Here is a story for you.

We begin with Alice, walking her dog, listening to her iPod. Not bothering anyone. Turning the corner, she sees a small, furry blur rushing toward them. A dog, a comically tiny dog, is running out of a backyard, and headed right for Charlie. It's trailing a leash, so she figures the owner must be somewhere behind it.

Charlie, who is not a lover of other dogs, promptly freaks, attempting to get as far away from the other dog as his leash will allow. Alice tries to continue on, but the dog follows. Where is the owner? No one is showing up to explain why this puffball of a dog is free to accost the general public. The dog, whom Alice has named Teeny, appears to want to play, but the playing is taking the form of nippy neck-lunges. Charlie assumes that the dog wants to tear open his carotid. Unable to make a run for it, he finds himself running in frantic circles around Alice. Teeny follows. Yay! Fun times! thinks Teeny. (Actually, Teeny is probably thinking "tththththththththththththth" because Teeny has a brain no bigger than a nail clipping.) Having grabbed Teeny's leash, Alice is now thoroughly tangled. Her earphone cord somehow gets involved with the leashes. It's chaos. "Hello?" Alice calls out to the empty street. "Whose, uh, dog is this?"

Charlie backs away and slips out of his collar, freeing himself, and darts into the street. Teeny tries to follow. Alice screams for him to return, but he's no fool. And go back to that tiny scrabbly thing who wants at his precious neck parts? No thank you. He can still be seen at the far end of the block, peeing on a bush, eyeing that hateful tiny thing. Alice lets go of Teeny's leash and runs toward Charlie, but of course Teeny gets there first, causing Charlie to run farther away and cower behind a tree. Before both dogs run to the next town, Alice grabs Teeny's leash. She attempts to get Charlie to return to her using her most forceful tone of voice, and somehow he falls for it. Now she's managed to slip his collar back on him! Bet you didn't think that was going to happen! Meanwhile Teeny lunges and yaps and Charlie shrieks in horror. Someone's growling. Her? The dogs? Hard to say. She holds both dogs as far away as possible from each other. Now what?

There are at least two more minutes of Teeny lunging for Charlie and Charlie running in circles and Alice getting caught up in both leashes. There must be a smart way to solve this problem , Alice keeps thinking, I should be able to triumph over a dog who is the size of my fist. Is there anywhere to tie up Charlie for the time being? There is not. So she gets both dogs onto the porch of the house from where Teeny may or may not have come, and rings the doorbell. A larger dog barks and scrabbles at the front door. Charlie looks at Alice, as if to say, Are you inviting that dog out, too, because if you are I don't think I can live much longer.

She rings the doorbell. And rings again. Teeny tries to go for Charlie's neck one more time, and he lets out this mournful howl, as if he's calling out I AM TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT. So Alice ties Teeny to a bench on the front porch of the house, and Alice and Charlie make their way back home. And either the owner of that house will arrive home and think, excellent, I see my evil tiny dog got out to wreak havoc yet again, or else, who left that curiously noisy koosh ball tied to my porch?

Just your average Tuesday.

I walked Henry to school today and walked most of the way back home before realizing that I had a wooden hanger hanging from the belt on the back of my coat.  A large, wooden hanger. 

I'm telling you this to illustrate 1) how much of a dork I am and 2) how mentally and physically worn out I still am from yesterday's shoot. I have no idea why I should be this tired, because most of my day yesterday was spent sitting around.  It was too much excitement for me, I guess. I am even more delicate than I believed.  Or my humours are out of whack. A bloodletting is in order!

So! Yesterday was the photo shoot for Wondertime, as I mentioned previously.  Present were Tim and Liz, the lovely and kind art directors from Wondertime, as well as Asger and Lloyd, the infinitely patient photographer and his charming assistant. Henry, Scott, and I were outfitted and posed and fed snacks. And we had so much fun. Draining, life-sapping fun. Here are the photos. If they don't make sense to you, well, you'll have to wait for the May issue of Wondertime to come out. Maybe you should subscribe!  That's an idea I spontaneously had right now. (Please note: I am not receiving kickbacks from Wondertime.)  (Unfortunately.)

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Here's Henry, getting notes on what his motivation should be. "You're Darth Vader, coming out of the shower." How sweet does he look here? It's kind of killing me. Of course you can't hear him whining about the unbearable weight of the light saber, and the fact that the mask was choking him TO DEATH.

