Tim’s Valentine’s gift from me, if you remember, was a new bathroom. I stripped wallpaper, spackled, painted, and decorated, all in the name of love.Unfortunately, I forgot to prime. The golden rule of painting? Preparation, preparation, preparation.This weekend, we are fixing my mistake.I don’t really feel bad about it, though. The schizophragma hydrangea vine I bought myself for mother’s day suddenly died this week. Coincidence? Naaahhh.

Lately, Evan’s gotten the brunt of comparisons against his sister. With her being the early talker, and him being the silent one, it was inevitable. But his time has come to shine. Of course, I could pull the “he climbs the climbing wall at the park and takes the balance beam with ease” type of stuff, but doing so would be a disservice. That’s just playing into stereotypes.You know where you’ve got your sister, kiddo? Hands down? Your mastery of eating utensils. And, no, this is not playing into the stereotype of “a boy’s gotta eat”. ‘Cause you don’t eat all that much.Your sister still can’t manage a spoon half as well as you can. And when you use yours to spoon salsa into your mouth — by your own volition? Well, that’s enough to melt my heart right there. All love.

I’m not so good at this mothering thing, most of the time. I try, though. But when, in anger and sheer frustration, I gathered — all by myself, because it was just easier – the three thousand small toys strewn about the playroom and shoved them willy-nilly into one huge basket, I knew I’d just about given up. Screw the lesson about cleaning up after themselves.Then, the Stroke of Mommy Genius.I sat down. I pulled the first of the three thousand toys out of the basket and asked, in my best ring-master voice “Wheere doooes this gooo?”Suddenly, I had two excited kids, ready to place each of those three thousand toys exactly where it belonged, with nary a single complaint.Good Mom. Good Mom.(We just won’t talk about the reason the three thousand toys were strewn about the playroom in the first place…)

My son just pulled a Cheerio out of his butt and offered it up to me. I ate it. If that isn’t endearment, I don’t know what is.

Only a couple of years ago, my husband and I were fond of enumerating, by visitation, what we called “strip mall gems” — small, locally owned restaurants, with fantastic food and amiable atmosphere belying their strip mall addresses. These were our “hang outs,” where we’d go to relax, unwind, and enjoy some good food and good company. Our haunts, if you will. Our favorite was Mi Tierra, a South American-inspired restaurant with a mean plate of patacones on its menu. Mi Tierra was well named. My Earth. My Ground. My Land. It was ours, all right.These days, we’re not so much in the regular practice of visiting those strip mall gems. Kids, you know, will do that to you.They’ll also, if you let them, let you discover a whole new world to haunt.Shelley Lake, with its rock-climbing wall, gracious shade trees, miles of trails, free fishing equiment library, and thousands of ducks, is a sublime full-morning outing. Mom gets her exercise, and the kids never get bored.Brookhaven Nature Park, with its secluded stream, is perfect for a little surreptitious wading and ripe for salamander discovery. Keep your eyes peeled for a lazy snake or two, and you’ll have scored a jackpot. Bring the dog along, break the leash law, and let him get some much needed exercise while no one else is around. Everyone goes home happy.The airport observation deck never loses its charm. Bring your jackets, even on a spring day, because it can get chilly with the breeze blowing up on the deck. Sit and listen for a spell to the chatter piped in from the air traffic control tower. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a helicopter or two to land right in front of you.Rainy Day? Don’t let that get you down. Head straight to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences. Make sure you hit the 10:30 storytime. Sunny or Barb will be sure to delight with alligators, turtles, and, maybe, my favorite, the blue-tongued skink. Psst. It’s great on a sunny day, too.Just around the corner from our house is the fire station. Anytime the engine’s out, stop by. The firemen (and woman!) would love to show you around. The kids will go home with a hat and a hundred stories.And, of course, there’s always the library. And the front yard. And the sand pit in front of the neighbor’s yard, leftover from their recent addition construction. And the…I’m rather liking my new hang outs. Mi Nueva Tierra. Who wants to hang out in a strip mall, anyway?

Delightful. In one word, our visit was delightful. Of course, we had far more than one word to exchange. We stayed up till midnight. I don’t know about them, but I enjoyed their visit very much. I’m so very glad our paths crossed, at least this one time. If we’re lucky, our paths will cross again.Now, as for that Gretchen and Rebecca? Hmmm. They seem mighty shady to me…

