CPR for parents

I signed my teenage son up to get lifeguard/CPR certification over the holiday break, figuring he oughta do something constructive and not just hang out for 2 weeks.
He passed the class, yay, and came home and told me and his father that he now knows exactly what to do in case we have a stroke.
What a relief.

Day in Chinatown

No matter how many times I go to Chinatown, every time I go it feels like I've never been there before.
It's like an onion you keep peeling.
Today I went to the bird garden in Sara Roosevelt Park where people bring their birds in pretty bamboo cages with porcelain food and water dishes. They air their birds the way we walk our dogs. They call the birds and the birds sing back.
I also went to a Buddhist temple and saw a tall golden Buddha with red lips and lotuses. People were bringing offerings of oranges and flowers and incense; some got down on their knees, some wept.
I listened for awhile to a man playing erhu in the park. He would take no money for his music. He was advertising his skill as a teacher and selling erhus from a cart. They had carved dragon heads at the top of the fretboard.
And I went to many wonderful stores, including one that sells nothing but chopsticks, including a pair that cost $600, and Pearl River Mart, which makes me want to throw out everything I own and start all over again with home furnishings like lamps in silkscreened paper shades in leaf designs and a wardrobe with a black velvet hooded coat with buttons like flowers and a silk brocade purse shaped like a Chinese takeout container.

Thank you Joyce Szuflita

My friend Joyce Szuflita was quoted in The New York Times today in a story about middle school anxiety. Joyce runs a business called http://www.nycschoolhelp.com/ to help parents navigate the insane process of sending your kids to 6th grade. It really shouldn't be this hard, but it is.
Joyce was also good enough to give a shoutout to my music video, Advice to a Teenager,
on her blog http://mysidewalkchalk.blogspot.com/2008/12/13-is-new-18.html as was my friend Louise Crawford at http://www.onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.com/. Thank you Louise and Joyce! Please watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7NduwSTiY.
...If you haven't read Louise's annual list of 100 people who mattered this year, please take a look http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.typepad.com/only_the_blog_knows_brook/2008/12/the-2008-park-s.html. It actually made me very sad this year because there were several in memoriam items for people who were much too young to die.

Dec. 25

I grew up with Christmas and Hanukkah. Because my husband is Jewish, we only do Hanukkah at home. But my sister still does Christmas so on Christmas we always go to her house. We had bagels and lox in homage to our Jewish dad and eggnog with Remy Martin in homage to our New England mom.

Music videos

It is entirely possible that some day I will regret this, but I have just uploaded music videos related to the theme of my book 13 Is the New 18. The first one is called "Crazy from Being a Mother" with apologies to Patsy Cline: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFvSIQZYAMA.
The second one is "Advice to a Teenager from a Mother" using the Toreador song from Carmen,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7NduwSTiY.
Actually I am not cultured enough to know Carmen; I know the song because in one of my favorite episodes of Gilligan's Island, they stage Hamlet and use the Toreador song to sing "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."
I'm not much of a singer nor am I much of an actress, but I hope you think some of the words are clever. ANd I sure wish I had been wearing shoes in "Crazy."

Nothing says Happy Hanukkah like illegal fireworks!

Even though I live in Brooklyn, where you would think there would be lots of Jews, I never seem to have any Jews at my Hanukkah parties. But that's OK, because goyim bring the BEST Hanukkah presents. I think the Hanukkah party I had Sunday night was the best of my life. First of all, my one friend Margaret brought a huge explosive device, this illegal fireworks that she bought out of state. We set it off in the street and hoped no cars would come and ran for the hills, and it shot a series of colored rockets into the sky and I prayed no trees would catch on fire and we were all screaming and hollering our heads off and hoped none of the neighbors would call the cops. It was SOOOOOO fun, I felt like a kid. Second, then my friend Molly, who is THE BEST HANUKKAH shopper EVER, brought me salt and pepper shakers shaped like little dreidels. Unreal! In the past, Molly has bought me pasta shaped like stars of David and chocolate Maccabees. None of these items can ever be located anywhere on earth by any Jew, I am convinced. It requires someone with the temperament and discerning eye of a determined Christmas shopper to root out such great stuff. I go to the store to look for Hanukkah stuff and all I can find is chocolate gelt, but Molly is another story. Other amazing things people brought to my party: wine from Israel, cake, cookies, chocolate and an edible fruit arrangement that looked like a bouquet, with spears of pineapple and melon on sticks. WOW! And my latkes were really great, Elon helped me mathematically calculate what time to start cooking so that half would be done by the time guests arrived, and once you're in the groove, the second half is easy, plus another nonJewish friend helped me finish the cooking while I supervised five children lighting five menorahs simultaneously and hoped they would not burn the house down. Then I gave them sparklers and Silly String and those little pop-pops that you throw on the ground and they go POP and sent them outside to throw snowballs and make trouble. Anyway it was TOTAL MADNESS AND JEWISH FUN WITH MY GOYIM FRIENDS, THANK YOU ALL AND YAY HANUKKAH!

if it's snowin' in brooklyn (remember Ferron?)

Just yesterday I was bemoaning the fact that we hardly ever get snow. Not like when I was a kid and we had to walk 2 miles to school in it... not really, I grew up in Manhattan, school was two blocks away. Anyway, my little boy loves snow and it finally snowed and he spent hours playing in it. And now I'm remembering why snow is not so fun when you are the mother because my house is filled with random wet articles of clothing on every floor, radiator and rug - gloves, sweaters, socks, shoes, coats...

redoing the kids' rooms

My boys are 16 and 11, and after forcing them to live their entire lives in tiny rooms filled with hand-me-downs, furniture I found on the street, and furniture that belonged to relatives who have been dead since before they were born (not that there's anything wrong with that, as JS would say!), I have decided to redo their rooms. My sister points out that my older son is going to college in a year and a half so why bother? Um, exactly! It will be fabulous and I will get to enjoy it without him! No, I don't really mean that. Now that he is a total teenager who never wants to be in his own house, maybe a fabulous room will entice him to spend more than five minutes at a time here. Besides, I can no longer stand looking at that Grand Theft Auto poster on his wall of the girl sucking on the ... lollipop. The redo will include new posters. I'm sure he'll sub that out for like, Picasso. As for the little brother, I'm currently searching for a wolves howling in the snow motif comforter. Incredibly, there are so many to choose from, I cannot decide.