The fairy man came this morning. Tristan and I went out to meet him at the barn, where we had scheduled a 9 o’clock appointment. My son was wearing a red ski helmet and carrying a plastic dragon. Those are, in his view, the accessories with which one should be equipped to meet a fairy man. Based on Tristan’s expert knowledge about fairies, derived entirely from his fairy-obsessed sister Phoebe, he was sure the man would have transparent wings and carry a large stock of sparkly dust tied into a leaf with a vine. Instead, the man had a dirty white truck, leather chaps, an anvil, and a large stock of sweet grain in a coffee can. Definitely not Tristan’s image of a fairy man, and Phoebe most certainly would have been appalled. Leather chaps? For real? That does NOT look like a fairy, she would have said.

Alas, the fairy man is actually the farrier, a reasonable misunderstanding for my two-year old. He was coming to give mani-pedis to our two horses. Both of our horses were gifts, as in free. Neither of them I have ever looked in the mouth, though I’m sure they’re due for some equine dentistry.

Bella is a pretty Arabian mare who was serially abused and neglected. A horse trainer rescued her from her last person, a cute horsie teenager turned back woods meth-head, and brought the horse to me. Bella has turned out to be a wonderful, thinking animal. She puzzles over complicated ways in which the trainer and I ask her to move and stretch, and she works through her confusion. She’s a smart girl. Buddy is her companion, a gelding Quarterhorse. The daughter of a nearby rancher saved him from a meat auction. As she pulled off the freeway into the auction site, she saw an old cowboy riding off the exit ramp on a knobby grey horse. She then saw the horse on the block with a note pinned to his halter: “This is a gentle, kind horse,” it read. There was no walking away from that, and home he went in her trailer. But the girl was leaving soon for college, and the rancher’s wife said, no way, he’s got to go. He ended up with us, to be Bella’s buddy and to keep her from nervously pacing the fenceline. He must have nine lives, or at least three — he’s ugly as sin and lame to boot, but he’s been rescued at least twice. He is, indeed, a nice guy. Someday I hope to track down the old cowboy to tell him that the grey is alive and well.

I enjoy my time with the fairy man, most of it spent talking to the back of his Wranglers while I hold the lead rope and he bends over the horses’ feet. He’s a bottomless source of stories, and, even with his mouth full of frightfully sharp shoeing nails, he spins an endless yarn. He and his four brothers were born on various dairy farms, which I suppose means his daddy was a ranch hand. His mother had no idea what they were up to most of the time — there were simply too many of them and they were up to too much — but every night the family had dinner together and every morning there were five lunch bags packed and ready to go on the kitchen table. The fairy man lives in Shasta County, has a girlfriend in Trinity County, and has clients in those counties, as well as in Humboldt. He loves to go packing with his horses and draft mules, and often packs fish stock to remote lakes for the USFWS.

In addition to stories about his childhood and his packing adventures, the fairy man has a million anecdotes about his trade: There was the time a girl swatted her horse, and he kicked, and that caused the fairy man to drive a nail through his hand. There was the occasion he hit a giant buck on his way to a job. The deer’s antlers smashed his windshield and driver’s side window, and glass fragments sprayed into his cheeks. He pulled over, bleeding, to assess his condition and figure out what to do — the road was far from anything. Two guys sporting magnificent mullets pulled up in a pickup and looked at him. Without a word, they did a U-ie, tossed the impressive buck, which was stone dead, into the back of their truck, and drove away. WTF?! Today he had a story of another fairy man who, his mouth full of nails, inhaled one when the mean horse he was shoeing acted up. He survived, after a major surgery to retrieve the shrapnel.

What a great character, my fairy man. He’s excellent at what he does, he loves his work, and he’s interesting. Though I’m guessing he doesn’t get credit as such, he’s pretty much a structural engineer, trimming and filing and shoeing to keep the horses’ load bearing parts bearing their massive load in the best way. He can look at a horse’s foot and tell it’s life story.

