I just found myself giving the finger to the TV set.  CNN was on with some story about how a great Mother's Day gift would be to give your mom a checkup at the doctor.  After all, they said, mothers do everything around the house so when they're sick the entire family falls apart.  

 

That's when I gave my flat screen the finger.  Look, I have nothing but respect for moms and of course I realize that in the majority of homes they still do most all the heavy lifting while the dad waltzes home from work, unloads the dishwasher six times a year and wants a medal for each time.  But in my house that stereotype hardly applies.    And this Sunday, after A and I made French toast and eggs and bagels for my two, her one and another one she was looking after, I rushed off to back-to-back playdates, not returning home till eight, their schoolday bedtime, hustling them into bed and then lugging a Santa Claus-sized laundry bag down to the building's basement to do two loads of laundry.  

My own mother passed away when I was sixteen so for me it's mainly been a grandmother's day anyway.

 

The few actual Mother's Days I did celebrate back when we were still married were already weird for me. My ex had insisted that we split everything down the middle to the minute and Sundays were my day, Saturday's hers. When her third Mother's Day came I offered to switch days but she said she already had plans.  This was a year before I was actually a single-father but I remember the sad smiles I got from the intact family next to us at the restaurant.  It seemed clear to me that they thought I was a young widower.  I guess it was clear to me that's what they were thinking becuase that's how I felt.

 

By now, five years later, we're all so used to it.  I made the kids make cards for their mom and grandmom and mailed them down to the little town in Georgia where they live.  My friends are so used to it as well.  I'm sure this Sunday I'll get at least one call from a  wiseass wishing me well.

 

 

I like this one because I can pretend that the polar bear is a dude.

 
Happy Mother's Day to all you real mothers out there.  I learned so much about what I know about parenting from you. 

Sunday turned out to be a Japanese-themed day.  First we were invited to the second-annual Japanese children's festival, Kodomo no hi. 

It was originally just to celebrate boys but they've gotten with the program and now include  girls as well.  Chet's friend's mom put out the traditional carp kite and laid out a spread of traditional Japanese delicacies.  Having lived in a small town in Japan for four months I knew that what looked like chocolate was really sweet red-bean paste but I didn't tell the kids that hoping to fool them into trying something new.  Didn't work.  Oh well. 

 

Afterwards we rushed downtown to Koreatown where American friends had rented a karaoke room.  I've been to big drunken karaoke bars and the whole public humiliation thing or the insufferable amateur showing off thing  never grabbed me, however here we had our own little room with a futuristic wireless karaoke set up and disco lights.  The kids weren't the only ones in heaven.  We all shouted our heads off to Smashmouth's "Rockstar" and "Let's Get it Started in Here."  For Chet and his young kindergarten friend Benny, reading so quickly  was  a challenge, especially the uptempo songs, but they did great.  Some song choices were a little dicey. When my friend Steve punched in the numbers for Eminem Ava giggled her head off at the parade of bad words.   Dominique, Steve's wife, sounded like a real rockstar.

 

 

If you've got a Korea or Japantown where you live try out a karaoke bar with the kids.  It would make a great place for a birthday party too. 

 

 

Being away from the kids for four days is just about the perfect amount of time.  It was short enough for me to thrill at my new-found freedom but with none of the guilt.  I was also so happy that they were getting quality time with their mom.  When I returned on the redeye Tuesday morning I was afraid that rush hour traffic would have made me miss them before they left for school so I told them that I wouldn't see them until after school when I picked them up, but I just caught them as they were leaving.  They shouted, "Daddy" and pounced on me.  I realize that that is normal for most dads with small kids when the dad comes home from work every day but since I'm their mommy/daddy my regular appearances aren't such a big deal.  Their mom cooked for them while I was gone, which I appreciated. I'm more of a semi-professional microwaver, but she left the kitchen, the whole apartment really, a bit of a mess.  After she left I called the kids to attention and had them unloading the dishwasher and sweeping the kitchen floor.  

Upon returning I was also greeted by a flood of emails.  MSN.com had rerun an article that I had written about dating after divorce.   The funniest part was the graphic they used for me. Not my best likeness:

 And a real step down from the way they had portrayed me the last time:

 

I showed the kids and Ava especially, laughed herself silly. 

Here in LA it's 90 degrees and my rental PT Cruiser with the top down is like a rolling microwave.  Still, I've missed the sun.  I'm also missing my kids like crazy (although A and I did get a one-day mini-vacation that I will never forget).  Meanwhile Chet has become a TV star.  One of my best friends is directing a NickJr. pilot and they were casting all these professional child actors and as a lark he asked if Ava and Chet wanted to try out.  Ava lit up. Although she's so shy at first, she would love to be a movie star.  Chet already acts like he is one and never fails to put on a show for every stranger we meet.  It turned out, however, that they were only looking for six-year-olds so she didn't get to audition.   It's a show for the Dora set and the "big kids" act out famous stories for them.  Chet tried out, was called back, got the part and last week he shot his little scene.  Of course I'm concerned about turning him into Danny Bonaduce but he did say he loved it. He played the farmer in Jack in the Beanstalk. 

