Also in the Stash of Regrettable Childhood: my security blanket, or as I called it, my Cribby. Everybody, meet Cribby. Or...what's left of it. Cribby was, at one time, a fitted crib sheet, though the elastic has been gone for about as long as I can remember, and even photos of me with Cribby as a little girl show that it was pretty much a shredded pile of a sadness bowl since very early on too. I don't recall how old I was when I finally allowed my mom to put it away for good, though I know there were at least a couple aborted attempts that ended with me walking into her room and shamefully requesting it back. Cribby didn't come on my honeymoon or anything though, so go me. Today, Cribby reminds me of a Regretsy-worthy scarf offering: I would totally try to sell it for $50 as a FELTED VINTAGE COTTON HAND-KNOTTED AVANT-GARDE OOAK HIPSTER DOUCHEBAG NECKERSCARF if it weren't for a couple mysterious reddish stains on one edge: I am pretty sure biohazards will get you negative feedback on Etsy. (I had a back-up Cribby for when the A-squad one was in the wash. It held... Read more →

Camp, day two. Huddled at B&N again with, unfortunately, no wallet. Hiding behind a...pillar thing so the Imaginary Authority Figures don't catch me poaching free wifi despite not purchasing anything. Though I would love to purchase something! Maybe one of those Twitter marketing books could tell me how to beg for spare change. If every Rockville-based follower stopped by with a nickel I'd be halfway to a latte right now! Where are you assholes? God, but social media is useless. I've now been officially singled out as an Old Timer at the drop-off and pick-up. Mothers are all but sidling up to me all, word on the street is that you've been here before and know a few things about this here special ed jungle. Can I get a preschool recommendation in exchange for a playdate? Who's your occupational therapist? Come on, man, help me out, I'm dying over here. It's funny, but true. I apparently now give off the vibe of someone who knows what they're doing. Maybe I seem less...insane or high-strung or HI HI HI LIKE ME LIKE MEEEEE than I used to, or because I know all the therapists and counselors and even a few of... Read more →

I just dropped Noah off at his first day of summer camp, which is in his old preschool classroom, with his old preschool teacher, along with three or four of his old preschool classmates. None of which helped the case I was trying to build all last week about preschool being over and it not being my fault that I couldn't take him to preschool, I'm not saying this to be mean, Noah, there really just isn't any school but hey, thanks for letting me know that you truly would rather do anything else in the world than hang out with Mommy for a few measly days. Last summer, Noah immediately became somewhat infamous at this camp for wedging his entire body into a cubby and refusing to come out for much of the first day. Today, he and I got into a spirited discussion in the car about how five was his favorite number, and how five had been MY favorite number as a little girl too, and whether it was okay that we both had the same favorite number, because he didn't think so. I was like, whatever, I claimed five as my favorite number back in 1981,... Read more →

(I promise I'll go easy on the scanning stuff from now on, as I'm sure the amusement level is running down with each subsequent post, like yes, yes, we get it, Amy, you were a kid once! Like everybody else! And you said/wrote/wore the darnedest things, etc., ad nauseam, blah blah scancakes.) (Naked Old Man Monkey Baby says BITCH PLZ SHE'S GOT NOTHING ELSE TO TALK ABOUT.) I'm about Ezra's age here, give or take a few months, going apeshit over...something. I do wish my mom had saved those pants, because they are outstandingly awful. I would make my children wear them ALL THE TIME. There you have it: Definitive proof that the mailman is NOT Ezra's mother. And here is definitive proof that I was an obnoxious little overachiever, even in preschool: STRAIGHT O's, BITCHES. And two O-plusses, for "Sense of Humor" and "Attention Span." The teacher notes, though, after "Works and Plays With Will Others" that I "sometimes becomes emotional during free playtime. She is sometimes very sensitive about what others say or do." (Translation: She's a tattle-tale who cries a lot.) A couple years later my concerns about other people's behavior extended to the afterlife, as I... Read more →

Today's childhood relic, scanned and color-corrected and offered up for your mockery, is the very first thing I ever wrote in my life. I believe I have mentioned its existence before, though it turns out I had the title and some very important plot points wrong, and now here it is: Half short story, half children's book, half early experiment in Seinfeldian-like narrative structure of NOTHING HAPPENING, and yes, I know I've included too many halves there but I'm leaving it like that. After the jump, I present the newly remastered and out-of-my-mom's-hope-chest edition of The Little Bunny Rabbit, by Amy, age 5. *Clears throat* Ahem. Page one. "Once upon a time in a little blue" (In a little blue WHAT? Oh my God, this thing just hooks you in from the very first page.) (The accompanying illustration. Which MIGHT contain a hint, but I don't know. I was a tricky little thing back then.) "house there lived a little pink rabbit with a little gray tail" (Oh, It was the house. Never mind then.) "One time the little pink rabbit invited her friend the little orange turkey." (I so did not draw that turkey. My neighbor's older sister did,... Read more →

