Down, Boy!

The children wanted a dog. I was seven months pregnant and hyper-vulnerable to anything precious. Smelling my weakness as only children who want something can, they took me to a pocket-sized pet store on Lexington Avenue "just to show me" the baby bulldog. It was kismet. The bulldog seemed to recognize me immediately, as if maybe she had been my faithful sidekick in a prior life. Or even a favorite niece. She danced in her cage, yipped playfully, winked. I was melting.

Like a steamship in a cloth coat, I made my way to the end of a narrow aisle where a saleswoman had been watching us.

"Does she shed?" I asked, pointing to the dog, who was making googly eyes at Scott.

"Like a mother you-know-what," said the saleswoman shaking her head.

She wedged herself between me and a row of dog food on my starboard side and leaned into my ear.

"Don't do it," she whispered. "She's cute now, but that's not the right dog for you. Those bulldogs, they slobber like crazy. And I don't know how she'll be with a baby. You got your hands full as it is," she said, looking pointedly at Scott, who at that moment was pretending to be a dog sniffing the children's pockets for treats.

"This isn't the first time you talked a pregnant woman out of a dog, is it," I said knowingly. "Thank you."

"I've had four kids myself," she said, then disappeared behind the fish tanks.

I ushered the children out. Emma began her negotiations: "If we don't get a dog this year, then maybe for my birthday," she began.

"Look, I love dogs. But we are about to have a baby. Can we just wait and see how much fun your baby brother is? If he's not that great and you still feel like you need a dog, we'll re-evaluate."

"Okay," said Emma. "Let's pencil in a discussion for next Halloween."

Henry thankfully has proven highly entertaining to his brother and sister. Not only can he fetch, but he licks their noses, rolls over on command and loves them with abandon. Halloween passed without discussion of a dog, although I was prepared to put Henry in a puppy costume if necessary.

I thought I had dodged the doggie bullet.

And then Scott and I attended a silent auction and cocktail party to benefit Quinny's tony nursery school.

The crowd was glittery, women in double-digit-carat diamond rings sporting a rainbow array of the season's It bags and men in bespoke suits. I was wearing a Betsy Johnson dress several seasons too tight, Aerosole boots and a handbag I got for free with a subscription to W ten years ago. Scott's suit was rumpled from playing with the kids and his tie was cocked at a funny angle because, according to another class father, his knot was too small.

On empty stomachs, we had three quick glasses of wine and perused the auction items. We dutifully bid on Quinny's class project and ribbed the parents of one of Quinny's classmates who were tipsily bidding on a Donnie and Marie Osmond Broadway Christmas show package.

I love a silent auction and I admit that I have had problems in the past with drinking and bidding. I've had good luck - a lovely party at a gym for Quinny and all his classmates, and bad - a portrait of a woman sprouting green wings and standing on Saturn that no one gets but me, which is now in Scott's mother's basement and a giant oil painting hanging in our living room that my mother says looks like snakes crawling through a pillory. (I see a circus.)

Scott was keeping a close eye on me when I saw it: the grand prize of the auction, a Jeff Koons puppy vase donated by the artist himself. The opening bid was a couple thousand dollars under market and no one had bid yet.

Not only do I have a problem with drunk bidding, but I am convinced that one of these days I will strike it rich. Easily. Like, by purchasing some great piece of art that googles in value. Although my mother would disagree, I fancy myself as having an eye for art.

Thus, the Koons Puppy Vase.

"Let's bid," I urged Scott. "Please!"

"You are nuts," he said. "No one else bid on it. What do you know that they don't?"

"I know that the market value is 50 percent higher than the opening bid," I said sagely. (A class mother had told me this.)

We had another glass of wine.

"I can't believe I'm even considering this," Scott said. But he has his own weakness. He has never said No to me. And so in his spidery scrawl, he wrote down our names on the clipboard next to the Puppy Vase.

I danced in place happily. Suddenly, the glittery parents grew silent. The school's crown jewels of parents had arrived, Donald and Melania Trump. They air kissed their way around the auction items until they came to my dog.

The Donald picked up the clip board.

"Don't you dare bid on my dog," I hissed into his cotton candy hair, somewhere where I thought an ear would be.

"Or maybe you're too smart to bid?" I added, suddenly doubting myself. He smiled at me the way you smile at small children or really old people and replaced the clipboard.

"Walk away," I said to Scott. Maybe the dog wasn't such a good idea. It was incredibly expensive. And The Donald didn't seem to think it was such a hot investment.

A young father with a beautiful blond wife walked over to the dog.

I could read her lips. She was either saying, "I want it for Sophie's room," or "This weather is doom and gloom."

He picked up the pen next to the clipboard.

I tugged on Scott's arm. "Look at that guy! He's taking our dog!"

They were probably ten years younger than us. The man was at least a foot taller than Scott and the woman was so thin she seemed vaporish. And they were looking at our dog with what I can only describe as entitlement.

Scott strode purposefully over to the clipboard and outbid him.

The man picked up the pen and outbid Scott.

Scott outbid him.

They went back and forth like this until the lined page was almost full. Finally Scott strode up to him and said in the gravelly tough-guy voice I fell in love with: "I'm not gonna stop."

The tall man scribbled his name again, looking defiant. Scott immediately wrote our names under his.

The man walked up to me. "Enjoy your dog in good health," he sneered.

"You betcha we will!" I answered.

"You beat him!" I said to Scott. "We won the dog!"

"Elise, how are we going to pay for this?" Scott asked, looking suddenly serious. "You do understand that we are easily the poorest people in the room and we bid on one of the most expensive items."

"We'll pay for it out of my retirement account," I answered brightly. After all, I had quit my job so I actually am retired, at least for now. And what better investment than a one-in-3000 dog vase?

"This is what happens when our pathologies collide," Scott said fondly, tousling my hair.

Up until that moment, I had thought about the combination of our pathologies in bleak terms - the dark spells we had, how we could lose one another, or worse, sometimes hate what we saw.

But this puppy vase, excessive and ridiculous as it was for a couple of pikers like us, is evidence that even our pathologies might be able to play nicely together.

It will also be a reminder of what I love in Scott, that scrappy Staten Island kid whose not afraid to play in anyone's sandbox. And who can't say no to me.

"We have a new dog," we told the children when we got home. "And whoever breaks it is going to public school," Scott added.

Reality Bites

There was a day not so long ago when I was holding a gallon of milk in the middle of my kitchen, unsure what to do with it.

I didn't recognize it as milk qua milk. I just knew that it something that went somewhere, usually in the morning. I touched it. It was cold. I looked at the refrigerator. I may have said aloud: "Aha, cold things are kept there," and that's how the milk wound up in the fridge instead of Scott's sock drawer.

The State Department regularly includes sleep deprivation among methods of torture in its reports on human rights abuses. Ninety-six hours straight is pretty much the standard minimum for torture, although lots of people start hallucinating after forty-eight. It had been about ten months since the last time I had more than three straight hours of sleep when I forgot what milk was.

I knew I needed help. Henry woke every two to three hours to nurse long after friends with babies the same age were starting to enjoy twelve baby-free hours at night. Getting Henry to nap required at least an hour of cycling through rocking, singing, jiggling him, holding my breath while he at last fell asleep in my arms, placing him in his crib, having his eyes flutter open the minute his back hit the mattress, and back to rocking, etc., until he finally passed out. Then he would nap for twenty minutes and wake screaming and exhausted. I would pour him into the stroller and stagger around the neighborhood hoping he'd close his eyes for even a few minutes.

