Bettie Bookish

The best Christmas ever

I probably wrote that last year, too, but whatever.

Here's a quick rundown:

Best gift given: Krups Coffee Grinder & Brewer for HSH because he hates our coffee. And because I am the prototypical 1950s housewife, I find that equivalent to his hating my housekeeping skills or blowjobs. Because I'm a lady like that.

Best gift received: A small Guan Yin, which makes me think of taking both of my daughters to the Six Banyan Tree Temple for a blessing, one of which was cut short by a cell phone call received by the monk.

Two other amazing gifts: A phone call received from Xerxes before we had a chance to call him. The Soundtrack to Office Space, worth "Damn It's Good to Be a Gangsta," alone.

Best food consumed: Vegetarian lasagna on Christmas day.

Runners-Up for best food consumed: Trader Joe's truffles and Lila's chocolate chip cookies.

Best drink consumed: Tempranillo brought by Lila (help  me out here with the vintner, L), around which she tied beautiful red and green ribbon. Edited to add: It wasn't tempranillo - it was rioja. With Pure Spanish Character. (Thanks, Lila.)

Best feat of engineering and persistence: Four adults (two of them Ivy leaguers) assembling a kitchen playset at midnight Christmas Eve. I was not one of the Ivy Leaguers. But I was sharing the Tempranillo with one of them.

Worst gift decision: Buying a T-shirt online.

Best gift decision: Buying Superbad for my brother from Amazon, and then having to buy it again because it had not arrived in time. Special gift for me - Cash Back!

Bee's favorite gift: Real makeup from Grandma.

Posey's favorite gift: Four consecutive days at home with four adults = four consecutive days of lap sitting and death defying for an audience.

Photos soon.

Mmmmm, tasty

Not long ago, Angela Marie wrote about the notoriously underdeveloped palates children have when it comes to fine baked goods, and she offered as evidence the fact that her child's classmates enjoyed a batch of chocolate cupcakes that were less than perfect.

The description she gave of the cupcakes was so intoxicating that I begged for the recipe, promising never to make or distribute them in her home state.

She was generous enough to oblige, and yesterday, Bee and I made a batch.

That's my son's ladyfriend, who is unanimously adored around Bookish Farm.

Also, she has been known to read this here Internet Thingy, and even has the charming decency to be mildly shocked at how often I use the word fuck.

She's a sweet girl.

I'm not a seasoned pastry chef. Cooking is just not among my meager talents. I'm not even a very good eater, for that matter. I'd be perfectly happy eating the same two or three dishes* every day for the rest of my life.

*Dishes that, ironically, are not available in any restaurant in a 60-mile radius of our home.

The point is that I don't cook often or particularly well, which speaks volumes about Angela Marie's cupcake recipe, because (cover your eyes H-------) holyfuckingwiltonpans those cupcakes are delicious.

Bee and I made them to welcome home our Hot Shot Husband/Papa, who returned last night in lake effect snow warning conditions from Florida, where his sister has surgery last week.

We made regular cupcakes, and we also made a pan of heart-shaped cakes. Those were Bee's favorites, and she sighed blissfully as she frosted one of them: "They make me want to love."

These cupcakes are, without exception, the best cake product I have ever eaten. My only dilemma is deciding what to call them.

• Angela Marie's Effing Good Cupcakes

• Blogcakes

• Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

• Internet Strangercakes, because every time my husband sees me reading a blog or hears a story about something I read, he asks if I'm checking in with my Internet Strangers.

Thank you, Angela Marie. You've changed my life. And probably my jeans size.

I AIN'T SAYING SHE'S A GOLD-DIGGER

Last week, Bee announced over dinner one night that she and a little girl in her class named A---- had gotten married that day.

"That sounds like a lot of fun," I told her. "Is A---- one of your really good friends?"

She didn't answer because she was too busy humming the wedding march with her mouth full of pierogie.

"Why did you and A---- decide to get married?"

This is going to be great, I thought. In her little girl innocence, she's going to say something about the nature of love that we adults should all take to heart. I opened my mental notebook and prepared to take dictation.

She shrugged. "A---- and I got married to N------- because he was a prince."

TEETHING, CLIMBING, RENOVATING

Baby Posey has had a fussy week, what with her HSP being out of town. In his absence, she latched on to me even more forcefully. You should see the bruises.

