And thus do Caleb's battles commence, every evening after school or after breakfast, or pretty much whenever. The time is always right, it seems, for an adventure, an explosion, or some sort of violent confrontation.

Playmobil figures are a pretty recent addition to this lego-heavy household; Caleb got a few different sets for his birthday in August and now it's his latest addiction.  But this new love doesn't mean that legos and star wars have been replaced. Oh no.

What it means is that all the worlds are linked, pretty much seamlessly: light sabers are wielded by Roman centurions riding camels against the medieval siege wagon manned by a police man carrying a double-headed battle ax. These figures are, collectively, known as "guys," and Caleb adores them all.

Derrida said once that every discourse is bricoleur--from bricolage, a term that originally meant using found objects in ways very different from their original purpose.  In regular person's terms, think "Killing Me Softly," from the Fugees or, for that matter, lots of what gets sung on Glee.

Who knew that my five-year-old was such a philosophe, eh, creating his own narratives regardless of what's pictured on the packages.

Those little bits of molded plastic offer him hours and hours and hours of play-time, almost always on his own (except when Liam deigns to dip a toe back in the world of imagination). I know Caleb is hoping that Santa has a direct line to the Playmobil factory--and I realize that when 'the guys" get packed away for good, I'm going to be sad to see them go.

(And--toy alert--if you're a playmobil fan, you might want to look FAST at the Momtrends website, where she's featuring a Playmobil contest, among other goodies.)

There are days when it seems like all that comes out of my mouth is an endless loop of be careful watch out be careful watch out be careful...

When did I turn into that person?

My constant cautionary recital seems particularly peculiar to me because I'm not really a fearful person. I know that bad things happen but whether through sheer ignorance, blind faith (in what I'm not sure), or simple optimism, I rarely that those bad things could happen here. (And yes, I do recognize that I am totally tempting fate with that comment, which, in turn, demonstrates at least some fear on my part. I mean, I'm not crazy--remember when your kids were young and you'd say proudly that your infant had learned to sleep through the night and then you'd be up all night with a screaming banshee from hell?)

So why then my constant admonishments? I mean, despite wanting to wring their scrawny necks on a fairly regular basis, I do in fact recognize that I have basically good kids who won't dash into the street or run away or use their scooters to play candlepins with the old people waiting for the bus. 

Are my cautions a sop to the fates, a kind of twisted-around prayer that none of the things that I'm describing in my cautions will actually come to pass?

I know that my words alone will not prevent the scooter wheel from catching in a rut and sending the scootee sprawling.  And it's pretty clear that the phrase "glass coffee table" does not connote the same splintering bloody mess in their minds as it does in mine. But saying these things, reminding myself that these things could happen...maybe it is reminding myself of how thin the line is between "everything's fine" and "oh shit."

Of course, I think it's safe to say that the boys don't even really hear me, actually, other than as a kind of Charlie-Brown-esque wonkh-wonkh-wonkh-wohnkwohnkwohnk floating through the air.  Hell, sometimes, I don't even hear myself, that's how automatic my comments have become. And if I'm boring myself, god knows I have to  be boring them.

I wonder. If we're all bored by my warnings, what would happen if I tried an entire warning-free day? Seriously.  An entire day without telling anyone to be careful, or watch out, or slow down...what could happen? Would the sky fall? Would they? Would we make it to bedtime unscathed and unscratched?

I'm going to try it.  I'm tempting fate. Tomorrow, caution gets thrown to the proverbial winds.  

And then when one of them falls off the scooter/bike/junglegym/couch/bed--THEN they'll realize that they should have been listening all along.

Knock wood.

We need this day of Thanksgiving - a pause that makes us remember all that we do have, reminds us that we can fight back against the sludgy tide of greed, inertia, and despair.

To that end--a poem by Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

picture taken by Caleb at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden

poem reprinted from Mary Oliver Online Poems

Scary stuff, absolutely--and as many of us are all too aware, while bed-rest might initially seem like a dream come true, it very quickly (like overnight) becomes a nightmare, all too reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (the heroine in that story, you remember, ends up crawling along the floorboards of her attic, over the body of her unconscious husband, peeling off the wallpaper as she crawls).

But I'm not actually going to write about scary pregnancy stories, or about women slowly being driven insane by the medical establishment. Instead, I am going to write about the diagnosis given to K's sister: she has an "incompetent cervix."

