Yesterday was a blog-free day.  Besides, I was feeling like a self-pitying character in a Lifetime made-for-TV movie starring Lindsay Wagner after she was the Bionic Woman and before she was a spokesperson for mattresses. Even I wanted to change the channel.   

Today, we started with the usual Saturday morning violent cartoons.  Too bad my son has outgrown “Arthur” on PBS.  Now, we have to watch mean aliens and anthropomorphized animals (as opposed to friendly talking aardvarks, rabbits, chipmunks and other animals on “Arthur” who learn to live and play and get along with each o-o-other-r-r).  Now we have totally demonic creepsters (even the humans).  Even the commercials are so bizarre I can’t tell it from the cartoon until the Skechers or Geox logo appears. There must be subliminal messages in all of this.

Cartoons, a run (me), a haircut (boy, does he look handsome), lunch, errands and gymnastics took us to 3pm.  A little note about the haircut.  He had $5 in tooth fairy money and wanted to buy a matchbox car at the hair salon.  He sees a silver one and it is $2.95.  We think, “hooray, no issue over spending more than his $5!”  We open it and it turns out to be a matchbox car replica of a HEARSE.  Yes, a HEARSE.  Why did it ever occur to the makers of matchbox cars to make a HEARSE.  We had to tell our son what it was because he was showing his new car to everyone who looked surprised and ooked out when they realized it was a HEARSE.  Our son understands what goes in a hearse but he decided it was a subterfuge for a mobile command station in the war of the planets.  He is such a good sport. I still don’t want him to bring it to show-and-tell.  EEEeeeewwww. 

We dashed to Tribeca to meet another family for a play date.  We live on the Upper West Side.  They live in Brooklyn.  Tribeca is mutually inconvenient, so it works.  There is a pretty nice park there (if you are careful not to sit in bird poop and are willing to stare down some pretty daring pigeons).  Until the family arrived and for sometime afterward, our son played pied piper to young Jasper, who had a Tribeca groovy name, Tribeca groovy long hair and a Tribeca groovy shaved-head, tattoed, goatee’d dad.  When our friends arrived — a couple with a boy our son’s age and two younger identical twin girls — the two boys went off to play and met up with a handsome-like-a-model young boy about their age with flowing blond hair and a Che Guevara t-shirt.  His name?  Herman.  Herman?  HERMAN?  With a name like that, it is a good thing he is model-handsome, with groovy t-shirts.  All in all, this park was CRAWLING with way too many groovy kids and parents.  And with my gray hair and my uncool running clothes, I looked like the ungroovy grandma.  So, this was an even un-groovier realization. 

At some point my partner needed to leave the park for ten minutes.  She doesn’t smoke or drink, so you ask what stealth thing required her to excuse herself without explanation?  Was she testing societal norms?  I know my partner, so it could only be one thing: she needed a “retail therapy” fix (was there some middle-aged angst afoot?)  She likes to buy clothes for our son. I remembered a kids’ boutique across the street from the park and I knew that she was having her therapy session there. 

As it turns out, it was a good time to have some therapy because our son proceeded to get drenched in the sprinklers.  Not just wet like most kids, but sopping as if submerged in water for days.  We are (who am I kidding, my partner is) usually prepared for these contingencies but not today.   As if on cue, my partner returned to the park with a shirt and pants she got on a fabulous sale.  Seeing our child, she sent me back to get underwear.  Of course, the store only carries Le Petit Bateau underwear for $15 a pair and you can only get in packages of 2.  So I spent $30 on a pair of stretchy boxers — he is going to wear these until he’s 13. Bargains always happens to someone else.  They see me coming and they double the price.  And they say Jews don’t pay retail.  I pay uber-retail.  Have I assimilated that much?  But, I digress.

So, we spent a long time at the park and went for dinner.  Our son eats his entire meal and eyed his friends chicken fingers.  His friend didn’t like the chicken fingers and our son was ready, willing and able to relieve him of his burden.  My partner and I were quite impressed with negotiation skills of our friends’ son.   People of lesser will power (like me) would have given in to his demands of dessert even though he didn’t eat any of the chicken.  But they are strong.  When the waiter came to the table and asked, “any dessert?” I yelled “NOOOOO!!!” so scared that my friends would be sabotaged in their strong resolve.  Strong work, ladies. 

So, the check came and our friends will not hear of splitting the bill because they are five and we are three, so out comes the calculator, but one of the parents was faster with a napkin and crayons.  Got to love the irony of adding “big numbers” with a crayon, so I took a picture.

So, tonight, we thought our son would fall asleep immediately after a bath, and teeth brushing.  Nooooooo.  Just getting hyped up for a game of tag (in the house) or play fighting (with me) or for spilling out his cars and his animals.  Where is the “off” button?