Boy did I need to see this tonight.

I can’t say for sure what was at the end. But I had my two redheaded midgets in the car with me when we saw both rainbows.

I’m just sayin’.

I’m limiting myself to just five, because otherwise I’d stay here writing for the next seven hours and my children, who have been banned from the house until further notice, may well freeze to death.

Come to think of it, i think I learned that move from my mom.

In no particular order:

1. How to drive stick shift (mom and dad)

2. If you have two or three people outside of your immediate family who you can trust – as in, you need help moving the body in the middle of the night trust - consider yourself lucky and hold onto them no matter what (dad)

3. How to get from Stamford to Manhattan by car, either for free or paying a minimum of tolls (dad)

4. The fine art of burping and soothing a screaming baby (mom) (and oh my god, how this came in handy in the middle of the night 24 hours after giving birth the first time!)

5. How and why to show respect to coaches, teachers and other grownups so you don’t get tossed from the team, stuck in detention, uninvited from the next sleepover (mom)

How they reared four of us, I’ll never fully grasp. These two boys of mine are quite a challenge. Something tells me they’ll have their own lists to compile and stories to tell some decades down the line. Maybe starting with “Hey, remember that time Mom locked us out of the house for three hours because we were wrestling in the living room?”

What a day. Soccer, pumpkins and costume shopping… Later.

Tonight I had the pleasure of meeting a fun, talented group of area bloggers.  When I got home, my littlest Doo-little demanded to know where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing as he dodged my questions about why he wasn’t sleeping yet.

I explained I was out with ____’s fabulous mom, which made his face light up with recognition. I also mentioned having a beer with the  younger brother of someone I sat next to in 7th grade.

“Oh.”

His brow furrowed.

After careful consideration of exactly how long it’s been since I was in middle school, he asked “Is he still alive?”

Don’t worry, Kevin, I assured him that you are a mere youngster, still clinging to this mortal coil for all it’s worth.

Which makes me happy. Because I can’t imagine having drinks with a corpse would have been nearly as entertaining.

I found these pirate mood rings the other day. Two rings at $3.99 each saved my family from a collective mid-vacation nervous breakdown.

But please don’t buy it as i paint myself as the savior. There’s no doubt I started it. I can sulk with the best of ‘em.

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The last time I went fishing, I was 12 and accompanied by four other 12 year old girls. It was my friend Midi’s birthday party. She lived on this completely sick horse farm in Darien, and there was a pond across the street stocked with who knows what kind of fish. It’s safe to say these fish of indeterminate origin were unprepared for an encounter with a small army of pre-teen girls. It disappoints my oldest son to no end that I don’t remember more of this story, but this is roughly how it went. One of us was holding the fishing rod as the lure and hook dangled salaciously (well, to a fish, I guess) in the murky water. We were surprised flabbergasted rendered incapable of any kind of communication other than shrieking when we actually caught a fish.

I don’t remember how we got the fish off the hook. I want to say I was brave enough to grab its body and hold it still as I gently removed the hook from its mouth and tossed it back into the murky depths. But I’m pretty sure I’d be making that part up. I do remember the whole experience was enough to keep us up chattering into the late hours (it was a sleepover) as we played Titanic, a fun and extremely involved 1970s board game I never came across anywhere else besides Midi’s house.

When we were lifeguards, my friend Joe and I feared hearing one thing more than anything else: “Hey lifeguard, I’ve got a fish hook in my eye. I think I need some first aid.” We developed a Universal Symbol for Fish Hook in Eye (with your forefinger slightly curled, stick it just under your brow bone and hold on tight while making your most grotesque facial expression) and waited vigilantly for our first victim patient. Of course, we also spent our time waiting for a commercial airliner to fall out of the sky and (conveniently) into the Long Island Sound so we could see exactly how long it would take us to row out a few miles to grab all those survivors. I can safely attribute our love for the macabre to being bored out of our skulls.

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Summer 2005 should have been a flat-out great summer. We were new to the pool club that year, and spent as much time as the boys would let us floating in the water as night fell. Our oldest boy had just turned five, and we were well past the diapers, sleep deprivation and constant neediness that left us with blank pages where our memories of 2002 – 2004 were supposed to be.

My husband suffers from the occasional migraine, and I am a chronic (if periodic) insomniac who can usually beat it back with exercise. Suddenly he had two, sometimes three migraines a week. I was routinely waking up at 3 a.m., unable to even consider falling back to sleep. Neither one of us was willing to admit the problem: not to ourselves, not to each other. Our son was about to start Kindergarten, and we were ten kinds of freaked out.

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Today was the double whammy: closing on the refinance and my boys’ birthday party.

I tend to approach major financial decisions with a debilitating combination of irrational fear and panic. Given that our estimated closing costs varied wildly today from three times what I anticipated all the way down to a third of the original estimate, I was a mess.

Thanks to our good friend Brian (and if you need a finance guy, boy do I recommend him!), we ended up on the low end of the out-of-pocket range. That’s some kind of black magic, making a mortgage point disappear in just three hours.

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The little girl jumped on the next swing over and schooled my boy on how to do it right.  No, PUMP YOUR LEGS!  Like THIS!  Wearing a floral Speedo at the backyard pool party, this wisp of a tow-head told us she’d be sitting at the boys’ table when it was time to eat cake. Because it was decorated with pirates. She liked pirates. The girls’ table featured a pink and purple cloth with some kind of a girlstuff design. And she wanted no part of it.

If time travel were possible, this girl would have been me from 35 years ago, coming to see what the future had in store.

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My son is splayed on the couch, watching TV but not really seeing. Surrounded by Gatorade boxes and dosage cups measured in teaspoons-and-a-half, his eyes are glassy while his forehead radiates red-hot heat.

I panicked a little Sunday as he showed me one, then two, then five shape-shifting rashes on his pale flesh. His persistent low-grade fever from the past 10 days was inching higher. The sullen, adolescent scowl that overcame his beautiful eight-year-old face took my breath away, when I dared to ruin his weekend by taking him out for ice cream.

I’m placing my bets on this doctor, the third we’ve seen since the fevers started. She’s earnest and attentive, and listens carefully to every symptom I describe. From the inflamed lymph node to the low-grade fever to the sudden personality change, she takes it all in. As she peeks at his lower back to see the amoeba shaped red rash with the white center, her expression of benign concern changes to one of satisfaction. For a moment I envy how much she loves being a doctor.

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