"What are you doing in the bathroom, son?"
"I'M TURNING TO THE DARK SIDE, MOTHER."

Henry was amazing, actually. The mask was heavy, the light saber was heavy, the shirt was chafing him, the fog from the fog machine smelled funny, and it was hard to hear everyone's direction over the sound effects coming from the light saber, but my baby posed for longer than I ever could have anticipated. 

On the other hand, he got to play with incredibly cool light sabers. They're worlds away from the crappy telescoping plastic kind we own. It must be horrible, having us as his parents.

Scott worked until 2:30 a.m. that morning, so he could spend his day pretending to be Luke Skywalker. Did he do it for me? I like to think so.

We tried to include Charlie in a shot or two, but he was being a prima donna about it—only letting us shoot his right profile because that's his signature look, etc. He didn't make the cut. Sorry, dog.

Henry declined the use of the mask for his Ultimate Battle with Obi Wan, so Liz gave him the option of giant movie-star sunglasses and a headband. It doesn't sound like it would work, but it worked well enough. Bonus: Henry didn't throw himself to the ground in mortal agony.

"Can you be a dear and get me a glass of sparkling water? With a little lemon juice? Not a wedge of lemon, dear, I DON'T WANT TO SEE ANY LEMON, just sort of a lemon essence. Wait a minute, is this pulp? I see? That's it, you're fired."

Henry kept asking Scott, "When are you going to fall down and die?" Not for a few years, son, so meanwhile you and your Oedipal struggle best hush up.

I contemplated uploading this to Finslippy yesterday and asking, "Is this a bad sign?" Ha, ha! It's just a fog machine in my oven. DON'T PANIC.

The photographer kept saying that he wanted to make me look "elegant," which I thought was a lovely sentiment, considering that I was wearing cinnamon buns on my head and a pom-pommed bathrobe from Target.

When the shoot was over (seven hours, my friends! SEVEN) Tim and Liz gave Henry not one, but TWO of the light sabers. Was he excited? A LITTLE BIT. I'm still amazed that we got him to sleep, or eat, or stop trying to amputate our limbs for more than two minutes.

So that's our story! Aaaand now I'm going back to bed. Wake me when the issue comes out. Thank you.

Happy, new, year.

To herald the death of the old year and the arrival of the new, we allowed Henry to do the heretofore unthinkable: stay up until midnight. Would he manage it? He is a boy who is usually snoring peacefully by eight p.m. and stays that way for eleven or so hours. When he stays up even an hour after his bedtime, he devolves into a blithering maniac who skitters from room to room on all fours, speaking in tongues. So we had our doubts. Still, though, we were attending a get-together wherein the children would be pajama'd up and free to snooze, if they needed, so the worst that could happen is that he crashed along with some other preschoolers. Also, when had we not been sitting at home being boring, for New Year's Eve, since Henry was born? Never, is when.

By allowing Henry to stay up until midnight, we granted him his heart's desire. Every few days Henry pleads with me to let him stay up late. "But you will be insane," I tell him, but that makes no difference to him. Night time is when all the exciting stuff happens. When we don our smoking jackets and trade witty quips. And then retire to the playroom, to enjoy our Bionicles until the sun comes up.

Anyway, the party actually went well. Although the children were marinated in sugar and hopping up and down on each other's heads, there were no tears, no bloodshed, no broken bones. Henry was cheerful, if drowsy. As the clock struck midnight, he wrapped his flannel-clad body around me and whispered, "Please, can I go to bed, now? "

So all was fine and dandy, until we got home, and he went to sleep. And woke up. And woke up again. There are four reasons why he won't be up until midnight again until he's at least 30.

1. 2:00 am. I wake up to the sound of someone crashing around downstairs. There's a burglar! We're being burgled on the first day of 2008! Also, there's weeping. A highly emotional burglar is lurching around our home. I run to the stairs to restrain him and/or provide emotional succor. But of course it's Henry, who's on his way back up after wrecking the place, and is sobbing. "What's wrong?" I ask him. He lurches back to bed. "Aaaiiiiiigh," he tells me, and I ask him to repeat himself, but he's snoring.

2. 2:30 a.m. A pitiful wailing wakes me up. I make my way to Henry's bed, where he's under the covers, shrieking. "You have to ree my snore!" he screams. "What?" "You have to ream my store!" "WHAT?" "READ ME A STORY." Oh, I am so in the mood to read some Magic Schoolbus. But that must wait. Until I'm CONSCIOUS.

