Eden M. Kennedy has acted impulsively in ways she now regrets.

Mother's Week

This may be the first and last time that Mother's Day lasts an entire week for me. I totally scored. Monday I bought myself a flatbed scanner. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: okay, nothing really happened, but Friday! Jack asked me to take some pictures of a house he had built in Montecito for a certain gazillionaire (I'm not supposed to say who it is, but the guy owns a hockey team and a basketball team that didn't make it past the first round of the playoffs). The views in this place are extraordinary. The grounds were designed by Lockwood de Forest, there are black swans in the reflecting pool (when they're not getting eaten by bobcats), and Oprah's moving in next door. You get the picture. So, the architect/designer needed some shots to submit to Architectural Digest ("A.D." as we say around the house in a terribly affected manner), so I packed up the Nut and a camera and went on over. But once we got there we realized that I needed (a) a tripod, and (b) a wide-angle lens. So Jack just skipped out and bought them for me! Woo hoo! New toys! And then I didn't even have to worry about taking decent shots because the designer, this wonderfully nice man named David Martin, just took off his shoes, grabbed the camera, and started wandering around this enormous house looking for nice angles. So one of the maids and I took turns playing with the Nut as he crawled around on the eighteenth-century Belgian parquet floors and rubbed his drooly hands all over the velvet chairs. He also got to work on his stair climbing technique (excuse me, stair crawling technique).

Saturday brought roses from the farmers' market (awww), and Sunday I actually got an hour of alone time when Jack decided to take the Nut shopping. This usually worries me, as whenever Jack goes off with the Nut they usually come back with something fun but unnecessary. Like a pair of $40 Nikes for a kid who can't even walk yet. And today was no different, I'm lying on the bed reading the paper (it's Mother's Day so all the stories are about the "new ambivalence" women are feeling about being moms -- like our mothers never felt like getting in the station wagon, ripping out the rear-view mirror, and just driving away with Sugarloaf blaring from the AM radio) when I hear reindeer bells coming up the hall. It's a very specific sound and it doesn't belong in the middle of May. I turn and look and Jack's carrying a huge bag from Williams Sonoma in one arm and Jackson, who has sleigh bells strapped around his ankle and a huge smile on his face, in the other. In the bag, all for me, are a muffin tin, four tiny loaf pans, two books of muffin recipes, and a Diana Krall CD. I now have Besame Mucho playing over and over in my head for eternity.

Speaking of things that won't leave your head, ever, I had this friend, Eric, I used to work with at Shakespeare (he was an academic, a Joyce scholar, making, oh, about $5 an hour) who told me that thanks to the enormous amount of television he'd watched growing up, on his deathbed his last coherent thought would be, "Packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies."

Do not let your kids eat pennies minted after 1982, or dirt.

Link

0