I love people like the fairy man. There are gobs of people in this world who do what they do, and who are, at best, mediocre at it and not the least bit interesting in talking about it. I think people who are excellent at what they do, and who love what they do, however lacking in prestige the work might be, are fabulous. We have a second-hand dryer, purchased from a genius down in town who buys washers and dryers that have no other future but the dump, fixes them up expertly, sells them for reasonable prices, and puts them back into action for a whole lot longer than they would have been in action without his tinkering. The guy knows EVERYTHING about every model, the old replacement parts, the new replacement parts, every sound the machine should make, every sound the machine should not make, and what those sounds mean. And he can talk about washers and dryers with an enthusiasm and eloquence that is entirely captivating. That is SO cool. He’s brilliant.

Likewise, when we lived in Indonesia, we knew an amazing mobile cobbler. He walked up and down the streets, all the tricks of his trade in a bundle no bigger than your average Hello Kitty lunch box. He hooted his particular call, and folks with a flapping sole or blown-out flipflop ala Jimmy Buffet (doubtless the most common local shoe repair need) would flag him down on hearing his sound. He’d settle down on the ceramic tiles of your front porch, carefully do the necessary stitching and glueing, and produce a neatly-repaired shoe or sandal that would take you on a hundred more treks across town. Once, when Gary complimented his work, he replied, “Senang membantu, Pak.” Happy to help, mister. A sweet, modest admission of his own skill.

My kids are experts at various things about which they can talk with great passion. Tristan is a truck enthusiast with topnotch identification skills: he can ID a “fai tut” (firetruck), “ment mitter” (cement mixer), “pit up tut” (pickup truck), and so forth without a moment’s hesitation. Phoebe is, as you know, a fairy expert. Last week she produced a thirty-page field identification guide to local fairies. The illustrated manual was a gift to a school friend, a blossoming fellow fairy aficionado. Though quiet Tomas doesn’t tend to spout on about his interests, he, too, has passions about which it’s a pleasure to hear him talk — Lego, American history, and baseball.

Oven repair men, tree fallers, pre-school teachers — whatever the job is, I find it extremely fun to meet people who are expert at what they do, love it, and can talk about it. Somehow I haven’t yet mastered the art of describing diaper-changing strategies in a fashion that can keep an audience rapt, but there must be a way. Let’s see…There’s the flying diaper change, when Daddy holds the angry baby up in the air while Mommy pulls off the soggy diaper and attaches a dry one. Then there’s the car trunk diaper change, when Mommy wedges the wiggling baby between bags of groceries to put on a fresh diaper in the supermarket parking lot. And, ug, there’s the yucky restaurant diaper change, when, in lieu of the absent fold-down changing table, Mommy spreads paper towels thickly on the bathroom floor and changes the baby on top of them. And then…Nope, I don’t have it yet. I suspect I’m lacking the necessary passion. Sigh.

When we moved back to the US from Indonesia a few years ago, still a family of four, it was not pain-free. After seven years in West Java, we almost burned up on re-entry.

Gary and I had previously spent long periods — six or eight months at a time — in Indonesia during grad school, doing our field research, but those stints abroad didn’t make us feel like foreigners when we returned to campus with our canvas sacks full of Rite-in-the-rain notebooks, silica gel, and rolls of slide film. On the contrary, we were perfectly in our element. Most of our fellow students were coming and going, to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Brazil, Thailand. It was all par for the course when Dan came back with leishmaniasis, Ben brought home a botfly larva that he gently nursed with maternal affection until it pupated from the back of his hand, Danny reappeared with a horrifying scar on her arm from a Zodiac propellor, and Chris returned from French Guiana with a thick accent Français. We all re-entered safely, with our new parasites, accents, battle scars, and so forth. But not so upon our return from seven years in Indonesia post-grad.

It wasn’t simply the length of time we spent abroad. No, it was that it was a critical period of our development, the period where we became working parents with kids. We left the US freshly-PhD’d thirty-somethings just beginning our careers. Crazy, isn’t it, to be that age and just getting started? We were practically…neotenic. As in, adult salamanders that are capable of making babies but that still retain baby features of their own, like larval gills. Nevermind. Anyway, we had earned a meager living throughout grad school by teaching, but, now, heading to Indonesia, we were embarking on our first REAL JOBS.

