By: Ann Brown

I may have mentioned I have this little, er, quirk wherein I imagine kicking the butt of a man near me. As I said before, I believe this is solely a function of wondering about my own strength and not a sign of any latent violent tendencies within me. Still, I am not unaware of the reaction my confession evokes. I see you scooting your chairs away from me as you read this.

And I feel a need to explain myself.

I read somewhere that the most important thing women over fifty can do to keep themselves healthy is stretch every day. As a woman over fifty, I generally discard the advice I read because so much of it  centers around changing my negative attitude about aging and, frankly, my negative attitude about aging is all I have left of my youth so I want to hold on to it.

But this stretching thing got me to thinking. They’re right. We rarely stretch ourselves. We don’t use all we’ve got.

After The Revolution, when we all live on my commune in side-by-side yurts and grow hemp, stretching ourselves to our limits will be a regular part of daily life. I mean, just chopping wood and folk dancing to the water hole will fulfill the 10,000 steps a day quota that the makers of New Lifestyles pedometers warn we all need to stave off premature death. And I bet our children would be perfectly well- behaved because after a day of using up all they’ve got, they’d be tired. In fact, we’d all be tired. The good tired. Not the tired I usually am, bitchy and distracted by afternoon, licking the morning coffee grounds from the compost pail for a buzz, and updating my list of transgressions the world has committed against me (most recent: water in my ear that is making me dizzy when I look down to type. Ow.)

I took a lot of dance classes in college. Mexican couples dances, Indonesian Gamelan dancing, Greek dancing, every day was filled with dance classes. (Note to the college bound: be an Ethnology of Non-Western Music and Dance major. Totally rocks. And when you graduate, the world will offer you a smorgasbord of jobs. Bitchin jobs. Like, once I sang Jewish folk songs in a maximum security prison in Tracy, California. Try to land that gig with a degree in, say, medicine.)

What was my point?

Oh, right. Dance classes. At the end of a day, I was wonderfully, satisfyingly, deliciously spent. I slept like a log (as opposed to these days when I sleep like a baby: wake up every two hours and cry until I eat). I believe that when we move to the commune, there will be no fighting, no bitchiness, no whining, no interrupted sleep because we will all – children, adults, parents – be well used up. Also, because we can smoke our hemp tunics when life gets stressful.

But in modern life, here in suburbia, we live such contained lives. We have to share armrests in movie theaters. We have to refrain from jumping onto the moving clothes rack at the dry cleaners and taking a ride. We are not even allowed to finger wrestle prospective employers when they shake our hands. And we are left with a bunch of leftover energy that has nowhere to go. We are left wondering just how strong, fast, loud, obnoxious, fearless and mighty we can be.

So I check out the men in my classes. I take in their upper body strength, the contour of their forearms, their overall look and I fantasize bopping them on the nose, kneeing their groins and, occasionally, swinging them over my head and twirling them round and round like Brutus used to do to Popeye before the can of spinach magically appeared.  I have no reason to feel threatened by men. I’ve never been in a situation that would warrant a need to hurt them or get away fast. Well, once a guy forgot to pay me for a parenting consult but he remembered as soon as he got home and he came back. With a ten dollar tip, as apology. No need to break his kneecaps.

My point being, there is no rational reason to fantasize about this. And, let’s be honest, unless a man was in the middle of a serious heart attack, I’d probably not be the victor. I mean, I am no weakling but my 45 minute daily stroll in the park with my dog and the occasional foray into Curves isn’t gonna get the job done against a forty-something dad. I suppose I could just sit on him and that would be that, but I am too vain to use my weight as a weapon because what if he lived, and told everyone, “she fucking sat on me and she weighs a ton. I thought I was dead” and then the papers would sleuth out my actual weight and report it and, yikes. Yikes.

Still, I crave real-life experience. Tae-Bo with TV Billy Blanks in my bedroom is like practice- kissing your pillow, you know? So with my late-fifties around the corner, I am going to do a little more stretching in my life.

I believe I will begin by reaching over my computer to that glass of wine.

Ow, my ear. Damn it.

.

.

Ann Brown

By: Ann Brown

If Robin ever leaves me, I am going to have to rely on you to get me a date because I’ve been kicked off the online dating sites. And, frankly, it isn’t going to be easy to pimp me out. I’ve been letting myself go for the past, oh, fifty-five years or so. Recently, I thought I’d better get to work on my personality since, clearly, the wiles are running thin but, God, working on my personality is so much….well, work. Plus, my flaws define me. Who am I, if not this basket case wrapped in a couple of spare tires inside a smart-ass remark?

