Tag Archives: family

Motivation

Sometimes we all just need a little push from a big supporter.

“I don’t want to do it” she said. “ I have been too busy”.

“but you love to do it!” I exclaimed!

I told her to think about how much she loves to do it. If you love something you will work hard to do it. It teaches us a lesson to do what you love and work towards that. If there is something you love to do, your life should include that in it.

Even if things aren’t working out for you in this thing, you love it. You will work hard for it even when you are busy. It is so important! No matter how hard it is, it is important to your life. Think about this thing in your life, Just think.

This was a recent conversation with my mom. She has been behind on blogging. I helped her stay motivated.

- Levi Rich Gettleman (Age 12)

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Do we mom’s deserve a right to privacy?

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Would a warning like this keep my computer files safe from children’s eyes???

“Get off my computer!” I impatiently bark at my 12-year-old son, Levi. He raised his guilty paws from the keyboard as if a masked robber had surprisingly cornered him and yelled, “Put up your hands!” I moved into his place and started pounding away at an e-mail I had neglected to send earlier in the day.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you,” I later apologized. “It’s just frustrating that you’re always on my laptop. After all, you have your own.”

With that rebuke, Levi slunk away without a word. I felt badly. Mothers are supposed to be selfless and giving. Why am I so irritated and resentful about sharing an electronic device with my kid.

I checked my e-mail as I pondered this maternal quandary. That’s when I saw it; an e-mail from the practice coordinator at our Orthodontic office. It was an introductory sales letter inviting us to meet Dr. Sams and tour the office. This would have been a lovely invitation had we not been already been seeing this Doctor for over two years. I was livid.

My fingers snapped to attention and without effort I typed back a snarky response. “Dear Jenny,” I wrote, “It might behoove you to pay better attention to whom you are sending an introductory letter like this so that you do not inadvertently send it to people who are already patients. Trust me, it makes us feel insignificant.” Then, a captive of my momentary rage, I deliberately hit “send” and watched my haughty response disappear into cyberspace.

Levi was still sulking across the room. “I’m sorry, buddy,” I told him, “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. What were you doing on my computer anyway?”

“Oh, I was just looking back through all of your old e-mails,” he explained. “There are e-mails from like three years ago. Don’t you ever throw stuff in the trash?”

Suddenly a horrifying realization overtook me. “Oh no,” I thought. Yet another Debra moment of leaping to the erroneous conclusion. I re-opened my e-mail and saw the appalling truth. That e-mail from Jenny was in fact from 2010. It was her warm invitation to us to meet Dr. Sams and visit his office. I did it again! I’m like a an emotional Tourette’s patient. I just emote at people randomly, without a shred of rationale for my outbursts. Shit. This is soooooo embarrassing.

“Levi,” I calmly pronounced, “Why would you look up my old e-mails? That’s weird and kind of…creepy.”

“I like to learn stuff about myself when I was younger. Plus now I can read e-mails you wouldn’t let me read back then.”

That actually sounded kind of reasonable. It wasn’t until I was in bed a few hours later that I started to feel like his behavior was completely inappropriate and uncomfortably invasive. I nudged my husband, Mark, who was snoring next to me.

“Huh? What’s wrong?” He bolted upright.

“Do you think it’s okay for me to tell Levi he can’t use my computer and that he is never allowed to read my e-mails? I just feel like I should have some semblance of privacy in my own home. I mean before we had internet and e-mail it wouldn’t have been okay for a kid to rifle through his mom’s mementos hidden away in a box in her closet, would it? So just because everything is electronic these days that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have clear boundaries and restrictions. Right?

A loud snore wafted through the room. He had immediately fallen back to sleep, which seemed to be a fairly common response to my pontificating. I was on my own with this one.

The following morning on the ride to school I told Levi that my computer and email were off limits, that I needed to have some privacy, that not everything about parents should be accessible to their children.

He said he understood and apologized. “But you know, mom,” he said, “There is something really cool about reading all your old blogs and plays and e-mails. I get to really know you, in a way most kids never know their moms. That’s pretty awesome.”

Suddenly the privacy invasion felt a little less irksome. The haunting truth that at any moment adolescence could rear its ugly head and make me the least fascinating creature on the planet, was a reality too ominous to ignore. I felt badly, again. Maybe I had over-reacted.

But I didn’t turn back. I should have a right to my privacy, right? I’m an adult woman who doesn’t want to share every detail of my life with my 12-year-old son. That’s reasonable.

