I want to live in a Pottery Barn catalog

Yesterday was a lazy, day after we got back from vacation day, the girls were riding their scooters around the basement and I was flipping through the latest PB Kids catalog and thinking, for the thousandth time,"This is how I want to, no - must live."

With pink and green gingham curtains hanging neatly from the girls' bedroom window, a whimsical finial to wrap the excess fabric around so sunlight comes through the window, just so.

With rows of neatly stacked craft baskets (identified by child's name, of course!) sitting on perfectly neat whitewashed shelves, nothing out of order, and my children, with their tangle-free hair in perfect little ponytails, playing sweetly with the Caldecott winning hardcover picture books (jackets still attached) that they've gently taken out of their dollhouse-shaped bookcase.

Instead, I look around me and see a Scooby-Doo Chia Pet that has been mauled by a curious cat, a basement brimming with stray Mr. Potato Head parts, Crazy 8 cards and the unfinished masterpieces of attention-deficit children for whom Scratch Magic lost its allure many months ago. And seemingly a thousand plastic figurines, McDonald's and Burger King toys from failed movies and numerous naked dolls forever separated from their clothes.

I don't know what it is about looking through the PB catalog, especially, but everytime I do, I get wistful and think, "How manageable and graceful and wonderful my life would be if I could just get rid of all the clutter and live like these fake catalog people do."

It's a fantasy, I know, but it grabs me everytime and sucks me in.

And so this is Christma-Hanukkah

And what have we done? Well, apparently sending out a Hanukkah card instead of an all-purpose "Season's Greetings" one this year has effectively ended our relationship with my in-laws, who are practicing Jehovah's Witnesses.

It's so unbearably sad, but as a friend noted, many people consumed by a religion eventually cut off their families to bow to what they truly believe is a greater good. The notion that a loving God would tear families apart in this life to attain Nirvana in the next is a concept I'll never swallow, but that gives me, and eventually my 5-year-old girls, small comfort when they next venture to ask when they'll see their grandparents again.

So, after digesting this bit of holiday cheer via a terse phone call on Christmas Day/Hanukkah Eve, we packed up the kiddos, the menorah, the gifts and some mittens and headed out to Montauk, Long Island for a brief holiday week respite.

F's artsy photo of the beach from Montauk Point seems more appropriate to this post than the sweet one of the girls with the Lighthouse in the background (that's in the Flickr box), although the mood was far from somber, what with the two healthy kindergarteners racing around the Point on boulders the size of small buildings, the unseasonally warm wind at their back and getting caught up in the notion that we were "explorers" on an adventure.

Still, it's strangely appropriate that in light of recent events, we traveled to a place on the Eastern seaboard that's nicknamed "The End" since at its easternmost point it juts out into the Atlantic Ocean on three sides, causing terrific winds, beautiful waves, and a sunset that takes your breath away.

For even if my in-laws finally realize they miss F, me and their grandchildren too much to stay away, this experience closed a 10-year chapter in my life that began the day I met their son. And things can never be the same again.

Tales from the Transit Strike

I snapped a photo from the long, snaking line I waited in tonight just to enter Penn Station to get home, but my Treo 600 has a pretty crappy camera, so it's really not worth posting. Take my word - it was long and snakelike.

Suffice to say, it took a half hour just to get inside the darn terminal due to the high volume of people heading out on one of the only train lines left in service during the strike. I almost made it inside in half the time, but an eagle-eyed cop saw me try to sneak under the barricades to cut the line. Busted. In my mid-40s, I'm still a rebel. (But I still managed to shake the fuzz when they tried to redirect us once again once we got near the entrance to one a block away. I maneuvered my way inside by pretending to head towards New Jersey Transit. As if.)

Unlike my husband, who has to walk about 40 blocks downtown to work, I usually head to and from work on foot for the exercise so the strike hasn't affected me too badly. I feel for the people from the outer boroughs who depend solely on the subway. Especially those who don't get paid if they can't get to work and can't afford to get to work now if they don't get paid. Catch-22.

Which doesn't mean I don't see the union's side, too. Despite the mayor's protestations that this is an illegal strike, the original strikes that begat organized labor were illegal, too. Sometimes you have to buck the system in order to effect change.

Just from an experiential point of view, any kind of mass experience like the strike, the blackout and 9/11 does tend to bring out a friendliness in NYC that isn't often apparent in the day-to-day sturm and drang of city life. Strangers commiserate with strangers, police officers with bullhorns unleash their inner comedians (One cop tonight, after announcing the entrances that were open for varying commuters hastened to add that buses and trains were running smoothly in Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC, so if anyone wanted to head there on Amtrak, they could use the entrance on 8th Avenue. That gave the crowd a good communal chuckle).

Once inside, I hooked up with the husband and we luckily made it home in time to play with the kiddos for a bit before bedtime.