Seriously.  That's the medical definition given to this condition--a diagnosis that throws us right back into the 19th century, when women were, in fact, deemed incompetent, fit only to have babies, and when to be female meant that you were always on the brink of hysteria, a word that originates from hyster, the Greek word for "womb." 

K., in telling me about her sister, posed a key question: why is it that her sister's cervix is "incompetent," but a man who can't get it up is deemed to have "erectile dysfunction" or to be "impotent"?  True, impotence means a loss of power, but to be incompetent, according to the first definition in the dictionary, is to be "not legally qualified."  And if you're not legally qualified, you have no standing in the eyes of the law - you're a non-person.

Do you think Viagra would be such a best-selling drug if it were sold as a treatment for an "incompetent penis"? What man would cop to such a diagnosis?  And--further--could there really be only one pill to cure that condition? Especially when there are so very many ways for a penis to be incompetent (not the least of which is its inability to aim a stream of urine accurately into a toilet bowl).  Fixing an incompetent penis would necessitate an entire cocktail of drugs, I think, and several months of sensitivity training for the body attached to said incompetent organ.

But I digress. K's sister's diagnosis makes me wonder if, on some level, the days of The Yellow Wallpaper aren't so far away after all.

(Let's not even get started on the whole Stupak thing, yet another attempt to keep women from being legally qualified to govern their own bodies, and which in turn raises the question of how it is that the Right can, on one hand insist that the government stay out of individual lives and, on the other hand, insist that government get right inside the most intimate act a body can perform. Hmm).  

Oh dear, that was another digression. I seem to be getting all hysterical about who has access to my hyster...

Seriously, though, what if we re-diagnosed K's sister's condition? What if we said she had a "flexible cervix," or a "forgiving cervix," or--perhaps most appropriate--a "tired cervix"?

Yes. That's it.  A "tired cervix." Because you know what? Doing something as personal and as powerful as growing a baby? It's exhausting.

Liam's mind works in wild, whirling circles; he synthesizes minutiae and detail like a cross between JRR Tolkien and Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man." Like Dustin Hoffman's character, Liam frequently doesn't really conversate; he just wants you to appreciate the ideas being downloaded from his brain.

Nothing deters Liam from his narrative, once he gets going--not sirens, brakes, stop lights, whining little brothers, barking dogs--he just keeps talking. He may have a bright future as an auctioneer.

We leave our building and he's off:
--So I'm inventing this game and the first level will be Artic Explorer...no...wait, Artic Conqueror. Yeah. Conqueror.
--Uh-huh, that's a good word.  Do I need to stop at Trader Joe's for milk or will the line be too long by the time I get back from school
--And that level gets you twenty million points that you can use to get the equipment you need in order to defeat the malevolent invader from the east, because you need an ice ax that emits poison elemental gas when you swing it and then after that level you become an Artic Mage
--Mage, huh? Serious stuff did I answer that student's email about her thesis and should I circulate that document via email before Thursday's meeting and should I email the editor to see if she's got the deadline... 
--But with wizarding abilities... No...no...actually, you need to have the wizarding abilities first, I think, so that then you can strategize to combat the fire-breathing dragons that emerge from the ice... But then when you get to the level where you can enter the melee school of combat training--

I jolt out of my to-do list: Did you just say melee school of combat training?  that's really funny-

--yeah, I know, so after you've trained for three levels you can earn the crossbow of artic death...
--Artic death, sure don't forget the dry cleaning

And so it goes: quality time with my son. We have mornings like this a lot--just me, Liam, and whatever game Liam is inventing.  I don't think he knows that I'm only barely listening but maybe this is one of those times where the listening itself doesn't really matter. What matters is that he wants me there to listen to his tales--and now that he's nine, I hear the clock ticking louder, counting down the days until I become so uncool that he cannot possibly be seen with me.  

So until that day comes, bring on the Arctic conquerors, wizarding mages, poison-emitting ice axes, and training at the melee school of combat training: I'm all ears.

The god Dionysus, as most of us know, is the god of wine. In mythology, he is also the inspirer of ritual madness, ecstasy, and theater, as well as the god of the epiphany. He is sometimes known as "the Liberator" because he frees us from our normal selves.  Dionysus usually plays a flute or other reed-like instrument and his mission is to bring an end to care and worry.