The constant trail of saliva that has been hanging from her mouth like a fire escape ladder tells me that she's also teething, which couldn't have helped matters.

When she's not drooling or clenching one of my nipples in her vicelike little manhands because I threatened to put her down, she has been climbing. She climbs on the chairs. She climbs onto the dowels under out trestle-style dining table. She climbs onto the base of her highchair and looks like she's sailboarding.

She is not afraid of anything. Yesterday, she tried to climb onto the front of the Dyson - while I was vacuuming.

She and Bee are such different creatures. Bee covers her ears and flushes the toilet with her elbow. Posey wants to ride the vacuum.

She is not only fearless, but amazingly strong as well. Here she is crawling away after pulling up a slate tile from our entry hallway.

And while Bee likes to lick the chocolate batter from the beaters

Posey drinks hot sauce straight from the bottle.

I'm a good mom.

Boy, that guy likes velvet

Thanksgiving 2006 will forever go down in the Bookish family lore as the year J-- S----- tried to kill me.

It started cordially enough when I mentioned that, ever since undergoing chemotherapy, my alcohol tolerance is much higher, and my hangover rate is much lower.

J-- took this as some kind of challenge, and asked, "What are you saying? Are you issuing a challenge?"

I hadn't been. But suddenly it seemed like the thing to do.

He spent the next two and a half hours refilling our glasses. Sometime after dessert, I managed to find my way to the sofa, where I fell asleep (or something like that). I woke up and found Lila and her mom watching an interview with Mel Gibson about Mayans.

I hoped I was hallucinating, but an ad spotted on TV today tells me I wasn't.

And J-- thinks he won. That's OK - I'll give it to him.

Dear J--, you can officially outdrink a 120-pound cancer survivor.

PACKING MORE DAY IN YOUR DAY

Today was my brother Thor's 32nd birthday, so the whole family came over to our house, and we ate leftovers and soup and sandwiches. (J-- quietly recovered on the sofa most of the afternoon. Me? I've been fine all day.)

We had cake and presents, and then all the women ran giggling upstairs so we could put together our baby bed and make it up with the pretty, pink, ovulation-inducing crib set that Sunshine gave us.

No sooner was the bed together than we all had to pack up and head into the village for the big annual Christmas "parade."

Bee had two invitations to ride in the Santa entourage, so we bundled up and stretched our waving hands.

Santa and Mrs. Ms. Claus arrived, and took their seats on a sleigh that was sitting on a platform-type wagon being pulled by two Belgian draft horses. The sleigh sat in the center of the platform, and was surrounded by hay bales, upon which all the children were going to sit.

Bee didn't want to ride on the wagon, so she opted to ride on the fire engine.

She sat in my lap, and sighed. "I wish my sister was here."

Abot halfway down Main Street (which is all of 6 blocks long), she turned toward me and asked, "Can we do this again sometime?"

The village's mayor, who also was riding on the truck, told her that, yes, she can come back next year - WITH her sister.

SPEAKING OF WHICH

The travel agency called today to let us know that we are leaving one week from tomorrow.

Everyone we tell squeals in excitement. Our stomachs hurt. Oh - we are so unprepared.

We do have an assembled baby bed now, though. So our little one will have a place to sleep without disturbing my dresser drawer full of novelty socks.

Tomorrow we travel to the Big City to load up on supplies such as saline nose spray, baby prunes and glycerine suppositories. We might get some stuff for the trip, too.

And we will definitely partake of some restaurants.

Next time - a ladder

All the hoi polloi of the village turned out in the icy drizzle to deck the poles along Main Street.

There is a committee that oversees this process and assigns each family to a specific pole. At the foot of the street lamp, there is a bag with the family's name on it and ribbon, garland, lights, bows and intructions inside it.

The instructions begin with the directive to attach the wired ribbon at the top of the pole near the lamp.

I should mention here that, while we did not bring a ladder, we did bring an 18-year-old son.

I've been schooled

Little Bee started going to school for the full day this week, as I have started going to a real, grown-up type job this week.

She comes home looking a lot fresher than I do, I'm afraid.

She seems to love it. My son always came home looking as though he had been drained by leeches during aftercare. After snack, before dodgeball.

Not Bee. She bounces out of school at 4:30 or 5 just the way she bounces out at 12:30.

