This morning I was working away in my office when I heard Adam’s voice. It sounded sort of small and distant, as though it were coming across a string and into a tin can held up to my ear.

Strange, since I didn’t have a tin can telephone on my ear. Even stranger, it sounded like he said there had been an explosion in the basement.

Lucy and Alice were in the midst of a giggle fest in their bedroom, so I had to holler at them to pipe down for a second.

Then came Adam’s voice again—through the laundry chute.

 “I must have misheard you,” I called down. “It sounded like you said ‘explosion.’”

“Yep,” he said. “In the dryer. It’s really bad.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear explosion, basement, dryer and really bad all together in one sentence, I have but one thought:

“Oh no. A rat crawled into our dryer and died and somehow through the process of decomposition accelerated by heat, its guts burst from its belly and are now sliding slowly, cruelly down the sides of the dryer, weaving awful new patterns into our clothing.”

But maybe that’s just me. In my own personal dictionary of life’s little traumas, “bad” by means rats, dead or alive, along with innards of any sort.

So it was good news, then, that the basement explosion involved neither rats nor their juicy bits.

It was a crayon, hot pink, that made it through the wash and into the dryer before it succumbed to the heat and exploded all over every single long-sleeved uniform shirt the kids own, as well as our bath mat and Adam’s pillowcase, which he tossed into the wash yesterday after it got covered in lavender bubble bath.

(This bubble bath business is a long story unto itself, as is the reason the bath mat was being washed in the first place. Let’s just say that the bubble bath meant Alice had to take a second bath right after the first, only this time without bubble bath because the last of the bottle was on Adam’s pillow. And I am pleased to report that it was chocolate on the bath mat, and not what I’d originally suspected.)

In any case, the good news is at least there were no rats involved, unless by “rat” you mean the kid who put the crayon in her shirt pocket. (And I know which kid it was. The shirt looks like her heart burst. It’s sort of gruesome.)

Oh, but I joke, I joke. Who hasn’t put a crayon through the wash? Any kid who hasn’t probably doesn’t color enough. Or that’s what I say to make myself feel better for not checking pockets thoroughly before I toss stuff down the laundry chute.

The hard part, though, is getting the crayon out of the clothes and off the drum of the dryer. But even that isn’t as hard as I’d feared. 

A friend sent along a recipe for removing crayon wax from clothing. The list looked long at first. But then when I went down and compared it to the list of things I’ve accumulated as a parent—Shout, OxiClean and the leftover Borax from the slime we made at Lucy’s “gross and disgusting”-themed birthday party—I realized that I already have it all.

And that is true, in an even bigger way. Stuff goes wrong in life. But when you have the wisdom and support of friends, a well-stocked cleaning supplies cupboard, and acceptance of the fact that small calamities will happen even when we are busy with other things, you feel better, almost instantly.

But I’ve still made it good and clear to the kids that crayons don’t go in pockets. Judging from the looks on their faces when they saw their school shirts, this time they’re going to remember.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Old people get a bum rap for two things: the early-bird special, and the amount of time they spend discussing their physical ailments.

But you know who does this to an even greater extent?

Nine-year-olds.

Let’s start with the early-bird special. At our house, dinner is usually around six p.m. Adam arrives home then and I do my best to have something tasty on the table, even if the kids and I tend to disagree over the definition of “tasty.” (Their definition: anything from a box.)

It’s not exactly a late dinner we’re having, but Lucy simply cannot wait for the meal to start. Never mind that she devours a lunch that weighs several pounds because she eats like a fruit bat. Never mind that I give her a huge after-school snack; she is forever sneaking into the cupboards and gorging on nuts, fruit leather, raw oats and other assorted items.

No matter where I am in the house, I can hear those cupboards slam, slam, slam, so I know exactly what she’s up to, even if I’ve told her to hold off on stoking her engines because dinner is on its way. (Oddly, Lucy slams the cupboards open; they’re always gaping when I go into the kitchen. We usually look like we’ve just been robbed.)

In short, the child would be happy to have dinner start at 4:30 p.m., and whenever possible, I feed her then. For a while, I worried that she was going to eat her way onto the obesity charts. Wrong. Lucy is made of solid muscle and she can lift her 180-pound father off the ground. She’s a spray tan and a body of baby oil away from being Little Miss Ironpants. Honestly, I am starting to worry that she’ll rip the kitchen cabinet doors right off their hinges.