 

Of course he wants to buy hundreds of dollars worth of Pokemon with his money but I'm making him save it.  

I'm leaving for LA for  meetings and a quick long weekend vacation so I flew the kids' mom up to watch them while I'm away.  We get along just fine but I try my best to work it so that we're not ever actually sleeping under the same roof.  She usually arrives the day that I leave and then she flies out the day that I return.   This time, however, since I'm going for just four days and the kids hadn't seen her in two months, they really wanted her to stay a little longer. She arrived yesterday and I leave tomorrow morning.  

 

She sleeps on the sofa bed in the living room, even when I'm out of town.  I'm not normally susperstitious however I just think it's already weird enough having her sleeping in the apartment.  Sleeping in my bed when I'm not there seems like it would be an invitation to cooties.  Too much sadness passed between us to impart that vibe into my Swedish memory foam mattress. 

 

As you can imagine the women in my life have never been too thrilled by this arrangement.  The kids of course love it.  Tonight the four of us had dinner together for perhaps the fifth time in the five years that we've been separated (not including Christmas dinner that I still spend with her folks).  It's hard to explain to outsiders how completely de-sexualized it all is. It's just a very rare treat for the kids to feel like they're like most of their two-parented  friends.  I'm proud of the civility we show each other.  I think it is the main reason that our kids seem to be flowering so nicely.  

 

But what do I know.  Anybody out there do it differently?  I'd love to hear your two cents. 

I swear I try my best to be a good parent and shield my kids from the non-age-appropriate, but for some reason sex seems to find me.  My six-year-old is Pokemon obsessed (and Bakugon and Ben 10) so when the Takashi Murakami exhibit came to the Brooklyn Museum I knew I had to take him.  

 

 

 

Chet was in Heaven. Ava wasn't complaining too much.  A and I bribed her with the promise of pizza and ice cream later at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.  

I often drag them to museums and they often caterwaul about it but this time Chet, as he wheedled his way onto the crowded floor of a video screening room full of twenty-something hipsters all  transfixed by a Murakami cartoon he  whispered, "I love it, daddy."  I swelled with pride.  I was ready for my medal from the Cultural Affairs Commissioner for the City of New York. 

Unlike the brilliant Kara Walker  retrospective at the Whitney where friends had warned me not to take the kids unless I wanted some tricky and lengthy explaining to do, my friends who'd seen Murakami hadn't given me a parental heads up.  So we just wandered into a room with several cartoonishly buxom  topless blondes/motorcycles chasis (?) spears (?).  Chet ran to them giggling.  Then we entered a room and saw her:

 

bigger than lifesize on a pedestal.  The kids were, understandably, fascinated.  And across from her was her boyfriend?, lover? a blonde guy, also a bit larger than life with that same white stuff coming out of his erect, shaved penis.  It's all so cartoonish and bright and plastic that the effect of the room is unsettling and funny at the same time.  Chet and Ava were doubled over giggling.  The older museum ladies in the room with us had eyes as wide as saucers. Everyone in the room, it seemed, wanted to hear what my kids thought of this art.

 

"What's that coming out of the boy's penis, daddy?" asked Chet.  Ava too busy giggling to talk. 

 

"What do you think it is?" his cowardly dad asked him.

 

"I think it's sperm," said my young genius.

 

"I think you're right."

 

The rest of the exhibit was mainly happy and light like this:

 

 and the pizza at Grimaldi's was some of the best I've ever had.

 

 

 

As Chet and Ava get older I'm delighting in forcing them to earn their keep. At six and nine they've been putting their cereal bowls in the sink for a while now but I've moved on to having them actually rinse them and put them in the dishwasher.  My friend Quincy tells a story about how his dad put him to work as a kid that I love.  It was back in the 70s and TV remote controls were just coming out but they were ugly beige boxes that actually made the TV's dial chunk-chunk-chunk around.  Quincy begged his dad to get one. 

 

"Why do I need a remote control," barked his dad. "When I got you?"

 

I've been waiting on these little things like some sitcom butler and now it's payback.  I was cooking omelettes this weekend when I asked Ava to crack the eggs (something she usually likes). When I called her back in from the TV room to set the table she protested, "But I've been slaving away for you all morning!"  (referring to cracking five eggs).  I just gave her my best non-pleased daddy stare and she shrugged and pulled out the plates.  