I am missing her, to be sure. But Mama's gotta make that money. By which I mean, not very much money at all.

Tonight when I came home - around 8 p.m. because I had to "work an event" heh, dirty - Buttercup followed me around while I was heating up my slice of pizza that HSH had saved for me (he's the schmoopie), and she asked, "Can I sleep on your shoulder?"
"You want to do what?"
"Sit in your lap and put my head on your shoulder and sleep. Just for a little while. After you eat."

What's that in my shoe? Holy crap, my heart has melted!

She is missing me, too. Fortunately, she is in lerve with her teacher, Ms. R. Last night, we were picking out today's clothes and Bee made sure that everyone in the house (and throughout most of the valley) knew she wanted to "look very VERY pretty for Ms. R."

And the feeling is mutual. Maybe Ms. R really is in love with every single child in the class, but it's clear that she has genuine affection for my daughter - a young lady who can be as challenging as she is amazing and wonderful. We're very lucky.

So it's going pretty well with the working and the child care. Little Bee needs more intense attention after I come home, so I've been conscientious about taking the time to really be present with her, even if my first impulse when I get home is to drink deeply and cry longly. Or drink sparingly and cry briefly.

I'm joking of course! Working is great. If you haven't already, you should definitely try it.

And you should read a story that contains a picture of a monkey to my daughter, because she might tell you (with accompanying hand gestures) that "Monkeys are funny and dogs are soooo shweet and MERmaids are BYOOtiful and RAINbows are pretty!"

Um. Yeah. You totally nailed that one, Little Bee.

Where babies come from

The long-awaited Baby Ellah has arrived and she is definitely so cutiepie. At least, I think she is so cutiepie. It was hard to get a good look at her through her interminable entourage* of big brothers.

*Spammers: Feel free to use the phrase "interminable entourage" as your next cryptic subject line.

Her 3-year-old brother excitedly greeted us as the hospital elevator and exclaimed: Guess what! My baby sister came out!

She also has 7-year-old twin brothers. One of them said "I feel like this is a dream!" He also proclaimed that his little sister was "Better than a unicorn."

His twin brother confirmed the assertion, tweaking it slightly for his own sensibilities. "She's better than a real komodo dragon."

In the past few weeks, as we've all been talking about the imminent arrival of Baby Ellah, Buttercup wanted to know exactly how Ellah would exit her mommy Sunshine's stomach. I'm not shy about these things. I explained that Ellah was not really in Sunshine's stomach, where the food goes. She was in Sunshine's uterus. And when the time was right, Ellah would come out through the vagina, which is how these things normally happen.

B didn't skip a beat about all of this. She's a real nuts-and-bolts kind of girl who wants to know how things work - no how they really work. I mean, having a baby inside your body is so weird to begin with that it just figures the whole affair would end with the baby coming out of your befront.

At any rate, we've been talking a lot about babies and reproduction and going to China to adopt B's own baby sister.

The other night over dinner, Buttercup casually mentioned that she used to be a little baby who was in my tummy.

I told her that, no, she wasn't in my tummy. We talked again about how she was a baby in China and we came to China and adopted her, and that's how we met.

"Yeah," she said. "And now we're a family because a family is people who love each other."

(I think that's a direct quote from a Barney song, although we do support that general attitude.)

At the time, I felt like it was almost the perfect teachable moment to begin a conversation about Buttercup's birthmother. We talk all the time about adoption and her adoption, specifically. And she has had close contact with two women as they were pregnant. But this is the first time she has connected those dots, and come to the conclusion that she came from my body.

But the moment was not quite perfect to explain that, while she did not come from my tummy, she did come from someone's tummy. She did not appear from the ether in China all ready to be adopted.

We were eating in a restaurant, and we were with my mother-in-law and the food had just arrived, and in the context of that setting, I stumbled.

I've been kicking myself a little ever since then. I wish I could have handled it better. And while I know that I will have many opportunities to handle that conversation (or mishandle it) in the future, I feel like I missed a chance to talk about it casually and organically.

That night, Bee chose her bedtime stories as usual, and she chose "In My Heart," "Everywhere Babies" and "I Love You Like Crazycakes." We lingered a long time over the page in "Crazycakes" that talks about the baby's birthmother. The lingering was my choice, though, not hers. I wanted to give her the opportunity to ask about how that works. No, how does it really work?