So perhaps her early-bird special isn’t exactly like the senior citizen one, which is more about chicken soup, soda crackers and fiber supplements. But the way she and her friends discuss their ailments? Now that is like a little corner of Florida has parked itself in my family room.

“Look at this bruise!” “Once, when I was coughing, yellow stuff came out!” “Did you hear that David’s toenail fell right off?”

The worst part, though, is hearing them talk about their orthodontia, largely because it has a show-and-tell aspect. In the weeks before she got her retainer, I heard repeatedly about how a friend of hers had one.

“It hurts,” Lucy said. “Her teeth ache. Her jaw barely works. And she can’t talk right when it’s in.”

“Lucy,” I said. “I had a retainer. They’re not that bad.”

“Oh, but they are,” she said. “They’re terrible. They KILL.”

“Are you worried about your retainer?” I said.

“No!” she replied. “I can’t wait!”

She even brought her friend over to me for a little retainer demonstration the day I volunteered in class. Her friend clicked her retainer out of her mouth and offered it to me for inspection. Unlike my retainer, which was dyed to match the roof of my mouth, this child’s retainer was blue with stars. And lots and lots of saliva.

“Want to hold it?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe put that back in your mouth, OK?”

“Ish kind of hard to talk when ish in,” she said.

“See?” Lucy said. “She can’t say her Ss.”

When Lucy finally got her retainer on Monday, she was in her night-before-Christmas mood—vibrating with energy. I picked her up in the waiting room of the orthodontist and was practically blinded by her wire-enhanced smile.

“Ish hash a kishen on tah!”

“What?” I said.

“KISHEN!”

She unhinged her jaw and showed me the roof of her mouth. Apparently stars are not the only decorative orthodontia option. You can also get kittens on your retainer.

“But you can talk normally, Lucy,” I said. “Please talk normally. I talked normally when I had a retainer.”

Didn’t we all talk normally when we had retainers? Wasn’t a speech impediment something you wanted to avoid? Like visible underwear and/or head lice?

Not so to kids these days. They celebrate their infirmities.

Because our appointment at the orthodontist’s office was sandwiched between school and Lucy’s back-to-back dance classes, I stopped at a teriyaki joint to feed the kids an early-bird special dinner. While we waited for our food to arrive, Lucy alternated between popping her retainer out of her mouth and snapping it back in so she could mispronounce words for Alice’s entertainment.

“Shee?” Lucy said, “I can’t shay tup.”

“Lucy, you can say cup perfectly well. You are faking it. FAKING IT!” I said.

To no avail. Alice was highly amused and rattled off a long string of words for Lucy to mangle until dinner arrived. And Alice can’t wait for her turn to be crippled by her own teeth.

For my part, I shake my head and hobble behind them, trying not to let anyone know that my Achilles tendons hurt because I played with a jump rope on Saturday. Somehow, I don’t think anyone would be interested.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Dear Makers of Fun Size Candy Bars,

I am old. Middle aged, as one of my high school students told me two years ago, when I had significantly less gray hair and fewer wrinkles than I do today. A sign of how bad things have gotten: I now have bangs because my forehead looks like an elephant’s ankle. Every day is a bad forehead day, and I’m soon going to have to grow a beard to hide what’s happening with my neck.

Despite my age, however, I do remember the glory days of Halloween, when a child had to trick-or-treat carefully because of the razor blades in the apples and the LSD in the Mickey Mouse temporary tattoos. Both were urban legends, but hey! It was Halloween. The scariest day of the year (after school picture day). This sort of thing only helped the holiday live up to its terrifying potential. 

Back then, fun size candy bars actually were sort of fun. They were heavy enough to make the trick-or-treat bag/pillowcase bruise your ankles, and they were just long enough to seem like they could conceal something deadly.

Fun size candy bars today should be called dollhouse size candy bars. It’s not just my failing eyesight, here. These things are tiny. Lilliputian. My children are suffering because I have to steal two and three candy bars at a time to feel satisfied/protect their teeth/do my part in staving off the childhood obesity epidemic. By tomorrow, their trick-or-treat bags will be empty black holes collapsing in on themselves.

Meanwhile, so many other things in my life and the lives of other parents are now full size.

I’m talking about the size of the car insurance bill, which will now go up because of the minor fender-bender a certain beloved member of my household had last week.

I am also talking about the laundry pile, which, if it were a volcano, would be large enough to be classified as a federal emergency management administration hazard area.

