The Bedroom Shuffle

It all starts out normal enough. My son curls up in his tiny toddler bed covered up with stitched dump trucks and front end loaders all over the the quilt. The motif is repeated on the lamp and the hooks and pillows and such. After the three of us read stories together, my little girl goes to her flowery room and climbs the ladder to slide beneath a hand-made quilt of mix and match flower prints and grasps the coordinating pillow she's had since before she was born. They fall asleep quickly and all is well in the world. My husband and I check on them again before mom and pop retire to the master suite for a mid-winter slumber.

If we're lucky, the "bedroom shuffle" doesn't start until 3 or 4 a.m., but last night it started just after midnight. My son comes up and scours around for what I might have left on my night stand as a midnight snack. Satisfied that there's no soda, chips or chocolate left, he climbs in next to me on the side near the edge and falls asleep immediately. I, of course have trouble going back to sleep and eventually move him on the other side between my husband and me, stop worrying he'll fall out of the bed and go back to sleep.

For a little while, anyway.

I swear I've been asleep for all of three minutes when my daughter comes up, scours around for what might have been left on my night stand as a midnight snack, sees her brother in bed, assumes he's beat her to it and climbs in between him and me. My son squeals, I pretend to be asleep to avoid conversation (I use to think my husband was pretending, too, but I think he can actually sleep through all of this!). There's more squealing going on so I move my son back to the other side of me and things calm down. I think I fall back to sleep.

For a little while, anyway.

My daughter gets too hot sleeping between the two of us and starts kicking covers off of all of us. She inadvertantly kicks my husband and I guess he wasn't pretending to be asleep because he gets up and goes off to sleep somewhere else for the rest of the night. I go to that private place in my head and think about a time when "bedroom shuffle" had a whole other meaning and smile to myself in the dark...I'm remembering the bedroom shuffle of a violinist who practically seduced me while I was conducting him in an orchestra. Hmmm...where is my husband, anyway? My reverie is broken with a jab to the nose by a tiny elbow. That's it. I get up and go searching for another place to sleep.

I look for my husband. Oh well, he's completely out in my daughter's slide/ladder bed with the flowered quilt and rainbow canopy. I go to my son's room and skip the toddler bed (all of 4 feet long) and drop into the daybed we had set up for grandma's visit a few months ago. I immediately fall asleep.

For a little while, anyway.

Before long I feel a warm body next to mine...is it the violinist? Oh! Wait, that was another life...so long ago and so far away. Is it my husband? Has my son returned to his own room? Nope. It's my daughter who's come to look for me. I pretend to be asleep to avoid conversation and eventually wake up to find it's 6:30.

We all converge at the breakfast table. No one is happy with their respective night's sleep. The tiniest guy with the tiniest bed is disturbed to wake up alone in the biggest bed...and the rest of us are sore from being cramped up...or kicked or jabbed.

Fortunately, it doesn't always go this way. Just four days ago I was bragging to my friends at lunch that we were all sleeping in our own beds every night--and it had been that way for a long, long time. I guess I should have knocked on wood because four nights in a row, the bedroom shuffle has been all the rage at my house.

At breakfast, as I down my third quadruple-shot latte (yeah, four shots at a time really only makes sense at home--a controlled environment for my mania), I notice my husband is missing a button right in the middle of his shirt. I point this out. Turns out he knows and that's why he's wearing the shirt today. Oh how far we fall after marriage. My mind flashes on the violinist's crisp shirts--even the morning after. Of course we didn't date long enough for me to see how far he'd fall...I grab a glance at myself in the mirror. It's the morning after a big Oscar Reception where I was done and I do mean done. I look like Medusa where my hair was teased so big and whereas I had on a trendy-cut boucled wool suit fitted to perfection, today I'm wearing flannel pajamas that are too big and the drawstring bunches up the fabric to make me look 15-months pregnant. I giggle to myself as I wonder what the violinist would think of that and my family looks appreciative that I can giggle after spreading the table with stacks of pancakes, bacon and eggs sunny-side up.

If I don't get some relief from the bedroom shuffle tonight, I won't have any giggles left in me tomorrow, you can bet. One solution might be starting where we eventually end up...

The Best Looking Man in the World

There's nothing more attractive than a man taking care of his child...that tiny hand lost in his...the little face looking up oh-so-high at daddy. My dad was gorgeous. He looked just like Elvis Presley...dark hair all slicked back with the perfectly formed crest above his blue eyes...drove a motorcycle. Vroom, vroom.