Well, I saw Dionysus last week, right here in Manhattan, but these days, Dionysus plays a Fender guitar, not a flute. The end result is the same, though: for more than three hours, all my worries and woes vanished, swept away by an ocean of sound and energy, a torrent of screaming, clapping, booty-wiggling joy.

Yes. I saw Springsteen at the Garden and it was good, my friends, it was good.

Shuffling through the crowds into the Garden that night, I grumbled and groused at (long-suffering) Husband: we're too old for an arena show, too tired to be out on a Sunday night, too broke to be spending money on concert tickets and babysitters.  Then the lights went down, the music came up...and it all made sense: of course we were here.  Where else on earth would we rather be? 

Bruce and the band played "The River" in its entirety (only the second time they've ever done so, apparently) and sent Husband back in time, to waiting in line all night to buy concert tickets (remember when we waited in line instead of online?). The songs from that album reminded me of high school, bombing around in my mother's station wagon and bellowing the words to "Cadillac Ranch."  

Carried along on Little Stevie's guitar and Clarence's horn, my youth went zooming through the arena--even my omnipresent cynicism faded away, so that the sight of Pat Riley (gotta love what you can see with binoculars, right?) pumping his fist to "Born to Run" didn't make me laugh the way it should have.

But hell, we all pumped our fists--me and Husband; the sixty-something couple behind us who'd flown in from Seattle just for the show, having never seen Bruce before; the twenty-something kids sitting next to us, singing along heavily accented English--we all danced and sang and clapped until our hands burned. The spotlights glinted off gold watches and bifocals, and belt buckles cinched tight against the sploogy onset of middle age; graying heads bobbed along with every guitar lick. 

His audience might be aging and he himself is now on the other side of sixty, but Bruce and the band seem ageless: I guess drinking in the adulation of twenty thousand people a night must be a kind of immortality tonic. His joy at making music seemed as great--or greater--than our joy in hearing him play, and for more than three hours, it seemed like our energies might literally blow the roof off the place.

I forget sometimes, in the forward onrushingness of everyday life, that it's important to stop. Yes, okay, sure, you can stop to smell the roses if that's all you've got handy, but what about jumping up and down and screaming at the top of your lungs because the music has entered your bloodstream and you've been liberated from the need to be rational, calm, grownup.

Springsteen does what Whitman wrote about: sing the body electric/the armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them/They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them/And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

It seems fitting, then, that the one of the last songs of the night--an audience request--was "Sweet Soul Music," and that the very last was "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher." That's exactly what happened--Bruce and the band lifted us, and we lifted them--higher and higher and higher.

So even though the week that followed the concert was full of the typical logistics and schedules and hurry-up-we're-lates, it didn't matter as much--my body might have been shuttling kids around the city, but my soul was still clapping along with the heart-stoppin, booty-shakin, earth-quakin, hard-rockin, history-makin E-Street Band.

concert photo credits: Michael Zorn

It's a great sentiment, right? We should all be doing all we can to encourage kids to read...and yet:

The image on this poster is the image from the movie, not Sendak's book.

Are we to conclude that reading will inspire us to become independent auteurs with a fondness for dress-up and Catherine Keener?

Or are we to draw a more cynical conclusion: read, sure, but first...stop at the multi-plex and buy a ticket for Jonzes' movie.

I was wrong. I hadn't dodged a bullet, I'd only delayed being hit. After I told him that people often had more than one child and that sometimes only children were lonely, he got to the heart of things:

Liam: How? How does the baby get inside her?

Me (dammit): Well, the woman has eggs inside her--

Liam, hysterically laughing: Like she's a chicken?

Me: Well, no, not with a shell or anything.

L: Wouldn't that be funny if in a million years or so there were invaders from space and they ate only human eggs, wouldn't that be funny? I mean, sort of funny but really pretty bad, too?

Me: Funny? I don't know about that -
 
L: Where is the egg?

Me (deep breath): In the uterus, which is inside the woman, sort of lower than her tummy--

L: What's a woombah?

Me: What? Oh, a w-o-m-b?

I explain--very briefly--that wombs and uteruses (uteri?) are both part of the baby-growing process, and realize that my knowledge of my own anatomy is shockingly--shockingly--vague.