And I’m talking about the parent’s to-do list, which keeps growing like a giant pumpkin. Just this week, I’ve had to track down flu shots and fill out legal waivers for multiple activities, one of which was a birthday party. We’re living in the fun size times of legal liability, flu pandemics and other horrors. Doesn’t it make you miss a good, old-fashioned epidemic, or even the simple elegance of a hidden razor blade?

So this is my request to you, oh makers of Fun Size candy bars. Instead of using your educations and talents to shrink one of life’s sweet pleasures, please direct your attention elsewhere. Make poverty fun size. Make wars fun size. Or, if you want to start really big, make my waistline fun size.

But please stop shrinking the size of the candy. My midlife crisis depends on it.

--Martha Brockenbrough

The most popular article at the New York Times last week was one with a title I couldn’t resist: For Some Parents, Shouting is the New Spanking.

Almost from the first, the story drove me nuts. After delivering a backhanded sort of praise about how our generation praises our toddlers for blowing their noses, the writer says, “incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.”

First, could it be any more obvious that the reporter has never chased a toddler with a tissue? Kids this age look at Kleenex as the Devil’s own hanky. So, yeah, it is not all that incongruous to holler, “Buford! Come back here! We have to wipe your nose! No! Not on the couch!” Any kid who submits deserves a “good job.”

Second, I am quite sure this generation did not invent yelling. Perhaps we feel guiltier about it, thanks to stories like these that on the one hand make fun of our efforts to be careful and engaged with our kids, while on the other hand point out how grievously we are failing to achieve that.

In my book, though, the silliest quote comes from the author of a study on the damaging effects of yelling, one Murray A. Straus.

“It affects a child,” he says. (Duh. That is the idea.) “If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.”

Yes, it is true that we don’t give children the same perks and treatment a grownup would get at work. For one, they’d have huge temper tantrums if you served them coffee from a vending machine. Grownups shrug and drink it anyway.

More to the point, children are not employees and families are not corporations. Not even nonprofit. It would be nice if they were, though. We’d get much better benefits and vacation packages. (Anything is better than zero.)

But if I were running my family like a business, let’s see....the first thing I’d do, after lobbying my local, state and federal government for massive tax breaks and grants to support my work, is write a policy manual, to be supplemented by intermittent company memos, that explained how things in our little family enterprise would run. I’d also write job descriptions, so everyone knew what their responsibilities were and could refer to them in times of trouble.

And of course, we would have a human resources department to ensure these standards were fairly and consistently applied. I even know whom I’d appoint for the job: the neighbor’s cat, the one who poops on our garden paths and sits on the porch blinking smugly at the dog.

I’d tack memos by the fridge, like this, using inappropriate quotation marks for emphasis just to keep it real:

MEMO: To all employees
RE: Milk

It has come to the attention of management that some employees are unaware of how to tell that the milk carton is “empty.” Employees put empty milk cartons back in the refrigerator and then leave the door open until the lettuce droops and the meat is warm enough to experience a “zombie resurrection.”

We will be holding a “mandatory” milk-carton-operation training session Friday in the break room. Anyone who fails the milk carton test will be subject to immediate outsourcing to a foster company. Plenty of orphans in India would gladly come to work for us.

P.S. Don’t even think about filing a discrimination complaint. Human resources is NOT happy about the milk situation and will not listen sympathetically.

Look, no one likes yelling. But there is a huge difference between regular, bug-eyed berating of your kids and the occasional burst of anger. The first is probably a sign that you’re trying to do too much and you’ve lost focus on what’s most important. Cut yourself some slack, lower your expectations all around, and you’ll feel a lot better. Kids who are yelled at regularly really do suffer.

The second? Well, a little “Looky here, Buster” now and then is how we show kids that there are consequences to doing the wrong thing—breaking well established family rules, picking on a sibling, ignoring a parent. Anger isn’t fun, but it’s something everyone experiences from time to time.

Not everyone shows it by hollering, but it’s not such a terrible thing to do so. If we don’t occasionally show kids how bad behavior affects others, they might grow up and be the kind of people who swipe your lunch from the company fridge without giving it a second thought. Maybe one reason yelling is not routine at work is that parents did their jobs.

Ultimately, there are just two things I wish for: that all families make it through the day without getting pushed to the breaking point, and that the money spent studying obvious things—like the unpleasantness of yelling in the home—instead were funneled to programs that actually made it easier to make it as a family in today’s world.

Even the neighbor’s cat agrees that would really be something.