That's when the Baby Whisperer magically entered my life.

Imagine mixing former Texas Governor Ann Richards with a baby nurse and a liberal shot of hot sauce and wrapping it all up in petit four pastels and you'll get Linda.

Linda caught the eye of some clever television executives after working her magic on one of their own babies. They decided to make a presentation tape to shop around the networks. I met Linda after a casting agent determined that I looked the part of a desperate housewife in need of some serious baby whispering.

Linda doesn't walk into a room, she blows in like a strong gust of wind. We got down to business right away. I was jiggling Henry on my hip and apologizing as he climbed up my shoulder on to my head like a little monkey and started tearing out my hair from the roots.

"He's tired," I explained.

"Honey, it's like he's been on a hamster wheel all night," Linda answered. "Put him down," she ordered gently.

"Down? On the floor?"

"Let me him play. Let him crawl, wear himself out. You've got your house baby-proofed. Give him some space."

I put Henry on the ground gingerly. He crawled over to the coffee table, which I had ringed with thick plastic foam, and pulled himself up to stand, smiling his wide, gummy grin.

"He's not gonna get hurt on that. There's more padding in here than a mental hospital. Let him go," Linda said.

That was my first revelation - that Henry needed more time knocking himself out physically before I tried to put him to bed. I spent hours upon hours playing with Henry, rocking him, cuddling him, reading to him -- but what I didn't do enough of was just leaving him alone (but supervised) and allowing him to explore.

"You have a dysfunctional relationship with your baby," Linda said frankly. "You are co-dependent."

I couldn't argue. Henry and I were literally joined at the hip and I had been unable to stomach allowing him to cry himself to sleep. But I was keeping him from learning how to soothe himself.

Linda was firm, but reassuring -- I was sure she made the sharpest hospital corners and the softest biscuits in Texas. With her by my side, we put Henry down for a nap and let him cry and wail for almost three hours before he finally fell asleep.

That night, he slept through the night with barely a whimper before bed. Linda arrived the next day for more "baby boot camp." Henry gave her a hard look. His eyes seemed to say, "You are so damn lucky I can't talk yet."

Naps were to be our greatest challenge. No nursing Henry before bed, no rocking him to sleep. I could develop a sleep-time routine, and then he was to be put down awake and allowed to cry himself to sleep -- or, as was the case with Henry, to stand rigid against the bars of his crib shouting "Mama" at the top of his lungs for two hours until it was time for his next feeding.

Linda returned to Texas, but stayed in touch by phone. She left reassuring messages for me when I was afraid I might crack. I had to put Henry down, then go into my shower, the only place in the apartment where I couldn't hear his screams.

I'm not sure who cried more during sleep-training, me or Henry. Leaving him to cry in his crib took every ounce of strength I had. I couldn't sleep at night because I was waking up every couple hours to listen for him. When I did finally sleep, I had nightmares.

Eventually I resurrected Henry's pacifier and allowed him to have it when I put him to bed. And I rocked him while I read and sang to him. But our entire routine was down to about 15 minutes and I always put him down in his crib awake.

For two weeks, I stood by my routine and Henry stood by his. I put him to bed, he stood at his crib railing and screamed. But each day, he screamed a little less. Then there came a day when Henry flatly refused to nap. He howled like an animal. All day. That night, he was still up at 11 p.m.

I was an emotional shipwreck a mile from safe harbor. We were so close, and now everything was lost. Mother overboard. I searched the house frantically for Linda's number and couldn't find it. I sent manic texts to her business manager.

In desperation, I called my mother. "It's always darkest before the dawn," she said.

That day in the Post, there was a story about David Tarloff, a man who is claiming insanity after he brutally stabbed a psychologist to death. He was carrying adult diapers at the time, and later said he was planning to free his sick mother from her nursing home and take her to Hawaii. Turns out David and his mother slept in the same bed in Queens until he was about 40.

I didn't want to raise a David Tarloff. I wanted an Olympic champion, a future president, or at least a man who could sleep through the night without his mother.

The next day Henry and I were up with the sun.

After his breakfast, I took him into his nursery, rocked him for a few minutes, read him a story, and forced myself to say brightly "Nap time!" in the same voice I usually reserve for "Cocktails!"

I closed the door and waited for the verbal assault. Nothing. Not a peep.

He woke two hours later, calm and smiling. I fell on him like I was Michael Phelps' mother. "I am so proud of you!" I gushed. We did a victory lap around the apartment.

Four hours later, I did the same thing - a little rocking, a story and some singing. I laid him down in his crib with his "softie," a cross between a stuffed animal and a plush handkerchief.

He blinked a few times after I announced "Nap time!" I shut the door. Silence.

Since then, Henry usually goes to bed without a fight. Henry sleeping is a wondrous thing. He is less agitated, more cuddly. He has been eating almost twice as much and his time between naps is filled with happy play.

Sometimes a dose of harsh reality is exactly what we need.

Togetherness

We took the children to Atlantis, a Caribbean children's paradise with miles of swimming pools and umpteen water slides.

As most families do when they relocate, we quickly settled into a routine:

In the mornings, we had a big family buffet breakfast. Every day we coaxed eggs into Quinny with promises of a chocolate munchkin. Emma discovered the joys of chocolate syrup on chocolate chip pancakes, served up with a side of bacon. Henry enjoyed the local homemade yogurt after almost choking on a piece of egg white. I drank a pot of the good, strong coffee and Scott presided over the table with a big smile, waving away offers of more food - "You have it" - just happy to be there with his brood.

After breakfast, Scott took the children swimming in the sea while I put Henry to sleep in a nest I made him, encircling him, once he was safely unconscious, with oversized pillows that I prayed were bed bug-free. He staunchly refused the hotel crib, and I couldn't blame him. It looked like a baby jail cell on wheels with plastic sheets and a bumper that smelled of wet diapers.

While Henry slept, I tidied our room and then sat on our balcony watching Scott with Emma and Quinny. Like a familiar constellation in the night sky, I could always spot them immediately: Three brown heads close together near the shoreline, Scott holding Quinny close, Emma circling them, swimming out a few feet to look at a fish, then quickly coming back.

Scott loves nothing more than having all of us within arm's reach. But I need time alone as much as I need oxygen. I felt claustrophobic with the five of us packed into a single hotel room. The complete lack of privacy set my teeth on edge and made my bones ache, like an arthritic before a storm.

Yet on my perch above the sea, with Henry gently snoring on the other side of the open door, I buzzed with love for all of them. How happy I knew Scott to be in that moment, his shoulder blades turning boiled-lobster-red, Quinny balanced on his knee, Emma bringing shells like small offerings to her beloved Papa.

It was so easy to love them from that distance. Depending on where they were below me, I calculated how long it would take me to reach them if I were to see a dorsal fin or if one brown head suddenly disappeared underwater. My love shone down on them like the sun.

But by noon, Henry would be awake and the children and Scott would be ambling back into the room, shedding wet bathing suits on beds, tracking sand across the carpet.

On the day the maid failed to clean while we were out at lunch and I walked into a hotel room that looked like the scene of a playdate gone wild, I announced that I had to leave. Imemdiately.

"Can I come?" asked Emma hopefully.

"No," I said. "I just need to be alone."

