Animal allure

Men are diabolically attracted to gadgets, power tools and magazine fantasy women who don't exist. Women are psychically drawn to beautifully uncomfortable shoes, dangerous men who make them cry, and many variations of chocolate.

Gross generalizations, I'll grant you, but definitely true for a large percentage of the population.

Which brings me to young girls between the ages of 4 and 6, who (if my twins are indicative of the zeitgist) are irresistably drawn to cloyingly cute, soft, furry stuffed animals. Of all shapes and sizes. From alligators to zebras, with a strong concentration of bears, mice, cats and dogs, and families of bears, cats and dogs (with larger animals serving as the parents of the smaller animals)

Their love for these furry critters knows no bounds. They spend weeks coming up with the perfect name (right now we have Woof, Woofie, Cheese, Meowy, Tigery, Cheddar, Cattie, Ruffle, Lovely and Quackly - to name a few). They tend to them more lovingly then their real-life cats, bestow upon them full-fledged personalities and are heartsick when the weekly favorite is missing at bedtime.

And like a Hummel nthusiast who can't pass up a new variation on an old theme they are always on the lookout for new specimens to add to their collection.

I know there are women and men in the world who also grew up loving stuffed animals and may still keep a few by their bedside, but this type of stuffed devotion was never my thing. I can't remember having any stuffed animals, much less a favorite one, as a child., although I'm sure there were some lying around. I was much more into dolls with long hair that I could braid and twist and shampoo and comb for hours (a favorite was the Crissy Doll whose hair lengthened when you pushed a button on her belly and then got shorter again when you twisted a knob on her back - I was thrilled beyond belief when I ggot her as a present after a tonsillectomy.

But I digress.

As their mother, I think it's incredibly cute when L&J engage in elaborate role-playing with their aniimalss, racing through the house to save Cheddar from the evil bear (who then miraculously turns good whenever L has control - she's the softie in the crowd).

But as someone who's trying to keep the clutter under control (I'll never live in a Pottery Barn catalog but I don't want to end up on the cover of Garbage magazine either), their obsession is threatening to spiral out of control. And I seem to have misplaced the ability to say "no" when one of them sees a new, particularly adorable Ty critter, grabs it to her little breast and assures me she can't live without it.

I'd conservatively estimate that since they turned 4 (they'll be six this summer), we've spent at least $500 on this hobby, with no end in clear sight.

That's still less than a few pairs of shoes lurking in my closet or the telescoping ladder and obscenely large lantern F just had to have a few months back, but I wonder if they'll develop lifelong links to their furry friends or if the majority of them are destined for garage sales or the Salvation Army.

For now, it's a kick to watch their imaginations at play, and hey, if they ever get sick of them, maybe I'll start them on a new obsession. I hear you can get a mint condition Crissy doll on EBay for about $100....

102 minutes

I just finished reading 102 Minutes, a gut-wrenching history, pieced together from 911 transcripts, oral histories and survivors' accounts, of what really happened inside the Twin Towers on September 11, from the moment they were struck, until the time they fell, written by two New York Times reporters.

Ever since 9/11, I've been waiting for this kind of book to come out, and although it came out in hardcover last January, I don't think I was ready to read it until now.

Every New Yorker has a 9/11 story to tell and mine's certainly less tragic than most. I lost no one in my family or close circle of friends, although I was friendly with Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain who died after the second plane hit. (A bond we shared was that he was a twin, and he was very kind to me during two miscarriages and then a scary pregnancy with my own twins). I wasn't even in Manhattan that day - I was working at home and oblivious to what was going on until my husband called me from West Fourth Street after he emerged from the subway and told me that he was looking downtown at the towers and that one of them was on fire and he heard that a plane had crashed into it.

We both assumed it was a small plane that had gotten lost and accidentally crashed into the building, much like the Empire State Building tragedy many years earlier. So he went off to work and I turned on CNN.

As I watched TV, I was overcome by a sense of disbelief and confusion, which only increased when I watched a second plane crash into the other tower. Even then, it didn't register that we were under attack and that my husband was just 20 blocks away from where terrorists had struck.

I watched in horror and helplessness with the rest of the world as the cameras panned in on desperate people on the upper floors clinging to open windows miles above the ground with no hope of immediate rescue. It was only when the first tower fell that I started to cry because I knew that thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands of people, were dead.

The phone lines to the city were so overloaded that I wasn't able to call my husband all day, but had to wait for him to contact me. He finally left his office to go to a friend's apartment, and although all transportation to and from Manhattan was temporarily suspended, he was able to get a commuter train home and arrive at nearly his usual time.