--Martha Brockenbrough

--Martha Brockenbrough

Both Adam and I come from large families—he has three siblings and I have four. I’ve always liked the noise that brothers and sisters provide, not to mention all the scapegoating possibilities. There was no question that we’d have a brother or sister for Lucy.

Dogs, though, are a different matter.

One would be enough, I thought. It always had been enough before.

When I was pregnant with Alice, I lost my beloved dog to cancer. It was excruciating. I’ll never forget staying up with her on her last night, stroking her damp fur as she gasped for air and looked at me with pleading eyes. She died the next day in my arms. For weeks afterward, I kept reaching out to scratch her behind the ears, finding only emptiness in the spot where she always lay.

I thought we’d maybe never have another dog. They live such short lives, relatively speaking. And the holes they leave behind are huge. You don’t know quiet in a house until you stop hearing a collar jingle or a tail softly thump the ground as you pass.

But then a friend who breeds golden retrievers called. Would we like a puppy? She gave me the date a new litter would be ready to join a family. It was six months to the day that my dog had died. I took that as a sign, a sign that could not be ignored.

Now, I recognize it was a sign of insanity, because the date was also my due date with Alice.

“How hard could it be having a newborn and a puppy?” I said. “I’ll already be waking up in the middle of the night for Alice. Might as well get it all over with at once.”

For the record, it is very hard, indeed, having a six-week-old puppy when you have a five-week-old baby (Alice arrived a little late).

And, in fact, puppies are even harder than babies. Though newborns of all species eat, sleep and relieve themselves pretty much around the clock. But human newborns keep their dirty bits covered in diapers. Human newborns also do not chew the couch, slip through the fence, and take themselves on adventure walks to the coffee shop down the street.

I have very little recollection of those months of my life. It’s like a gaping hole in time and as much as I look back, I remember nothing of it beyond how cute Alice looked when she smiled, and how cute Rosie looked when she bounded through our just-planted garden, tearing out the new trees and shaking them like weasels. She was like a dandelion puff, only with sharp teeth.

Rosie and Alice are now both five years old. Rosie no longer destroys shoes, plants or furniture. She’s sweet and fun with the kids. But unlike my last dog, who had no interest in others of her species, and really considered herself to be a shorter, hairier human, Rosie loves other dogs. Loves them.

When I take her for walks and she sees other dogs across the street, she leans her whole body toward them. She assumes the play position when we’re lucky enough to pass a potential dog-friend on our sidewalk. She could spend hours wrestling with the dogs at my parents’ house.

I have started to feel an enormous burden of guilt that she spends most of her life separated from her own kind.

Other things counter this, of course. Rosie has been a bit of a disaster dog. She once ate a bee, which stung the inside of her mouth. Her cheek swelled to the size of a large steak. This summer, she ate some crab shells at the beach and needed emergency veterinary care. Shortly after that she was treated for a case of Giardia she picked up somewhere in the neighborhood (apparently a lot of dogs had it).

Without being indelicate, I can reveal I came thisclose to having to replace the carpet in my office in the aftermath. A few weeks later, she did something to the bottom of her foot that resulted in a temporary cast, antibiotics and a plastic cone of shame. (The vet also threw in drops for her Rosie’s bilateral ear infections.)

In short, she is a handful. Only a lunatic would think of adding another dog to the mix, knowing all that we have going on with our jobs and with two kids in school and assorted activities.

And yet. And yet...

When I watch her look out the window and wag her tail at the dogs that pass by, when I think about how happy she would be to have another dog to curl up with at night, I think it’s just a matter of time before I ignore the wise angel sitting on my shoulder and instead listen to the naughtier one in my heart, the one who thinks happiness for everyone in the house—dogs included—is more important than a clean floor and manageable vet bills.

Apparently the bad economy has created a glut of grownup golden retrievers in need of rescue. I think it’s just a matter of time before one finds her way into our home.

Wish me luck.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Lately Alice has been saying all sorts of amusing things. She has a knack for getting a word almost right in a way that improves on the original.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, she told me she planned to sleep on the “toe” of my bed. She meant foot, but toe sounds even more unobtrusive—like something she might actually get away with doing.  She also told me she was good at grinding cheese, and while the correct word was grating, hers is more appealing. 

Other kids do this, too, of course. A friend told me his five-year-old son was looking forward to “be-cation,” which such a more Zen way to envision “vacation.”

Which brings me to my point: We think we’re going to remember these sorts of cute expressions forever, but they do tend to leak out of the brain, or maybe get ground out of the neural folds by the cheese grater of life.