She didn't ask.

She did, however, sleep entirely through the night, which is a rarity in our house. And in the days since, she has slept through the night more often than not.

I worried that night, as I was putting her to bed, that she might have even more trouble sleeping than usual as her brain and body tried to process this new information.

Now I believe that she is able to sleep better because what she knows in that wordless place that exists within us from the moment we're born and what she has learned in that front-of-the-head, Q&A-type information file we get from our parents and our conscious observations and our acquisition of languages make more sense together.

In which I stay in bed all day whimpering to the real estate gods

Dear Innernets,

If you have any room in your heart or your day that would allow you to send a little positive real-estate-closing energy in the direction of my brother and me, we sure could use it.

We are supposed to close on our mother's house sometime this afternoon.

I will spare you the blow-by-blow account of this house-selling adventure (edited to add: No I won't, read on), but I will tell you that in the past four months, we have had three contracts - two of which fell apart. One of those fell apart on closing day. Twice.

For this third contract, we moved the closing day back one week from the 10th to the 17th. On the day of the 17th, it didn't happen, and we were told "tomorrow - Monday or Tuesday at the latest."

We've spent the last week hearing from the buyers' mortgage broker that it will be "tomorrow." We have spoken so often and so frustratingly with that broker, my sister-in-law Lila and I have started calling him K-Fed because he inspires in us the same slack-jawed disgust as the other K-Fed.

He is definitely in the cooker. We've already bought the paper plates.

On Friday evening, he assured me that FINALLY all the paperwork was in order and that "as long as we don't have a hurricane, we should be able to close on Monday afternoon."

Fuck.

I'm not getting out of bed until the house sells. Or until I get really hungry.

In which I act like a real mom

Thank goodness for girlfriends. And thank goodness my son has one.

If it were not for his girlfriend, we would not have spent two days last week driving across the state to visit a miniscule village in the middle of nowhere and the college campus that envelops Main Street.

Xerxes' girlfriend has fallen in love with this school and has every intention of attending. This is her third visit there, and she attended a weeklong writing program there this summer.

This is not the only campus she has visited. Her mother forced her into the car at the appropriate age and hauled her all over New York looking at institutions of higher learning.

I didn't know forcing was an option.

Apparently, the girlfriend also has taken her SAT and ACT exams. Again - I should have forced?

Frankly, no, I shouldn't have. My son is an amazing young man, but if I had stuffed him into the car and dragged his ass to one college after another, it would have been more likely to ensure that he never set foot in an accredited institution of his own free will.

This way is much better.

He loved visiting the campus, and he wants to visit others now. He has formed opinions about student-teacher ratios and meal plans. He is personally invested.

And I learned something, too. Visiting colleges is fun.

I didn't do it when I was in high school. I think it didn't occur to my mother to do that sort of thing. Or maybe she looked at my high school attendance record and decided that I wouldn't be able to hack it in a real school. Whatever the case, the summer after my senior year, she drove me to the local community college and signed me up.

In the end, I'm glad she did. I met JC the very first day of classes. I also met my first husband, my son's birth father. So I can't say I would have wanted things to happen any other way.

But to have walked a real campus at 16 or 17, and met those professors and eaten in a dining hall ... and to have had someone guiding me in that direction instead of telling me that those things were for other people. Well, that would have been pretty damn spiffy.

And, my own lesson learned, I'm going to start visiting colleges with Buttercup the year she enters kindergarten.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edited to add: I have one toe on the floor. My Realtor just called and said that paperwork is moving, and a closure looks imminent. Did I spell that right? Probably not, and the blinking spellcheck doesn't work with blinking Safari.

My dear friends, this is the Little Real Estate Transaction That Could. Chant with me: I think it can, I think it can, I think it can...

Maybe my medication works TOO well

Today was Girlday Giggle Baby Fever Roadtrip with my sister-in-law Lila, her mother and Lila's sister-in-law Sunshine. I know. Usually, I just introduce all of them except my sister-in-law as cousins, and that seems to satisfy the notion that we're loosely related without having to go into the kind of eye-stabbingly dull chart presentation one usually associates with the first page of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.