Liam: What happens to the egg?

Me (persistent little bugger, isn't he?):  Well, the egg is fertilized with sperm from a man and then the baby grows inside. 

Wait for it, wait for it...

Liam: How?

Shit ... here we go...

Me: Well, when the people love each other very much it can feel very good to be close to each other and then sometimes they decide to make a baby together, but not always. 

Yes, yes, that's right, I did a TOTAL END RUN around the key details.

Liam, thoughtful, sinks under the water in the tub and blows some bubbles. Emerges: Where does the sperm come from?

I am exhausted. This is the longest bath ever in the history of baths. 

Me:  It comes from a man's penis--

Liam, panicked: WHAT?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN???

Me (confused): Well, sperm is inside the man's body, when you get older, and it comes out - sort of like pee, you know?

Liam, calmer: Oh. Okay. I thought you had to get it off the penis or cut the penis off or something-

Nice job, mom. let's get that therapist lined up, shall we? Can you say castration anxiety?

Me: No, no, when you're older--then you'll have sperm. And sometimes it will come out even when you're sleeping, like during a dream. It's just part of your body getting ready to be a grownup.

This detail led to some technical discussion about penile plumbing that I shan't go into here--suffice it to say that there were analogies to garden hoses without water and garden hoses with water, and then we pressed onward, into literally murkier waters (it was a LONG bath).

Liam, laughing: What if you don't have an egg? Do you get a mad scientist to concoct one?

Me: Well, actually, yes--I mean, not a mad scientist but--

Liam: Wow. Do you need a man and a woman to have a baby?

Me: Um...you need the sperm, but that can happen in lots of different ways. So if a man loves a man, or a woman loves a woman, or a man and a woman love each other, they can have a baby; or if just a man or just a woman want to have a baby, that can happen too. 

(Desperately inventorying all the families we know: have I included all the various permutations of parenthood and familyhood? This conversation was a hell of a lot easier in the Betty Draper era, when families pretty much came in only one basic model.)

Liam finally climbs out of the bath, demurely covering himself in a towel. I take a deep breath, figuring we're on the other side of the difficult bits of the conversation.

Liam: Mommy? What does gay mean?

You're killing me, kid. I explain what gay means and then say that people often use the word as an insult and he nods, names a kid who is a bit of a bully and uses the word all the time, to be nasty.

Liam: But why would anyone care about gayness, mommy?

Me: I don't know, sweetie, they just do.

Liam: I think I would like to have a baby. When I'm older, I mean. I mean, kids are fun, right?

Me: Mmmm, yep, just loads of fun.  

Liam leans close to me and I reach to hug him, sure that he's feeling all listened to and supported and understood after our Deep and Important Conversation.

Mommy, he whispers, can I use the computer now?

There we were, at the dermatologist's office, having her look at some skin discolorations on Liam's face, and while she was checking something in her computer, Liam popped the question, with no introductory remarks, no prefatory throat clearing, just jumped in:

So how does a woman get a baby inside her?

I saw the doctor's head swivel towards me, then back to her computer, and it occurred to me that I could just punt: ask her to answer the question.  She is, after all the medical professional, and maybe she could even pull out a few charts and an anatomically correct mannequin.

But no, no, that wouldn't do.  We're supposed to, you know, be all patient and wise about this stuff, right?  I'm not supposed to let on that the very thought of my child--that sweet little body--getting all sexed up makes me want to cringe--and collapse in wild laughter. So I just said that when we were somewhere more private, I'd be glad to answer that question and we went on with the dermatologist visit.  And I can't swear to it, but I swear I heard the doctor chuckling as she left the examination room.

A week or so passed and I thought maybe The Question had gotten buried under homework and soccer practice and what-to-be-for-Halloween, but then one night when Liam was in the bath:

So mom, remember that question I asked you at the doctor's office?

I nod, knowing what's coming.

L: What's the answer?

I feint: "well, what do you know? What have you heard about how this happens?"

Liam: Nothing. I mean, basically nothing.

Me, following the instructions I read about in a really useful book called From Diapers to Dating (thanks, Carolyn, for the suggestion): so you want to know how a woman gets a baby inside her?

Liam: Well, I mean, once a woman has a baby, why would she have another one?