I ran to the adults only swimming pool like an escapee being tracked by dogs and dove in as if to hide my scent. I stayed underwater for a long time, hearing nothing, being nothing. I walked to the beach and into the warm, clear water. I floated on my back.

I must have beeen gone 20 minutes before I urgently wanted to see Emma. The disappointment in her eyes was haunting me. I walked, dripping, back to our room. There was a neat stack of towels in the bathroom and the beds were made, but Scott and the children were gone. A thunderstorm struck suddenly and I sat on the balcony scanning the resort for a sign of them. I was just starting to get frantic - thinking about the metal in Henry's stroller, wondering if the children had drank enough water - when Scott called.

They had gone to the aquarium, then stopped in a lounge for a drink. Scott sounded pleased with himself. They were all dry, and each child had a new stuffed dolphin. I pined for them ... Until they blew back into the room like a tropical storm, needing showers and teeth brushed, rifling through drawers to find the exact outfit they had to wear to dinner, jumping exuberantly on the freshly-made beds.

On the chartered bus back to the airport, Scott let out a sigh. "That was so relaxing," he said. I stared at him, dumbfounded. I hadn't slept more than a few hours each night and my arms were aching from holding Henry and throwing the big kids around in the pool. We were about to take an international flight with three kids and an obscene amount of luggage, made all the heavier because most of the contents were wet. The unpacking! The laundry! My head was spinning while Scott started gently snoring beside me, a small, contented smile on his face.

Back in New York the next day, we took the kids to the playground. I tweaked my wrist taking Henry out of the baby swing. It started throbbing.

"You have to go to the hospital," Scott said. "I think you broke your wrist."

"I don't think so," I said. But it hurt. A lot.

My mother called, her momdar sensing that there was an injury.

"Go to the hospital," she said.

"I can't leave the kids," I answered.

"Of course you can. Scott can handle them."

She was right, of course. I put Henry and Quinny down for a nap. Scott and Emma were embroiled in a tense game of Star Wars Lego Wii.

"I'm going to the E.R.," I called out.

"Good," said Scott. "We're fine."

On the way to the hospital, I got an ice cream cone. I signed myself in and sat in the waiting room, licking my cone. A Jets game was playing in the corner. The only only other person in the room was a homeless man who had procured a cheesburger for himself and was rapaciously eating it.

"Bon Appetit," I said, cheering him with my cone. For the first time in a week, I felt my shoulders drop from where they were hunched next to my ears. I smiled. He smiled. For different reasons, we were both just happy to be there.

You Can Go Home Again

Ah, the family vacation - a rite of summer. Memories that become as much a part of us as our tissue, blood and bones.

Our summer vacations always entailed the family station wagon breaking down on the way to see our grandparents and our father trying to fix the car with whatever was at hand. When our windshield wiper inexplicably broke during a thunderstorm, my father stopped at a farm stand to buy a potato. He bit the potato in half and smeared the windshield with the potato on the theory that potatoes were somehow water-repellent.

When that didn't work, and with the windshield now completely obscured by rain and potato, he tied one of my brother's shoelaces to the end of the wiper, rolled down the window, and drove with his left hand outside, manually operating the wiper using the shoelace. Where was my mother in all of this? She was reaching around behind her, swatting her hairbrush in the general direction of the backseat to quiet the chorus of protests by my brothers and me.

Given this, you may wonder why I chose to visit these people this summer, and to subject my own children to them.

It was Henry's first trip to Cumberland, my hometown. We stayed at Rocky Gap, a lovely lakeside resort that I have been visiting for more than 30 years, the kind of place where kids under 10 still eat for free and the service is slower than an upside-down box turtle.

Several of my best friends from elementary and middle school still live in Cumberland and almost all of them have daughters. Sherri brought 5-year-old Elle and her toddler brother Ben Ben down from New York. Julie was visiting from Florida with Cameron. Kerry came with 7-year-old Ila. Samantha brought Grace. And Emma and the girls, who last saw each other a year ago at Rocky Gap, immediately reconnected and formed a girl gang. Shawn, who is an adoring auntie, and Heather, who had the sense to let her kids stay on their bedtime schedule, joined the rest of us for drinks lakeside while Scott and Samantha's husband watched the girls swim and my parents stayed with the boys in our room.

We got caught up on each other's lives over shots and homemade birthday cake. I love these women. They oxygenate my blood. Heather has her mother's hilarious sense of humor and could win a prize for sexiest preacher's wife. Julie, who still loves a good time, just like high school, was the prettiest homecoming queen in our history and is still clueless about how gorgeous she is. Kerry is one of the most passionate people I've ever met, especially after a few beers. Samantha is mother to everyone, loving our children as if they were her own and raising Grace to be a little lady worthy of her name. Shawn is a glamour girl on the outside, but on the inside, she's a country girl more loyal than a St. Bernard. And Sherri is the closest thing I have to a sister, and I'm not convinced an actual sister could be better.

We have been there for each other through the deaths of parents, the births of children, the ends of marriages, the beginnings of new relationships. I don't think I could live without them. And to see our daughters playing together, bonding, having an impromptu sleep-over in Sherri's room and sneaking potato chips in bed, almost blew my heart out of my chest.

It was worth the fifteen hours spent in the car with a crying six-month-old, Emma throwing up into a grocery bag and Quinny having to go potty during a traffic jam on I-95. It was even worth the fight Scott and I had over a headrest that was obscuring the back windshield, which ended in me giving him the finger in front of the children. (In my defense, I gave him the finger so that I wouldn't curse him out loud.)

Close on the heels of this trip to Cumberland was Scott's family reunion in Westchester. The Balber reunions were started 40 years ago by ten Balber cousins who grew up in the same building in Brooklyn. There is a dysfunctional structure to these reunions, with a regular family meeting presided over by Balber Board Chairman Cousin Michael. Cousin Petey, whose real name is Stuart, is the family CFO, who reported a zero balance in the family's coffers. (Not surprising, since the sole family asset is a forty-year-old hard salami.) Cousin Marty gave a stirring presentation on Balber family origins, discovered by him at a genealogy booth at a Renaissance Fair: "You thought we were Russian, but we're Swiss, you dummies," he said, unveiling a computer-generated Balber family crest. In the center was a large palm tree, possibly foretelling the ultimate migration of an important contingent of Balbers to Miami.

Along with being chairman, Cousin Michael is also the only Balber who can discern whether a new Balber has the Balber Thumb. Cheers erupted during the Friday night buffet when he declared that Henry does, indeed, have the Balber thumb. And with that, Henry was pressed, literally and figuratively, into the bosom of the Balber family, in the form of the ample cleavage of Cousin Irene.

As Henry exulted in being passed from Balber to Balber, falling asleep in Cousin Dara's arms, snuggling into Cousin Dossie's neck, it dawned on me that my boy is part of this tribe. He belongs to them every bit as much as he belongs to me, a fact made starkly clear when the family's matriarch, Great Aunt Joy, wept when she saw that Henry had the same birthmark as her beloved brother Genie, Henry's grandfather, now dead more than twenty years.

When we arrived home on Sunday, I picked up the Sunday Times and read an article in the Business section about happiness. The one thing the happiness experts agree upon is that stuff doesn't make you happy, strong relationships do.

And I thought about Scott and me, imperfect parents, sometimes struggling partners, who accidentally gave our children the one thing this summer that may truly make them happy: membership in a clan. And then I thought about how we knew to do this. For me, it began with a station wagon and a potato.