Sunshine is pregnant, due in September. This is her third pregnancy, fourth child and first daughter. She's so excited that her every pore is glistening with pink, sparkly honeysuckle nectar that perfumes the room and makes every woman in a 100-foot radius ovulate from the mere proximity.

Because we live in the sticks we have to drive more than an hour to get to that hallowed ground of expectant parent shoppydom that is Babies R Us. And drive we did.

I had never been in an actual bricks-and-mortar version of the store before, and I have to tell you that it is the most gratuitious, consumerist bacchanal of babyshopping I've ever seen.

Also, I wish I had had one of these when Buttercup was little. And one of these. And these. And I could still use this.

I have such a love/hate relationship with babyshopping.

First, I believe strongly that the capitalist powers that be have sold mothers of my generation a vision of motherhood that is hollow and expensive. It's not about parenting. It's not about the nurturing and development of a small, helpless human being. It's not about the efficient and intelligent use of resources to bring your children to adulthood in more or less one piece.

It's about accessorizing.

I hope I have a girl, because they're so much more fun to shop for.

I have known more than one woman who dreamed of motherhood for the shopping opportunities it would provide. The shopping and the built-in, guilt-free career change. And no one should be shocked to know that these are the same women who could be heard bemoaning most loudly the unforeseen agony of breastfeeding, the utterly unexpected anguish of sleep deprivation and the absolute and complete transformation of every moment of every day for the rest of your life that just sorta sneaks up on a new mom.

When they decided to have babies, they weren't thinking about that. (And, as the mother of a 3 year old and a 17 year old, I can tell you all that stuff is the EASY part.)

They were thinking about this. And this. And this. Oh,oh,oh and THIS. No, wait, two of those.

That pretty much covers the Hate part.

And the Love part is easy to guess.

I wouldn't mind having one of those fancy, lightweight urban strollers. Especially if it's possible to navigate one with a single hand. (Anyone?) And if someone gave me a Fleurville, I'd use it. And I'd probably feel pretty good about it, while simultaneously feeling kind of bad about myself.

And my next high chair will have the kind of sleek, user-friendly engineering that you can only get by paying a ransom to the Italians. (Or to whomever can make the best knock-off."

And there's the real thing. For a year and a half, I had expected that we would be needing a high chair of our own this summer. Summer is here, but there is no baby. There is no baby even on the horizon.

I had thought that today's girly shopping day would be a little hard for me in some ways. I thought that, in the midst of dodging Sunshine's laser-scanner and encouraging her to register for a range of ridiculous products she may never need, that I might pause by the high chairs or receiving blankets and willfully blink my misty eyes into stonefaced submission.

But I didn't feel that. I've been expecting so long now, that I'm barely expecting anything at all any more.

I did not look at the little lavender dresses or the pink painted changing table. And if I looked at that high chair or a $300 crib linens set, I certainly wasn't serious.

I'm not sad. I'm terminally disappointed and angry and exhausted. And if I hear myself say one more time something brilliant like "It will happen when it happens..." I'm going to punch mysef in the fucking head.

Being sad is much, much easier than this.

Get your motor running

Do yourselves a favor and hop over to American Family and read about why we are led to believe that minivans are not cool, despite the fact that they are so OBVIOUSLY the most utterly fucking amazing vehicles on the road.

Pictured above is my minivan, with a message on the windshield that I love New York. I do.

I also love my minivan, and I don't care who knows it.

And the more I think about AmFam's theory that the minivan's second-class status springs from its primary function to accommodate the needs of women and children, the angrier I get. Meanwhile, what are the cool rides? Collateral Damage-Mobiles and Penile Facsimiles.

No thank you.

The minivan is a marvel of function and comfort. Mine has dedicated slots for 10 beverages. That's three more than the number of passengers it can carry. This is a vehicle with me and my predeliction for simultaneously nursing both a cup of coffee and a bottle of water in mind.

All that and I can see over the steering wheel and drive as fast as I wanna.

I got my first and only speeding ticket driving my mommyvan along the rolling hills of central New York.

My biggest fear about next winter is that I will have to give up my van because it doesn't have 4WD and may not be able to make it up my steep driveway. If that's the case, I'm cleaning it up, and upgrading to a model that can handle my drive.

I want that bumper sticker that says Fight the Man - Drive A Minivan.

I want an airbrushed T-shirt with my van on it.

I want to put spinners on every cup holder.