Witness the feminine flurry whenever a dad drops off the child at our school as we all congregate around the entrance in the morning. We have our share of entertainment industry dads who look effortlessly hot anyway unshaven and in their ripped jeans--but put a kid in their arms and they become...well, irresistably hot. I have to retreat to that private place in my head momentarily to regain composure. The trouble is, my head has a tongue and I'm not very good at self-censorship. All I've heard from one of my school chums lately is about "the new hot dad in our class, the new hot dad in our class." I don't think she ever even mentioned his child's name and I had never spotted him, but then one morning we're all clutching our cappuccinos when she says, "there he is!" Wow! I didn't go to do it, it just spilled out. "You are the new hot dad!" He looked NOT confused enough (as if he hears this all the time) and smiled. "But I didn't say that," I pass the blame like a seventh-grader, "she did!" My flustered friend starts beating me with her purse as new hot dad takes his son to class and tells me this is the second time I've done this to her. Twice? "Yeah...remember last year's Hallowe'en Party?"

Oh, yeah.

I just think that if someone's attractive, you ought to tell them. Personally, as a not-particularly attractive person myself, if someone thought that about me, I'd wanna' hear about it. All about it. Now maybe new hot dad has heard it before, but that guy at the Hallowe'en Party probably wasn't use to it.

He was balding with long hair--a bad combination if ever there was one for a hairstyle (along with the comb-over). He could have played this to his advantage of course, being Hallowe'en and dressed up like a character from "Rocky Horror Picture Show" but this idea was obviously lost on him. He wore unfashionable glasses and ill-fitting clothes. So what was he doing here with the rest of us folks?

Well, he did work in the industry...and his attractive-quotient hit double-digits as we watched him play with his daughter! As we watched from inside, he handled his little princess with ease...then the other little princess as well...then mom brought out the baby and he offered to change princess number three! We were already swooning when he turned into Doctor McDreamy before our very eyes. He'd take the other two girls (both under five) with him while he changed the baby's diaper so mom could relax and get a drink!!!

I knew hissing at his wife and the mother of his children while she leisurely perused the hosts' fabulous wine collection trying to choose which one to indulge herself in was absolutely childish. The only solution was to corner this man when he was alone and flash him my tits.

Ok...that was never going to work and I knew it. Sizing up the age of one or two of his kids, I knew he was seeing tits morning, noon and night with that breast-feeding wife of his. That was at least one thing he was probably getting enough of at home.

Maybe kidnapping him towards the end of the party...but how was I going to pull that off between wrangling my kids around? My daughter might be dressed like a princess, but she sure ain't acting like one. And what would my husband say when I got this long-haired bespeckled man home? Hey, I think they wear the same size...at least I'd have something to offer this guy. Maybe my husband would welcome the help. You certainly wouldn't catch him offering to take one and change the other one's diaper.

As soon as Mrs. Unlikely Attractive carries her Spanish wine out of the room, that's when I yell it out the window: "We think you're cute!" My friend beats me with her purse (and she carries really big purses!) and says she can't believe I did that and storms out of the room.

Mr. Unlikely Attractive doesn't even look up because it doesn't occur to him that I'm talking to him. How adorable! I corner him. I don't flash him my tits. I do tell him how adorable he is because he's so great with his kids. He looks surprised, tells me I'm not too bad myself and we both walk away with a smile.

I bring home two grumpy kids (and no kidnapped, long-haired, bespeckled man which my husband doesn't even realize was a consideration earlier in the evening). They've had too much fun, too much walking, too much candy. I come home to a grumpy husband. He's had too much work, too much sitting working on year-end closing and too much of his own cooking. Why do we look forward to holidays so much when they inevitably end up with too much of everything? By next year, we will all gleefully unpack our Hallowe'en Swag and anticipate the wonders of this night...and it will end the same...but we won't remember this part.

My daughter is disappointed that she didn't win the constume contest in her homemade 'rainbow princess' outfit. Suddenly, even my husband can turn into the best looking man in the world as he takes her hand and tells her she's the most beautiful princess he ever saw and how not everybody can win everytime. She looks up at him extremely pleased and he leads the yawning princess off to bed.

My son went to a birthday party this past weekend. Talk about a gorgeous-looking guy who was great with kids...it was at a gym and the instructor, every bit of 22 or 23 years old was a treat for both the kids and moms alike...and probably the child with two dads, too. A group of us moms speculated what he told girls he met when he was out carrousing around on Saturday night when they asked what he did for a living. Fitness instructor? Gym coach? Entertainer? We decided it probably depended on the age and biological clock of the woman. Good with kids is very, very attractive to a woman in her 30s and beyond...