I hope the strike ends soon, but in the meantime, for us New Yorkers, it's just business as usual. Only it's a little more unusual due to the strike. And we're all just taking it in stride.

Black is wack

I went to a business holiday lunch last week and got a bracing reminder of what kind of person I don’t want to be, working mother or otherwise.

I struck up a conversation with a friendly woman who, within minutes of meeting me, realized she had apparently left her Blackberry at the office across town. Although the luncheon was only scheduled to last for 2 hours, she called to have her assistant messenger the device to her at the restaurant, so she wouldn’t be without her email fix for the duration.

No wonder they call them “crackberrys.”

Welcome to the jungle

Most days I feel I've got this working mother thing down pat. Yesterday was not one of those days.

The girls have made friends with another girl who goes to the same after school program. The mother and I have become friendly, the girl has come to our house for playdates and I agreed to let the mother take them home with her yesterday and then I'd pick them up at her house when I got home from work.

Big mistake. L threw a tantrum when it was time to leave, and despite gentle cajoling, promises and threats, she continued to rage. The upshot? I ended up alternatively picking each one up, dragging the other one (L didn't even have a coat on in the freezing cold) the 2 blocks to the car, and while they both screamed bloody murder in the backseat, realized I had left my car keys in the mother's apartment.

By the time we got home, both were in full-out tantrum mode, and I literally had to push J inside the house, because she refused to go in and L was freezing.

Which prompted my daughter to start screaming at me over and over again, "You are the devil!" Then, when it just became all too much for one supermom to bear, and I started crying, L came over and clutched as my legs, shouting, "Stop crying! I don't know what to do when you cry!"

Which stopped me dead in my tracks. Last thing I need is for my 5-year-old to have to worry about taking care of her mother.

So since their father had to work late last night and I knew I had to go it alone, I breathed in and breathed out, was finally able to calm them down and get them into bed and asleep by 9 p.m. One half in her pajamas, the other fully clothed. No one brushed their teeth.

Lesson learned? No playdates on weekdays ever again.

Jon Stewart at the Guggenheim

Anyone planning a trip to NYC might be surprised to learn that a portrait of Comedy Central star Jon Stewart is hanging in the Guggenheim's current "Russia" exhibit.

OK, so I used Photoshop to add him to the current subway poster publicizing the event - but you have to admit, the resemblance with the portrait to his left is uncanny. (The original poster is below in my Flickr box)

And since Stewart is Jewish and probably has some Eastern European ancestry, it's not too far-fetched to assume that this guy's a distant relative.

As a New Yorker, I'm used to spotting celebrities at restaurants, in the lingerie department at Macy's (caught Al Roker lurking there about 15 years ago) and on the streets, but I actually had dinner with Jon Stewart once, way back when he was just starting out at HBO in the early 1990s.

A friend of mine worked at HBO and somehow I got invited to dinner at an upper East Side coffee shop with her and Stewart, and then we went to watch his act at a local comedy club.

During the meal, I learned that Jon and I had another quasi-celebrity in common, City Councilman (now Congressman) Anthony Wiener. I knew Wiener when I worked as a reporter in Brooklyn and he was an ambitious aide to then-Congressman, now-Senator Chuck Schumer. Turns out both of them worked as pages on Capitol Hill back in college.

Two things I remember from that dinner - that his humor already had an intellectual, political edge (one joke alluded to the fact that in some Third World countries citizens braved gunfire to go out and vote, while New Yorkers avoided the polls if there was a 10 percent chance of rain). And he said that if women had a choice between a funny guy and a handsome guy, they'd choose funny every time.

A word about housekeeping

I'll be the first to admit I'm a bourgeois, upper middle class working mother whose own working mother had housekeepers as I was growing up to perform the mundane tasks of cleaning our family's bathroom and doing the laundry.

While dating a socially aware guy during my college years, he nearly had an apoplectic fit when he noticed a pamphlet lying around my suburban home called "Speaking Spanish to Domestics."

I'd seen the pamphlet around before, and it never registered with me that this might be offensive (it was the unpolitically correct 1980s, after all). I'm surprised he didn't break up with me on the spot.

Throughout college and my young adult years, I worked in secretarial jobs and then in journalism, which meant I could little afford an apartment, much less someone to clean it. So I spent quite a few years lugging my laundry down five flights in my 5th floor walkup Brooklyn apartment, heading to the local laundromat for a few hours, wrestling the clean and folded clothes back into the laundry bag and then back up the five flights to my apartment. I paid my dues.

So when I finally moved into a career where I could afford a housecleaner, I jumped at the opportunity. And as two full-time working parents with twin kindergarteners, I've often commented to my husband that I'd rather not eat than not have V come to clean my house each Thursday, and wash and fold my laundry. And you know I like to eat.