This is one of those issues on which I wish I could take a poll. Do you have personal boundaries in your home that protect your privacy or is everything fair game? I really need some good old fashioned girl-talk on this issue so please, share!

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Be here NOW!!!

jennifer_aniston_hair_the_17kr07q-17kr07tThink about something you feel passionately about today. Now envision yourself 10 years from now. Do you feel the same way? Slightly different? Radically changed? A new study published in the January 4th journal, Science, asserts that most adults change significantly over a decade but when asked to predict their future selves, fail to recognize just how much change they will actually see. Huh?

According to an interview with Harvard psychology professor, Daniel Gilbert, in Health Day magazine, “People dramatically underestimate how different their future selves will be.” That got me thinking about my own life and how much I’ve changed over the last decade.

Ten years ago my political beliefs were strikingly…how to put this…different. But I think that has more to do with having and raising two children. Suddenly the whole “do what you feel” and “follow your bliss” approach to life seems to wither as you raise kids. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Or is it?

Teaching kids about right and wrong seems to make parents concretize their own belief systems in a way that’s hard to predict. The practicality of life, the ups and downs, the immense challenges that pop up unexpectedly, all of these change us, make us harder, less willing to trust the whimsical mysteries of nature. Well, not for everyone. But it’s worked that way for me.

I miss my more childlike view of the world. It was a view that allowed me to trust in the goodness of people, to always follow my heart, to imagine that a spiritual force greater than myself was guiding my every step. Nowadays I feel consumed by the violence in our streets, the senseless genocide occurring around the globe, the carelessness people exhibit towards their neighbors and family. But I sure didn’t see this coming. I thought I’d always be wide-eyed and open to the possibilities of life.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a fairly positive gal. I still find ways to express my creative spirit each and every day. I try really hard to believe that life has a purpose and that somehow I’m on a path, albeit circuitous, towards discovering that purpose. But I feel a constant weight, a heaviness, that rests on my shoulders as I meander through life these days that wasn’t there a decade earlier. That makes me wonder about where I’m heading and what life will look like in the next ten years. Maybe I’ll make a total 180 degree personality swerve and end up more like the bohemian, free-spirited person I used to be. Or maybe I’ll do a full 360, grow a goatee and pursue my dormant dream of becoming a Krill fisherwoman in Antarctica.

Daniel Gilbert explains that people are just not very good at predicting who they’ll be in the future. He tells the New York Times, “Middle-aged people — like me — often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin. What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

Kind of depressing, no? I mean I hate to think that in ten years I’ll look back with embarrassment over my funky fashion foibles or trendy hair coif. Because looking back now, I can see that the whole Jennifer Aniston Friends “do” wasn’t my best look. But at the time, I thought I was red-carpet ready.

So we can’t accurately project ourselves into the future and we’re pretty much assured to be horrified by who we were in the past. Sounds like a lose-lose for all of us. Guess that’s as good a reason as any to live in the present.

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Benign neglect

imgres-5I feel guilty. I mean for the past few years I’ve religiously written a weekly blog that happily gets sent out to hundreds of awesome subscribers. But I’ve been inundated with work deadlines, life, family responsibilities, etc…And I’ve neglected my blog. It’s actually painful to come back after this kind of inadvertent vacation.

It’s like that cousin you’ve been meaning to call for a few weeks, then a few months, then it’s like seven years and you’re estranged for no real reason other than the awkwardness of not wanting to call after a two week hiatus.

The truth is, I haven’t had any terribly impressive, prolific or provocative ideas in the past two weeks. And I am vehemently against anyone who blogs about the inane trivialities of day to day living. Like what’s with those people who send out five, six, even 10 new blogs or tweets every day? Really? Do they honestly believe anyone cares? Hey, bloggers, we are deleting your frickin’ posts before even reading them if you’re inundating us with multiple reminders of how banal your everyday life is.

The same goes for Facebook. I mean, come on. Who gives a crap what you ate for lunch or where you went with your family or how many times you’ve watched “It’s a Wonderful Life.” NOBODY is interested. I actually stopped going to FB because I have several “friends” who post incessantly about inane nonsense. Sure I could have “unfriended” or “defriended” them or whatever it’s called. But I’m even more opposed to confrontation than I am anti-triviality.

So I remain silently devoted to all of you. Forgive my temporary lapse in the epiphany arena. Surely the muse will attend to me at some point. Then, and only then, shall I pick up the pen (or rather strike the keyboard) to share my deep and philosophical revelations.