 

Now that we live in a New York  apartment after their lifetimes in California what I miss most is having a washer and dryer at my fingertips.  Now it's a trek to the basement and paying for each load with a special debit card.  I do it as infrequently as possible so it looks like I'm lugging a couple of bodies down to the building's basement when I finally get around to it.  Actually, however, the washing and drying doesn't bug me, but the folding all that stuff drives me nuts.  I've taken to turning on Hannah Montana or iCarly and enlisting the kids but this week I  desperately wanted to run out and catch a movie with friends.  Bad dad that I am I dumped the mountain of clean clothes in front of the TV and commanded the kids to go to it.  Bernard, my ex-wife's friend and sometime babysitter who moved out here when we did, was babysitting and of course I told him I didn't expect him to help them.   Miraculously, the kids only complained a little.

 

When I came home the pile of clothes was gone.  Then I went into my room and was delighted to find this sight:

 

 

 

 

Not much to the untrained eye for sure but I whooped for joy.   Mabe they're not the neatest clothes-folders yet but I feel that we are on our way to (at least my) domestic bliss.

 

Anybody have any good tips on tricking kids into working around the house (without kvetching?) 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is what I wrote about him in Bedtime Stories: 

 

"Chet is  our opposite  in almost all things.  He’s a  chubby  love ball quick-crawling  to every single friend or stranger in his path.  His charm is so genuine and infectious.  I may be a little biased but to me he’s a genetically engineered hybrid of  Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali and Elvis.  

 

The Caetano song is the perfect portrait of my son.  I  memorized it when I was teaching in Brazil, so far from him and his sister.  After the fourth day away I was beginning to re-member, albeit dimly,   the timbre of my life  before marriage, kids and divorce.  I’d heard  the song for years and knew that it was one of  Caetano’s  most popular but it was only on this trip, after I had taught myself  Portuguese, that I understood what he was saying:
 

I love watching you little lion,
Walking under the sun.
I like you so much little lion.
You take the  sadness out of my heart, little lion,
Just by meeting you on the path.

 

A lion cub is not only cute, any baby ani-mal is cute, but a lion cub is also  goofy  and yet at the same time full of the promise of nobility and magnificence. That’s all that I see in my son.   

 

I forced the unfortunate Brazilians at the screenwriting workshop with me  to patiently teach me  all the words and that very first night back home it was my new lullaby for the kids.  Ava, as usual, laid motionless in her tod-dler sleigh bed until I finished the song and leaned over her . That’s when her arms rose and captured my neck.  I kissed her twice and she turned into her pillow with a smile.

 

Chet, on the other hand, had kicked off the blanket I had just tucked around him in his crib and was sitting up and smiling at me.

 

Go to bed, now.

 

I wrestled him into my arms and held him against his squirming  as I sang him the song again.  By the time I delivered him back to his crib he’d been tranquilized, and nuzzled his tiny nose against my bicep.  Not this night, but often, he would mistake it for a breast and tickle me by trying  to take a sip."

 

 

In Bedtime Stories I write about my kids, now 6 and 9, when they were much younger. My then wife moved out when Ava was three and Chet eight-months old.  For those of you who haven't read it yet I wanted to catch you up a bit on what they're like.  I'll begin here with Ava.  Here's some of what I wrote about her in the book: 

 

"My kids are magnificent.  Everybody says so.  In general they seem to intuit that I could easily be overwhelmed by the task at hand so usually cut me some slack and get along.  I had heard that having a girl first makes everything easier and that has certainly been true in my case.  From the day Chet was born Ava has been the poor kid’s bossy, tween-aged mini-mom.  Anna and I had read all the books on sibling rivalry and followed everyone’s advice simultaneously.  We read to her, I’m a Big Sister Now and picked up the trick of conning her into believing that Chet had brought a little present from the beforeworld just for her.  She was barely three when he was born and it wasn’t until a year later that she cornered me and said, Chet didn’t get me that jean jacket from the Gap, did he, daddy?

 

Like me she is sensitive and quiet.  She taught herself to read before kindergarten and quickly loses herself inside the pages of  any book. 

 

My mom was a feminist squared, so growing up in the Seventies, I didn’t have a choice but to believe that a woman’s place was in the House and the Senate, and in my mom’s case, Yale Law School.  She graduated magna cum laude from Howard, was all but her dissertation for her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan where she also taught, then when my sister and I were teenagers and she was thirty-three years old, she  enrolled in the best and hardest law school in the country. 

 

Three-year-old Ava, on the other hand, was passionate about cooking, baking, her nails, edible makeup and anything having to do with princesses. 

 

I am terrified that she is going to grow up and become a Republican." 