While we were living in Indonesia, we matured into working adults, first without kids, then with one, then two. But this developmental stage of our lives happened in a totally different…habitat, really, from that of other Americans getting started on their careers and families on home turf. In Bogor, dinner had been entirely in the hands of the fabulous Ibu Mimin and Ibu Tini, who also patiently taught us how to care for baby Tomas, ironed our clothes, bribed the garbage men with fresh sweet coffee to take our trash from the open concrete bin, flagged down the Aqua truck to get clean drinking water, and had generally been our family’s wise keepers. (I miss them so!) On our return, Gary and I were in need of a remedial course in keeping a house while working and being parents. I had to learn to cook. It was rough.

We struggled to get medical insurance, which we previously had in an international plan that gave global coverage, but for the US and Japan. The new insurers wanted proof that my noggin was still screwed to my shoulders, after they learned that, years before, I had sustained a head injury when our car was t-boned by a gigantic bus in a busy Jakarta intersection. We got the insurance, barely, after paying the doctor who treated me in Singapore a $500 fee for photocopying and mailing my records. Once we had insured access to the US medical system, we struggled to make it work for us. After a few months home, Phoebe got amoebic dysentery on our first family trip back to Bogor. Home again in the US, two doctors would not believe my (expert, if I may say so) diagnosis. One waxed on to me about his credentials earned in a tropical medicine course. Congratulations, Doc, have a cookie, I thought. In Indonesia, we had learned basic diagnosis and self-medicated for years. I could walk into any pharmacy, ask for the medications I needed, and be done with it. You’d be nuts (and soon regret it) to rely wholesale on the Indonesian medical system, and we were often far away from help. Back in California again, it took me weeks to get a prescription for Flagyl, during which time the amoebas whittled down Phoebe from a plump baby to a gaunt one. We avoided admission to the hospital only because she nursed. In the end, the doctors handed over the meds when they realized they had never run the necessary test and had, in error, reported to me a negative result. Here’s the Flagyl, please don’t sue us. There were funny things, too. We were mal-adapted, confused immigrants, fresh off the boat. On my first trip to the supermarket, I didn’t know what a debit card was or how to slide my credit card in the reader. Those things came into popular existence while we were gone. And Tomas (sweet Tomas!) took his shoes off whenever he went into a house or his pre-school. He’d stop just inside the door, crouch to pull of his sneakers, and then line them up neatly just inside the door. Even Lucy, the street dog we brought home with us, was a misfit; the dogs in our new neighborhood repeatedly launched snarling attacks on her. Also, I had to learn to watch my mouth. The expatriates in Indonesia swore like sailors, and, after we moved back,  it took a few dozen instances of shocked silence before I figured out I probably shouldn’t curse so much in casual conversation with other parents, check-out clerks, and the gas station attendant; turns out dropping the F bomb doesn’t just figure into daily conversation around here, and, unlike my kids, who’ve heard it all, there are lots of children who are hopelessly unable to resist firing off cusses once they’ve heard them. Before we moved back, I had absolutely no idea that many folks would prefer one didn’t use the un-abbreviated G-word in an exclamation of excited surprise, but that  “OMG!” is an acceptable interjection in a similar instance.

Gary, who grew up here in town, struggled to avoid feeling like he never left home. He had departed for college at a sprint, eager to get as far away as possible, as fast as possible. The little yellow house we rented after returning to the US was just down the street from his old high school. He pointed out the window of his guidance counselor, a polished jerk who had advised him not to apply to Harvard. “A waste of money. Think of your parents,” the man had said of the application fee. “You’ll never get in there.” Gary did get in, and did go to Harvard, and then went on to complete his doctorate…but it stung him to be back again and just down the street from that ass, sort of like he hadn’t actually made a getaway.

It’s good to be home again. It has taken a while to regain our land legs, or to readjust, but really we’re only a bit singed after re-entry. Now we are four years past our return, and I think we’re more or less ready for our citizenship test. We’re up on our fabulous mountaintop, far from Gary’s high school and the enthusiasm-squashing guidance counselor. (Who put that man in that office?!) These days I can make a mean steak au poivre, roast a chicken to perfection, and have successfully recreated Ibu Mimin’s coconut lemongrass soup (though, admittedly, not to her level of awesomeness). Tomas can manage to enter a door without taking his shoes off. I can slide my credit card like the best of ‘em. I can (mostly) stifle my curses, and I do truly appreciate that it’s nicer not to sound like a swaggering sailor. Phoebe never did get plump again. In fact, she never started to eat again. We keep her alive with peanutbutter and fried tempeh. (Hmmm, maybe I should think about litigation…) And finally, we still avoid the medical system as much as possible, a strategy to which we are doubly committed since whisking a very feverish Tristan off the ER last year, where Motrin, Ibuprofin, and four minutes with the doctor cost two grand. I can handle those meds on my own, Doc.