This one has been a Wicker Chicken morning.No sooner than I turn the corner into the kitchen to see my son helping himself to a glass of water and think to myself, “Gee, that glass is precariously close to the edge of the counter,” does that same glass fall directly on to the kitchen floor.Crash!Followed by silence. And then a weak “Uh Oh!” from my son.Down Comes The Green Flag for the Great Wicker Chicken Race.I start to clean up the glass shards, struggling to keep my son out of the mess. He starts to squat and grunt.”Do you need to go poopy?” I ask, not really understanding the consequences of my query.”Yah!” he answers, much to my dismay. Why couldn’t you have replied with your usual “Nooooooo!”I seriously consider denying I’d heard what he’d said, but I just don’t have it in my heart. So I leave the glass mess and escort my son to the bathroom. Once there, he begins his maddening game of switching between his potty and Oe’s potty — back and forth, back and forth — all while grunting and keeping me entirely on edge, convinced that he will deposit a turd right in the middle of the bathroom floor. This would not be a good thing.In the meantime, back in the kitchen, I hear a rustling and a bustling, and I realize my dog has gotten into the trash — that same trash that I’d left open while picking up the shards of broken glass. I make a quick domestic/executive decision and run to the kitchen to pry the dog away from the trash.Of course, in the thirty-eight seconds it takes me to extract the dog from the trash and close the kitchen cabinet door, my son, back in the bathroom, has peed on the potty. As in, on the potty. And on the floor. And on the basket of bathroom toys. Oh, and on the bathroom mat, too. Nice.I somehow earnestly congratulate him for peeing on the potty. “You peed on the potty! You peed on the potty!” He has no idea that the preposition “on” has an infinite number of nuances in reference to the phrase “on the potty,” and despite my thinly-stretched nerves at this point, I still don’t have it in my heart to dash his enthusiasm for toileting.The ensuing fifteen minute struggle to extract him from his game of being in the bathroom, however, is enough for me to dash his enthusiasm for toileting. “Enough, Evan! The potty is not a toy!” I force a diaper on him and go back to work on that broken glass in the kitchen. The mess in the bathroom will have to wait at this point.Cleaning up the mess in the kitchen, once I’ve been given the opportunity to fully devote my attention to it, takes exactly one minute and fifty-seven seconds. This is exactly enough time for my son to climb upstairs, go into the guest bathroom, climb up in to the guest bathroom sink, and finish taking that dump he’d started way back when. I discover him just as he finishes his business.I bring him back downstairs and into his room to change his diaper, but not before stepping on the one stray piece of glass my dog has apparently tracked into the hallway. I mindlessly pull the sliver of glass out of my foot and continue on my way, into my son’s cream-carpeted room, only to discover the sliver was apparently more like a shard, capable of producing a river-like flow of blood. Yeah, all over that cream carpet.Now, I’m trying to stem the flow of blood from my foot with a wipe in one of my hands, while using my other hand to try to keep a kicking-mad boy on top of a changing table. And there’s an open poopy diaper involved. The scene deteriorates quickly. That the product Resolve is involved in the end of it all is a cruel, cruel trick.Of course, that is not, in fact, the end of it all.Neither is the moment, directly following a forty-six second conversation with my husband telling him about the preceding events, an eerie silence, and a “Where are you, Evan?” when I then discover him marking in orange highlighter all over my newly recovered chair. Nope, that isn’t the end of it all, either.The end of it all?1:01 p. m. Nap-time. The Checkered Flag.I defy any top-level executive to weather the stresses of my day any better than I have. You say you don’t get a nap? You don’t deserve a nap.

It’s a quirky product of our new Internet age. I’ve known her for well over four years, and yet I’ve never met her. We’ll be finally taking care of that formality today.Can’t wait to meet you, Bubbyfinder. Just hurry up and get here, won’t ya? We’ve so much to catch up on!

I. Things My Dog Has EatenMy daughter’s art project. A lusty lion with a macaroni mane and a Mona Lisa smile. Calvin, Calvin, Calvin — dried macaroni noodles with glue? You never cease to amaze.II. Things I’m Thankful ForTuesday Morning. On a Friday Afternoon. A chance encounter with a friend and a trip to the bargain hunter’s paradise later, I quite possibly have a $60 alternative to an on-line shopping basket currently filled with $400 worth of merchandise. I’ll be ever so much closer to those $1500 pillow shams!(Quite possibly, I say, because I’ll still need to get the other half’s approval. And it has nothing to do with purse strings. Ahh, another entry entirely.)III. Things That Make You Go HmmmThe same woman who steadfastly awaited her lab results whilst her intuition predicted doom sunk into a puddle of tears this morning over a haircut gone horribly awry. Moving gracefully through life? Hmmmm. I’d reconsider.

There’s the young couple in the Home magazine who just spent four quadrillion on their back porch. Just their back porch.There’s the cute brunette mom at my preschool who drops her daughter off saying, “Mommy’s got to go play tennis. I’ll be back after lunch.” Her other kids are home with the Au Pair.There’s the couple in our former neighborhood who just bought a house — worth more than two of mine combined, only to tear it down.And then there’s the $1500 pillow sham. One pillow sham. Somebody had to have bought two of them, probably four. Six thousand dollars on which to rest their pretty little heads.I’m not one to complain too much about money. Really, I’m not. We live fine and dandy, by most standards. No debt to speak of, other than the house, and we’re able to enjoy life most of the time. Sure, there’s the perennial “Where the hell did our money go?” at the end of every month, but I know good and well anyone who can choose to more than halve their family income by staying at home (yeah, that’s right, I made more than he did) is doing quite well by the American Dream, thank you very much.But it seems as though I’ve been bombarded recently with a lot of proof that I’m not doing as well as a lot of other people out there. Those damn Jones’.Evan has recently become obsessed with the change lying about the house. Since he’s never been one to put things in his mouth, and I’m generally a slack mom, I humor him his play toys. “Money. Money. Money, ” he says, thoughout the day, as he moves from cache to cache. He even knows where the stash of change in the car is, and makes a bee-line for it each time he climbs in the car.”Money. Money. Money.”I can’t help but pity him. Not even two and he’s beholden. Unless something drastic happens, he’ll be collecting spare change until the day he dies and he’ll still never be able to sleep on $1500 pillowcases.You’ll only drool on them, my son. It’s sage advice I should take myself.