 

Six years later she's still a girly-girl, now Hannah Montana and iCarly and webkinz-obsessed.  She's still addicted to reading, however, Nancy Drew is her drug of choice.  Her teacher and I are trying our best to coax her into more challenging reading.   She's stil giggly and silly around me, flings herself on me and sighs several times a day.  

 

She makes me feel like Elvis.

 

 

 

 

After my Nancy Drew found the hair in the bed I knew that I would soon have to level with the kids and tell them that A was more than just a friend.  As I write about in Bedtime Stories, as part of our divorce decree my ex and I had decided not to introduce a romantic other to the kids before we'd known the person for six months.  I was determined not to subject them to  a parade of women (if I ever managed to entice a parade.  That was my childhood James Bondian fantasy but has never been a reality).   I met A in November but we have mainly been friends since then, or at least that was our goal, so when I first introduced her to the kids  at a SuperBowl party I felt as if I was living within the spirit of the law.  Well, since then things have changed and we've been seeing a lot more of A and her toddler.  

 

We were about to meet A for a snack this weekend when I told the kids that she  had become more than just a friend.  Ava, 9, seemed singularly uninterested but Chet, 6,  immediately started to grill me.   

 

"Were you seeing her when you were seeing Cris?"  Cris is my ex, living in Italy, and still one of my best friends.  

 

"No.  Of course not,"   I said.   He's extremely moral, my son. Cris and I had broken up months ago but  I had told  the kids only a few weeks ago.   I think he's still trying to process the reason his mother and I are no longer together.  She left me and this day Chet said, "Women usually break up with men."  

 

"How do you know that?" I asked.  He just shrugged.  I explained that people change their minds sometimes.  I reminded him that last year in kindergarten he had a burning crush on E but this year he says he's changed his mind.  He contemplated that for a moment and then asked, "Are you going to kiss her?" 

 

"Yes."

 

"On the lips?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Chet!" bellowed his big sister.  "We don't  need to know these things!"

 

"Are you going to have socks?"  he asked.

 

With this both kids literarlly fell off their chairs they were  giggling so hard.   Their mother had given them a New Age crash course in sex ed last summer. They both now know that a lingam enters a yoni to make a baby.  His knowledge was imperfect, however.  Until I corrected him he believed that a miniature little baby  was living inside his balls.   I told him that grown up boyfriends and girlfriends have "socks."  Of course I didn't correct him.  You hold onto your kids' malapropisms because you know that any day now they will grown out of them and yet another chapter in their magical evolution will have ended.  Ava, when she was a toddler, used to reach her arms skyward and say, "Hold you!  Hold you!" and we never ever corrected her.  

  

"Will this be your last girlfriend?" he asked.

 

"I don't know."

 

"Hmmm.  You can have three more girlfriends, that's it."   I asked him how he arrived at that number.  He explained that I had had two already (since being forcibly bachelored), and L, a girl in the first grade with him has had five boyfriends already and that is a good number.  I explained that I was a lot older than she was so maybe he could up my quota a bit. 

 

"Fine.  Five more girlfriends and that's it." 

 

"Can we please talk about something else now!"  huffed Ava.

 

Anything like this happen to any of you? 

Ava is doing much better now from the strep but the nurse said I had to keep her out of school for 48 hours for the antibiotics to kick in enough so that she would no longer be contagious.  She was so quiet in the other room while I worked in my office that I'd forgotten she was there.  However when I'd last checked on her she was busily writing in her notebook, a multi-chapter mystery inspired by her love of all things Nancy Drew.

 

I was on the phone trying (in vain) to get the evil people at Advanta to lower my credit card rate from 29.9% to something less worthy of The Sopranos.  Ava marched into my room while I was on the phone dangling what looked like a long strawberry blonde hair.  She knows my hard and fast rule is not to interrupt me while I'm on the phone but she felt that this just coudln't wait.  I rotated my chair away from her and tried once again with the vultures at Advanta.  Ava moved around in front of me again, hand on hip.  I gave up and hung up.

 

"Daddy, I found this on your bed. I don't have red hair, Chet doesn't have red hair, you don't have red hair." 

 

I made myself laugh, mumbled something unintelligible, and then told her it was nothing and that after I answered an important email I'd come in and make us lunch.   I didn't exactly panic but I desperately did need some half-way convincing lie.  They knew that I'd broken up with Cris, my Italian girlfriend of the last three years, but so far had no idea about my recent romantic developments.  I immediately called A, daddy's special friend, and the owner of the hair.  She had been over the other night, but the kids think we're just friends.   A reminded me that she had also come over during the day with her little girl and had put her down for a nap.  So when I rejoined Ava, as she was spooning her chicken noodle soup, I casually mentioned that the mystery hair must have been A's from when she put her baby down on the bed.  Ava just slurped her soup.  I usually remind her not to but of course this time I let her slide.  