I’ve buried the lead, however, haven’t I? What am I, happily married for almost thirty years, doing trolling online dating sites?

I went online to pimp out my 85 year old mom. I went to JDates, the Jewish online dating site. And got my ass flagged. It’s such horseshit, really. I merely responded to the gentleman who listed his age as “in my mid- 70’s”, and under the category of the women he is interested in meeting, he wrote, “beautiful, active women between 50 and 64″.

REALLY?

I checked out your photo, sir. First of all, you are not in your 70’s unless there is such an age as seventy-nineteen or maybe you spent the past twenty years lying in a vat of cocoa butter on the surface of the sun. And, dude, you are wearing Velcro sneakers so I guess your activity level does not include tying shoelaces. Is that why you want an active woman? Be honest, asshole. Say, “I want a woman who can bend down and reach my feet.” That’s what I’d put in my ad: I am looking for an intelligent, attractive, financially stable man to do a monthly examination of the weird mole between my second and third toe because I cannot hold the position long enough to do it myself without pulling a groin muscle and falling over.

I really hate liars.

So I felt it was my duty to contact this guy directly. Just to share my feelings with him and hopefully, get him back on track, see the light, date women his own age, you know,  as a sort of public service. I am all about public service.

Well, I might have used some offensive language in my email. And I might have insulted the guy. I may have Google’d him, made a few phone calls to his home and, oh, I don’t know, egg’ed his Buick Electra and threatened his life; it’s not important. The important thing is that suddenly I am persona non grata to the Jewish online dating world. Excommunicated.

This makes me nervous because someday Robin might just decide I am too much work and split. I see him looking at me sometimes, in that inscrutable way he has. And then he lets out an almost imperceptible moan and rubs his temples in circles for a few seconds. The other day I swear I heard him whisper, “God, just leave already” when I had told him – for the third time – that I was going to Safeway to get the good Braeburn apples I like.  Plus, his blood pressure is already kinda high and he’s no spring chicken. Things can happen. I’m just saying.

So one of you is going to have to find me a new man if I find myself alone in the next, oh, forty years.

For your files: I am 55, I enjoy taking walks in the park with my dog, ironing, making excuses to get out of shit I don’t want to do, a glass of water with lemon after meals, Caller ID, revisionist personal history and fine wine.

And I am interested in meeting men between the ages of 19-28.

Dr. Strangemom

By: Tosha Woronov

I’m sorry, but it’s quite possible that there is nothing cuter than a 5 year-old boy in a jacket and tie.  There’s just something so…unexpected about it.  Especially on a weekday afternoon, nowhere near a wedding, or a church, or an Easter brunch.  Leo just decided he wanted to wear his “handsome clothes” today and came downstairs fully decked out.  We ran errands; he accompanied me to the dentist.  For a kid who doesn’t really want attention, I don’t know what he was thinking.  The lady in the bakery called him – not her cupcakes – irresistible. A guy on the elevator said “Hello, Senator.” People walking by put their hands up to their mouths in disbelief.  I’m telling you, it was pretty cute.

And then he decided to wear a little pin on his lapel (I mean c’mon!) that just said “Love”.  Definitely rockin the campaign trail now.  I had to convince him, because it was raining buckets outside, that the rubber boots completed the look.