My father died 16 years ago today and it's taken this long to admit that to most people he probably looked more like Don Knotts on a scooter than Elvis on a Harley...but when I put my hand in his and looked up at him, he was the best looking man in the world...maybe he looked more like Clark Gable or Montgomery Cliff or...

The three-year old's birthday

I don't know who else takes their three-year old to Las Vegas for his birthday, but that's exactly what we did. I haven't been there in fifteen years because I use to work Caesar's Palace with my all-girl band and when I was through, I ran screaming from the city. It wasn't the worst gig I ever had (I had to stick a coat hanger with tape around it down into a floor safe once to get paid and we drove up to a club in a hick town that billed us as "Five Girls -- All Live" once and they asked us to take our clothes off...Oh and the western bar behind chicken wire where we were expected to dance with the patrons on our breaks...well, I guess those are all stories for another time!). Let it suffice that Las Vegas has changed a lot since 1991.

When my 5-year old daughter walked down the strip, enjoying the fountains at the Bellagio she declared it the most beautiful place she'd ever seen (though she's a seasoned international traveller including Paris, London, Iceland etc.) and wanted us to cancel Disneyland right away so she could spend her next birthday here (a mere six weeks away).

And now I know why they REALLY call it Sin City. My kids were eating ice cream for breakfast. And I didn't say anything. I didn't even care. Was it really all that much worse than the GRAVY-DRENCHED CHICKEN-FRIED STEAK on the buffet for breakfast? Or the greasy hash browns? I doubt it. Besides, I have this private, impenetrable place in my head where I was currently hanging out replaying a scene of my family from the previous five minutes where my 3-year old was contentedly eating his ice-cream complete with candy sprinkles while my husband grunted like a gorilla gesturing to my son to eat his trans-fat laden scrambled eggs and my 5-year old daughter bounced in her booster seat making babyish pre-verbal wah-wahs trying to get something slightly out of her reach.

It was bad enough that I had witnessed this scene in the first place, but why was I torturing myself with this little clip over and over like the six o'clock news? Ice cream, grunt-grunt, wah-wah, ice-cream, grunt-grunt, wah-wah. It put my family in such an unattractive light. Is this really my life? Somehow, you think you're going to have pleasant conversation at mealtime for the rest of your life when you get married...somehow it turns into...into...well, this! My kids have moved on to the cookies and my husband is now hunkered over a new mountain of food.

My son starts tapping out distinct, grooving rhythms on the dinnerware with his knife and fork. Ofcouse, I know that I should stop it. Not only is it irritating my husband, but probably other folks around us...but I find it hard to squash his budding sense of musicianship. Part of me is proud he plays so well. Having dated so many drummers, I've heard the stories about wanting to--well needing to beat on everything...all the time.

Oh, those drummers I dated...I sigh and smile as my mind wanders back to that private place in my head again for awhile. My family actually pauses from munching long enough to look at me curiously. My son takes it as approval and starts playing the 'drums' louder.

Finally I get up for some more coffee--if that's what you can call it. Suddenly, I'm homesick for my triple-shot lattes with easy foam steamed to precisely 140 degrees. Hey! Some girls just know what they like.

We make our way to the tigers. As I try to take a picture of my husband with them and become frustrated at the lack of the tigers' cooperation, he points out to just forget it, that he has plenty of pictures of him with tigers without the glass in between. I have a renewed sense of appreciation for my worldly husband having been to over 80 countries and done things as exotic as taking an elephant to a business meeting in Thailand because that was the only way.

My son learns that penguins can live in warm weather--which I didn't know myself. I thought the white stuff they were walking around on was suppose to be snow. Turns out, these are African Penguins and it's suppose to be white, sandy beaches! He also learns that hot lava comes out of a volcano from the 'volcanic explosion' at the Mirage. He repeats this for the rest of the week. "Hot lava comes out of a volcano, right? Hot lava comes out of a volcano, right?"

We pass Paris, Las Vegas and my daughter points out that the Eiffel Tower (which she has been to) isn't real and we eat at the Rainforest Cafe where another patron points out the animatronic monkey to which she glibly replies 'that isn't real, silly!'. My husband can't hear anything on his cell phone (which doesn't stop him, by the way...) and I get to relay a story to the kids about our honeymoon in Costa Rica where LIVE monkeys are making such a racket that daddy DOES get off his satellite phone (even THEY seem surprised!). By the next day, my daughter looks up at me and says, "you know mom, I like this place OK, but nothing's really real. I want to keep my birthday at Disneyland. At least the princesses are real!"

My cosmopolitan family...I guess they're not so bad after all. Grunt, grunt...wah-wah.

Those drummers were all shitheads, anyway.