Someday we’ll take our kids back to Indonesia to live there for a while. Tomas is, after all, of Indonesian background, and Indonesia is definitely a part of Gary and a part of me. We want our kids to have that, too. When we go, we might experience some re-entry friction there. Maybe the prices on the angkots (the little green minibuses) have risen, so we’ll be short and have to bum 500 Rupiah off one of the buskers sure to be hanging like a barnacle from the rattling bus. Or maybe the city changed the routes so we’ll end up in Ciawi instead Cilandak or Cicerup instead of Cimangis and have to negotiate ojeks (motorcycle taxis) to get us back where we want to be. Or, worst of all, perhaps all of Jakarta’s Duty Free shops have closed down and, without a handy black market contact, we’ll end up paying the equivalent of $20 a bottle for Yellow Tail. But we won’t burn up on re-entry, there, or here.

We live in a kind of Narnia, or a Magic Tree House, sort of place. There must be some kind of wardrobe door, or lamppost, or other portal at the bottom of the hill. This is rural Humboldt County, so maybe it’s an…an old tire. The road heading up our mountain doesn’t bring everyone here. If it did, droves of people would ascend en masse. The population would explode, rampant construction would taint the landscape, and the police would have to start patrolling the road. The authorities currently ignore the road as if it didn’t exist, except when they drive trucks full of confiscated weed UP the mountain to burn it at the tiny local airport. Apparently they used to do that down in town, but it drew too many deep-breathing onlookers. Gotta love Humboldt County. On the upside of population growth, someone might open a taco truck…

Our mountain is a magical place, really.

It has trees and prairies and incredible views of mountains and valleys and the Pacific Ocean. There are no shops or gas stations. A few hundred people live here. They are ranchers, farmers, lecturers at a local university, people with businesses in town, dope growers, and weirdos like us, with jobs far away. The non-human denizens of our mountain include black bears, mountain lions, bobcats, and ten million pocket gophers. I’ve had people (far’ners to our mountain) look out our window and ask, “What are you going to do about those gophers?” Are you kidding? Even Sisyphus would have looked at the mounds dotting the landscape, sighed, and proclaimed, “Fuck it. I’m just not doing it.” Plus, Tristan likes to drive his toy bulldozers through the mounds, and sometimes the gophers turn up beautiful arrowheads of various shapes and sizes.

My kids go to the tiny public district school — 27 kids in three classrooms, K-8. The dynamics among the children of different ages in this small school are fabulous: the big kids play with the little ones; help them tie their shoes; pat their shoulders when they’re crying. I remember big kids being mean and scary at my big public elementary school back East. For such a small population, the diversity at the school is huge. There are a bunch of non-white kids, and a whole gaggle of adopted ones. Our not-white, adopted Tomas’ best friend is a not-white, adopted girl with a long black braid. She’s way cool. She wears Carhartt pants and a cap featuring the logo of a tractor company. Tomas and she are attached at the hip.

Grown-up kids we’ve chatted with who attended our little school through the eighth grade say they were well-adjusted to enter the big public high school down in town. This is comforting, as I’m occasionally haunted by images of the high school’s “hick parking lot”, where the cowboy kids park their gigantic jacked-up trucks and adjust their oversized belt buckles. They just don’t look very…sweet. But, somehow our school toughens our mountain kids up enough for the outside world.

The things that are fabulous about our mountain also make it hard. It’s not the Antarctic, but it’s isolated. Mommies in need of some help with the kids don’t just call up a sitter or ask the neighbor to stop in for a bit. I don’t “pop out for diapers”. I’ve had to do some interesting improvisation: Dang, we’re out of salt. Can I use soy sauce in the cookie recipe? Our USPS packages get diverted to a post office 25 miles away. Are you serious? I just drove all this way to pick up a certified mail envelope addressed to some random bud trimmer who once housesat for the previous owners of our place? Arrrggg. And, of course, there’s no taco truck. What I wouldn’t do for a taco truck…I think I’ll head down the hill now, buy my weekly stock of groceries and red wine, scope the store for handsome firemen, and hit the taco truck.

