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.