Happy Chanukah!

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In search of a plot

“I need a plot! What if I die?” this is the text I received Thanksgiving night from my 12 year old son, Levi. He’d finally left the table and was worriedly texting me from the next room.

It all happened because we were enjoying some post repast conversation at my mom’s house. One of the guests, a long time family friend, works at the Jewish cemetery in town. The discourse had shifted to her work and she was astounding us with stories about elderly people who simply refused to contemplate death, funerals and anything associated with burials. My brother-in-law, an uber-responsible physician, chimed in, “It’s just idiotic not to take care of these things ahead of time. Idiotic and irresponsible.”

Suddenly I look across the table and I see Levi, his head in his hands, prone for an anxiety attack. “Why don’t you go play with your cousins,” I suggest.

“No, mom. I want to stay with the adults,” he insists.

“Well, are you sure you can handle this conversation?” I ask gently.

“Yes,” he replies, “I’m sure. But mom, how much is a plot? Because I need to save up and get one.”

Conversation halted and everyone looked at Levi. Several of the adults started to roar with laughter.

“Levi,” I tried to explain, “You really don’t need to worry about that right now.”

“But I’m going to die,” he matter-of-factly refuted, “I don’t want to be stupid, or irresponsible.”

Suddenly I was transported into the celluloid world of my all time favorite Woody Allen movie, “Annie Hall.” I morphed into Alivie Singer’s kvetching Jewish mother and insisted my 9 year old son, Alivie, tell the psychiatrist why he was so depressed.”

Alvie’s mother:
Tell the Doctor why you’re depressed, Alvie. It’s something that he read.

Alvie:
The Universe is expanding.

Doctor:
The Universe is expanding?

Alvie:
Well, the Universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything.

Alvie’s mother:
He stopped doing his homework.

Alvie:
What’s the point?

Alvie’s mother:
What has the Universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding!”

Doctor:
It wont be expanding for billions of years, Alvie. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we’re here.

Why is it that some kids burden themselves with thoughts like these while others are content to stuff themselves silly with turkey, corn and mashed potatoes? I so want to be one of those care-free people who raises easy, playful youngsters who throw spitballs into the unsuspecting heads of classmates and giggle gleefully when the teacher accidentally strings together words like “under” and “where.” But alas, that’s just not who we are.

I actually remember my first 100% sleepless night. I was about my son’s age and was convinced that the angel of death was coming that very night to take me away. My poor father tried everything to get me to go to sleep. Finally, with a tear in his eye, he implored, “Please, Debbie, just close your eyes. I’ll stand guard all night and I promise not to open the door if he comes. Just go to sleep!”

I guess the sad thing here is that this whole experience just confirms what I’ve known all along; that children really are just mirrors that showcase every flaw, fault and foible of our own misguided psyches. Genetics, my friends, are inescapable.

It’s all kind of depressing. In fact, sometimes I find it so disheartening that I relate completely to Annie Hall’s brother, Duane, (played eerily by a young Christopher Walken), who behind the wheel of his automobile,
confesses to Alvie while speeding down a darkened freeway, “Sometimes I have a sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into an oncoming car. I anticipate the explosion, the sound of shattering glass, the…flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.”

Alvie is stumped for a reply but spits out, “Right,” just as they pull to a stop, “Well, I have to — I have to go now, Duane, because I’m due back on the planet earth.”

Sometimes it sucks to be me. I desperately want to see myself as Audrie Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” or Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa.” But no matter how hard I try, my true alter ego wont let me forget that I’m really just a female version of a Jewish, neurotic, anxiety-ridden Alvie Singer.

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Where have all the Cowboys gone?

For once I have the perfect gift for our upcoming Anniversary!

Our dog, Maggie, is a lot like Lassie. So the other night while my youngest son, Eli, was sleeping, it wasn’t at all surprising to see her perched in the threshold of the office barking a series of short staccato yips at my husband, Mark, while he typed away at his computer. “What is it girl?” he asked a la Timmy Martin, “Is someone in trouble?”

Maggie voiced a few more Morse Code like woofs and gestured with her head for my husband to follow. He quickly complied and Maggie led him down the hall towards the living room and courtyard. She stopped abruptly at the archway to the living room and yipped another string of urgent yelps. Our other dog, S’more, had joined her in the portal. They wouldn’t extend a paw beyond the threshold.

