear a lot of funny quotes during the day and I think they need to be recorded. So this blog is going to function as my own personal quote sheet and also as the part of my brain that should remember all the funny stuff that Emerson says but which does not.

We'll start with this one when I went to get Emerson after his nap:
"Mom! (fake cough) I need water because I am coughing."

Look for the tag Quote Sheet to see them all together.

Father's Day funnies

I surprised Eric with a special Father's Day Eve date night on Saturday. After an excruciating departure from a hysterical Emerson, we made our way downtown for some fun sans kids.

We picked up tacos (three fish, three rajas con queso) from Taco Bus and ate them in the park over by the children's museum which overlooks the river and the campus. We washed them and the incredibly spicy salsa they came with down with a few beers poured into opaque cups. The temperature was perfect. We chatted some and spent some time just sitting quietly, watching people playing soccer and taking wedding photos and playing in the water.

After our mouths stopped burning we walked over to the Straz Center for a comedy show. There may have been some warning signs that it was not going to be stellar. It was billed as a four comic line-up of "up and comers." It was sold out but at showtime the auditorium was barely half full. But I wasn't worried; we used to go see amateur comics in SF from time to time and it was still funny, just sometimes not in the way they intended.

Let me just say this: all the comics' parents, and a lot of their friends, were in the audience.We may have been the only people there who didn't recently hang out with one of the comics.

It was almost really good. They had a lot of good ideas, they just didn't quite have their timing and language fine-tuned. One bit was about this guy getting mugged on a subway when the only other person on a subway was an 80 year old woman. And then some of the ideas weren't so good: one guy spent a good portion of his time doing an impression of Stephen Hawking in "unexpected" situations like at a strip club. He had the whole mechanical voice and everything.

I can't wait for next Father's Day.

Not our best parenting

One of the things I have really appreciated about being at home full time with the boys is that I can be completely focused on them and not always feel a little distracted. But, due to sleep deprivation and brain-melting hormones, results have been a little discouraging recently.

For starters, we continued the family tradition of letting our children crawl out of our bed when they hit around six months old. Eric started it with Emerson one morning when I left early to teach a 6:30am yoga class and Eric fell back asleep but Emerson didn't. Eric called me later that morning to tell me that he had awoken to the sound of a thud and then screaming. Unfortunately, I can now relate to exactly how he must have felt. On Saturday afternoon, I put Ethan down for a nap in our bed and then forgot to turn on the monitor when I came downstairs. I was deep in "In The Wood" on my Kindle when I heard a heavy thud followed immediately by very sad crying. He cheered right up once I scooped him up off the floor and I am optimistic that he is completely fine.

Later that day, we went out to do some errands together as a family. We were several minutes into the drive when Emerson chirped from the back seat: "Uh oh! You're not strapped in!" (He still thinks "you" refers to himself, since that's how we always refer to him.)

Yup. He was sitting in his carseat but not restrained at all. We pulled over, buckled him up and vowed to get a better night's sleep that night.

Goodbye Johnny Stef

I learned this morning that my dear friend Johnny Stef passed away last Thursday. John was my favorite person (by far) in my five person learning team at business school and my friendship with him was one of the best things I got out of going to business school. After scouring airline websites and thinking creatively about childcare options, I am sad to say I don't think I will be able to make it to his memorial service on Tuesday in New York city. But just because I can't be there doesn't mean I can't spend some time remembering my good buddy Stef.

John was one of the most decent and big-hearted human beings I have known. What I mean by decent is that he was someone who was more honest than most of us and didn't shy away from difficult conversations or doing the right thing even if it was uncomfortable or hard. He took good care of people and he went out of his way to help people, but in a quiet way that made it clear that he was doing it for them, not for himself. He was "hip" in the best sense of the word: always impeccably and boldly dressed, always knew what was going on and had a knowledgeable and thoughtful take on it. And he was quirky too: ask him what he is reading and he is as likely to say The Peloponnesian War as The New Yorker.

I have fond memories of spending time with John during business school. Beyond the many group projects our learning team worked on, we spent more than a few nights out in Philly with classmates and friends drinking and dancing until late (the song Magic Stick was a favorite, and I seem to remember more bhangra than one would expect from a white guy who grew up in New York). John and Suhana's wedding reception was also a highlight and I felt honored to be there to celebrate with them.

When I lived in DC I was often in New York and could meet John for brunch or fancy cheese with wine in the afternoon or even the occasional live music show in a basement in Brooklyn. He always had some funny story to share and a spot-on critique of a recent movie and I always felt more cultured and in the know after seeing him. My move to San Francisco meant I saw less of him, but we still managed to meet for coffee on one of his trips to SF and that was when he told me he was going to be a father. The last time I saw him in person was right after his son Henryk was born, back in July 2009. I had never seen him so happy. He had not thought he would be able to have children and he truly cherished Henryk.

I knew John had had a stint in the hospital with pneumonia a little less than a year ago but he didn't tell me until he was out and "fine." I guess I should have known there was more to the story but I believed him when he said he was OK. I was shocked this morning to see in my email a note from a mutual friend letting me know that Stef had passed away. I am so sad that he is gone and I feel even worse that I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. And, not to make this about me, but I am horrified with myself that I wasn't there for him during his final fight. I have spent the whole day doing little more than wishing I had known what was going on so I could have been as good a friend to Stef as he always was to me.

I missed my chance to say it in person, but here is what I would have said:
Yo Stef. I am so glad that I knew you and got to be a part of your life. I really admired who you were and how you lived your life and I felt lucky to be your friend. I always felt like you were looking out for me and taking care of me even in ways I wasn't aware of. Thank you for being such a good friend. I wish your son could have grown up knowing you. As a mother of a 2 year old myself I can hardly imagine how hard it must be for you to leave him. I hope that he will grow up surrounded by people who knew and loved you and who can share with him all of the wonderful memories so he will know how lucky he was to have you for a dad, even if just for a short time.

You will be greatly missed.

It only took us six years to find out

On Saturday night Eric and I went out on a date. And because we are parents in our early 30s living in Florida, obviously that means just one thing: we went mini-golfing. 

What we didn't know was that it was National Miniature Golf Day. A whole game of mini-golf was just 99 cents!

If you haven't heard of National Miniature Golf Day before that might be because it only started in 2007. It is always celebrated on the second Saturday of May, which I think means it might always be the day before Mother's Day.

Perhaps we have a new family tradition.

Never hurts to ask

During nap times on our very successful camping trip, we drove around a bit so the boys could sleep. After many hours at the beach, we decided to get some ice cream at the camp store. Eric was driving so I ran in and ordered a cone with mint chocolate chip ice cream.

The woman started to scoop up the cone and determined that there wasn't enough ice cream left in the bucket to make a whole cone. (This was not really true. There was still at least a pint of ice cream in there, it was just all in the corners where her big scooper couldn't get.) So she pulled out the bucket and put it on the floor.

"You aren't going to let that ice cream go to waste, are you?" I asked.

"I'm just going to throw it away," she replied. "What, do you want it?"

Guess what I said.

The best part was the looks I got while sitting on the curb with the bucket waiting for Eric to circle around and pick me up.