We used to be so cool. No, really, it’s true.

Every once in a while, my husband Gary or I will run into somebody cool, somebody in their twenties and heading off to do something fabulous. I might be in a cafe and see a student holding a frisbee. “Hey, do you play Ultimate?” I ask. Perking up at the affirmative response, and wiping a smear of lunch from the front of my t-shirt, I say brightly, “Oh, I used to play Ultimate!” The kid looks doubtful. I feel desperate to convince him. The whole encounter ends for me with a feeling of disappointment. Or maybe Gary meets a young person somewhere who’s heading off to PhD School, about to embark on an exciting research project in one of the few remaining remote bits of the planet. Gary has to bite his tongue to stifle his painful desire to insist that he, too, has been where no man has gone before, to uncharted territories where he would make new discoveries, swing from vines, and get malaria. Been there, done that. No, really!

But truly, we used to be cool. It’s just, somehow, with each successive child, it’s less apparent. Some examples:

First, travel. We used to get around the world, and around town, in cool ways. As graduate students, Gary and I would board international flights to Asia with our scuffed-up backpacks and canvas sacks stuffed with rat traps and rain gauges. Or, for a trip across town when we lived in Bogor (Indonesia), we’d hop on our periwinkle-blue 1973 Vespa. The scooter was sure to break down at least once, maybe several times on each outing, and even that was cool. Young Indonesian guys would materialize out of the diesel smog on their own cobbled-together Vespas, whip out their greasy tool sacks, attach a few rubber bands here and there, and have us up and running again in a minute. Never failed to happen.

But these days, since Tristan became ambulatory, the farthest we’ve traveled as a family is the five hours to San Francisco, and our mode of transportation was distinctly NOT cool. To our frustration, no enterprising engineer has created plexiglass dividers to separate children from one another in the backseat. Packed like sardines in the back of our Subaru, Tomas wedged between Tristan’s carseat and Phoebe’s booster, they fight like rabid pitbulls. One of us would have been dead before we reached the Golden Gate Bridge. So, we rented a minivan. The horror. And the coolness indicator just plummeted.

Second, sports. We were cool athletes. We played Ultimate competitively in grad school, and later around the world — Jakarta, Bali, Bangkok, Singapore, Perth. Before all that, Gary was a bike messenger in D.C. That is seriously cool.

These days, my exercise consists of chasing Tristan around at the kiddie gym. I sprint from one potential disaster to the next, swooping in to catch my son as he nearly Tarzans on a rope swing into a sweet little thing with tiny pigtails and a purple sparkly unicorn shirt, diving to stop Tristan from wrenching his preferred hula hoop from the hands of a small boy whose meaty father is closing in, and so on. Likewise, my husband is not currently a cool athlete. A couple of times a week he hobbles to the local gym to tread the ellipse for twenty-one minutes on his one good knee. Ah, to remember him diving for the disc.

And then, there’s food and fine-dining. When Tomas was little and we were still more or less cool, Uncle Chris (my brother) was a high flyin’ dotcommer, or at least still living the good life after it all. He used to take us out to the hippest restaurants in San Francisco. That ended when Tomas, still in diapers, crouched under our table during the entrees for a poop. Chris was appalled. “Can’t you stop him?” he whispered urgently. Uh, yeah, if you want everyone else to know your nephew is pooping under the table at the coolest joint in town. Things along those lines had happened before: once our flight into San Francisco began its landing just as Tomas was mid-squat at our feet. Forced back into his seat, Tomas repeatedly yowled, “But I needda poooooooop!” Of course, just as on all US airlines, that flight was entirely populated by people who, apparently, were never children themselves and who were, thus, not obliged to exercise the slightest bit of tolerance for one.

Anyway, that was the last time Uncle Chris took us out to a hip joint. When we visited him a few weeks ago, it was dim sum. No complaints. The food was fabulous and the Hong Kongese staff totally unperturbed when the kids in our party engaged in a wrestling match on the carpet. They simply seated all of the other customers at the other end of the restaurant. But, it was distinctly less cool than that other place.