Among the many things my mom held onto: School photos. Lots and lots of school photos that FOR SOME REASON I CANNOT FIGURE OUT never made it into frames on the wall or hell, even tacked to the fridge with a magnet, because here they are years later still in their envelopes. Most of them didn't even get the wallet-sized ones separated from the 5x7s. (Sort of like Noah's school portrait this year, which I only ordered because I thought they were funny, because I completely forgot about picture day and sent him to school in desperate need of a haircut [and probably a bath], in a soccer jersey because it was the only clean shirt I could find. Now I have two dozen of these studies in ragamuffinism and zero idea what to actually do with them:) (CATCH WORLD CUP FEVER!) (OR ELSSSSSSE!) Anyway, now on to the really embarrassing shit. This is the only photo I can for-sure identify what grade I was in -- sixth -- simply because of the accompanying class photo with me wearing the same outfit. It was a dress. A floofy full-skirted one, with matching tights. I remember picking it out at TJMaxx... Read more →

We visited my parents this weekend. I haven't really written about them in awhile, I know -- it's easier to report on a crisis than to write entry after entry about a parent's slow decline. But I'll skip ahead to the conclusion of a lot of stuff from this year: My parents are getting ready to sell their house and move into some kind of senior/convalescent/assisted care home. And now I'll gloss over THAT and skip ahead to the bright side of things, which is that my mother's attempts to purge their house of as much clutter and stuff as possible mean that I came home with a HUGE BAG of hideously embarrassing artifacts from my childhood and adolescence to share with you guys. There was also an ex-boyfriend sighting and if you're the type who likes to keep a mental score when it comes to these things, let me assure you that I TOTALLY WIN, OH MY GOD. Bright side! We shall look at the bright side! But before I start firing up the scanner so y'all can make fun of my hair and I dunno, I think there's some poetry or some stories about unicorns in there too,... Read more →

Indulge me, you guys. For lo, my memory card reader has been lost for many, many days, trapping so many lovely photos from last week on my camera, because I am dumb and forgot that you can just stick a USB cable directly in the camera, like oh. Right. Technology! What a country! Anyway, I'm on a very tight deadlines everywhere today because I promised to take Noah to see Toy Story 3 after lunch. He is LIVING for after lunch right now. It is the center of his entire UNIVERSE right now. He cried this morning when he realized that he could not simply eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for breakfast and thus trick the space-time continuum into suddenly being "after lunch." (He JUST became aware of the movie's existence earlier this week. He saw a commercial for it and seemed to think, at first, that it was one of the previous installments, but then that big number three appeared under the logo and he was all, "THREE? THREEEEEE?" He's been bouncing off the walls ever since. I foresee a lot of super-geeky camping out in lines in this fanboy's future.) Anyway! Here are some pictures from Noah's end-of-school parties.... Read more →

One of the things we were told to "work on" this summer was...shaving cream. No! Really. We have a note from a therapist and everything. OBVIOUSLY, a lot of Noah's sensory/tactile issues have improved dramatically over the past year. He'll walk barefoot in the yard, play in the sandbox, get dirty at the playground -- sometimes he'll even fingerpaint! Imagine that! But shaving cream still freaked him out. And oh, but early intervention folks LOOOOOVE the shaving cream. They paint with it, "cook" with it, encourage the kids to get really messy with it. They've been trying to get Noah to play with shaving cream for a good two-and-a-half years now. It's like an SPD rite of passage: BOW DOWN BEFORE YOUR GILLETTIAN GODS. But he wouldn't go near it, ever. He refused. Sometimes there were tears. Sometimes he'd hide under a table. By the end of this school year he would simply scream "NO THANK YOU" as soon as the can of foaming gel made an appearance. His teachers eventually stopped trying -- Noah was improving in so many areas that they decided he maybe deserved a pass on this one little quirk. So that was on our list... Read more →

So. Yeah. That was fun. Those of you on the Twitthing already know, and probably feel like you know too much. But for everybody else: I got sick. Like, really terribly embarrassingly, what-do-you-MEAN-I-have-to-ride-in-an-elevator-to-get-to-a-bathroom sick. (Over the weekend, Ezra had one of those mysterious out-of-nowhere barfing incidents, where he just puked up an entire meal and then went on with his life just fine. Flash to 72 hours or so later, and INCUBATION COMPLETE! FULL ADULT-SIZED VIRUS MORPH ACHIEVED! NOW IS THE TIME TO DIE!) So. Yeah. I woke up yesterday feeling...not great, but not terrible. A little off. I blamed a shitty night of sleep, since I woke up multiple times convinced that I'd overslept and missed my 8:30 am presentation, only to look at the clock and see that, no, it's 3:15 am, jackass, simmer down. I tried to eat a bagel and just...couldn't. I blamed this on the fact that it just wasn't a very good bagel, ignoring even more signs that my body was getting ready to revolt. (I would make a terrible protagonist in a Dan Brown novel, don't you think?) The rest of the morning was a blur -- the first session went okay, even... Read more →