This entry is dedicated to Chaney Dakota Spring, who gave 16 years of faithful service as Zealand Family Dog. She is catching sticks for the angels now. Rest in peace. Good girl.

More Gaga, Less Goo Goo

It was 103 degrees in the shade and I was happily traipsing through the concrete canyons of Tribeca on my way to meet a friend for lunch. These were the stiletto sidewalks of my singlehood, and after spending the Fourth of July weekend with Scott and the children at the beach, I was overcome with nostalgia for my life as a unit of one.

My friend and I had agreed to meet at the Odeon and I arrived early. I reveled in opening the door with my hand instead of kicking it karate-style so that I could jam a stroller through it. I sat down, ordered a club soda, and just breathed.

My friend arrived, looking damp, but dapper. In the middle of a successful law career, he had taken a turn at home with his two children and I was hungry for some empathy.

"So," I began, reaching for the bread basket. "About staying home and raising children..."

"It's horrible," he said with a big smile.

That moment captured for me the dichotomy of parenting. We spent the rest of lunch discussing the boundless joy of watching your children grow and the paralyzing fear that something could somehow go terribly wrong.

I told him about the weekend we had just spent at our good friends' beautiful new beach house. On the one hand, I relished our big barbecued meals outside, our post-bedtime, adults-only wine talks and my delicious swim with Emma and Quinny while my friend held Henry in the shade and loved up on him. But where I once adored water in any form, now, with three children, it became another hazard and source of anxiety. Our friends' pool sparkled, but it also menaced. Jerry Bruckheimer has nothing on me in dreaming up disaster scenarios and this little flagstone oasis became the backdrop for my worst fears played out in the technicolor 3-D of my overactive imagination.

My friend told me about the day he took his daughter on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. As the car crept up the rickety tracks toward the first drop, he was at once both utterly proud of her bravery and completely convinced the tracks would collapse and their bodies would be thrown into Astroland.

"How can you bear the anxiety?" I asked.

"Because I want them to be brave and adventurous," he said. "I want them to be bold."

"Damn," I thought. "I do too."

Because I was, and can still be, bold. I just need to be reminded that inside this Upper East Side mother is a cocktail-swilling, purse-slinging daredevil who once grabbed Manhattan by the horns and rode it like a mechanical bull.

My mother always says that when you're paying attention, the universe will guide you.

As luck would have it, the next night, I had tickets to a Lady Gaga concert with my dear friends Kate and Anne and my new friend Cristina. They are three badass blonds who love a good time and somehow have refused to allow their family lives to swallow them whole.

I knew I could learn from them.

So I pureed carrots for Henry and pumped a bottle of milk, threw a roast chicken on the table for the big kids, stuffed my bra with breast pads, shook my hair out of its bun a la Linda Carter turning into Wonder Woman, bid Scott a fond farewell, grabbed his credit card and hailed a taxi.

After some pre-Gaga libations at a bar down the street from Madison Square Garden, we strode to the box seats that Kate had wrangled for us. We were sharing the box with the usual panoply of bankers and lawyers.

Lady Gaga made her entrance and I was captivated. She appeared on a giant screen in silhouette, several stories tall, in what looked like a set of bat wings, but turned out to be giant disco ball shoulder pads.

We danced and shimmied while the bankers and lawyers emptied the chafing dishes of their fried chicken strips and hot dogs. The mix of free vodka and Gaga left us dizzy. "Jump!" shouted Gaga, and we jumped.

On my second trip to the private restroom - a close runner-up to the open bar for my favorite feature of the corporate box - a woman hissed in my ear: "Going to the restroom again? I'd like to be doing what you're doing."

I looked at her, confused. All of that jumping was a bit much for my post-baby bladder and I had slightly peed myself. Just a little, but enough to require a couple trips to the Ladies' to, um, mop the floor, so to speak. She wished she had wet herself....?

Then it dawned on me. She thought I was doing cocaine.

I went back to my Gaga gaggle and told them what happened. It is rather telling of our current station in life that everyone was outraged by the suggestion. "Can't we just be high on life?" Kate asked in a snit, until Anne reminded her that we were also high on a bottle of champagne, a round of pre-concert Gaga-tinis and the deadly Cape Cods Kate had been liberally mixing at the open bar.

We jumped higher and harder as flames shot out from Lady Gaga's leather bikini. I didn't even think about Quinny's bathroom nightlight setting the hand towels on fire and burning down our building, or whether I had left some carrot chunks in Henry's food.

"You can be whoever you want to be," exulted Lady Gaga, who had changed into a transparent nun's habit. We cheered wildly.

As the show ended, I got a carefully-worded email from Scott asking when I might be on my way home. I slipped into a cab and sped back to my life.

I opened the door and a battle-weary Scott was holding a non-sleeping Henry. The big kids were asleep, but Henry was just getting the party started.

"From Goo Goo to Gaga," said Scott.

"And back again," I thought scooping up Henry.

I put the baby to bed, then woke up two hours later to feed him. At 3 a.m., a wet Quinny crawled into our bed dragging his urine-soaked blanket with him. An hour later, Henry was hungry again. When the sun rose, so did Henry, and I saw that one of his eyes was swollen shut with mucus. It was about this time that Quinny used his Yoda underpants as his own personal toilet for a number two. I began collecting soiled bedding.

My hang-over, which had just been flirting with the corners of my eyes, smacked me upside the head. There would be hell to pay for the fun I'd had. And laundry - yes, there would be laundry. Lots of it.

But I had been to Gaga. I was a Gaga-loving mama. And if Lady Gaga was right and I could be whoever I wanted to be, I would choose exactly this: a woman facing three loads, one in Quinny's underpants, and a vodka death spiral that would take two days to overcome. I vowed then to keep that Gaga flame alive.

Before I left the Garden, I bought the concert t-shirt, the one with the oversized banana and two disco balls on it. And yes, I will be rocking it at the Citarella fish counter.

Black Is the New Black

The other mothers were obviously wondering why I was wearing black nail polish to the Fancy Nancy-themed birthday party.

"It's called 'Nocturnelle,'" I whispered to one woman who was staring in alarm at my hands. "By MAC."

She was immaculate in a white linen suit and wearing something eggshell-pinky on her perfectly-manicured fingers.

"It's not really black," I tried again. "It's deep grey."

Truth was, it was the black nail polish I had bought for Emma and me for Halloween when we dressed as vampires. And the reason I was wearing it in mid-summer at a party where little girls were parading in matching pastel tutus and twirling chiffon parasols goes back to my desire to impress Quinny.

Quinny is a tough customer. While Emma seems to have just accepted me as this woman who landed in her life like a friendly alien one day, Quinny has always been a little skeptical.

I am a third wheel to Quinny. He has a mama whom he adores. If you ask him his favorite ice cream flavor, he'll say "Mama." He loves to go to "Mama's Bank," which he apparently believes Mama owns and keeps stocked with lollipops just for him. And of course, he has Papa, too, who carries him around on his head and tickles him just right. So with lollipops, tickles and all that love, who needs this other lady with her incessant hand washing and rules against lightsabers in the living room?

Quinny understands that I carried his beloved brother Henry in my belly and that I am therefore Henry's Mama. So he begrudgingly accepts that I have to be in the house, sort of like the late party guest who brings a case of beer after the liquor store is closed. No matter how you feel about him, you have to let him in.