Mark opened the French doors and walked into the courtyard expecting to find some wayward quail or other lost desert creature. He found nothing and re-entered the house.

“There’s nothing out there, sweetie,” he calmly replied. But the yelping continued as both dogs stood frozen like guards at Buckingham Palace. Mark knelt down and tried to ease their heightening panic. That’s when he heard the unmistakable shake of a rattle behind him. He slowly stood and turned towards the sound. There, in the middle of our living room, stood a 3 foot uninvited Rattle snake.

Secure that our youngest was sleeping soundly down the hallway and the dogs wouldn’t approach the venomous intruder, he methodically backed away and moved stealthily into the garage to retrieve the first long metal object he could find. It was a rake that proved to be the ultimate asp destructor. Once it was officially deceased, he carefully speared it on the sharp end of the rake spokes and shot-putted it into the desert wash behind our property.

When I came home with my older son, Levi, I noted particular nervousness in both of our normally easy-going pups. S’more was barking at every sound and motion, while Maggie just sat curled up in a corner of our bedroom. “Is everything okay with the dogs?” I asked. My husband nodded and tried to smile, “Yep. Everything is A-OK.”

After Levi went to sleep I returned to our bedroom to find the two dogs and my husband cuddling eerily on our bed. That’s when he confessed his murderous crime. I didn’t ask for the details. The thought of my gentle husband smooshing the life out of any creature, be it in self-defense or not, was too much for me to bear.

I chastised him mercilessly for failing to do something sensible like calling 911 or scooping up our son and canines and rushing madly from the house. “I had to protect my family,” he told me bravely, “I had no other choice.” I admit I kind of liked seeing him as a lone cowboy standing guard over us, his unprotected herd. After all, most of the time he’s just the big lug who leaves his dishes in the sink and socks strewn across the bedroom floor.

I found myself texting everyone I knew. “Nerdy Jewish doctor or ruthless Rattle snake slayer? You decide.” He caught me mid text. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to bed?”

“Oh yeah,” I stammered. “Just had to finish a few emails. I’ll be right in.”

He took a few steps towards the bedroom a la John Wayne, then stopped and turned back to me, “Well goodnight, little lady.” he declared in a low manly voice. Then with a tip of his mythical hat he added, “And remember; Don’t squat with yer spurs on.”  And with that, he sauntered off into the distance, leaving me with only the shadow of his courageous smile and the memory of his selfless bravery.

 

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My son the RINO: Responsible In Name Only

“Personal accountability!” My husband, Mark and I chimed out in sync at a Saturday morning family school session at our synagogue. “Taking responsibility for one’s actions.” We’d been asked by our Rabbi to name something we’d learnt from our parents and hoped to pass along to our kids. Lots of parents had good answers; “work hard,” “be kind,” “give to charity.” But we liked ours best. It was, after all, the central theme of our parenting philosophy. Having both been raised in families that harped upon us to “make your own breaks” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” we were committed to passing those tenets on to our own offspring.

After we’d finished, our kids were invited back into the room and the Rabbi asked them to go and pick out which value on the list their parents had written. Oh, this was gonna be easy. We snickered to ourselves silently as we waited for Eli to ace this assignment.

“Accept everyone?” he questioned proudly pointing to the third value listed on the white board.

“Well, that’s certainly a good one,” I answered. “But that’s not the one daddy and I wrote. Why don’t you try again, sweetie.”

“Treat others as you would like to be treated?” he confidently corrected.

“Um…no, honey,” I stammered a bit surprised by his error. “Guess again. It’s something that daddy and I make you think about all the time.”

“Be kind!” he shouted with a victorious lilt.


When he trepidatiously pointed to “Ride bicycles together,” I lost it.

“Eli,” I said in a voice much louder than I’d meant to, “None of our bicycles even have tires. We haven’t ridden bicycles since last Halloween. Really?”

Then I pointed to our all capped “PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY.” “Oh,” he calmly voiced, “I didn’t see that one.”

I was furious–at him, at myself, at my husband. What did all our work add up to if he couldn’t even pick the right parental value out of a line-up of usual suspects that seemed blatantly obvious to us?

I tossed and turned over this all night. Then I woke up and recreated the list on a small poster board and asked our older son, Levi, who wasn’t at the family school event, to peruse the list of parental values and tell us which one was the one we had listed.

“That’s easy, mom,” he answered in less than a nano-second. “Personal Accountability.”
I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “That’s what you’re always saying,” he went on, “That’s pretty much the whole premise of how you parent.”