 

 

Because of my own kidney issues and coming from a family of physicians I like to think of myself as something of an amateur internist.  Give me a sympton and Google and I will diagnose.  Since Fifth's Disease was going around her school and Ava had some of the symptoms, like a red rash (but not on her cheeks which is typical) I assumed that's what she had.  Since she has had bouts with kidney problems like me and since Fifth's Disease comes from the Parvovirus and that virus can trigger some serious kidney problems according to some studies that I had not only read but one I was also in, I was in full fledge panic mode.   The problem was my Columbia insurance wouldn't let me take her to a specialist (pediatric nephrologist) before seeing her primary care physician and her amazing pediatrician was out of network.  So I ran around trying to find another pediatrician who would see us that day  to allow us to see a pediatric kidney doc right away. 

 

I found one who was actually next to the kids's school but no pediatrician was available, only a nurse.  She came in, took a quick look and asked Ava to take off her shirt.  She said it might be Fifth's but it's probably strep.  She poked that long q-tip down Ava's throat and said by the look and the smell her twenty years nursing it's almost definitely strep. Then she left to test it and returned ten minutes later and said it was definitely strep.  Oh and she checked Ava's kidneys and they were perfect.  That's especially good news because strep can attack the kidneys as well.  And did you know that the red rash from strep, "Scarlatina," is just another name for "Scarlet Fever."  I think they just changed the name so we parents would freak out a little less.

 

The thing about Fifth's is that your kid just lives with it, strep, of course gets treated with antibiotics.  So she's been out of school for the last two days so the meds can kick in and she's no longer contagious.  She's feeling pretty fine and it's actually been lovely having here with me while I write in one room and she works on her own book in the other.  It's a mystery, she tells me. She's addicted to Nancy Drew and the Babysitter's Club.

This morning she finally went back to school. It's lovely here in New York City today. Perhaps the first real day of Spring.   I took this picture last weekend on an outing in Central Park with the kids.

 

 

 

Of course because I wanted everything to be absolutely perfect it wasn't at all.  I haven't left the island of Manhattan except for an hour in Brooklyn a few weeks ago, since mid-January.  Last week was my Spring Break from Columbia but the kids' NYC public school had a mid-Winter break a few weeks ago and another one in April.  Staring at me on my desk is a coupon from Continental for $300 that I have to use or lose before May, mocking me.  I ached to get out of the city to some place warm for a week on that free ticket but that would have meant their mom would have had to come up from Atlanta to watch them and she happened to be in Germany instead, visiting her boyfriend.  

 

Then my best friend since the fifth grade, Ben, invited us to Easter dinner in Hamden, CT, where I grew up and where he still lives.  Not exactly Aruba but I missed him and was desperate to get out of town.  In the morning I bought one of those enormous, lamp-sized Italian chocolate Easter eggs and the night before I had the kids lay out their one set of sort of fancy clothes.  We are not religious and they don't go to Catholic school so Chet wore a button-down shirt for perhaps the third time in his life.  I remembered to pack the camera and the egg and we were all set to go.  

 

Ava, however, said she was feeling weird.  

 

"Weird?  Weird, how?" I asked.

 

She couldn't really explain but I gave her some baby Tylenol anyway and off we went in the car.  Just as we approached the farthest reaches of the Bronx, just moments from  escaping  from New York City she said, "Daddy, I'm going to throw up."  Now I don't drive often and when I do I might go a bit fast and the kids often tell me it makes them want to puke.

 

But puke she did.   Did I mention that I had given her my camel-hair coat to wear as a blanket during the ride?  It's now hanging in the shower, most of the vomit off it but still, that smell...  

 

I pulled off the highway into a gas station and we cleaned up.  She was so apologetic it broke my heart. 

 

"I'm so sorry daddy. I feel much better now.  We can go. Really."

 

I called Ben and turned us around.  She spent the day dozing on the couch. Chet and I played catch in the long hallway.

 

She developed a rash before going to bed and after some googling and remembering that an email warning from the school  about an outbreak of Fifth's Disease   I realized that that was what she had.   

 

My poor baby. At nine she seems so grown sometimes.  But on days like today she needed me like she needed me when she was in diapers. 

 

 

Well at least the best in New York right now.  I was dying to see the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit at the Guggenheim but when I suggested it to the kids they hooted, "NOOOO!" and tried to convince me to take them to Dave & Busters or Chuck E. Cheese.  I insisted.  I knew they'd love to see the exploding cars dangling in the center of the museum's atrium.

