This past week both boys have been in a soccer camp, 9-4, every day. Yes, it’s 90 degrees in the shade here in sub-Saharan Manhattan, and as humid as a wet gym sock, but the kids  play on. I learned a new way to tell the difference between kids and adults this week: after dragging themselves cross-town to pick up their kids at camp, grown-ups want a nice shady bench and maybe an adult beverage. The kids, however, after a Pizza Infusion, will happily play tag in the sprinklers for another three hours.

Soccer camp started in just the nick of time. I start a new job next week and if the boys hadn’t had soccer camp to keep them busy, I probably would have had to do something highly illegal–lock them in closets, perhaps, or leave them in the park overnight–just so I could prepare for The Next Chapter of My Life.  Oh, and did I mention that Husband is traveling for two weeks?

So soccer camp, in this house, translates to “life saver.”

But I digress. Today was the last day of this soccer camp and so the entire group of kids, ranging in age from 14 to 6 (Caleb was the only 6 year old) divided into teams for a tournament.  The teams played against one another all day in the sweltering pre-hurricane heat and Caleb’s team came in 4th out of 10 teams.  A perfectly respectable finish, right?

Perfectly respectable, that is, except trophies were only awarded to the top three teams.  Now, Caleb has got a season of little league under his belt and he’s been watching his brother do all these sporty things, so he knows the drill: at the end of whatever it is everyone gets a trophy.

I don’t like the fact that trophies get handed out like breath mints and so was delighted that only the top 3 teams got doodads. But Caleb was inconsolable (and bruised, battered, and covered in a thin layer of sweaty grit).He moped and moaned all the way home, began to cry in the elevator, and when we got into the apartment, he flopped down on his bed and began to sob.  I figured he was down for the count.

And then the skies parted and little cherub heads rained down on me. Or something almost as miraculous: Liam began to comfort his little brother. Told him that the coaches had said great things about Caleb’s skills, that he’d done a really great job, that even really great soccer players don’t always win, on and on and on.  I slipped out of the room and Liam kept talking, reminding his brother of all that he’d learned this week, and even conceding that Caleb is a much better player at 6 than Liam was.

I swear to god it was as if he’d actually been listening to all my lectures this summer about how important it is for siblings to take care of one another.

Of course, another possibility is that because Liam’s team won the tournament (and there’s a big shiny trophy on his desk to prove it), he felt he could afford to be compassionate and my lectures had nothing to do with it.

But no. I’m not going to undercut their tender moment with cynicism.  I’m going to stick with cherubs and miracles…sort of my own soccer camp trophy.

Let’s clarify, shall we?

This is a mosque, people:

This is a community center:

Anyone notice a slight difference in scale? The Cordoba Building will be about 13 stories tall and in downtown Manhattan, it will look like that white guy who used to play basketball for the Utah Jazz, remember him? John Stockton:

A big guy, but on the court with those other really big guys? Not so imposing. Ditto Cordoba House. It will be surrounded by tall buildings filled with capitalists busy making sure to preserve the financial loopholes that allowed our economy to mimic the record of the Knicks last year (and the year before that, and the year before that, ad infinitum). 

You’d think that perhaps leaders of the Tea Bag Brains would worry about financial malfeasance, huge unemployment numbers, and stuff like that – you know, the stuff that really hammers middle America.

But then…on second thought? Nah. Economic despair and financial unrest create anxiety, which with the right words can be turned into fear. And all those Tea Bag Brains are steeped in it: a thin bitter brew of fear, anxiety, and ignorance, with a little fame-mongering thrown in for good measure.

If John Stockton and Karl Malone can create one of the most formidable pick n’roll plays in basketball history, surely an ugly 13-story community center and worship space can co-exist with the steroidal slabs that already exist downtown?

Jitney season is winding down. If you live in New York, you know those big green “motor coaches” that rumble along the avenues, collecting weekenders and second-homers and hauling them east: the tonier south forkers towards the Hamptons, the rusticating north forkers towards Orient. (Long Island splits at its tip into two “forks,” north and south, with Shelter Island in the middle. The north fork is Long Island Sound; the south fork is the Atlantic. Thus North Fork and South Fork).