Of course, for my part, I am wild about Quinny. I haven't known this kind of unrequited love since my freshman year of high school when the basketball player I had a mad crush on wanted nothing to do with me. He worked in the mall and I spent hours teasing my bangs into an irresistible hedgerow before gracing his counter with my presence, only to be ignored. My only solace is that he still works at the Chick-Fil-A.

But back to Quinny. I decided that we would make Star Wars cookies. Taking my cue from McDonalds, I thought I could endear myself to Quinny by aligning myself with his favorite franchise.

We bought Star Wars cookie cutters and new baking sheets so they wouldn't burn. Quinny and I made the dough together and pressed it into Darth Vader and Yoda shapes. Giddy with success and Quinny's smile, I announced that we would now make Darth Vader icing.

Having slept maybe three hours, I took the container of black food coloring, popped off the lid and then shook it vigorously. Quinny watch wide-eyed as I sprayed the kitchen with what looked like squid ink. The floor, counter tops and appliances all had leopard spots. Somehow, Quinny was spared, but I looked like a chimney sweep.

"Papa! We had an accident!" Quinny shouted. I put my hand over his mouth, instantly covering his face with black fingerprints.

"Ha ha ha!" I said. "Isn't this fun? This is how you're supposed to make Darth Vader icing."

"Papa!" screamed Quinny.

It took a roll of paper towels and an entire container of wet Swiffers to clean the kitchen. By the time I was finished, Quinny had lost interest in decorating the cookies. And I had about 5 minutes to get ready for the birthday party. So I loofaed myself until my face, neck and chest were covered in pale green rather than black blotches, but my fingernails still looked like I had been making mud pies. So I quickly coated them with black nail polish.

Emma eyed me critically.

"Black nail polish really isn't in style anymore," she informed me.

"I know," I said.

"Grey is in," she offered.

"I know."

"Mama wears grey," Emma continued. "It looks really pretty. It's called 'Chinchilla.'"

DEGAGNE

I've always been a late bloomer. I drove myself to the mall to buy my first training bra. I didn't start law school until age 26. The only thing I did before most of my friends was to marry and divorce.

When I was a little girl, I assumed I'd start having children around the same time my mom did, well-timed to coincide with the legal drinking age. But my twenties came and went, then I found myself separated from my husband at age 32. Although I had high anxiety about whether or not I would ever have children, I was able to distract myself with my law career and a string of relationships, some good, some not so good, while time marched on and my ovaries began their steady decline.

Then I met Scott. And he came with two of the best little bundles in the world, Emma and Quinny. And so it was that in my late 30s, I was introduced to the wonders and perils of true love, love for a man and his children, the kind that suddenly leaves you vulnerable to the vagaries of the universe in a way you never thought possible. One minute I was blithely jay-walking in high heels through Tribeca traffic, the next I was clutching two beloved little hands in an Upper East Side crosswalk, saying a little prayer that we'd make it to the other side.

The watershed moment when it really hit me that the footloose, champagne-fueled single girl I had been was gone for good came when I was about five months pregnant and Quinny had the stomach flu. Scott and I took turns carrying him into the bathroom, watching him cry and wretch into the toilet while we sat on the ledge of the bath tub and surreptitiously wiped our own tears. Exhausted, Quinny finally begged not to go into the bathroom again. So I held him over my shoulder and I just let him throw up all over me, again and again.

The sun came up and an exuberant Emma woke. She was nonplussed by her brother's stomach troubles - she'd recently had her own vomit-a-thon after getting over-excited about a trip to Disneyland - and insisted that I help her with a Halloween word search.

"Emma," I chided, with Quinny slung limp over my shoulder and both of us stinking and covered in vomit, "I'm a little busy. Can't you see that your brother is sick?"

"But I can't find 'DRACULA' anywhere," she pleaded.

I looked down and studied the puzzle. "Some of the words are written backwards," I told her. "Which really isn't fair. That's too hard."

So while Quinny rested his big, vomity head on my soiled neck and Scott changed our bed linens for the fifth time since midnight, Emma and I finished the puzzle. And I realized that I had completely capitulated to this family.

Nothing about my romance with Scott has followed the typical boy-meets-girl trajectory. It's more like one of Emma's word search puzzles than a narrative. Here's "LOVE," here's "CHILDREN," here's "FAITH." And just recently, over Memorial Day weekend, Scott and I, after "CHILDBIRTH," became "ENGAGED." Almost simultaneously, to Scott's delight, we also added a "CAR." And I suppose, once we get Henry sleep-trained and Quinny settled in nursery school and we find an apartment big enough to accommodate this growing menagerie, we will have a "WEDDING."

But for now, I am going to enjoy being a fiance. Because even though we've cared for children together, had a baby together, even bought an SUV together, Scott was still romantic enough to buy me a ring that, to this country girl, looks big enough to fry an egg on. There are moments in the midst of the chaos of our household when the light catches the diamond just right so that a little fire burns on my ring finger. And I remember that what came first was a girl who loved a boy and a boy who loved her back.

It Sells Itself

Scott and I tried to buy a car last weekend, the Acura MDX, which got the highest safety rating in Consumer Reports and has room for three car seats, bless it. We wanted this car bad. And we were well prepared to go head-to-head with the dealer. We looked up the inventory price. I trolled car fanatic chat rooms to get a sense of the going rate for a base model and researched car dealer lingo so I could translate what the salesman was saying when he "talked to his manager." Scott and I practiced our good cop/bad cop routine, with me in the role of bad cop.

As we walked into the show room, I got an excited little flutter in my stomach. When I was a kid, my parents would take us to a used car lot on Memorial Day and tell us it was an amusement park. We totally bought it because there really was a carnival atmosphere: There were giant blow-up clowns waving their empty windsock arms on the roof of the dealership, free popcorn and balloons for the kids, plastic flags in red, white and blue, and men sweating through their polyester three-piece suits as they demonstrated the incredible features of the 1979 Datsun 510 station wagon, replete with wood panels and a carpeted trunk with fresh vacuum lines running across it.

I still love the smell of fresh paint on a tire. And there I was, in a show room on Memorial Day, ready to make a deal and drive that car home today, ladies and gentlemen.

But something was off. There was a noticeable absence of confetti. There weren't even any giant SALE signs painted in fluorescent bubble letters on the dealership windows. And inside, it was as quiet as a museum. We had to ask to see a salesman and when one finally approached us, he did so reticently, as if he thought maybe we were armed.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Don*." (*Not his real name. His real name was Darnell.)

"Hello," Scott said brightly, already playing good cop. "I'm Scott and this is Elise."

"Ffft." I said, dropping a pretend cigarette on the floor and putting it out with my toe.

"Can I help you?" Don asked.

"We'd like to buy an SUV," Scott said.

"Well, we'd like to look at an SUV," I interjected, elbowing Scott in the ribs. "Let's not make this too easy," I muttered under my breath.

"Did you want a new car? Or a used car? We have several 2007s." Don made a lackluster sweep of the showroom with one arm, then dropped his hand to his leg as if he were suddenly very tired.

"Let's look at the 2010s," Scott said. Don pointed to a gleaming black SUV several yards away. "There you go," he said. "Over there."

"Did you want us to know anything about the car?" Scott asked. "Could we look inside?"

Don opened the back door and stood silently next to us.

"How's the trunk space?" I asked.

Don opened the back door.

"Do the seats fold down?" I asked. Don folded down one seat.

"Not a lot of room back here," I frowned.