 

What I didn't realize was that everything is so very accessible for the kids and for me. The fake tigers riddled with arrows  

The sea of wolves crashing into an invisible wall. And then we went upstairs to the retrospective of smaller works hanging from the ceiling, among them a bag of snakes seen only via three mirrors, and a giant shield-shaped gong.  There, under the hanging art, was the greatest thing my kids ever saw in a museum.  Cai had built a tiny river that snaked along the floor of the exhibit space and then created a small raft out of yak hide that kids (and un-shy adults) could sit in and float down the water.  It was absolutely magical.  For the rest of their lives I hope they remember that one day they floated down a river in a yak-skinned raft in the middle of one of the world's great museums. 

 

NOTE:  I need your help.  Although I've been doing a ton of publicity for Bedtime Stories

 

like an NPR interview yesterday and the Dr. Drew show today,  I'm being told that many bookstores around the country still aren't carrying the book.  If you've had a hard time finding it in stock please do two things. 

 

1.) Ask the bookstore to order it for you. For every one person that asks they know that translates to hundreds who are looking.

 

2.) Tell me  about it.

 

 Thanks and I hope you're having a great week.

Although I would love that to be the nickname bestowed upon me by a special friend, I am in fact referring to today's dessert, moelleux aux chocolat.   My old girlfriend, when she would come over from Italy, would make it for the kids and me.  After we broke up she had left one last box in the cupboard.  This morning Ava asked if we could make it tonight and I said yes but was more than half-way hoping that she'd forget about it.  The Italian directions seemed crazily complicated for a mix:  leave the eggs out until they reach room temperature, butter and dust with flour the four "stampini," molds (or "ramekins" in English, one of my favorite obscure words), stick the chocolate in boiling water for ten minutes while you mix the cake mix with two eggs.  And of course it had to be 220 C. for a gas stove so I had to run to the computer and figure out that that meant 428 F.  

 

Sundays are already kind of hard for me.  The kids are usually pretty great but still most all weekend long I'm on duty alone all day long so by late Sunday my patience is usually worn down to a nub.  Ava wanted to help cook so she started to crack open an egg.  When Chet discovered what she was up to he rushed in and demanded to crack the other egg.  They started to fight about it because she'd already begun the second one and it was starting to look ugly until I deputized him to prepre the ramekins with the butter and flour.  

 

The kids were excited. It's their #1 favorite dessert, however I wasn't in the moment. I was watching the clock to see if I could finish the mix, feed them their dinners of soup (lentil for her, chicken noodle for him), the dessert, and then separate baths (as of last month) and washing and conditioning and combing out and parting Ava's hair, reading Chet a story (part four of the Narnia Chronicles, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader") and then my own dinner and then back to work till 11:30 and bed.

 

Then I stopped myself.  I was baking with my wondrful kids and I'd better stop and remember this.  In fact it was pretty easy to make and as I spatulaed the gunk into the four ramekins Chet, especially, hovered over the bowl ready to pounce and lick the bowl.  I had such a nice flash of my mother and me.  I left them then bowl and the spatula and put the cake-lets into the oven.

 

That's when I heard the screaming.  They were yanking on the bowl from opposite sides of the table, "No! That's not the middle of the table!  THIS is the middle of the table!"  I started a slow burn.

 

"Kids," I said, calmly, and more than once.  "Cut it out."

 

They kept on yanking and whining and shouting until I roared, "ENOUGH!"

 

Silence.  Then tears.  Did I just turn a happy childhood memory into yet another session with their future shrink?  Ava ran out of the room vowing not to touch the dessert.

 

I explained that I had warned them and of course she came around and when the little cakes came out of the oven, smelling like everything good and tasting like wealth, all was forgiven by everybody all around.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ava has been dreading this day for a year now, ever since we moved to Manhattan from California.  In the New York City public school system they have a program to teach fourth or fifth graders ballroom dancing.  Yes, ballroom dancing between boys and girls. A few years ago there was a documentary made about the program, "Mad, Hot Ballroom."   Although some of her friends have crushes on boys she swears to me that she still thinks they are yucky. I have been telling her that it's not about crushes or not crushes, it's just about dancing.  Still, she tried to say she was sick over the weekend to get out of going to school on Monday.   I have been cruelly (but lightly) teasing her about her impending doom but got her to lighten up a bit when I asked her to practice with her little brother.

 

 

She had her first lesson Monday and they started with the merengue.  She still says she doesn't like but, "please ask me later when I'm deeper in the course."  (She's standing over my shoulder and hugging me as I write this." 

Chet is the happiest, silliest little guy, except when he's not.  He's been having a lot of full-on freakouts lately and I'm trying to figure out what they're about.  He's six, and at school the teacher tells me he's a model student.  With me, usually, we wrestle and I wrap him up like  two Ultimate Fighitng Champions and toss him over my head onto the bed and whenever I'm watching TV he climbs onto my back and perches on my shoulders.  