We’ve been to both forks in the last month–double-forkers, that’s us–and so we joined the throngs of jitney riders standing on the corner of 3rd and 40th. And that’s when I noticed: there were no kids waiting for the bus, other than my own squabbling pair. The first time, I sort of understood: we were riding the so-called “luxury liner,” which despite the overtones of White Star Lines, means only that you get a plug for your computer, and bins in the back of the bus filled with individual packets of cheez-its and chocolate chip cookies. 

On our way back from the East End, again on the luxury liner, and again: no kids but ours. Some truly sophomoric men (usely the term loosely) sat in front of us and cackled about cute girls on facebook, but there were no actual chronological children on the bus.

Then, on a subsequent weekend, we were again waiting for the jitney–the regular ol’ green bus jitney–to go to the North Fork. A definitively more down-scale crowd all-round, and no bottomless bin of chocolate chip cookies, much to the boys’ disappointment.  But again: they were the only kids. Going out and coming back. 

Friends who ride the jitney report the same thing: they are a seemingly child-free zone.

And yet, I see children on the beaches of both forks.  How’d they get there? Are they shipped with the baggage (and why didn’t I think of doing that)?  Is there some unwritten rule that people traveling to one or the other fork with kids must do the train-switch sprint, kids in tow, through the hellishly crowded train station in Queens?

It’s a mystery. Because let’s face it: unless you’re traveling on, like, Beyonce’s motor coach, a bus is a bus is a bus. I don’t care how many packets of cheez-its you give me, it’s still a bus. Not a glam way to travel. Those jitneys should be crawling with kids, while the glam-forkers whisk out east on the train, or the ferry, or some other more eleganza conveyance.

Clearly, our friends on the forks should continue to invite us out for visits on a regular basis (I’m thinking weekly) so that I can continue this jitney-based research.

Suffragists started advocating for the vote just after the Civil War, in what was for many women a continuation of the campaign to end slavery.  More than fifty years after the end of the war, the government finally decided that women were citizens, and altered the Constitution accordingly. A radical act, right? Deciding that women could participate in the political life of their country?

Anti-suffragists claimed, among other things, that women might cheat in elections by stashing extra ballots in their puffy-sleeved blouses;  confusingly, they also claimed that women were far too child-like to be responsible voters:

Let’s ignore the weirdness of this doll-faced child talking about her husband, shall we? Here’s another, much more direct anti-suffrage poster: 

Now, with almost a century of hindsight, these arguments look ridiculous to us; it’s easy to forget how terrified anti-suffragists were about moving away from the status quo. We should stay the way we are because that’s the way it’s always been. Change is bad (unless we’re talking about that pesky 14th amendment, right Mr. Boehner?)

Hmm… women voting is a menace to the home…

and homosexual sex is a menace to national security.

How would that happen, exactly? A woman has sex with a woman and suddenly the entire military-industrial complex goes into a state of cardiac arrest?  Yowza.

So on this 90th anniversary of women shouting loudly in order to be heard, here’s hoping that we won’t have to wait fifty years for signs like this to be tossed on the scrap heap of history.

Happy Birthday, Amendment 19.

Someone told me my iPhone could help me lose weight, so I downloaded this new app, called LoseIt.

I thought all I had to do was rub it across my muffin-esque belly and voila! I’d be all Heidi Klum.

Ha. Apparently it’s just an app that helps me do stuff like, you know, keep track of calories and exercise.

BORING BORING BORING. 

That’s not an app. That’s a diet.

I’m totally deleting it.

Baby Caleb is six today. He still sleeps with four small bears and a tattered blankie, but his body is long and lean, the shape of the young man he will become.   He is a pirate and a spy; collector of important rocks and sticks; he walks like an Egyptian when we’re out doing errands and then worries that people might be looking at him. 

When we go swimming, he leaps into the pool, attempting to do a cannonball, even though he can’t really swim. 

