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Everytime we go to Rouse’s you’d think I had a little celebrity on my hands. The girls behind the deli counter remember his name – both of them – Constantin and Tin – and they even remember his birthday (scary!). Then at the check out, about 10 women converged on him like he was chocolate ice cream – read: they were looking for a spoon to eat him up.

This little boy is a flirt too – he just smiles and bats his eyeslashes where he can making those women swoon. He’s rather shameless.

What can I say?

Why it is fun to have a kid – PANCAKES on Saturday morning!

I was speaking with friends yesterday who were sitting on their porch having a nice afternoon. We were talking about weight and family issues as girls are want to do. One said that her philosophy is that as you age you become more of you and that is why it is difficult to maintain some relationships as we age. If more of you and more of someone else just don’t match up than it is flame on.

I buy that, I do believe at 50 I became me and so I am more of me now than I have ever been.

I broke the milestone today on my weight. My desirable weight is 150 lbs. I’m 5′ 8″. That’s not let’s say ideal for the general population who likes to see their women skinny as a chicken in Cuba, but it’s ideal for me and when I feel and look my best. I’ve weighed as little as 118 lbs and as high as 170 lbs in my adult life. The 170 lbs was my first marriage weight. But going into this Jewish Lent period I was at 166 lbs. Like I said 8 lbs for my mother and 8 lbs for Tatjana – joy and grief weight. The joy weight is like Ganesha – just a love of love and more to love. The grief weight is like armor suiting up to battle the biggest demon of my life – losing my mother.

And now I want to be back at my fighting weight – 150 lbs. I got on the scale this morning and despite not being able to go to my twice a week step class because it’s in the evening and T is away, and despite not changing my eating habits except maybe losing the snacks that went with my evening cocktail, I’m 159! Woohoo! I broke the 160 lb mark which has had huge mental victory for me.

Now there is 9 more but since it has been coming off at a pound a week, I’m not expecting anything less than 9 more weeks of this – not the Lent part – but the active and conscious desire to get back to my fighting weight. I will make it happen.

This is me in 2006 at 150 lbs – not thin, not fat, just right:

We got a call today about a possible adoption, a baby girl due December. “Doesn’t Tin need a sister?” the voice on the phone said. Uh, let me call you back, I said. If there were world enough and time, yes. But right now we want to focus on this blessing before our cup runneth way over.

We always have to have a little music for our day to be complete. We read the farm animal book three times and then I put on Barry White. Tin has some new funk moves he has been developing the last few days – Barry was the perfect catalyst to work through some of them.

The pediatrician or the vet – same thing right? The way they greet you as if they haven’t seen you in years – awesome. And when it comes to what to do with a child who has a ton of energy and a dog who hops, it’s the park. Lots of walking we’ve been doing these days – lots of walking. Look at this boy’s tired eyes after he ran up and down the Exposition Boulevard in City Park.

I keep thinking about the article in the NYT magazine about Treme when it said that New Orleans is all about the moments. Like the moment when we were about to come out of the park yesterday, and I noticed, beside the white stairs that are in the meadow that are an installation post-Katrina that signify the steps home, a gold chair made of twigs and leaves. I did a double take. Today Tin and I went to go investigate and it was still there, a gold chair. The same people who would spend an entire year sewing tiny little beads on a costume they will wear only once are capable of making a gold chair out of twigs and placing it, unfettered, in City Park.

T is coming back this Saturday from her 15 day jaunt to Europe. It’s what Europeans do – they jaunt. Meanwhile, she wants to know if I miss her and I have this to say about that: yes, I do. Despite having needed this time alone, I can’t say that Tin needed this time alone or that I would have taken 15 days to be alone with my thoughts. But having said that, yes I do miss her. And when I think of why, I just have to say because she is her and I’m me. I won’t say she is beautiful, because that is such a tired adjective, but I will say that I am drawn to androgyny in such a strong way and I’ve perhaps never met someone who was so equally beautiful and handsome at the same time. I won’t say she’s funny because her sense of humor sometimes borders on downright silly, but even then I laugh. I won’t say that she is smart because, duh, she’s a professor at Tulane for godsakes, but I will say she’s wise in ways while she is completely and utterly naive in other ways. She’s rigid yet she can rally like no one I’ve ever shared my life with before. She’s OCD but I’m ADD, so in some ways we’re highly complimentary. I like her teeth, they are crooked in such a way that I am always happy to catch a glimpse of them like today when we were Skyping and she was coming in real close to the camera. She’s hard headed and sometimes brays like a donkey, but then she did carry my heavy suitcase all around Croatia when my back was tweaked because of that same stubbornness and it was quite comical.

All in all, I’d say, yes, in the end I miss you. So come home.

T has been gone for 12 days and Tin misses her tremendously. He heard her voice on the phone early this morning as I was trying frantically to get her up on Skype video and feed him his bottle with the other hand but alas we couldn’t connect. He then started crying and flailing around and basically was inconsolable. I tried to hold him, bounce him on my knee, and finally took him a stronghold hug to the bed and massaged him till he calmed down.

Since she’s been gone he has gone from not noticing for the first stretch, to becoming visibly depressed when he hears her voice and turning super clingy with both Margarete and I, to now just out and out mad.

Seems like the same phases work with a one year old too – Phase 1, nada, Phase 2, missing, Phase 3, anger.