This is why I am making an attempt to write more of this stuff down.

We were driving by the neighborhood duck pond on our way home from an errand yesterday. Alice and Lucy always make a point of checking on the babies, who grew from duckling to teenage duck to adult over the course of spring and summer. (Teenage duck is entirely their concept. I’m sure there is a scientific name for fuzzy and sort of awkward, but teenage pretty much sums it up for me.)

I nearly had to pull over laughing when Alice said, “Ducks: They grow up so fast.”

It’s not just ducks who have a tendency to grow up quickly. Alice and Lucy are under the impression that childhood is forever. And why shouldn’t they be? They’ve been kids their whole lives.

But oh, how they’ve have grown. If there was any doubt in my mind that Lucy is officially a tween, it vanished the moment she got her first purse last week. She kept poking around in my closet, asking if she could have one of mine. Answer? No. So I took her to Target and let her pick something off their sale rack.

First, she decided she needed one big enough to carry around a script—she plans to be in a couple of plays this fall. She didn’t want the red one I liked best because “black was more versatile.” (Versatile!)

The capper, though, was what she filled it with when she came home: Band-Aids, crayons, a baby’s blanket—and Adam’s travel-sized Speed Stick deodorant. It’s a mix that says she’s part little girl and part adolescent, planning for skinned knees and sweaty armpits all at once.

Thinking about it makes me feel like I need a be-cation. These are great moments in anyone’s life, and I don’t want to miss a single one.

(Shameless Cozi plug, folks—have you tried the Cozi Family Journal yet? I tend to jot things down in mine for later perusal. My latest post: Alice told Adam, “When I’m dead, I want my body to be rotted in public.” Rot in public, folks. It’s the new R.I.P.)

--Martha Brockenbrough

If I only heard “Merry Christmas” one time on Tuesday, I would have chalked it up as a joke.

But at least three moms wished each other a Merry Christmas as we were dropping our kids off for the first day of school and it struck me that yes, this is the new Christmas for parents.

The old Christmas is quite a lot of work, what with the decorating, the shopping, the cooking and the Santa-line standing.

When you finally get around to fishing Santa’s slightly used tube of ChapStick out of your stocking and putting it back in your purse because Santa knows you’d rather have a) no more gifts to wrap and b) soft lips—yay!, it’s easy to conclude that as holidays go, this one is a bruiser.

I suppose the first day of school could feel like as much work as the run-up to Christmas.

There’s the shopping: new shoes, new clothes, pencils, erasers, binders, folders, along with things our parents never had to buy, such as supplies for the Emergency Care Package. (Coordinating these, by the way, is the one volunteer job at school that is always held by men. Why are dads attracted to volunteer positions that involve earthquakes, fires, terrorist attacks and other terrors--but not bake sales? Do they not possess the proper fear of Bundt cake?)

There’s also the night-before excitement that you have to deal with, which is why publishers have started putting out books like The Night Before Kindergarten, a parody of the original Clement Moore poem.

But there are two big differences.

The first? No gift wrapping or decorations.

The second? Well, when everything starts, you’re in your house alone (or in your car alone on the way to work). And it’s so darned quiet. Right now, I am in my writing closet and the only sound I hear besides my overheated laptop fan is the ticking of a clock. It’s either that or a bomb, because I don’t recall having a clock in my office. Hmmm.

In any case, that silence is a sound I haven’t heard for twelve weeks. Twelve! No one is asking me for a drink of water. No one is saying, “Oops,” followed by “I didn’t do it! It was an accident! Alice, get me paper towels. A WHOLE BUNCH!”

It’s affecting me so deeply that it practically feels religious. And while I could break out in a round of the hallelujah chorus, I won’t. For one thing, it would upset the dog, who is sleeping nearby. And for another, I miss the noise. The first day of school, and the departure of my kids from my house, is a reminder that one day, they’ll walk out that door and never live here again.

I can’t bear to think of it—here’s hoping Adam puts together a really good Emergency Care Package for me when that day comes.

--Martha Brockenbrough

It wasn’t until Alice said, “OK, I have my tennis mitt” that I realized how messed-up my family’s game of tennis really is. If the girls ever play the real thing, they’re in for a shock. Baseball gloves simply aren’t allowed.

Let me back up, though.