Don shook his head. "You're right," he said. "You could fit a few suitcases, but you might struggle to fit a stroller too."

"Ummm," said Scott. Clearly, he was having trouble remembering his lines.

"Maybe we should take another look at the Infinity," I prodded. This was part of the act we'd rehearsed just that morning over bagels.

Don's face brightened. "I used to sell Infinities," he said, and whistled. "They're beautiful cars. If you were going to travel any kind of distance, you might be more comfortable in an Infinity."

"Well, maybe we can test drive the Acura?" Scott asked helpfully.

"Is it a problem that we had a few drinks at lunch?" I asked Don, hoping to snap him out of his malaise. Scott struggled to keep a straight face.

"I won't tell if you don't," Don said, shrugging his shoulders. Then he pressed a button on his walkie talkie and asked that the car to be brought to the curb.

He led us to the test drive vehicle, a reddish-brown model. "What do you think of the color?" Don asked.

"I think it looks like someone had a perforated bowel and..." Scott put his hand over my mouth.

"I don't like it either," said Don.

While Scott and I took turns driving and arguing over the radio station, Don sat silently in the back seat. "Handles great!" Scott enthused. "Bad blind spot," I replied. Don said nothing.

When we returned to the show room, Scott bounded out of the car, took Don's hand and said: "Let's make a deal!"

Don led us to a table in the window. He named a price and I showed him an add from an Acura dealer in Brooklyn. "I'm sure we'll match that," said Don.

Don then looked over his shoulder and pushed a document toward me, pointing to the inventory price on a schedule. "You can probably get the car for this," he said.

"We checked the inventory price," I said triumphantly. "I was $800 less than this."

"Well, we recently had an increase in the transfer fees," Don explained. He pulled out a memo stamped "Confidential" to dealers from Acura, advising of an $800 increase in transfer fees.

"Let me leave you two alone to think about it," Don said.

"Let's try to get $1,000 off the inventory price," Scott said.

"I truly think he is already offering us the car at almost no profit to the dealership," I responded. "This guy isn't playing hardball. In fact, I think he wants us to leave."

When Don returned, Scott smiled and seemed to search around his mouth for his tongue. I leaned forward, removed my sunglasses and said dramatically, "We'll take the car today if you can take another thousand off the price."

"Hell, no," Don said. "They won't do that."

"Why don't you ask your manager?" Scott said affably.

Don left and came back a few minutes later. "We can take another $200 off. But that's it."

"We'll have to think about it," Scott said.

Don stood and offered his hand.

"Wait!" I said. "It's May 31st. Aren't you worried about losing your spiff if you don't hit your mark?" I didn't want to leave without showing off the fruits of my research. A spiff is an end-of-month bonus if a car salesman hits his mark or quota.

Don looked at me sadly and shook his head. He didn't even see us out the door.

"Way to go," I said to Scott through gritted teeth. "You had to try to get below invoice. Now Don thinks we're grinders."

"Shut your clam," Scott said. "I know how this works. Don will call us tomorrow and we'll get our car at our price."

I called Scott at his office the next afternoon. "Did Don call? I asked.

"No," said Scott. "But he probably starts his shift at 4."

"I can't believe it," I said. "We are such losers. We were practically begging Don to sell us a car. And now we've blown it. I really wanted that car!" I felt a big whine coming on.

"If he doesn't call tomorrow, we'll go back and offer him another $500," Scott soothed.

"Okay," I said.

"But I'm going to demand that they detail the car first and bring the paperwork to my office by messenger."

"Okay, tough guy," I answered. "And if they won't messenger over the paperwork?"

"If I have to go in there, I'm going to make sure I get a free cup of coffee."

Laundry Fairy, C'est Moi

Scott has been talking about his socks.

First it was: "I'm low on socks."

Then: "Every pair of socks I pull on has a hole in the toe."

And, in a more frantic pitch: "I am running out of socks!"

I have a color-coded rating system modeled after the Homeland Security Threat Level color scheme to help me determine my response level to Scott. This helps me maintain my busy inner life calculating how many pilates classes it takes to counteract the impact of a large serving of Sedutto's Birthday Cake Ice Cream while still maintaining critical communications. Blue means no response is necessary, for things like "what's this thing on the bottom of my foot?" or "we really need to put together a household budget." Yellow requires an elevated response, for things like "does this match?" or "where should we order dinner from?" Orange requires my immediate but brief attention -- things such as "what do you want for your birthday?" or "is the baby too young for Ambesol?" Red should be only used in the extreme case when I absolutely can't miss a word, questions like "will you marry me?" or "is that cab driver texting with the kids in the car?"

Socks are always blue, or so I had thought. Because, truly, why is he bothering me with this? And yet, he persisted, finally bellowing: "I need socks!" with the same urgency as another man might say "He's got a gun!"

"Then get some," I answered calmly. Scott looked at me as if I had just suggested he gather moon rocks. That's when it dawned on me. Scott doesn't know where socks come from.

He had never procured a pair of socks on his own. His mother, Roberta, still brought him socks for special occasions, socks with tiny dreidels on them for Hanukkah or bedecked with little candy canes in a nod to my insistence we celebrate Christmas. Scott still has socks from college with the days of the week on them in faded marker written by his mother.

Then he had his ex-wife, who spun casseroles into socks, or performed whatever alchemy it was that filled the sock drawer.

And now here he was, looking to me to fill the void and go sock-picking.

I looked at him with new eyes. This law firm partner who runs a global litigation department soon won't be able to put on his shoes in the morning absent my intervention. And despite the fact that I had just given up my own fairly lucrative career in the law to stay at home and raise Henry, I had to wonder: How does it feel to be that vulnerable?

You may be asking yourself why Scott doesn't just google "socks" and buy some over the Internet like his three-year-old son would. It's because Scott has never performed a single transaction on the web. He once tried to order movie tickets on line and couldn't follow the prompts unassisted. He can convert zlotys to dollars in his head, but he can't fill out an address screen. He will sprout wings before he has an Amazon password.

Scott is the opposite of an idiot savant. He is brilliant in all ways, except when it comes to the pedestrian things in life, like loading the dishwasher, purchasing socks or googling driving directions. But I have come to realize that these deficits are critical to our relationship, especially as I recreate myself from General Counsel to Domestic Diva. It helps keep us in balance, the yin/yang of our relationship depends upon it. We need each other. I need him to support us financially and rub my feet and he needs me for everything else.

This extends to the children. At eight, Emma is so precocious that if we didn't have a Wii, I think she might seek emancipation and lease herself a studio apartment. I am here to remind her that because she's not allowed to touch the stove or cross the street without holding an adult's hand, she probably wouldn't fare all that well on her own. Quinny is ridiculously handsome. Unlike his father, he knows his way around a computer and I once caught him googling "agent." But as I told him, until he's 100 percent potty-trained, Gap Kids is not going to want him modeling their pants, no matter how cute he looks in them.

And in this way, like Sisyphus, I find meaning in my loading and unloading the dishwasher, meal after meal, day after day, night after night.

Last week, we were going away for the weekend. After I had held the baby football style and rushed like a wide receiver across the length of our apartment gathering snacks and googling driving directions, I found Scott and the children sitting on our bed in their underwear.

"What are you doing?" I asked. "Why aren't you packing?"

"We're waiting for the laundry fairy," Emma said sweetly.

And you know what? They really were.