By: Ann Brown

Too bad you can’t see me right now. You’d have a good laugh. I’m hideous.
I was feeling kinda blah/ kinda wired yesterday and I had an hour to kill before I could justify eating lunch. I knew as I walked into the bathroom and picked up the scissors, that this was not going to end well. It never does. I never learn.
My hair looks as if I tied it in knots and set fire to it. It’s a Hebro gone wild. I look like the love child of Gene Wilder and Crazy Days Britney. This was not my intended result.
I have always felt, deep in my heart, that I am a talented hair cutter, albeit in the larva stages. I have absolutely no evidence of this, however, with nothing but a trail of exceedingly unattractive coifs and hair-clogged bathroom sinks. I honed my skills as a young child, taking scissors to my Barbie dolls and rendering them slightly insane looking, as if Midge had slipped a couple of tabs of windowpane into Barbie’s Diet Sprite, then handed her a dull machete. (How many nights did poor Midge watch her high-heeled, perfectly pony-tailed, alarmingly perky-boobed BFF take off with Ken, leaving Midge alone in the Dream House to watch “Mary Tyler Moore” reruns and eat Swanson’s Salisbury Steak TV Dinners while planning her revenge?)
When all my Barbie dolls were shorn, reglued and shorn yet again, I was ready to work on people. The problem with people, however, is that they have free will and refused my services. I needed customers, customers with the hair of humans but the obedience of a Barbie doll.
Opportunity came knocking a few decades later in the body of my two extremely hairy babies.
I mercilessly subjected my kids to my delusions of hairstyling grandeur. My piece de resistance was bangs. Frighteningly short, lopsided to the left, a curtain of hair chased and cut down in a desperate, futile race to the brow. The result was admittedly odd. Slightly maniacal. I’m surprised their preschool didn’t alert Social Services.
I’m not proud to admit that I knew they looked weenie. They are my beautiful boys but I was not blind. Worst mother ever.
Must we be exemplary people in order to be good parents? Can’t we be good parents who unwittingly make our children look weenie just because the actual hair-cutting is really fun for us? I mean, it’s not like I ever set out to make them look that way. I just didn’t have the willpower to stop.
Of course, I did stop eventually. One day my six year old asked me in his little quivering froggy voice, after surveying the damage I’d done to his beautiful hair, “will gravity fix this?” A few weeks later as we were driving down Van Nuys Blvd, he sounded out the words, “Super Cuts” on a sign (talk about motivation to read) and then the jig was up forever. Like when Robin once took the boys to McDonalds and when they came home, my older one said, “Mom! You are wrong! You CAN go inside there. Dad took us inside! And there are tables and chairs and everything.” Shit. Busted.
Which brings me to this morning. And what appears to be my pubic hair transplant. Maybe if I force myself to keep looking in the mirror I will finally learn my lesson.
Hmm. Nope. The more I stare at it, you know, it is starting to look kinda kickass.

Crib Sleeping

By: Megan Dobkin

“What do we do now?”

It is 11pm which, to my sleep-deprived husband and me, feels more like 3:00 in the morning.  In between us lies a 3-week-old Jake, swaddled in the Snuggle Nest – a co-sleeping aid that provides a walled incline for the baby.  Jake has been restless all night, but now he is outright crying.

He just ate.  He has a fresh diaper.  He had some gripe water, so we’re pretty sure it isn’t gas.

“Let’s try the co-sleeper.”

As soon as we settled Jake into the co-sleeper next to the bed, he settled down and fell into a deep sleep.

It’s been like this for awhile.  He’s only liked the co-sleeper when it has all four sides up, i.e, standing alone, NOT when it was actually attached to the bed.

It took us another week or so before we finally admitted that Jake was, in fact, more comfortable having his OWN SPACE.

We were not prepared for this.  Being the over-researcher that I am, I had spent the latter part of my pregnancy reading up on a grand spectrum of early childcare books.  My husband and I were moved by the concepts behind Attachment Parenting, and I read them all: The Continuum Concept, Jay Gordon, William Sears.  We were very taken with the concept of being the baby’s consistent pillars for as long as he might need.  Not in that RUNAWAY BUNNY way, where the parent keeps following the kid who just wants to explore.  But in a way that would help build a sense of security, allowing him to feel free in the outside world.  “We are here.  We are in no rush to stop being the ones on whom you depend.  You decide when you are ready to explore.  We will be here if you need us.”

I breastfed for as long as I could.  I wore Jake in a sling for the first year of his life.  I gave him infant massages at night before bed.

But that little bugger just did not need us while he slept.  Perhaps a different baby would have.

So, in this way, I am really not Pro-Co-Sleeping.

Nor, am I Pro-Crib-Sleeping.

I am, however, PRO-LISTENING.

It was the best and most fundamental lesson I have learned so far as a parent.  Two and a half years later, the need to listen and be flexible still comes into play at least once a day.  Like when I have decided that Jake and I are going to have a really fun afternoon at the museum, but he really is just in the mood to stay home.  Or when I don’t think he has eaten enough, but he tells me “all done.” And like when I try to put him in a nice button-down shirt for our holiday card, but he has other fashion plans.

They all come into this world as different beings with different needs.  All we can do is better understand our own interests and philosophies, and then listen really closely for theirs.

PRO-LISTENING.

All around.

vs.

Co-Sleeping

By: Rebecca Martin

We have two cribs in the garage. They are wooden, perfectly set up, gathering dust and webs. One of them was a gift; the other we bought at Babies R’ Us when I was overcome by a feverish nesting urge, unaware at the time that I was four hours away from early labor. We didn’t plan on it, but two babies (still in the bed) and two cribs (still in the garage) later, we are a fully committed, co-sleeping family.