I wondered if Mark had tipped Levi off and prepped him for my experiment. But my husband firmly denied providing our eldest with any pre-test coaching. The bigger question became; why hadn’t Eli been able to identify our parenting platform?

After much deliberation, we realized that sub-consciously we’ve been giving Eli a pass on a lot of things, in large part due to his younger sibling status. It’s just easier and less of a struggle to ask his older brother to help out. This was a text book birth order pit and we’d stumbled right into it.

As parents, it’s easy to declare loving all of your children equally. But that doesn’t mean we treat them all the same way. Finding those inequalities and managing them is a critical challenge that every parent of multiples needs to face. It’s not a pleasant reality. Maybe you do expect more from one child. Maybe you coddle the second. Maybe one’s easier to manage so you rely on him or her as more of a helper.

It’s not a simple issue. But it is one that’s worth examining. What do you think? How equitable are your parental expectations?

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Guilt

I’m tired of traveling! No more guilt trips.

First week of school over. Both boys are happy. Have diverted several potential disasters with head on, logical intervention. Who is this family?

Don’t get me wrong, life is beyond hectic. Having kids in different schools is like trying to manage a herd of wild goats. They both have different early dismissal dates, which means you can kiss your life goodbye. They have different parent handbooks filled with different rules and regs. Totally different curricula. Yet, and I’m really not sure how this always seems to happen, they both have the same “Meet the teacher” and “Back to school” nights. Clearly I missed the parenting workshop on developing super-human talents like being in two places simultaneously.

That’s really what is escalating my current stress level. I cannot be everywhere. To drive my eldest, Levi, to school, I have to forgo walking my youngest, Eli, to the bus stop. If I pick up Levi at his regular dismissal time, I can’t stand happily across from the mailboxes sporting my best welcome home smile as Eli steps off the bus and runs into my arms. And although no one would ever believe this, I like being there to send each off into the world every morning and then enfolding them into the maternal cocoon every afternoon. I feel guilty whichever kid I’m with, because while I try to see it as a healthy way of spending quality one-on-one time with each boy, all I can focus on is what I’m missing by not being with the other.

Does every mom of two or more feel this constant stream of unmitigated guilt? I often wish I was Catholic so I could confess my shame and then somehow be cleansed of it. We don’t have anything like confessional in Judaism. Instead, we’re more like the guilt proprietors; and we do everything in house. We create the guilt, manufacture it, dispense it. We even have entire family structures devoted to marketing and promoting guilt. I for one am high up in the guilt echelon. I’m kind of like a guilt mob boss. I control all the guilt within my family, my neighborhood, and my extended territory. It’s a tough job. But I guess somebody has to do it.

Or do they? Wonder what my life would look like if I shed the weighty guilt cloak for even a day, an afternoon, what about an hour? Would the world collapse? Would havoc reign throughout the universe? Would the entire family lose their way? Rationally I know that life would go on if I ceased being a slave to the guilt monster. It’s that irrational side of me that seems stuck in this unhealthy tangle.

I’ve always given lip service to the old adage that “guilt is a useless emotion.” I guess I don’t really believe that though. The truth is that guilt fills me up in some way that I’m unwilling to let go of. Guilt must make me feel important, like I matter so much that I’m capable of enhancing, degrading or destroying other people’s lives. That’s really beyond absurd. I can no more be responsible for someone else’s life than I can for a Tsunami half way around the world. But then again there is that butterfly effect. No. I am not going there. I am not responsible for the rest of the world’s happiness, unhappiness or anyone’s personal decisions about how he chooses to live his life.

Ah, freedom. KInd of weird. Feel like I’m naked.

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Celebrate the smothering!

Have you ever had one of those stunning moments of recognition that leaves you both horrified and utterly delighted simultaneously? Well, here’s one for the record books:

I’m snuggled up on the couch with both boys watching our new favorite show “Shark Tank.” My oldest has his head on my shoulder and my youngest is curled deliciously into my side. And it suddenly hits me; no one will ever love me as much as I am being loved in this current moment.

What a stark realization. I mean, I see it every day. The separation that has to happen with boys and their mother. They need to individuate. That’s critical for their own development and growth. They need to find girls and then women who appeal to them for romantic relationships. I know all of this. But I’m not sure we ever stop to really appreciate the few years we have where we are the all powerful love force in our kids’ lives. Cause I can see the edge of the horizon, and it’s approaching way too rapidly.