Adam comes from one of those tennis-playing families. I think his parents even play in those snappy little white outfits at their country club. I’m not a tennis-whites kind of person. In fact, I only have one white shirt because of my spilling problem. And you can forget about me in a short white skirt. There’s not enough self-tanner in the world to make that attractive.

More to the point, though, I come from a family where only half of us got any sort of hand-eye coordination. I did take tennis lessons when I was a child, but was so bad at it that I could go entire 30- minute sessions without actually making any contact with the ball.

I do remember being told to shake hands with my tennis racquet. I shook hands like I was going in for a big job interview. Fat lot of good that did. I was horrible. Ten years later, in unrelated news, an ophthalmologist examined me and said, “Huh! You’re legally blind in one eye. You don’t use it at all for distance.”

It’s entirely possible that my lack of depth perception made hitting the ball a challenge (and don’t worry, I got it fixed in time to get my driver’s license). But I think the truth is, I’m not built for anything that requires coordination or grace.

Early on in my relationship with Adam, I tried playing tennis again, hoping that my robust corrective lenses would work miracles. Statistically speaking, I suppose they did. Two hits per hour is a big improvement. But I had to quit because it made my wrists hurt—or so Adam thinks.

Tennis is back in my life, though. The kids think it’s an awesome game, but probably because they have no idea how it’s actually supposed to be played. Lucy inherited my talent. She actually took a swing, missed, spun around and made a solid connection on her second attempt. It was like a cartoon. She couldn’t have been happier.

Alice appears to be taking after Adam’s side of the family, and once she cracks the 33-pound barrier, she might not tip over every time you put a racquet in her wee hands. She can actually swing and move a ball in generally the right direction, and if she thinks she’s going to miss, she makes good use of the mitt.

About this mitt. It’s a small, pink thing made out of pleather and purchased for $4.99 at the drugstore because the other glove Adam bought Alice was too big for her to close. Odd as it is, it is probably not the strangest thing about our family tennis games.

Nor is the way Adam and I struggle to avoid hitting our children, knocking easy lobs to each other over the heads of the girls, who like to run around the court at top speeds, brandishing their racquets. (“Look at me!” Alice says. “I AM YELLOW LIGHTNING!” “Look at me!” Lucy says, “I CAN FIT THE BALL IN MY MOUTH!”) 

No, the strangest thing about the way we play tennis is that we’ve included our dog in the game. Tennis purists would have a heart attack. But it does add a certain level of excitement.

She runs around after the girls, snatching balls out of the air, depositing them at our feet, dirty and dripping with saliva. Then they squelch and bounce off in unpredictable directions, while the kids whoop and holler and slash at the air with their racquets and baseball mitts.

It got really exciting the time a bee joined in the game and everyone started shrieking and hopping in order to avoid getting stung. Poor Rosie. She took one right in the rear end for the team.

This game we’re playing is tennis, but more. You could maybe call it eleven- or twelvis. And while it will never get us any points in a real match, I’m happy with the score nonetheless. I believe the tennis pros have the right name for it: love.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Remember when the federal government regularly issued color-coded terror-alert warnings? Remember how they toggled back and forth between the orange “high” and the red “severe” for years? It bugged me that the other colors never got their shot. And now, you never even hear about this system anymore. (Although we are currently in the yellow zone for “elevated” threat—don’t you feel better now?)

In case they’re going to be selling off the concept at a government-surplus store, or maybe a bake sale to raise money for health care, I’ve been thinking of a perfect use for those rainbow signs. We hardly have to make any changes--just swap in “parental irritation” for “terrorist attack” and we’re good to go.

I don’t want to make light of terrorism. Or bake sales. But it sure feels the security of my own homeland has a lot more to do with how well I can keep my patience with my kids when they’re asking me for the millionth time where their shoes are. 

More often than not, I lose my temper because I’m trying to do too many things at once. But sometimes, life with kids requires the simultaneous juggling of phone calls, boiling noodles and kittens. Orange and red days happen.

I once heard a mom say she’d never yelled at her child. Maybe that’s true. I wanted to ask her if she’d at least used her outside voice with him. And I thought about asking if she planned to donate her body to science after she was done with it, to see if there was something going on with her brain that made her immune to the stresses of child-rearing. Or maybe she just has really stiff vocal cords. I kept my mouth shut, though, because I didn’t want her to know she was so much better at this job than I am.

I lose my patience with my kids far more than I’d like to. When I was younger and more idealistic, I said I’d never yell, because my mom hollered at us a lot. It was necessary—we were on a swim team and she had to rouse the five of us out of bed at like 5:30 in the morning. One unforgettable morning, she came into my room and whispered, “It’s time to get up.” I thought she’d finally gotten the message that my teenage ears were sensitive, but no. She had laryngitis.