It just felt so natural to have Noah, our first, cuddled between us in our bed. Someone told me it’s best for babies to hear the heartbeats of their parents through the night. Maybe they fall asleep to the rhythm, or maybe it’s like a cheering section saying “Yay! You were born! Keep going! See how great it is to have a heart?!”

We bought one of those “snuggle nests” so he would be safe between us, and read all the articles on how to do it right. Everyone was so worried about rolling over on baby, but that just didn’t seem possible, with the way our sleep lightened (for better or worse) to awake at our baby’s smallest need or movement. And once I discovered the wonder of night nursing –where I could just roll over and we could all stay in a semi-dreamy state of sleep –I didn’t want to move him to a crib where I would have to actually wake up to get him. I felt so overwhelmed at this new person being here with me permanently; to sleep with him helped me tune in to his needs and helped me to feel more confident about reading his cues. It deepened our bond.

Somehow I thought we would still use that shiny crib and get back on the path with most of our friends, but instead it became the best unfolded-laundry-holder ever. And Noah stayed in the bed.

We loved waking up to his smile. We loved being able to give in to the unstoppable early-parenting urge to check his breathing. We got to make a nest for him and it felt right.

Living in a one-bedroom house also supported this.  A kids’ room was not an option. But what started out as a space adaptation became a choice. I think we’re like animals -  we like to sleep in packs, we like to feel each others’ warmth. Maybe kids don’t really want to be down the hall. All those hours alone in a room, on some level, must register in a negative way. Whereas all those hours with the people you love, hearing their breathing, knowing they are right there, must register in a positive way.  It’s especially nice if the parent is away most of the day working; they get their secret sleepy baby hours. My husband surprised me -he ended up loving it as much as me.

Now Noah is four, and his little brother is 22 months old. We put the largest memory foam mattress we could find on the floor. We all pile on it, like a big raft in the middle of the room. My husband and I stay up later than they do for a little grown-up time and when we go to find our place, it’s amazing that two small boys can take over a whole bed. We did have a co-sleeper crib when our second baby was brand-new, mostly to protect him from rollovers from the big brother. But once it seemed like time, we were all back in it together.

This makes traveling much easier. Wherever we go, as long as there is a bed, no routine is broken. We go camping and throw a mattress in one little tent – just like home! So far, they seem to be more adaptable than separate-sleeping kids. And they don’t wake up as early. I feel secret guilty pleasure when people complain of early wake-ups from kids who maybe just want that extra cuddle.

As much as I love it, I do feel a little jealous when friends talk about putting their babies to bed, closing the door, and going to their own rooms. There are probably less kicks in the night, and it probably teaches kids to be independent sooner. But then, I think our culture rushes everything anyway, so slowing things down probably might bring it closer to balance.

If someone had told me when I was buying that crib that I would be like this, I would have laughed. But now I treasure the feeling of safety, the closeness of the family, and the fact that I gave into something that, even though I didn’t plan it, felt completely natural. I know the days of co-sleeping are numbered, like everything in this parenting journey. So for now, I am looking forward to another cuddly night with lots of warm toes in the bed.

A family is a family is a family airs this Sunday, January 31st at 7PM on HBO

>

One Parent

By: Allison Norris

“How do you do it?  Whenever my husband goes out of town, I think about you and can’t imagine how hard it must be for you!”

And so I answer, “I don’t know any different.”

He wakes in the middle of the night, I get up.

He needs a diaper change, I change it.

He’s hungry, I feed him.

I have to shower, he sits alone and I hope he isn’t crying.

I lay him in his crib after his bath and hope that he falls asleep soon, as it will be my long stretch of free time until I can no longer keep my eyes from closing.  I do the dishes, laundry, play on facebook so that I don’t feel entirely out of the loop, turn on my tunes, and pluck my eyebrows – if I remember.

I hear how the other moms can pass off the baby when Daddy walks in the door every night.  Their needs can be temporarily met while their other half is playing catch up with his offspring.

My son’s father helps whenever he is here and I get a taste of what it would be like; an extra set of hands to load the car or carry in groceries.  Hopefully, some day, I’ll have those hands at the end of every day.

Until then, I’m in control, or at least I think I am.  I control my wee one’s schedule, his mood, his outfits, and his hygiene.  I get spurts of rest in a huge bed all to myself (until my son, who is all of 5 months old, hogs the entire thing), my new biceps are bulging, nobody argues with me about how I want things done, and there is nobody to cook dinner for…  My frozen dinners are my secret pleasure -  maybe this is perfect?