Rock farms and peanuts

This being Memorial Day weekend, it's time to put plants in the ground.

JC rented a tiller "up to the Ace," as they say in the South, and this afternoon he and I and Buttercup tilled our large vegetable garden plot. He did most of the tilling, although I did try my hand at a couple of rows. I think it helps if you're tall enough to hold the tiller without having your hands almost level with your chest. A good roto-tiller tends to get away from a short gal, especially once she starts enjoying the gasoline fumes swirling about her little head like visions of sugar plums.

Where were we?

Oh, yes. The garden.

The garden, she is very rocky. She is, in fact, more rock than garden from what I can tell. So once the soil was nice and loose, Buttercup and I took the wheelbarrow up and down the rows and tossed rocks into it. Big rocks, little rocks, little bits of coal that were dumped in one corner by the school teacher or schoolhouse custodian 150 years ago. Of course, there wasn't a garden here then. And the people who first cultivated a garden there could not have known that they were building right atop the school teacher's favorite coal-dumping spot.

We have potatoes that we're going to put in the ground tomorrow. And we have squash and brocolli and tomatoes, eggplant and bell peppers that we've started in flats and are hardening off by letting them spend some time on the porch every afternoon.

I love the garden. I wish I were better at it. I wish I had either knowledge or creative vision. Fortunately, my knowledge grows all the time, and we are blessed to have bought our house from people who had what the kids call "mad garden skillz."

So this year is amazing. This year, we get to discover all the flowers and foliage as they rise this spring. We haven't been here long enough to ruin anything. If my calculations are correct, next spring will fall somewhere between a letdown and an all-out indictment.

The thing I love most about gardening badly is the time it allows for fretting and rumination.

Today, for example, instead of clearing my mind and getting back to earthy basics, I worried about money and travel and the state of healthcare in America. I worried about Little Orphan Annie and the girl who didn't win American Idol.

Did I mention that I attended a small get-together last week that could aptly be called an "Idol Party?" It's true. I was a one-night member of the Soul Patrol.

We were at Buttercup's cousins' house for the show. At one point in the evening, B's cousin decided to change his pants in a very public fashion. Buttercup was rendered speechless by the sight of her male cousin, naked from the waist down, jogging around the living room. But where words failed her, laughter found her, and she was soon rolling on the floor in a fit of giggles. No, seriously, ROLLING on the floor with laughter.

Her cousin didn't care. He's very proud of his boyhood, and is famous for his outspokenness about it.

In the moment, we had a very matter-of-fact conversation about the whole thing.

Yes, that's different than what you have, isn't it? It's a penis. Yes, that's how boys pee. Etcetera, etcetera.

A couple days later, B was on her way to the bathroom and told me that she wished she had "what J--- has to go pee."

I told her I understood.

"That looks cool, huh?"

"Yes."

"But what girls have is at least as cool as a penis. Probably cooler."

"But I want to be a boy. Maybe when I get bigger I wil be a boy," she said, really dejected about the whole thing. Then she moped off to pee with her regular, boring, girly "befront," which is how we generically refer to all the business that isn't the behind. We use the real words, too, but there are just too many of them to be economical enough for a busy 3-year-old.

Not that it matters whether we use the real words, and thank goodness for that.

She's developed a serious case of penis envy, except that she thinks it's peanuts envy. Today at breakfast in the downtown diner where there are only about 6 tables and the quarters are so close that the cook has to feed you, B decided it was time to talk about how she wanted peanuts.

"You want peanuts? I don't think they have them. How about eggs and pancakes?"

"No," she said, unable to believe our stupidity. "PEANUTS, like on your BODY. Like J--- has."

Oh. A peanuts.

I was thinking about that while I was pulling rocks from the garden and tossing them into the wheelbarrow.

B was thinking about it, too. Wiggling her fingers in the dark, loose dirt, she said without looking up at me, "Mommm---"

You've heard it. "Mommmm---- can I get a phone in my room?" "Mommmm---- can I stay up until 11? "Mommm--- can I ask you for something we both know you'll never give me?"

"Mommmmm----" she said, "I really want a peanuts."

And in what may have been my greatest parenting moment of the month, I was able to restrain the impulse to tell her that it's a lot more fun to rent than to own, if you know what I'm saying, heh, heh. And ha!"

She what a good mom I am?