I’m lucky enough to not have any. I’m scared of things, sure – but do any of my fears send me into a paralytic state? Not really. Unless you call freezing in front of my son’s entire school today paralysis. It’s funny, because speaking in front of big groups has never bothered me too much. I don’t like doing it – not one second – but I’ve always managed to muscle through these things. Today was different, though, and here’s why: the microphone.

Microphones scare me.

The buttons, the echo, the feel of it. I could have vomited today before my speech on respect. Just thinking about it right now makes me want to vomit. Which is so ridiculous, because the audience was filled with just kids. I could probably take half of them out on the soccer field and I’m terrible at soccer. So why the drama?

Probably because my voice is high – not really the kind that commands a lot of respect. And that microphone just made it worse. Like a valley girl-meets-hyena-meets-chalkboard. Ick – I want to vomit again just thinking about it.

So I guess now you know that if you ever want torture me, throw me a microphone. Or bees. I don’t really like those either.

My husband and I made a pact early on to focus on three mantras regarding raising our kids: Respect Yourself, Respect Others, and Respect the Environment. Anything else was sort of Tier 2 on our book.

So if our kids don’t finish their plate of food, we sleep just fine.

When they track mud in the house because they forgot to take their shoes off - an easy vacuum.

But if they call themselves stupid, others stupid, or recycling stupid, we have a sit-down. I’m sharing this today because I’m co-chairing the “respect” component to the Character Counts initiative at my son’s school. There are six traits in all – fairness, citizenship, trustworthiness, responsibility, caring and respect. “Respect” is reserved for the whole month of April and today is my day to forge its way into all the classrooms.

But just how do you do that with glue sticks, markers and poster board? I’m stumped. What I really want to do is just to grab all 600 kids and say ‘you, me, we are three.’ Because, think about it - where would we be without ourselves, each other and the air we breathe?

Ten bucks my group will want to do an Aretha karaoke instead – way more fun. I’ll keep you posted. If nothing else, it’s a good spelling exercise.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T….

Faaame! Remember that song? My son got an American Idol karaoke machine for his birthday last week and it came with the following karaoke tracks: Fame, Daydream Believer (Monkees), Love Shack and Dancing in the Streets. Neither kid has put their microphone down for seven days straight. I can’t tell you how much I want to send my kids on a short trip to Madagascar so I can rock out on this thing.

I wanna wear leg warmers forever…people, remember my name…fame! 

So it was announced yesterday that Ellen surpassed Oprah in terms of popularity. Probably due to a chunk of us needing a good laugh versus a good cry? That’s how it is for me anyway. That and the fact that Ellen’s on at 4pm where I live, and Oprah’s on at 3 – carpool time. We don’t have Tivo – messing with time freaks me out. And I used to make a living off writing commercials so skipping over them seems disrespectful. Regardless, hats off to those two gals for raising awareness on a lot of issues – and extra kudos for making none of them about cooking. J

There’s a guy in our neighborhood – sort of a fixture my kids call “Zeke.” Legend has it that he’s lived as a recluse in his same tiny house for 30 years. I wouldn’t know because he barely speaks. “Ah, here comes Woman Wearing Baby,” is all I’ve actually heard him say – his pseudo-Native American name for me when my youngest was small. Probably because I’d walk countless laps around our houses “wearing” Benji up until he was over a year old. The sound of a heartbeat and movement were the only two things that settled him for a long time – too long, it seemed some days. But Zeke just eyed me each time I walked by and grunted…”Ah, here comes Woman Wearing Baby”, and then he’d walk away. Almost as if he were offended.

But today I’m free to swing my hips up and down my streets solo because my “babies” are at school. This morning, in fact, I went for a run and passed Zeke’s house. I thought I saw a shadow of him at the doorway, peering at me…so I decided to back-track a few steps to say good morning.

“Nice morning, dontcha think?” I asked Zeke’s shadow. He emerged from the doorway but just stared at me so I started to go.

But then he surprised me with, “Where’s the baby?”

“He’s not a baby anymore. He’s at school.”

“So you’re ‘Woman Wearing Nothing’ now, I guess.”

“Nothing except my scars,” I confessed, pointing to the chest where the Bjorn used to dig into me. It was sort of close to my heart, I guess.

“Me too,” Zeke said. “Me too.” And then he disappeared back into the shadows.

Who knew kindergartners received report cards? Two per year, no less! We received our second today for Jackson, our Kindergartner Extraordinaire. We struggled with when to start him in school – his August birthday was “borderline,” according to educators. I laughed, initially, being a November gal myself starting kindergarten at 4. Until I saw the curriculum.

Algebra, so young?