But these days the very slightest thing can reduce him to a wailing puddle, a screaming alien writhing on the floor.  His nine-year-old sister opines that it's just a phase.  I tell him he's too big for these freakouts now but I'm not sure.  I don't remember how I was at that age and I don't even remember how his  sister was three years ago.  I think that racing from school to work to school again five days a week has scrambled my brains.  My entire 45-years seems like one continuous smudge.

Complicating matters is our situation.  Whenever they start acting a little off I can't help but wonder if it's because their mom isn't around.  They just saw her in Atlanta a few weeks ago but now she's off to visit her boyfriend in Germany.  She calls every couple of days, though, and they're always excited to hear from her.

So when Chet suddenly turns his body into rubber, slides down off his chair to the floor and wails just because he's convinced that Ava didn't actually brush her teeth but is faking it because he didn't see her do it and why don't I ever believe him, I worry.

Yesterday, after yet another freakout I sat him down and asked him to take three deep breaths.  I told him that spies and detectives (his favorite professions) need to keep their cool when things don't go their way.  I told him that panicking never helps and in fact often gets you into more trouble.  I asked him to take those deep breaths and then I tried to teach him a Buddhist mantra that I read once in a Thich Nhat Hanh book.  

You take in a breath and as you do you say to yourself, "Breathing in I calm myself..."

Then you breathe out you say, "Breathing out I smile..." And then repeat.

I was going to teach him the last half, ("Dwelling in this present moment, I'm aware this is a wonderful moment.") but for now I left it at half.

I'm not saying it worked miracles but he did like the game of it and the mere act of smiling does miraculously lift your spirits.

 What was nice was that this time, after he eventually calmed down and then was soon silly and jokey again, I was able to be jokey right back.  Typically he gets over his freakouts much faster than I do. 

 What do you do when your grade schooler flips out?

I've been called worse but I'm actually talking about the film I watched with my kids last night.  They'd never seen it although I'd bought it for them at the Wal-Mart near their grandparents's house in Social Circle, Georgia.  Every Christmas we all go down to my ex-wife's place. I send the kids down early but I arrive on the 23rd and then it's a mad dash to buy presents as soon as I land.  For some reason they hadn't yet taken off the plastic They'd seen a few PG-13 films before and I didn't remember this one being particularly dirty. I'd also forgotten that Dave Chappelle played the mean, ridiculous stand up that tells all the fat jokes (FYI the character is named "Reggie Warrington" after my friends Reggie Hudlin, director of "House Party" and now President of BET and his brother Warrington, a pioneering independent filmmaker.  In the Eddie Murphy/Rober DeNiro movie "Showtime" Murphy's character is named "Trey.") 

The scenes around the table where everyone (all played by Eddie Murphy except the young boy) fart, predicatably, was a big hit.  Then I went out of the room to sneak the last chocolate cookie (there was only one and if I didn't eat it  it would have been WWIII between Ava and Chet). When I returned Ava, 9, asked, "What's a dick?"

I was sure she was kidding. I think by the time I was nine "dick" was just about the most-used word in my vocabulary.  After all, she knows all about the power of the middle finger and for while, until I stopped it with serious threats, she delighted in trying to trick her  little brother into getting in trouble by raising his.

"A dick is a penis," I said.

She just nodded very seriously.

Today it's been raining all day.  We got out for a bit to rent some movies.  Chet wanted the remake of "Lost in Space."   Despite my huge crush on Heather Graham (she figures a bit in Bedtime Stories because  a few times, when I was living in L.A., we did the same yoga class.) I nevertheless convinced him that we should get DVDs of the original series.  I desperately wanted to be Will Robinson when I was a kid and my first and only autograph I ever got was from Jonathan Harris, aka, Dr. Zachary Smith, in front of "The Wiz" circa 1974.  

They liked the old show all right but for me it was crack.

By the way, if you'd like to read about a single mom's love affair with her baby boy I highly recommend Storked. 

And my friend Rachel's blog about dating while single-parenting her amazing little girl is the not-to-be-missed singlemomseking. 

If you all have any of your own favorite single-parenting blogs I'd love to hear about them. 

 

 

I was so excited.  It was to be my first reading from Bedtime Stories and I'd emailed tons of friends to come pack the bookstore.  The trick was the reading started at six, too early for my two rotating babysitters, so I'd have to bring Ava (9) and Chet (6).  That meant I couldn't very well read the section about the time my ex-wife found my plastic vagina.  Actually, there is very little in my book about how their mom left us and I started dated that I'd like them to read before I'm dead.  Luckily for me, for now, Ava is addicted to Nancy Drew.  She reads as soon as soon as she wakes up, reads at the breakfast table, reads in the subway and when I pick her up from afterschool she is reading still. 