I feel horrible when I lose it. Especially because a wise friend once told me that our voices are the ones kids hear when they finally internalize their consciences. In my dreams, my children’s consciences will be me, whispering gently.

Reality, apparently, is a bit different.

Lucy’s table manners tend to bring out my loud voice. It was one thing seeing her with peanut butter on her forehead when she was a toddler. Now that she’s 9, this worries me. If she’s in a rush, she will stuff her cheeks to the Dizzy Gillespie point. And she’s never met a sleeve that she hasn’t turned into a napkin (even on velvet holiday dresses). At this rate, she’ll never be invited to dine with the Queen.

If this sounds petty to you, I invite you to come over to my house to get the stains out of her clothes. Also, Inventions Department? Please make me detachable napkin sleeves for all her shirts. The Sleevekin™: I’d buy it in bulk.

A friend and I went away last weekend. We both needed time get ourselves back in the green zone after a long, hot summer.

Adam kept me up to date on the kids’ activities, sending pictures and text messages. My favorite was his last. He’d taken the girls to the neighborhood bakery for donuts. They sat at a table on the sidewalk, enjoying the summer heat. Lucy spied a police officer and said, “Alice! Quick! Wipe your face! It’s the police!”

The best part? The officer heard and—perhaps predicting their future as delinquents—said, “I’ll be seeing you later, girls.” Then he went inside to get his own donut.

It seems Lucy has internalized my voice into her conscience, after all, and I apparently sound like a low-level street criminal on Law & Order. We have so drilled the concept of table manners into her that she believes there is, in fact, a prison for kids with frosting faces. At some point, she might even internalize the manners part.

Until then, I’ll keep working on my parental-alert warning system, and I’ll keep hoping for some green and blue days.

--Martha Brockenbrough

When I think back to some of the hair and clothing choices I made in high school, I have two choices: to laugh or to cry. Or I can laugh until I cry, which has happened more than once when I think about the perm I got that burned off huge chunks of my hair at the scalp. Please don't say the word "tuft" in my presence. I'm still sensitive.

Men my age don't really have this painful nostalgia problem unless they rocked swishy mullets, and even so, I don't think they look back on that as anything but evidence they once had super-heroic hair follicles. In short, fashion victims my age are far more likely to be girls. But you know what? The tide has turned.

I was walking behind a young man yesterday who appeared to be wearing the pants of an 8-year-old girl. His entire bottom—which I could easily see was wrapped in heather-gray underwear with a blue and white band—hung over the brim of his skinny, skinny pants.

It wasn't just a muffin top. It was a whole bakery top. Part of me wanted to see what was going on in the front, but the angels of my better nature really, really didn't. As he walked, his pants would slide down his legs, and every few steps he'd jerk them back up. He was one trombone sound effect away from being a walking cartoon.

Minutes later, I saw another boy about that age wearing skinny, skinny turquoise pants that also served as nothing more than a display shelf for his bottom.

What is up with this? Pretty much the first rule of pants is that they cover your front and back doors. You start with the fig leaf and work your way down. It's not that complicated.

When you add to this the ridiculousness of Zac Efron hairdo—dirty, dirty locks flat-ironed toward the cheeks like limp dandelion fringe—it becomes clear that the middle aged men of 2040 are setting themselves up for midlife crises of mythological proportions. Forget convertibles and younger women. These men will buy flying cars and date embryos.

And while I laugh at this, I also recognize that this laughter comes from within the generous confines of my very first pair of mom jeans. Apparently, the apocalypse is upon me, and it came wearing sensible shoes.

I recently bought this pair of high-waisted jeans because I got sick of having to use the buddy system to sit.

"Cover me!" I'd say to a friend so that no one behind me was getting peek at the full moon in broad daylight.

I found out about my pants through an online mom's group. Someone asked about jeans that don't reveal our middle-aged-mom mysteries and I wrote down the recommended brand. And it wasn't just a recommended brand, but one designed for Target by a woman who lives in my very neighborhood. You know you're getting old when pants from Target designed by someone who shops at the same drugstore sounds far more exciting than $300 "premium" denim.

My mom jeans are so comfortable. I can bend and pick stuff up without having to use one free hand to hold my pants in place. I no longer feel an unwelcome breeze on my lower back when I'm sitting in a chair. It's a thing of great joy.