Fabulous, I think. We're not dealing with actual SEX here, we're just dealing with sibling rivalry. Piece o'cake.  I mouth a few platitudes about people liking to have a big family, and about how having a sibling can mean that you've always got someone to play with, even if they're sometimes aggravating, and so you don't have to be lonely--
 
Liam: So that's why anyone who is an only child has a gameboy, right? 

I nod, sure that I've dodged the sex-talk bullet.  But there is more to come, my friends, more to come.  It was a very long bath.

But then today--Saturday--was very cold and very gray, Liam had played a morning soccer game and an afternoon soccer game, and Husband needed time to finish packing for a week-long (week!) business trip. I like to say he's going to "Arabia," but in fact he's going to the much more prosaic (although still very far away) Abu Dhabi (which is not Dubai).  So when two mommy friends asked if we'd join them at the movies, I said yes (okay, in part I said yes because one promised to bring me candy corn from Economy Candy and I will do just about anything for candy corn).

Thus it was that I found myself, with a 5 year old and a 9 year old in tow, in a very crowded movie theater for the 4:30 showing of "Where the Wild Things Are."  If nothing else, I thought, I could hide my iPhone under my bag and make lists for the upcoming week: having Husband out of town for a week takes our already complicated schedules into a defcon four status that hurts my head to think about.

But you know what? I didn't even look at my phone once. The movie is...good. Actually, it's quite beautiful. Actually, many of the parents in the audience were snuffly-eyed at the end of it (you can decide for yourself if that's good or bad), and so were some of the kids.

It's not perfect, and it's not true to the letter of Sendak's book, but it's pretty close, I think, to the spirit of the book: the conflicting desires that we all have for anarchy and order, independence and dependence, adventure and safety.

The opening twenty minutes or so, which situate Max in "real life," enthralled Liam and Caleb. I think they saw in his life elements of their own, particularly the ways in which Max's world conspires to make him feel powerless.  And I saw myself in Max's mom--the belated tag-on of "please" to the shouted command to "get your stuff off the table now...."  and her attempts to deal with her tantruming son while she has company--the initial attempt to discipline said child with whispered commands through gritted teeth and a fake smile, the plea for good behavior so that fights don't have to take place while there are witnesses...oh yes, that's familiar territory.

But then Max takes off, and we are on unfamiliar ground. True, his room doesn't grow over with vines, but there is still a magical transformation, an epic journey "across a year and a day," and a violent stormy landing on the island of the wild things.

Much has been made of these wild things--their fuzzy costumes, the animatronic faces, the fact that they have individual personalities and, clearly, back stories: Judith and Ira are lovers, KW and Carol have had some kind of fight, no one pays attention to Alexander, Douglas and Carol are best friends...And the wild things talk about these relationships, fret about their emotions, and hope that discovering a King will Make Everything Better.

I would have thought that the five year old would be fidgeting and squitching during all the talky bits about these relationships, but it was the nine year olds who wanted to get on with the scenes of fort-building, mudball fighting, and, of course, the Wild Rumpus. Caleb sat entranced and when we got home, I realized why: after he dropped his coat on the floor (isn't that where it goes?"), he squatted down by his knight figures that he'd put down when we left for the movie and was immediately back to staging daring rescues and epic battles. The rest of us, as far as he was concerned, were completely invisible.  So Max's world, with some variations, was Caleb's world, while Liam and his friends have already left that world behind, for the (far inferior world) of computer games and sports.

Close to the end of the movie, as Max says good-bye to all his Wild Thing friends on the beach, Caleb turned to me and said, with whispered indignation "this a sad movie!" And then, when Carol comes lumbering onto the beach just in time to howl a bereft good-bye to his dear friend Max, Caleb whispered "Max has two families.The monster family and th'other family, wit'his mommy. I t'ink he loves both."

I was going to say something here about the whole power of imagination thing, or about hanging on to our inner child, or some blahblah like that, but Caleb's comment sent me in another direction. I went back to the logistics list that I didn't make because I got so caught up in Max's journey, and in the Wild Things' amazingly beautiful buildings, some of which resemble the sculptures of Martin Puryear.