I spent the afternoon at my daughters' daycare, watching TV, playing with my uncomprehending toddlers, and worried along with the rest of the staff about the parents they knew who worked in the towers.

In the days and weeks after the attacks, I couldn't bring myself to read the papers or the weekly magazines. I was instead transfixed by television and couldn't seem to shut it off. In retrospect, I think I was afraid to take my mind off the here and now because fresh attacks could be imminent and I needed to be aware of what was happening every second in order to safeguard my family. Reading a paper or a magazine then seemed a luxury of those who felt they were safe. I didn't feel safe in NYC for a very long time.

As a former reporter, though, that didn't stop me from going down to Ground Zero within a few days of the attack and getting as close as I could to the rubble to see it for my own eyes. My husband expressly forbid me to go there, but I needed to see it with my own eyes for reasons I still can't fathom. I saw just a brief glimpse of the remaining facade, twisted into an almost beautiful shape as it served as a backdrop against the smoke that didn't dissipate for weeks.

I remember writing an entry that week in a journal I had been keeping for my daughters since I was 16 weeks pregnant, pouring out my horror and shock and wondering what kind of a world I had brought them into.

As the days and weeks passed and the city and the nation and the world carried on, I started wondering what really went on in the towers that day. I know not to trust official versions of events, and was sure that one day a good team of investigative reporters would share the truth of that day with the world.

This book does just that. It shines a light on the civilian herose that day, $10 per hour security guards who never left their posts and helped shell-shocked victims escape while they stayed behind, a nd many others who tended to and saved many injured people on upper floors that rescue workers would never have time to reach. And it also casts an uncomfortable glare at the shocking lack of cooperation between the fire, police and port authority police departments that compounded and confused the rescue effort. While millions of people outside the towers could see quite clearly what was happening, hundreds of would-be rescuers inside didn't even know that a second plane had struck or that the South tower had fallen.

It saves its harshest criticism for the real estate developers who convinced the city in 1965 to pass laws that made tall buildings like the WTC virutually unescapable duiring the kind of catastrophic event requiring a full evacuation that came to pass that warm September day. From reducing the number of exit stairs to increase the amount of rentable space, to never testing the fireproofing - it closely mirrored the hubris and short-sightedness that led to the scarcity of lifeboats on the Titanic, and closer to home, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

I remember, after coming out of the fog of those days and weeks, that I was surprised that people who didn't live in New York were so affected by the attacks. People who had never, like me, walked up to the imposing structures in an awe unbefitting a New Yorker. Who had never ridden in those express elevators to press conferences when then-Gov. Cuomo took up residence in the building. How could people who had never even been to NYC be so affected? I wondered.

It took time and reflection to realize that for many reasons 9/11 was a worldwide event that will reverberate for years, if not decades. But what struck and still strikes me most about that day is the human tragedy, the people who jumped holding hands from the highest floors, the firefighters taking a rest on a landing and ignoring the mayday of others running down the staircase below them. The painful loss of the NYC skyline., which I anticipated and loved as a child, everytime my family would drive from the suburbs into Manhattan..

Today, I wonder what I will tell my daughters about that day when they get old enough to ask.

Malaprops and dentist chairs

We're skidding on one long, icy rough patch here, with L undergoing two tooth extractions in three weeks (with a filling thrown in between for good measure where she clutched at my shirt so hard, I briefly flashed the dentist and his staff), and various assorted injuries that has left one, or both of my daughters in tears nearly almost every night.

L's asleep on the couch right now, after meeting her 2nd dentist in three weeks who spoke sweetly to her, then jacked her up full of novacaine and pulled a baby molar out., leaving her bloody and numb.

And we won't even touch the tantrum situation, which is threatening to spiral out of control at any moment.

So, I thought in the interest of recording and remembering the joyful, bearable part of parenting, and before they realize how cute and ridiculous they are, I'd better write down their most recent malapropisms.

J started this one, when we introduced the notion of privacy in the bathroom. She interpreted this in her own 5-year-old way, aand now when she closes the door in the bathroom and someone tries to come in, she says "No, I need my private seat!"

J also invented this next one, after viewing numerous cartoons about mediums and superhero duos. When you ask her if she knows something that she obviously could not know , she says - "What am I, a sidekick?"

There's so much I'm going to forget about their childhood. I look at a 3-year-old now and can't even remember what J&L were like at that age. What kinds of foods did they like? What kinds of conversations did we have? I just don't remember and I have a feeling it's only going to get worse as they grow so I'd better get it all down now, in black and white. So one day I can look back and smaybe even show them how unbearable (and unbearably adorable) they were back when they were 5.