Twenty years from now, I might look back on pictures of me in my mom jeans and wince in much the same way I do when I watch my future son-in-law try to parallel park his flying car.

I'm guessing, though, that any regret I feel won't be over how I look in my high-waisted pants, but rather, because it took me far too long to appreciate the even greater comfort of an elastic waistband.

--Martha Brockenbrough

You can idealize childhood all you want, but I’m glad I’m a grownup, especially when the subject of birthday parties arises. These things can be minefields.

For example, Lucy just found out she wasn’t invited to a classmate’s party. Her school has a rule that says all the girls in class have to be invited, but not everyone obeys it. And during summer, who’s going to know?

Ah, but kids do find out—even when school’s not in session. It was rough for Lucy to hear she didn’t make the cut—particularly since the girls who did are the same four she plays with everyday at recess. When they let her, that is. She once came home in tears because the group’s ringleader, a child who’s often hard on Lucy, told her they were all playing separately that day. It was just a ruse to get Lucy to buzz off.

This is why, as Lucy’s ninth birthday approached, I was feeling torn. I wanted her to have a party, but I didn’t really want to have some of those kids over to my house. What if Lucy wanted a piñata? Could I trust myself with the club around the ringleader in particular? Okay, I’m kidding. Why would I thwack a child who isn’t stuffed with delicious candy? (Still kidding!)

At any rate, when school starts again, I’ll help Lucy to find more friends she can count on. For now, though, it’s all about helping Lucy turn 9 and realize she’s loved. This is where it’s really handy that Lucy has a bunch of cousins. Our family is crawling with them, and they all adore Lucy because she’s funny and crazy and can be counted on for instruction in all the important things in life.

So I asked my brothers and sisters if they’d be up for an impromptu surprise party. They were, of course, as was my mom, who asked if we could have it at her place, because my dad isn’t quite up to climbing the dozens of steps up we have. But this was even better because it meant I wouldn’t have to clean and someone else would have to inflate all the balloons. Of course I said yes.

We set the party for 6:15 on Saturday night. Well before that, the call came from my sister. They were ready for us. We weren’t doing much of anything, so we packed up to leave, with the understanding that I would send a text message when we got to my parents' driveway.

That seemed risky to me, though. My parents live on a narrow street lined with enormous fir trees. I’m not totally clear on how text messaging technology works, but it seemed to me that the text fairies who undoubtedly are used to deliver these messages might get their wings caught up in pine needles. We might surprise them with our arrival, rather than the other way.

So I decided to send periodic texts during the entire ride to Grandma’s house, so that they’d have the best chance of reaching their destination. And of course, I had to use code.

“The pig has left the poke!” I wrote, as soon as the kids were buckled into their booster seats.

My sister replied almost immediately: “We have rehearsed. We are ready. It is really hard to wait.”

We drove a few blocks, past a park filled with trees. “The pig is in the woods,” I wrote.

Her reply: “We are still ready and very excited—almost to the point of agitation.”

We made it through the woods and onto the next landmark. “The pig is on the bridge,” I reported.

The reply: “We have popped four balloons while waiting.”

Before I could respond, another message: “Make that five.”

I looked over at Adam in the driver’s seat. He was obeying the speed limit, as usual. I was feeling agitated myself, like maybe my head would pop. The car rolled onward, though, and my head remained intact. I sent the second-to-last text: “The pig is on the point!” This meant we were a half-mile from the destination.

The reply came almost instantly. “We only have two balloons left. Better hurry.”

Then we were at my parents’ driveway, and I sent one last message: “The pig is in the blanket. The pig is in the blanket.”

My sister’s reply arrived: “We have one balloon.”

And then Lucy was in my parents’ kitchen, where the cousins were hiding. They hopped out at once, releasing a single yellow balloon into the warm summer air. “SURPRISE!” they yelled. “SURPRISE!”

Lucy was, indeed, surprised. She spun around in glee as they sang happy birthday to her, and even though I knew what was coming right down to the number of intact party balloons, I felt my eyes prick with tears.

It wasn’t surprise that got me—it was the opposite. It was the knowledge that I could count on other people to love my kid. I’m talking about her cousins, but also her aunts and uncles who blew up balloons, set up a string maze, and organized everything for a round of the family classic, The Chocolate Game.

Being reminded of that every so often, especially after a bad birthday-party incident, is a gift a mother really needs.

--Martha Brockenbrough