But we persisted, and started him “early.” His first report card was fine – not great, but come on, it’s kindergarten. (His lowest score was in “rhyming” - ‘butt’ was his only rhyming word, evidently.) The one we received today, by contrast, was excellent. I even took him out for margs to celebrate - I kept telling him how proud I was of him.

“For what?” he asked.

“For all those ‘O’s and ‘4’s, Bud! You kicked butt.”

“Ooooh, you said ‘butt.’ Which rhymes with nut, which rhymes with gut…”

And that was pretty much how we spent the rest of the evening. High marks for consistency, I guess.

It all started when a girlfriend invited me to be her facebook friend. I accepted and joined the ranks of gazillions of others, connecting and reconnecting with the new, the old, the professional…I enjoyed it at first – better than googling  - but then it got complicated. I got emails from my new facebook friends asking me what color I was, if I was a vampire…facebook applications that can turn a dull moment into a moment less dull. But I found myself stressed – like if I didn’t take these tests, I’d hurt their feelings. Or if I came out the wrong color or vampire, they’d re-evaluate our facebook friendship. So I deactivated. But not before I reconnected with an old friend I hadn’t seen in 20 years. Twenty years of college sweatshirts, broken hearts, mended hearts, kids, volvos – years that facebook couldn’t possibly give me. There’s just something about being able to sit face-to-face – after twenty years - and share a salad.

That’s a friend in my book.

Do you and your significant other have a song? It sounds so Grease 2, but I’ve always been into that – the challenge of finding someone else’s words to mirror your own. With a guitar, no less.  I asked my husband a couple of years ago to give me a song for my birthday. I couldn’t believe that after two kids and several years of marriage we had no song. “Probably because you listen to the 80’s and I listen to NPR,” he said. Good point, but I still wanted one. I even gave him three months notice - plenty of time.

So it was the night of my 35^th birthday, I think, when he invited me into his car to listen to my song – OUR song. The stars were out, the kids were asleep, it was perfect. As he plopped the CD into the stereo, he revealed that it took him just one week to find it.

“You’ve been holding onto it all this time?” I asked, shocked. He just smiled, so proud. I try and remember that night on days like today, when he’s left me car-seatless. So here’s the song. You need to listen to it really loud. It’s the perfect song for a lot of reasons. And he picked it before it ended up on You, Me and Dupree and The OC which is just so…Joe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMnb614_lEA

In case this didn’t attach (sorry, I could only attach the video) it’s “all ‘Cause of You” by The 88.

P.S. He also gave me some gorgeous earrings that year. (As if he would have gotten away with just a song.)

I don’t have anyone who watches my kids. I used to have someone (well, I’ve had NINE people total) when I worked out of the home, but not anymore.  For a variety of reasons: One went to college, another stole my clothes, one got married, another stole my identity…let’s stop at her, actually, because it’s a good story. This girl was drop dead gorgeous. I mean, she literally stopped traffic. So there was no reason why she needed ANYTHING of mine. But there she was - plain as day on MySpace – with a profile that was identical to mine. (If I had a MySpace page, that is.) I looked up the history on my computer one day after she had left, suspicious that she was swapping kid time with computer time and sure enough, I found hours all tracking back to MySpace. When I hacked into her profile, I was shocked to discover that she was from MY town, with MY books on her shelves and driving MY car. (There were many other personal parallels, but, really, let’s stop.) Not so surprising, however, was that she elected to use her real picture.

So she wanted a prettier version of me? Join the club, sister.

Anyway, a girlfriend of mine called me today with a similar dilemma. It wasn’t a MySpace reveal, but instead she overheard a phone conversation between her nanny and friend during which the nanny recounted her day of appointments, lunch, that blessed traffic, a bang trim…all experiences my girlfriend had just shared with her while the nanny was home with my friend’s three kids. So it was my friend’s day, not the nanny’s.

Weird, huh?

Why would ANYONE who wasn’t a tired, over-worked mother want to drive a Volvo wagon? Or have bangs, for that matter?

Today is my five-year-old’s first Jog-A-Thon, his kindergarten fundraiser. He’s pledged to run ten laps, against most people’s advice. (It’s a “real track”, they say - big, I guess?) But what they don’t know is that once each of my kids turned two, their strollers were used only for hauling loot OR sleeping kids. If they were awake and healthy, they walked. (I had this weird childhood obesity/laziness phobia, I guess - probably stemming from latent “fat kid” issues of my own.) I’m not necessarily proud of asking my kids to walk as many miles as their age at times, (although they typically skipped ahead of me…) but you should see their legs! Calves to die for. So ten laps??? He could probably do 20. More than my wobbly self could, that’s for sure.Hope you all have a happy Easter! And that the bunny brings you lots of  loot.