While our kids are and will always be the individuals we moms love more than anyone in the world, the reciprocal is simply not the case. We may be the central love interest for a lot of years. But ultimately, if we want our kids to be happy and healthy people, we want to see them paired off with someone of their own age to build a life and develop a future. That means we need to fade into oblivion in a sense. Ouch.

So once again I need to slow down, take a deep breath and stop getting irritated every time my boys fight like Ali and Frazier over who gets to sit next to me at a restaurant. I have to appreciate the smothering attention that often accompanies our late afternoon dips in the pool when all I really want to do is swim laps by myself. I must promise to put on a smile when one of them demands a band-aid and kiss after a mere flesh wound that interrupts my dinner prep schedule.

Why is it so hard to appreciate the precious few moments of joy and adoration we’re afforded as parents? We’re all so damn busy making sure they grow up to be good, kind people, that we manage to miss the parts of the job that might actually feed us and give us the energy we need for endless more loads of laundry and eternal dishwasher emptying. Well, I for one am vowing to pay attention to the good moments, to accept the love my kids are offering so freely right now, to embrace their neediness, whining and overwhelming demands. Because one of these days, I’ll have a lot less dishes to empty and a lot less laundry to complain about.

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Seattle shivers

When I first visited Arizona, I remember my dismay at having forgotten my swim suit back in Chicago. I rushed over to the local Target to pick up a new one and was stunned to learn that, although it was a balmy 80 degrees outside, it was March and out of season so no swim suits were available. I found that to be odd. After all, coming from 30 below zero weather in the Windy City, 80 degrees was not only swim suit temperature to me, it was “sit out by the pool with a virgin strawberry daiquiri reading Cosmo and bathing myself in Bain de Soleil” weather.

I’d nearly forgotten the episode. Until this afternoon, when my shivering son, Levi, and I wandered into store after store here in Seattle looking for anything resembling a coat to protect him from the icy rain and frigid winds we were facing. I found it beyond baffling that in a city where summer temperatures routinely range anywhere from 60 to 75 degrees, not a single store sold jackets. We couldn’t even find a heavy sweatshirt at all of the big-box stores. By the time we wandered into K-Mart, which shows you how utterly desperate I’d become, I was fit to be tied.

“Excuse me,” I waved down a sales associate. “Where are the men’s jackets?”

“We don’t have jackets,” the surly young woman snipped. “It’s summer.”

“Thank you for that clarification,” I amiably replied. “But it’s freezing outside and practically hailing. Is there nowhere in Seattle to purchase a coat in June?”

“No.” she answered with an almost lilting rise of her voice that felt eerily similar to the tone my son uses when he rolls his eyes towards the ceiling to indicate that I am, without doubt, the biggest goon in the universe.

But I persisted. “I’m just curious, what do people from here do when the weather is this chilly in June?”

“They wear coats they bought in the winter,” she curtly snapped. Then she turned on her heel and strode off towards the patio umbrellas and outdoor chez cushions.

We did finally locate a rather large wind-breaker on a clearance rack near the sporting goods aisle and decided to count our blessings and buy it immediately. On our next day’s boating expedition, we would simply layer up our son in every item he’d packed, stuff him into the over-sized wind-breaker, and hope for the best.

But isn’t this a little odd? I mean, who makes these kinds of decisions? If it’s cold, chances are someone is going to need a jacket. Who cares if it’s May or December? Likewise, if you live in the Dessert and it’s hot, the strong possibility exists that tourists are going to plan on sunning themselves next to various bodies of chlorine-coated H20. So why wouldn’t you have a few swim suits on hand?

There are undoubtedly people getting paid a great deal of money to make these types of inane decisions. I found myself deeply disturbed by this and stepped into one of the 80,000 Starbucks that surrounded me like an army of java zombies.

“I’ll just have a decaf coffee,” I pled, knowing that the barrista would get it and hurry to accommodate my stressed-out state.

But lo and behold, I was mistaken. Instead, the young man behind the counter smiled a vacuous smile and said, “Sorry, we don’t sell decaf after 4pm. It’s a company wide policy.”

I shall leave you to puzzle that out on your own, dear reader. For somehow, in some fictitious universe somewhere, it is thoughtful, prudent and a good business decision for the largest coffee house in the world to refuse to sell caffein-free coffee after 4pm in the afternoon.

I give up. Guess I’ll keep pondering that one tonight when I can’t sleep after my unintentional afternoon caffein injection.

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