My list of How I Will Manage While Husband Is Away include one friend who will pick up Caleb after school on Tuesday, another who will bring Liam home from after-school on the day I work late, a third who will watch Caleb for a few hours on Wednesday, and the long-time babysitter who said she'd walk Liam to school every morning (okay, true, I'm paying her, but she's a college student and I'm asking her to haul ass out of bed and be here by 7:45 every day, no small feat when you're 19). In short, this group--my other family, you could say--is saving my bacon this week. 

Caleb hit it just on the head. Max sails the vast ocean alone in his wobbly little boat, but at each end of his journey, there is a family. So too with us, don't you think? Two families: One we are assigned by the vagaries of blood and fate. The other we create for ourselves, but we love both.

And we all know to swerve widely around the Ranters and the Shouters: you never can tell when Ranting will spill over into Wild Arm Swinging.

But what about those subtler NYC indignities: the subway crush, the zombie-like checkout clerk at Walgreens, the glacial crawl of cabs down 5th avenue at rush hour? Or--my personal favorite, now that I am a daily bus rider--the Woman With Stinky Perfume? Not stinky like powdery Aunt Tillie with her decades-old bottle of Shalimar. No, I'm talking headache inducing, get-inside-my-nose-and-stay-there-for-days type perfume, probably sold in ten-gallon drums.

Nothing to be done about Stinky Perfume Lady (SPL), usually, other than go home and try to wash out the inside of my nose, which generally fails because I start to snort and whuffle and realize that if I were ever waterboarded, I would pony up state secrets in a heartbeat.

Today, however, on my new home away from home, the 14D Bus, there was a collision between a Stinky Perfume Lady and a Ranter, and oh, my friends, it was delicious.

I smelled SPL but never saw her; her stench wafted far forward from where she was sitting and I started to calibrate whether I could get off the bus and still get to where I needed to go without being late.  Then booming through the bus, a voice:

Lady if you're gonna wear perfume wear something good I've got a headache already and it's only been two stops and I sure as hell hope you don't have a family because you're gonna kill them with that stuff it smells like damn gasoline!  You gotta get off this damn bus and air yourself out! Shit!

No one applauded but I wasn't the only one smiling in satisfaction. That's the thing about New York: in other cities, the id gets sublimated, repressed. Here? The id has a metrocard, just like the rest of us.

Caleb: Nuthin

Me (summoning the patience of Job): Right. But carrots or peas?

Caleb: Okay. Peas. FIVE PEAS. Cold ones. And I'm doing what Nancy said to do and holding my nose when I eat them.

In fact he ate SIX peas and stopped holding his nose when I pointed out that frozen peas have no flavor.

I consider this a major victory.

I thought she was kidding--we'd beeen the PTA Co-Presidents last year, and bake sales had been an ongoing aggravation: when to schedule them, how to staff them, how to scan every donation for potentially lethal ingredients (nuts! sesame seeds! wheat!), how to make sure that all the kids got a chance to exchange their sweaty quarters for a chocolate chip cookie.

But despite the aggravation, we staged those bake sales, yes we did. And there are four thousand, five hundred and twenty-two reasons why we did so: the four or five bake sales we held last year brought in 4,522 dollars.

That's a lot of sweaty quarters.

That much money allows our PTA to foot the bill for 5th graders whose families can't afford the price of the 5th grade class camping trip; to pay for kids who might not otherwise be able to join the track team; to fund instrument rental for kids who REALLY want to play the trombone, but whose parents don't have any extra money in their budgets.

The joke is that this is no joke: the DOE really and truly has put a policy in place that bans bake sales.

Bake sales sell unhealthy food, according to Mayor Mike and his sidekick, Joyless Joe, and so they are going to save our tubby children from further expansion.

Banning monthly or bi-monthly bake sales seems a tad...um...bass-ackward, frankly, if your goal is healthy kids with healthly habits.  What about...having gym class more than once a week? Or a post-lunch recess period that lasts longer than 20 minutes? Oh--right--I forgot. Those activities would take time away from Very Important Test Prep.

So okay, clearly more exercise is out of the question because Data Collection and Accountability matter more.

Let us then consider the school lunch menu for elementary schools in Manhattan, shall we?  Today's choices are Sweet & Sour Roasted Chicken, Golden Fish and Cheese, White Rice, and if you're at a SchoolPlus cafeteria you can get collards with sweet tomato.  Anyone want to place bets on how many fourth graders are getting the collards? And could someone define "golden fish" for me? If you drop your kid off for the free breakfast, she could have had a turkey patty with cheese on a biscuit, or pancakes with syrup. Tomorrow's lunch is something called Southwest Style Beef that comes with something called "Baked Scoops." Not sure baked scoops of what, exactly, but I'll bet it's...healthy. 