Finally, there’s the day-to-day. As graduate students, Gary and I spent months at a time in the jungles of Borneo. We woke each morning to gibbon song. We camped for weeks on top of a remote island where the local men harvested swiftlet nests to be sold to the Chinese for birds nest soup. Then, on the same island, we camped for weeks on a beach where we fished for dinner and cooked with lemongrass that grew in the sand. I spent a Christmas surveying rats and bats with Dayak headhunters in the interior — my “Christmas with the cannibals,” I called it. The daily challenges were cool, and exciting: how to get 300 pounds of rat traps onto the back of a motorcycle; how to avoid fire ants; how to set my traps where they wouldn’t be wholly eaten by bearded pigs.

And now, well, we’re parents with kids. The challenges are big ones, but not so glamorous, and my day-to-day is full of the usual mommy stuff, of which you will be spared. At least in this post.

But, you know, now we’re cool in a different way. Really! We’re…vicariously cool.

As a parent, you derive a lot of your coolness from your children. And our kids are way cool.

Tomas just performed on stage for the first time in a local repertory theater production of Fiddler on the Roof. It was entirely his decision to do this, and he’s a shy guy, and he did the whole thing with grace and maturity. The other night he hit his second home run of the season at his Little League game, and, at last night’s game, he pitched 78 awesome throws. He even split his pants sliding into a base. He rocks.

Phoebe is an amazing princess fairy. She mixes fairy dust in the kitchen. (Shoot, there goes another $8 bottle of paprika). She leaves offerings for the fairies in a hollow oak tree behind our house. And last week she delivered a spontaneous, solo, acapella performance of Lavender’s Blue at her all-school morning meeting. The superintendent generously allowed her to sing all four verses, and Phoebe received a whooping round of applause from the students and staff (but for Tomas, who was shrinking, mortified, into his metal folding chair). The superintendent then steered the meeting back to planning the school camping trip.

And Tristan…well, you’ve already had a few Tristan stories. His personality is still emerging, but, whatever it will be, it’s going to be HUGE, and it’s going to be way cool.

So, this is where we are now. I think I’ve worked through this. I’m good with it. The next time I run into a cute young guy with a disc, or Gary meets a jungle-bound student at the gym while he’s gimping along on the treadmill, we’ll stay mum, assured in our own conviction that we have been there, among the coolest of the cool. Yes, that’s it: we are veterans of cool. It’s up to our kids now. Awesome.

My two year-old son and I share a strong affection and appreciation for firemen, albeit from very different angles. Tristan is into the whole scene — the big red trucks, the sirens, the hoses and ladders, and the superheros who get to drive the trucks and “shoot the water.” I, on the other hand, am, uh, intellectually stimulated by a phenomenon in which an entire workforce population appears to be polite, soft-spoken, clean-cut, and incredibly good-looking. HOT men without swagger.

My fondness of firemen isn’t a long-standing one. No, it’s a recent one that grew with my son’s discovery of ride-on firetrucks and YouTube firetruck songs, and with my trips to Safeway for groceries. Huh? Yep. It’s strange, but one out of two times I shop in our small California city, a firetruck is parked in the NO PARKING FIRE ZONE and firemen are shopping inside. They seem to shop a lot. Are they culinary geniuses, in addition to being handsome and curteous? Shoot, that would make them absolutely irresistible.

Anyway, in our frequent encounters with uniformed firemen in the vegetable section, at the deli counter, and in front of the steaks, Tristan was repeatedly invited to visit a local firehouse. At first I thought the guys were just being nice. Visit men in their workplace? I don’t remember ever doing that when I was a kid; my father’s workplace was sacred and kid-free, as I recall. But, after a few such invitations, I got over it.

On a sunny afternoon, Tristan and I parked around the corner from one of our city firehouses. I stared at the Safe Surrender sign showing that the firehouse was a safe place to leave your baby if you were about to embark on a drug binge or a murderous rage and wondered if the firemen would think I was there to leave Tristan. I tried to put on a sane, stable face. It’s not easy after five years of no sleep.

I knocked on the firehouse door and asked the (very handsome) fireman who opened it if we could come in to see the firetrucks. Thereafter followed a most pleasant experience: for a full half hour or so, Tristan and I were fully attended to by three young, muscular, friendly, swagger-free men. They put Tristan in the firetruck, let him shoot a firehose, gave him a plastic fireman hat, and paid us their undivided attention. I don’t think I’ve ever had the undivided attention of THREE hot men at the same time. Or maybe not even one.