When I come home from work early each Thursday, I cannot even describe how wonderful it is to smell Murphy's Oil soap on the freshly cleaned wood floors, see my daughters' beds neatly made with fresh linens and know that, at least until my rambunctious 5-year-olds get home from school, I have waded into an oasis of calm.

Some women may derive joy from cleaning, but for me - it just breeds resentment. It's time away from my children, my husband or something else that has got to be infinitely more exciting than choosing which rinse cycle to use with the delicates or scrubbing soap scum off the bathroom tiles.

So when my husband told me today that V felt she was getting overwhelmed by doing all the laundry and cleaning our house today, my heart sunk and I was instantly on the defensive. We increased her pay when we finished the basement and my Dad moved in, to accommodate the extra cleaning. And I really don't want to pay what I'm paying and have to do a lot of my own laundry on top of that.

She's hardworking and reliable, so my first instinct (fire her and find someone else who will do it all) isn't the solution, at least not for today. But I gotta tell you, the knowledge that I'll be forced to do some of my own laundry going forward (I may do a load or two occasionally - but it's not the same as knowing I have to) is not a pleasant prospect.

I already told F that he's on laundry duty, too - he's better at it anyway, and really gets a charge out of adding Oxyclean and various assorted bleaches and softeners to the mix.

And when it comes down to it, I guess this bourgeois suburban mom can get used to the weekly laundry routine again, but man, I'm not looking forward to it.

Why I can't say 'no' to dessert

One of my daughters has inherited my unquenchable sweet tooth and even at age 5, I can see a little roundness in her belly that her twin sister, who we nicknamed Lily "The Body" at age 2, will probably never develop.

When I was younger, I had a variety of vices, which I won't go into in a public forum. Suffice to say, I was able to spread the cheer around in those days.

But now that I'm married with a serious career, the one vice I've got left does not mix well with middle age.

It's like alcoholics who tell themselves, 'I'm not an alcoholic, but you know what - I'm not even going to have a drink tonight." And then they end up hanging out with friends at the bar, and before you know it - bam! - they're sharing their saddest moment from grade school with the poor schlub on the next stool.

So it is with me every time I go out for a business lunch, or to the grocery store. I start out with the best of intentions - and end up sliding down into oblivion and whipped cream within 30 minutes.

Take today - I had a business lunch with a colleague from another firm and I started out like gangbusters - a lump crab meat cocktail for appetizer (lots of protein - no fat!), then followed it with a Caeser salad with grilled shrimp (OK, lots of fat in the Caeser dressing and shaved cheese, but still - I ate greens, wonderful!).

It's when the waiter came with the dessert menus that I completely broke down. I find I am physically unable to push a menu away and say "No thanks" as my svelte colleague did. So she demurely sipped a skim milk cappucino while I devoured an entire serving of creme brulee.

So when I find myself having to explain to Jessica why lollipops are not a good breakfast food, and why dessert is not a necessity, nor her God-given right after every meal, it would behoove me to remember that her thirst for the cane is genetic, and, like her mother, she may not ever be able to escape its syrupy grasp.

On Sunday Nights

Today, I could have earned a new merit badge in motherhood, but I chose instead to sneak out of the girls' room at bedtime to watch 'Desperate Housewives' and let their aunt and father (who slept much of the day) lay down with them while they toss and turned themselves to sleep.

And while earlier in the evening I carved a Boston Chicken carcass to an inch of its life to gather enough leftovers to make chicken croquettes from scratch, I am choosing (at least for the moment) to leave the dining room table in the dissaray that my family members left it after partaking of the evening meal.

I'm burnt out today, from a weekend of fighting with a stubborn 5-year-old who needs to take an antibiotic twice a day to knock out an awful sinus infection that has her coughing and heaving nightly, from spending the night at my mother's apartment shuttling between two little girls who woke up a varying intervals and cried out for me to come close, from the recurring pain of a recently extracted tooth that's left my mouth throbbing.

And to make matters worse, it just occurred to me that another drawback to having small children in your 40s is when you need to spend a full 5 minutes trying to read the fine print on the back of a Tylenols chewable bottle to determine how many to ingest (since the medicine cabinet is currently out of any adult analgesics).

I know that motherhood, like life, is ceaseless, that there are no guarantees that home life, work life and time for myself will ever move in a satisfactory rhythm. I'm not bemoaning my fate at all, and unlike younger women (and my younger self) who thought that whatever I was feeling at a certain place and time WAS HOW I WAS GOING TO FEEL FOREVER, I'm much more jaded and knowledgeable these days.

I'm tired and worn out, and not really ready for a new week at work, but I'll greet it when it comes, take the first shower in the morning as usual, and chances are, probably clean up the dishes before the whole routine starts over again. I might even make pancakes. Cause truth be told, i kinda like getting those merit badges.