He dog-paddles with great confidence, and blows the occasional bubble, but actually swim? Not so much.

Fearless: he never really crawled but learned to walk at 9 months, which is a really bad idea: his brain was still the size of a walnut. I suspect, however, that even in that walnut-sized brain, he was trying to keep up with his older brother. His brother is about 3 1/2 years ahead, but Caleb works hard to hold his own: he will probably be an excellent soccer goalie, for instance, because of all the “practice” shots that Liam has taken at his round little head: it’s basically block or die.

Keeping up with Big Brother may have created a fearless six year old, but also one who is too quick to say “I can’t do it,” probably because he has Napoleon as an older brother. Unlike Napoleon, however, Caleb makes friends really easily, and has even caused a stir in the female population of his kindergarten: one little girl told her dad, while they were watching “Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang,” that if she were Truly Scrumptious, she wouldn’t want to marry Mr. Potts–she would want to marry Caleb. 

It seems to me that being the second child means always existing in relation: there was never a time where there wasn’t someone else there. That means when Caleb is in the apartment without Liam around, he revels in having the space all to himself: he spreads out his “guys” (his Lego mini-figures, of which he has about a gajillion) and tells infinitely complicated, infinitely explosive stories, complete with remarkable sound effects, happily parading his subconscious for all to hear: “You are not the boss! Come on King Guy you can do it! Here come the bad guys and phfew smash clang now you’re doing it you can make it, get those minions to attack the demon leader guy charge the castle!”  He plays out these stories right here, behind my desk chair, and then when the battles have been resolved, he climbs up into my lap to regale me with the color commentary, detailing all that happened.

I worry about him, this six-year-old boy of mine.I worry that he’s overshadowed by his brother, that his parents are distracted and too busy, that in his rush to Keep Up he is perpetually exhausted.  Embedded in those worries, of course, is simultaneous nostalgia for vanished babyhood and the stunned realization that ohmigod these babies are growing into…boys.

Boys. I’m raising boys, who as they get older become more and more emphatically not me. It’s as if my tomato plants suddenly sprouted beans, or strawberries. My round little Caleb now leaps around making gun finger, or karate chops trees, or quite literally bounces off the walls of the elevator in his effort to be SpiderMan. How did that happen? People tell me that “boys are easier” and that “boys are nice to their mothers,” which may all well be true. Maybe I won’t end up alone in a studio apartment eating cat food when I’m 87 while both boys assuage one another with the thought that they called me, you know, just last month and I seemed to be doing fine… Still, though, it’s strange to think of these babies of mine moving irrevocably towards a place I’ve never been: manhood.

What’s that sound, you say? Oh, that’s just Husband, snickering at my melodramatic spin on things: he points out that Caleb is turning SIX, for god’s sake, not SEVENTEEN.

Okay. True. I’ll save the melodramatic musings for a decade up the road and take comfort in the fact that my fearless six-year-old still reaches for my hand when we walk down the street, still climbs into bed for a morning snuggle, still insists on his bears and his blankie.  I know he’s growing up…but just like all the books say, I didn’t know it would happen this fast.

7:19AM, Caleb bounds in: MOMMY! I had to go poop!

Me: unh?

Caleb: I had to go poop and I called you and called you and you didn’t come help me!

Me: unh?

Caleb: And so I wiped all by myself! I did it! 

Me: unh…good for you.

Caleb: I don’t know if I got it all but I got most of it, I’m pretty sure!

Me: You washed your hands?

Caleb: Yes! Because tomorrow is my birthday and I’m going to be six.

And with that he dashed out of the room, filled with joy about his accomplishment.

They grow up so fast, don’t they?

Last night on “Mad Men,” when Betty Draper saw that her daughter Sally had given herself a haircut, she slapped Sally across the face.  Later in the same episode, when she found out that Sally had been “touching herself in appropriately,” she threatened to chop off Sally’s fingers.