3. 3:00 a.m. Weeping, banging, screaming. I make Scott get up. More weeping, more screaming. Some of it is Scott. I get up. They're in the bathroom. "My eye hurts!" Henry is shrieking. There is much clutching of the eye and tossing his head back and forth, while Scott tries to get a look at what's going on in there. "If your eye is injured, my boy, you should let me look at it," Scott offers. "Quite," I murmur. (What, you don't think we can be that calm and reasonable at 3 am? You calling me a liar?) "NAAAAGH!" Henry wails, and runs back to his bed. Somehow I manage to pin him down and look at his eye. Because Henry's eyelashes are nine feet long, when there's a pain, it's usually an eyelash. In this case, his eye is fine. "There's nothing there, Henry," I tell him. He's asleep.

4. 3:30 a.m. Crying. More crying! I go there. To him. What do you want, what, WHAT? "I NEED TO PEE," he cries. I recommend that he goes to the bathroom. And stop myself from explaining loudly that I DO NOT NEED TO HELP HIM OUT WITH THIS. ALL CAPS.

And there you have it. We started the new year with a bang. And a whimper. And a poorly aimed whiz.

Here's a mall adventure for you.

So on Tuesday my friend asked me to accompany her and her children to the mall, and I thought, but I should be writing and then I thought, but if one does not experience life, how can one write about it? So I agreed to go, only to gather material. Also they have an H&M.

So off we went, and the first thing my friend Abby tells me is that she's almost completely out of gas, that in fact we would be lucky to make it to the gas station. Make it there we do, and while her car is being filled I ask, "So, how empty was it? Was the light on?" and she says, "For two days." And that right there would be the difference between me and Abby, or maybe between me and most people in the world. If the gas in the car dips below a quarter of a tank I'm twitching. If it's on empty I'm afraid to sit in it, because maybe I'll tip the gas tank a little and the gas will, I don't know, slosh over to the other side and then the car can't get to it? I'm not clear on how cars work. But there's Abby, mentally stable Abby, cheerfully toting around her children, the tank filled only with residue and memories. I'm just glad she told me this when we got to the gas station because I don't think I would have lived those few blocks.

Abby's a new friend of mine, and she's one of those people who when you meet them your insides are screaming BFF! BFF! And you're trying to act all cool and collected and blasé about when you might set up a playdate, but secretly you just want to have a date with only her and ditch the kids and run away together; is that weird? She's got a great son who is Henry's age, and the two of them are so compatible, two gentle souls who want only to build Legos and then build some more Legos. Which is such a refreshing departure from his other friends, who set fires and mug the disabled.

Tank full, we made it to the mall, with only minimal screaming on her baby's part. I tried to chat up the two-year-old, but she just glared at me, because I wasn’t there with a child, and what good was I, anyway? Abby and the girls dropped me off at H&M. I needed a fall coat, and by the way I needed MANY OTHER THINGS AS WELL. I barely heard them leave, what with the pile of clothing I had gathered on top of myself as I rolled around in the aisles. I haven't shopped without Henry in too long.

We were on a tight schedule, so I made my purchases—my delicious, delicious purchases—and a few minutes before we had to leave, I headed over to Old Navy, where Abby and children were to be found. Only I had never been to this mall and had no idea where Old Navy was. And this mall featured several tears in the fabric of space and time, so you would walk over to Section A and then suddenly you were on a fishing boat and everyone was talking in Old Norse. I began to walk faster and faster, and as I did my embarrassing walk-run-walk, walk-run-walk, my thinking went thisaway:

1. Abby's probably waiting for me, and now she's going to walk over to H&M. We'll miss each other.

2. She'll be late to pick up her son, and it will be all my fault.

3. She's going to hate me so much.

4. Good going, Alice. You just had to buy your stupid cheap clothes that will disintegrate within a month.

5. I am a terrible person. Who deserves to be abandoned in the mall.

6. I will die here.

While walk-run-walking I accosted a saleswoman to ask for directions. I attempted a casual air when I shrieked EXCUSEMEWHEREISOLDNAVY? She backed away—apparently I didn’t pull it off—and pointed down one of the many wings of the mall, the one that hadn't been visible before because it had traveled to an alternate dimension. Sure enough, there was Old Navy, and there was Abby, shopping away, oblivious to the insane little drama churning in my head. Until now, that is, because she reads my blog. Crap.