Rough Justice

Henry has a brother and sister - the progeny of Scott's first marriage - whom he loves with all of his strawberry-sized infant heart. When Scott told Henry that his beloved Emma and Quinny had strep throat, Henry worked his lower lip a few times, then burst into a wail.

"This is incredible!" said Scott, gazing at Henry as if he were a lab specimen. (And truth be told, he kinda was at the beginning. But that's a story for another day.)

"Of course he's upset!" I cried, running to Henry's aid. "There was this article in the Times Magazine about babies - they have real empathy. Quick, you have to make him feel better. Tickle him. Tell him they are going to be fine. He's so sad! Tickee, tickee, tickee!!" I shouted, making Henry cry harder.

"Emma and Quinny are going to be just fine," Scott said calmly, chucking Henry under the chin. Soon, Henry was reassured and back to his happy cooing while Scott did a nose dive into the article, telling me what I had just read for myself: Not only are children less than a year old empathetic, but they have a rudimentary sense of right and wrong. So much so, in fact, that one little baby in an experiment not only punished a mean puppet by taking away his ball, but also whacked him upside the head.

None of this was news to me. Three out of the four of children in my family have a stubborn streak of justice that persists despite all evidence that life just isn't fair. The fourth child is what scientists call an "outlier" for reasons I explain below.

As the eldest of the four, things went fairly smoothly for me until my first brother Christopher arrived on the scene eighteen months after my birth. I never felt particularly competitive with him for my parents' affection, probably because they were in their early twenties and too preoccupied with grad school and playing coed volleyball to pay either one of us much attention.

But then my brother was diagnosed with a rare, stupid disease and had to be in the hospital all the time. That was our first clue that life might not share our fundamental notion of justice.

Our second clue came after Justin was born. Justin was so skinny as a toddler that my mother had to feed him milkshakes for breakfast. While Justin was enjoying a thick, creamy milkshake every morning, Christopher and I were trying to survive on powdered milk and government cheese. When we protested, my mother just said, "Life's not fair. The sooner you learn it, the better."

But our sense of justice persisted, even in the face of our parents' totally unfair treatment. For example, until age 11, I was fine with the fact that all my clothes came from one of two places, the hospital consignment shop where my grandmother volunteered or Sears. After all, my BFF Shawn also wore Toughskins and the occasional plaid leisure suit to school. But then Shawn's father got a gig working construction in Saudi Arabia and suddenly there was money for Calvin Klein jeans. Shawn became an instant celebrity and my first frenemy.

I pleaded with my mother for designer jeans. "Designer jeans are an oxymoron," she said. And, more crushingly: "I am not going to spend $36 on a pair of jeans."

"It's not fair!" I cried. "I am the only girl in the whole sixth grade with knee patches sewn inside her jeans!" My father's response was to write "Jordache" on a piece of duct tape and slap it over my back pocket.

Despite the fact that I had to earn my first pair of Jordache with 36 hours of babysitting, I still clung to the idea that life should be fair. I even became a lawyer. And despite the fact that he spent his childhood outwitting a rare disease and getting blasted with mega doses of chemotherapy and steroids, Christopher also became a lawyer, convinced that justice is out there somewhere.

Then there's Justin, whose very name means "righteous" or "just one." Things slid sharply downhill for Justin after he gained the appropriate amount of milkshake weight. Matthew, the baby, was born, and Justin fell from star-baby to lower-middle-child status.

I called Justin "Justin Martyr" after his forebear (a second century moralist who was ultimately beheaded by the Romans) because Justin never stopped his campaign for "Justice for Justin." Justin always had to sit in the very back of the station wagon over the spare tire, he never got second helpings, and he was the only one of us who had to wear glasses in elementary school. Yet he never succumbed to the idea that life wasn't fair. When things got to be too much for him, he would just pack a jelly and cheese sandwich and a spare pair of underpants in a brown sack and run away to the public library. Once there, he would beg the pretty librarian to adopt him. She would return him to our family and the cycle would continue.

Justin's sense of righteousness persists to this day. Like 99% of the world, he works in an office and like 98% of those people, he would rather be at home. But unlike everyone else, Justin actually did something about it. He complained. So now he gets to work from home when he feels like it. And when he didn't like an overbearing manager sitting next to him, he kvetched until the company relocated the manager to another cubicle farm. Now he won't work weekends because his super-hot girlfriend just moved in with him. With these accommodations, work now seems more fair to Justin.

The rest of us just shake our heads and say, "He must be one hell of a programmer."

Now Matthew, the outlier: Whether Matthew was born with an innate sense of fairness has never been tested because Matthew literally has never had a bad day. Despite the fact - or maybe because - he was the only one of us not breast-fed, Matthew has never been sick. From the time he was born, he was not permitted to cry. One little hiccup from his Cupid's bow lips and the three of us were running to his crib, elbowing one another out of the way to be the first to pick him up.

Today, Matthew is six feet tall, a natural athlete with bright green eyes and blond hair. Taking a break from graduate work in linguistics, he works nine months of the year as a teacher in a cushy private school and spends his summers in Europe. Matthew will send around emails that say things like: "Geez, guys, instead of working this quarter, they want me to go to surf camp in Malibu with a few of the seniors." Matthew is engaged to Anna, a ridiculously beautiful Spanish woman who has a Ph.D. and a family vineyard in the south of Spain. "If we ever get tired of academia," Matthew has said, "maybe we'll just make wine."

I hope that little Henry was born under the same lucky star as his Uncle Matt. Certainly, his brother and sister spoil him with affection, almost knocking each other out to get closest to him. And in his wide-eyed, innocent way, he just seems to expect it.

Another Day, Another Baldwin

You apparently can't swing a baby in this town without hitting a Baldwin brother.

On Saturday night, Scott and I took my parents, who were visiting from Western Maryland, to a French bistro we like in our neighborhood. It being Mother's Day Eve, we brought Henry along and he was snoozing and drooling adorably in the handy little car seat cum stroller we use just for restaurants.

"There are famous people here," said my father, scanning the white table clothes and tuxedoed waiters. "I just don't know who they are."

He was correct on both counts. Alec Baldwin was sitting a few feet from us. My parents were oblivious, never having seen an episode of "30 Rock." This is because (1) the only television they watch are sports and DVDs of "24" and (2) they spend an inordinate amount of time horseback riding and attending turkey fries.

But I was excited - my second Baldwin in a week! The only question was whether he, like his brother Stephen only a few days earlier, would compliment me on my beautiful son. While Alec paid his check, I played it cool, pushing the sleeping Henry with my foot into Alec's path to the door. And sure enough, he stopped and bent over to peer into Henry's stroller where Henry was now grunting and farting the way he always does when trying to regain consciousness. Alec beamed at me. "Congratulations!" he said.

"Two for four!" I shouted back at him, pumping my fist in the air. I was collecting Baldwin compliments they way I used to collect KISS trading cards. I just needed Billie and Daniel and then my collection would be complete.

My parents didn't understand what all the hoopla was about. It is virtually impossible to impress my parents because they are clueless about the important things in life, like celebrities and good restaurants. It is equally impossible to embarrass them.

This is mainly because my father suffers from an affliction that has baffled the experts, but which one intrepid specialist called a "phonemic hole." Simply put, my father lacks the skill most toddlers have to blend sounds into words that make sense. My mother, after more than forty years of marriage, has learned to love him unconditionally and my brothers and I have teased him mercilessly about it. He is a beloved psychologist in my hometown and folks there know about Doctor Jack and his funny way of talking. But to the uninitiated, he comes off like a lunatic.