And as we peruse our school lunch menus, let's not even THINK about what all my friends are calling the "scary hamburger article" in Sunday's Times.  I mean, given the choice, wouldn't you rather your kid eat a sugar-bomb cupcake than hamburger meat that's potentially riddled with E. coli or god knows what else?  Can the DOE can guaran-damn-tee me that the burger patties, taco beef, and "baked scoops" on their lunch menus come from utterly safe sources? Given that the USDA is pretty much in cahoots with the beef-packing industry, I'm thinking that's a promise that will be a long time coming.  

So yeah, let's ban bake sales instead of equipping school kitchens so that they can actually cook. Right now, most school kitchens simply assemble food from a list of DOE approved ingredients: frozen pre-roasted commodity chickens, for example. Would anyone like to think about the source of something called a "commodity chicken"?

Notice that I'm not even talking about how school organizations and PTAs are supposed to make up the shortfall in their budgets if they can't hold bake sales. The Times article quotes a school official as saying that maybe schools could hold walk-a-thons to raise money, instead of bake sales. Hmm... let's see. Collecting money from donors, finding a route, organizing the participants, hoping it doesn't rain...versus a table in the cafeteria stocked with treats brought in by parents.

Okay, now maybe smokers felt the same way when smoking was banned in bars, but no one yet has said that a cupcake a month causes cancer. Banning bake sales brings to mind the word "draconian" - also ridiculous, farcical, and you've-got-to-be-fucking-kidding (if I hyphenate it's one word, right?)  It's like cutting off your hand because you've got a hangnail.

I'm fighting back, dammit. I'm going to send Liam and Caleb to school EVERY SINGLE DAY with lunchboxes filled with cupcakes, cookies, brownies, maybe even the occasional gummy worm--and I'm telling them to share with all their friends.

Let Bloomberg send the Sugar Stasi after me. They can have my cupcake when they wrestle it out of my fat sticky fingers.

It was my first-ever blog-related freebie: a product that someone wants me to write about. And so I shall, keeping in mind, of course, the Bloggers With Integrity pledge that I signed (because Mom-101 said we should).

First I should mention that Husband thinks it's marvelous that people are sending me products and he's wondering when someone will want me to write about a three-bedroom apartment with a garden and a river view somewhere in the West Village.  I say, let's start with the food processor thing and work our way up.

Second, I have to say that Liam and Caleb thought that the name--and the Ninja figure on the box--were "totally awesome."

So having told you that this is a product review for a freebie, and that my kids approve of the packaging, I should tell you how it works, right? Short answer? Works great. 

I've had a little bitty Cuisinart mini-prep for a while, which is fine for when I want to make just a soupcon of pesto, or a dollop of guacamole, but that's about it. I've got an almost vintage Osterizer blender with a very powerful motor (although it's been making ominous noises lately), but it's a pain in the butt to make anything in it other than smoothies and milkshakes: only the very bottom layer gets pulverized, so there's lots of stopping, scraping and smooshing. 

The Ninja, however, has its motor on top and it comes with a tall pitcher and a smallish mini-prep.  You pile your ingredients in whichever container, pop the motor on the top, and vroom, vroom, vroom: smoothie is done, guac is done, chicken salad is done... Presto. All the parts go in the dishwasher; the containers have storage lids so that whatever is left can get covered up and stashed in the fridge, and it fits very tidily on the counter where the Osterizer used to sit.  Someday (maybe in that West Village apartment) I'll have enough counter-space for ALL the appliances to happily co-exist, but at the moment, counter real estate is at a premium, so the Osterizer gets relegated to the closet.

Online, the Ninja retails for about $59, plus shipping/handling; the Cuisinart mini-prep is almost $30, without shipping/handling.  The Ninja doesn't have a bread hook, the way a big Cuisinart does, but hey--isn't half the fun of making bread pounding out your aggressions on the dough? Who among us really, really uses that bread hook?

Now... who do I talk to about that three-bedroom West Village apartment?