Chet, in the middle of first grade now,  is coming to reading much more slowly.  While she was reading in kindergarten he didn't start till this year and until two months ago he was struggling.  I've been sitting down with him a lot since then, not just with his one book a night from school but then I have him read me a couple more.  His progress has been freakish.  He was reading a beginner's book about fish the other day ("Fish have scales.  Fish have gills.  Fish live in salt water and fresh water.")  It was a level "H" book and he was so proud to have gotten there (back in November he was on "C").  Still, he read it so quickly that I suspected that he could read more so I turned to the glossary at the back of the book and asked if he could read that.  He took one look and read, "Cold blooded -- animals whose blood is the same temperature as their surroundings.  Amphibians, reptiles and insects are cold-blooded.")

 My jaw dropped.  He reminded me of the scarecrow when he suddenly gets a brain from the wizard and starts spouting off the definition of an isosceles  triangle.

But back to that night.  The reading was on a Tuesday, my hardest day.  I am a lazy dad and usually wake up at seven, roust the kids, then go back to bed till 7:30 and then sprint them to school at eight.  I used to worry about showering for all the hot moms at school but I need sleep more.   But this Tuesday was the first day of Ava's big New York Stare fourth grade math tests and she'd said she'd wanted a better breakfast than our usual cereal or yogurt and granola.  So this morning I actually got up at seven, made us all oatmeal and ran them to the subway to get to school. Then I came home, blogged for the HuffingtonPost on the election and then raced off to office hours at Columbia (1-2) and then three hours (2-5) of class and then the subway down to pick up the kids from school, and a different subway back up to the bookstore to be there right before six.  In the window I saw a poster of my cover and I smiled.  Chet read my name and Ava said, "Cool."  Then we bounded inside and...nothing.  

No one was there at all. Finally two people trickled in...my godfather and my uncle.  The chairs were set up in the back of the bookstore, my books were displayed on a table in the center of the store, and yet almost nobody was there.  Finally my friends Jamal and Cheryl with her new baby came by and they bought a few books.  By the time we left I noticed that my books on the table up front had already been removed and replaced by some self-published bodice ripper.

I needed a treat.  Chuck E. Cheese was just across the street and the kids, my friends and I went over for pizza.  I grew up outside of New Haven, Connecticut, the  birth place of big pie, American-styled pizza, so I'm very much a pizza snob.  I have to tell you, however, that the pizza there was trashy but surprisingly good.

Hello, everybody.   To those of you who were already reading me on TreyEllis.com welcome to a much cooler site.  Please click around. You're in for a treat.

For those of you new to my world allow me to introduce myself.  I'm a novelist (Platitudes, Home Repairs, Right
Here, Right Now), Emmy and PEN nominated screenwriter (The Tuskegee Airmen), playwright, political blogger on the
HuffingtonPost, NPR commentator and Assistant Professor of Screenwriting in the MFA program at Columbia.

Much more importantly I'm Ava and Chet's dad.  She's nine and he's six. I've got them 95% of the time.  This is us on vacation this summer:

 

 

 

When my partner of twelve years, wife of eight, suddenly decided to leave me and our
then three-year-old daughter and eight-month-old son, my once storybook romance and jetsetting life with a famous beauty (and novelist herself) was instantly blown to bits.  Since then I have been putting back the pieces. For the last four years I've been working on a memoir of my life as a single dad and it's finally here.

Bedtime Stories is the absolutely true story of my adventures, both heartbreaking and kind of funny, post-breakup.  Written  in the style of my first novel, Platitudes, with footnotes and bits of a  screenplay, music lyrics and various other post-modern digressions, I tried to write an honest yet novelistic take on raising my two kids by myself while looking for adult
love.   There's a piece about it in a great new magazine about non-fiction call SmithMag and an excerpt ran in Salon last month.

Here in this spot I will write more about my day-to-day adventures raising my kids alone in Manhattan.  For instance today, Saturday, I managed to pawn the kids off on playdates so I could write but in a few minutes I'll have to run back downtown, pick up Chet and then Ava will be hand delivered back to me around seven-thirty.  She's got a sleepover at our house tonight but the weird part is that I have a date so I'm leaving them with our long-time sitter for a few hours while I slip out (when I said yes to the sleepover I didn't know that this would be my only possible time this week to see my friend).  I already cleared it with the other parents and they didn't seem to freak out.  Then tomorrow the kids and I will  have our acting debut.  A student of mine at Columbia's film school asked if  Ava and I could help her out with a student film. I am so besieged on all sides these days (much more on that to follow) that I was about to say I couldn't but then I remembered what a ham Ava is.  She's aching to be the black Miley Cyrus.   In fact, when I told her she literally jumped for joy and shouted, "Hooray!"  Chet, on the other hand, immediately started bawling that he never gets anything, that life is so unfair, that everybody gets everything except him.  I of course called my student and she found a part for him too.