Thus, "phonemic hole" in my father's mouth becomes "pepperoni roll." Ask him his favorite movie and he'll tell you it's "The Shimshaw Resurrection" -- or "The Shawshank Redemption" to you and me. When he asked the 7-11 clerk if they sold Cardinal Rickenbacker, I was there to translate "Orville Redenbacher" for him.

To understand my father when he speaks requires context and lots of it. Thus, when he called me from the car on the way home from his visit absolutely apoplectic because he left his "story teller machine" at my house, I knew that he meant the CD player he stored in a fanny pack along with several books-on-CD. He was understandably upset because the storyteller machine doubles as a tune-out-my-mother machine and he truly couldn't face life without it. Scott dutifully assured him that he would return it pronto by Non-State Quick Service.

As a result of his illness, my father can't remember anyone's name. Scott's mother's name is Roberta. My father really likes Roberta. Nonetheless, after I offered him a thousand dollars if he could come up with Scott's mother's name, he could only sputter "Rurrr, rurrrr, rurrrrr," like a Model T being cranked. My brothers and I once offered to pool all of our savings and write him a nice fat check if only he could come up with the name of the evil mastermind behind the 9-11 plot. "Osman, Oscar, Ombudsman," my father said, turning purple with effort.

This is mean sport, but especially so because my father subsists on a $5 per day allowance my mother lets him have from his earnings, as if he were a wet brain instead of a Ph.D. with a thriving practice. But he puts up with it because she makes his favorite meals for dinner and reminds him to button the top of his pants.

And I think they really, truly are happy.

Apocalypse Now

My baby turned three months old today. At each month milestone, I have fervently thanked God that my son has survived - never mind that the infant mortality rate in the United States is about 6 per thousand, or less than one percent. If it weren't for my fear of caning, I would relocate Henry to Singapore, where the rate is 2 per thousand.

To say that I am paranoid about Henry's safety is like saying Hitler had a burr in his behind. I quit my job in part because I knew that no one could take care of Henry better that I could - or would - but also because I believe, truly believe, that I am the only person on Earth vigilant enough to keep Henry alive. For example, would your average nanny obsess about the Toyota accelerator issue to the extent that if a Toyota Camry taxi were idling at the crosswalk - and yes, there are plenty of Toyota cabs out there - she would wait until the light changed again before crossing the street with Henry? Would a baby nurse have patrolled the toilets in our apartment during the first few weeks of Henry's existence to ensure that the lids were all down - lest he drown if his father or grandmother accidentally dropped him in the potty? And how was I the only one who could see the airborne carpet fibers floating over the couch, threatening Henry's nascent airways?

I know that somewhere in New York, there is a man who wakes up every morning certain that today is the day his nose will fall off. My anxiety lies somewhere between that guy and the mothers who travel in cabs with their infants without car seats.

I hate that my vivid imagination has been pressed into the service of imagining horrible accidents, terrorist plots and natural disasters. To my magical way of thinking, I believe that if I can imagine a horror, I can prevent it. And I am frustrated that no one else seems to share my level of anxiety and concomitant level of care.

The morning after a car bomb failed to detonate in Times Square, Henry's father Scott and I were going to walk with Henry to the Toys R Us at 44th and Broadway. I hadn't yet seen the papers. Before we left, Scott said casually, "There was a car bomb thingee in Times Square last night. It didn't explode and they don't think it was terrorism."

I lunged for The Post and read that Toys R Us had been evacuated sixteen hours earlier. "Are you insane?" I asked. "And of course this is terrorism. Only a terrorist would drive a smoldering SUV laden with explosives into Times Square and park it in front of The Lion King! Aaargh!"

Later that night, after a visit to FAO Schwartz, Scott tried to put a new crib sheet on the crib mattress. Crib sheets are of course incredibly tight fitting so that they don't come untucked and become a smother hazard. Scott became frustrated with trying to tuck the crib sheet over the mattress and tore the sheet, then left it barely hanging on the edge of one corner of the mattress.

"I am moving to Singapore!" I threatened, not for the first time. This was, after all, the same man who bought a sleep positioner for Henry's crib. Didn't he know that sleep positioners were discouraged by Consumer Reports and the American Academy of Pediatrics? What next, a loaded gun for little Henry to use as a teething ring?

My college roommate used to tell a story about her mother, Glenda, who called her elementary school principal in hysterics because she was pretty sure she forgot to take the rind off the bologna before making her 10-year-old daughter's sandwich. When I worry about how I will raise Henry in New York City without him ever crossing the street or using a public restroom, I think about Glenda. I know I can't be the first mother to wonder whether it would be safe to use a bungee cord to secure a crib sheet, nor will I be the last to cut my child's jelly beans into thirds.

Day One

I had never thought about adding my own wispy vapors of thought to the blogosphere. Blogging was fine, it was just something that other people did, like shopping at Sam's Club or following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. In fact, until recently, I had never even read a blog. Then my friend Cheryl sent me one she had written about me after I gave birth to Henry. A blog about ME sparked my interest. And it was good. Cheryl is a former sportswriter -- she was a woman in the locker room long before such women (and their stalkers) became ubiquitous -- and now she is a mother of three who keeps a blog to stay sane and help other mothers do the same.

My sister-in-law is a blogger. My best friend now blogs for money. During my maternity leave, I started bumping into lots of mommy bloggers and soon saw that these smart, sassy women were a force to be reckoned with. They are quoted in the Wall Street Journal, they are courted by marketers, they are taste-makers and soothsayers. I realized what mothers around the world knew long before me: If you have a cool blog with decent audience, you get awesome free products and tickets to Oprah events.

So after I decided to leave my job as the lawyer for a media company to focus more time on my family, my next thought was to write a blog about it. I clicked on something that said "start a blog" and got a blank template, like a vacant apartment that I apparently can decorate with gadgets (what are they?) and photos of my family, just like my real apartment.

So, to begin: Today was my first day at home with Henry. Although like any mother of an infant with a lick of sense, we didn't stay home. We walked six miles round trip to have lunch with my friend Theresa at Union Square Cafe. (After three months of maternity leave, I still haven't figured out how to collapse my stroller and take public transportation.) Theresa has managed to raise two boys while making partner at a law firm. In the course of two hours, she spoke authoritatively about insurance law, child birth and real estate - she's like a living, breathing Sunday edition of the Times, but funny.

This being New York, at the end of our lunch, Stephen Baldwin stopped by our table to compliment Henry. I wanted to ask him what he thought about the website that some fellow born-again Christians created to allegedly raise money for him since his faith has hurt his Hollywood prospects - was he embarrassed by it? In fact, can anyone who baptized Spencer Pratt on "I'm A Celebrity, Get me Out of Here" get embarrassed? But it didn't seem the time nor the place. Luckily, the Baldwin brothers are everywhere, so I should get another chance. And I must say, although his hair was a little long for my taste and he was a bit chunky, there is something so compelling about that Baldwin face.

And so I passed my first day as a SAHM walking the length of Manhattan for some good conversation and a hamachi sandwich, trying to get used to being the woman on the sidewalk pushing a stroller -- the one the suits see with a cartoon bubble over her head that reads "Latte, latte, latte."

It is getting late. Henry is asleep in the crook of his father's arm, their heads bent at the same 30-degree angle. I have fed my baby well and kept him safe. It was a good day.