I don’t know about you, but for me, those moments are harder to watch than any of the show’s casually (or deliberately) sexist moments; I flinch with every inept or destructive thing that Betty does and I’m dreading the outcome of this particular plot line (my aunt thinks that maybe Sally’s grandpa was doing some inappropriate touching of his own…).  I’m also wondering what the hell kind of woman moves her second husband into the same house she lived in with Hubby #1–even into the same bed–but this post isn’t about a Betty character analysis.

Or rather, it’s about analyzing my own inner Betty–and my inner Betty isn’t a Grace-Kelly lookalike.

She surfaced this morning, when the boys were arguing about who had one particular Lego piece. One piece, among thousands. Accusations were hurled–you took that piece off my desk! I did not! You did too, you IDIOT!–doors were slammed, tears were shed. It was 7:45AM and I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee.

Betty loomed yesterday too, on the (endless) jitney ride back from Easthampton, when the boys argued loudly about who got to use Daddy’s iPad as opposed to the iPhone; and then when the iPad was declared off limits, quarreled about which iPhone, Mommy’s or Daddy’s, was better; and then just for good measure tossed in a bicker-fest about which game was better.

Betty thinks, just for a flash, about SLAPPING a bickering boy to make him stop, or about threatening quarreling brothers with physical harm if they don’t just SHUT UP!

Now unlike the real Mrs. Draper-n0w-Francis, I manage to squash those impulses. Sometimes it means taking several deep breaths and going to stand in the bathroom behind a locked door; sometimes it means finding a way to make a joke and defuse the situation; sometimes (like on the jitney) it means hissing across the aisle to the boys that if they ever hope to use an iphone again they’d better just STOP.  

TV Betty seems like an example of that generation’s loused-up, repressed (and repressive) parenting. But even so, a teeny little part looks at Betty’s slaps and threats and thinks, “gosh, that seems so easy.“ 

Maybe that  should be my new threat: “if you two don’t stop fighting, I’ll go Betty on you both!”

Then this summer, just across 4th avenue, next to the newly opened (and badly stocked) Nordstrom Rack, a Duane Reade opened. A huge Duane Reade, practically midwestern in its sprawl. It’s clean and light and filled with all kinds of whatnots, including frozen pizza and expensive shampoo. Everything a gal could want.

So you’d think that this Duane Reade is designed to put the old grimy Walgreen’s out of business, right?

Wrongo, batman. Seems that Walgreens, last February, bought Duane Reade. For about a billion dollars.  That’s a lot of toilet paper and aspirin.

And as so often happens, when the spiffy new kid shows up, the wallflowers try to gussy up.  Our grimy Walgreens has undergone a transformation and now seems almost Duane-like in its spiffiness–and it’s stocked with the same stuff. 

Exhibit 1:

Exhibit 2:

It’s been a few days since I took these pictures and now when I look at them, I am not quite sure which is which. I think exhibit 1 is Duane Reade, which means the other one is the newly gussied-up Walgreens.

These two stores exist about 100 yards from one another. They sell pretty much identical merchandise at identical prices. Who benefits here? I guess the people who got jobs at the new DR, but I’m not sure about anyone else. How many epsom salts, shampoos, condoms, aspirins, and ace bandages does one really need in a square block radius?

Is this like some kind of expensive “survivor” type game? Whichever store becomes more profitable will stay open and the other store will close down?

It’s a little bizarre–we’ve gone from having one kind of scurfy store to having two positively gleaming emporia within a stone’s throw of the front door. I can’t figure out how on earth it makes any business sense, but I do know that both stores carry Frederic Fekkai’s new “Glossing” line of shampoo in a three-pack (shampoo, conditioner, and something else) for 27 bucks. YES I know that’s 9 bucks a (small) bottle, but it smells sooo good and comes in such a pretty package.

And isn’t it all about the package?

We took the jitney to East Hampton this weekend. Husband needed to Get A Little Work Done:

This is why Steve Jobs is a rich man.

(And, yes, full disclosure, I took this picture on my iPhone 4, which I adore. And, I have to admit, if I don’t have my phone with me, I feel anxious, a little bit naked.  So I play my own part in keeping ol’ Stevie J. in pin money.)