Then I got the genius idea that the local firehouses offer childcare. I suggested the guys float the idea at their next fire department meeting. Can you imagine? The moms would be in heaven, the kids would be out of their minds with joy, and, given how frequently the firemen shop, they would always be well-stocked with the essential diapers, wipes, and Cheddar Bunnies.

I was stuck with another brilliant thought: Tristan and I could do this weekly, even twice a week! Our city has at least nine firehouses. We could just cycle through! Tristan would get his fill of firetrucks and I’d bathe in the lavish attention of curteous firehouse studs. Could there be any more effective medicine for maternal exhaustion and sleep deprivation malaise? When we exhausted our local firehouses, we could range more broadly, throughout the county! There were months of entertainment for Tristan in store, and, in contrast to the less enticing option of playing hide-and-seek or going to the park again, I’d be just as dedicated to the mission as my son.

Alas, just as I was ready to implement my plan, Tristan is now onto other things. Every morning he puts on a plastic police helmet and a Captain Hook hook and says he’s a police pirate. The shiny red firetrucks and the firemen no longer have the same allure for him. Crap. I momentarily imagined embarking on a tour of local police stations, but images of twitching meth heads sitting on benches while they waited to be booked, and gigantic men raging behind bars, and uniformed men with swagger quickly crowded out any images of inviting policemen I could conjure up. And we don’t have any local pirates, so it’s back to the same old, same old.

Yesterday at the grocery store I saw M&Ms on the shelf and was reminded that I should potty train Tristan. One peepee, one M&M. Two for a poop. Operating on the bizarre principal – inherited from Oma (my mother) – that peanut M&Ms offer a significant nutritional advantage over the other kinds, I threw a bag of those in the cart.

Later, when we were home and Tristan was up from his nap, I informed him of the promised booty for waste products produced in the red plastic potty. Tomas and Phoebe, too, were told they would receive the same rewards (for Tristan’s accomplishments, of course) so as to promote their support for the program.

Smart little Tristan looked at the factors – and those missing from my proposed system – and did some calculations. No volume requirement, huh? In the first 45 minutes of Shrek 3 (the inaugural movie for potty training) he sat his bum on the potty no fewer than six times to squeeze out tiny toothpaste cap-sized dribbles of piss. Tomas and Phoebe joyfully received their rewards alongside the twerp.

Fearful of the certain consequences, I introduced a volume requirement. The peepee had to be big. No problem. Tristan selected a plastic teacup from the kids play kitchen set and proceeded to fill it at the bathroom sink three dozen times. Then he made a couple of gigantic peepees. He also managed to squeeze out a totally unnecessary, meager poop to receive the double reward.

And then he was JACKED UP. He cackled like a mad man. He climbed the walls. He made swords out of anything and everything. By the end of the night, he had ruined the family movie, peed on the floor, put Phoebe in tears a dozen times, pissed off Tomas, utterly destroyed Daddy, completely screwed the rewards system, and, well, demonstrated that he was potty trained.

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Education

2003 PhD, University of Michigan, Biology Dept. (I know, right?! I wouldn’t even mention this, but for how additionally ridiculous it makes my life seem at times.)

1995 BA, University of California, Berkeley, Integrative Biology Dept.

1989 Princeton High School

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Employment

2004 – 2010 Scientific advising, program development, and grant-writing for non-profits  in Indonesia

2010-2012 Same thing but from back here in the US

2012 Ceased all efforts to have a job following my braindeath after the third child

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Kids

2006 Tomas, adopted in Indonesia (currently 9)

2010 Phoebe, homegrown and born in Singapore (currently 5)

2012 Tristan, homegrown and born in California (currently 2.75)

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Stats

Diapers changed: 357,987

Disasters narrowly averted: 4,679

Children successfully potty-trained: 2

Children successfully trained to sleep in a crib: 0

Children currently able to sleep on their own: 1

Brain cells lost to sleep deprivation: most

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Well, I think that’s all the necessary background. Onto the stories of the trials and tribulations of motherhood! I hope you’ll enjoy these as much as I love to write them.