When we lay in bed together, every morning, he smiles at me and I remember that I am not alone.  He is my teammate and my partner.

His hands are the softest to hold.  We need each other and I’ll never be “single” again.

vs.

Two Parent

By: Sandra Peria

My husband is a type A personality; actually he’s more like an A+. From the moment he learned we were going to have a baby, he bought every book, printed out all pertinent articles online and started analyzing everything from sleep schedules to pumping, to recalls on Carter’s p.j.’s. He followed the baby’s development chapter-by-chapter, week-by-week. “Do you want to know what the baby’s doing now? It can hear, it hears noises.” “Hello baby,” I mutter. I am excited as well, of course, but tend to be a more go-with-the-flow-hope-for-the-best type of person. I am a B-.

After the birth, he kept me on a strict feeding schedule, getting up with me some nights to make sure I remember to actually feed our child. For this I will be forever indebted. He also put the baby to sleep at precisely the same time in exactly the same way every night. He’s the sleep master; three books, a lullaby (“You are my Sunshine”), and off to sleep our son went. When I am especially busy in my day, I know how lucky I am to have my man take care of things like paying the bills and organizing the children’s books tall to short, (told you he was type A) and even taking a swing at dinner, sure to have a protein, a veggie, and a carbohydrate on each plate. He follows the recipe very closely.

There is a strange thing that happens when your husband is Mr. Overachiever; it makes you feel inadequate and you start to doubt every decision you try to make. Is it time for his bottle? Should I take him out or is it too close to nap time? My husband, the dear man, would call me from work telling me it was time to put the baby down. “I was going to,” I explained, “but he needed to be changed and then he seemed hungry again so I thought…” “That’s not what we set up, honey. That’s not what we committed to doing, you can’t make up your own rules.” He is a well-meaning, lovely man, but I can’t help feeling like a complete idiot in regards to raising our child.

Sometimes I do wish I was single and it was just my son and me, battling the world together, making mistakes, doing it wrong. Staying up until midnight eating cold pizza, running around with no diapers, drinking too much juice and bouncing off the walls, putting crayons up our noses, walking in the dirt with no shoes, and then, to finish, the cardinal no-no in our house: sleeping in our bed. I wish I had the right to do it all my own way. I mean my parents screwed up; don’t I have a legacy to uphold?
I realize organization and routine are ultimately for the best, but if I were a single mom, I would love to just jump in the pool with my boy to see if he can swim.

All said, I wouldn’t change my husband or my son for the world and I love them both dearly.

By: Tosha Woronov

Here it is, only the second week of the New Year and nothing has changed, resolution-wise, from years prior. Except that my list of resolutions is on my iPhone.

I have always been pretty hard on myself, seldom satisfied with who I am, looking to change, improve. So the start of each year for me means an exhausting period of self-analysis and criticism. But I’m beginning to realize that constantly claiming that one is too hard on one’s self probably means by definition that one is not hard on one’s self at all and is really just a big f-ing lazy fraud.

And the fact is, my resolutions are in total conflict.

Not only do I have a list as long as my arm, but one of them is to *Be less list-y.

Some are super-specific – *Get Leo to school on time.
Others, pretty general – *Be nice to Peter.
(Ha! I barked at him at 8am on 1/1, probably because he said good morning! with his cheerful happy loving face. Blech. And because the realization that I had already blown one of the most sacred of my resolutions before even opening my eyes to 2010 depressed me so much, I barked even more because who gives a shit now? About any of it! Might as well cross out resolutions 2, 5, 9, and 16 while I’m at it, and, instead, skip spinning, eat an EggMcMuffin, and take a morning nap.)

There has always been the diet/weight/nutrition/exercise/total body health category on my list. When I was 22 I had some along the lines of *Become a vegan! and *Run as many 10ks as possible.
After Leo was born it was *Lose those last 5 pounds. (That number keeps creeping up.)
Next year it will probably be *Eat at least one vegetable in 2011 and *Refrain from taste-testing the crusted-over ice cream that landed on your shirt the night before.

Now I have added (in an effort to save money, be a better mom, be a better wife) *Cook at home! And I really have; I have cooked more in the last 2 weeks than in all of 2009. But it’s been enchiladas one night and steak another (huh? It was on sale at Whole Foods –an oxymoron -and I couldn’t pass it up), so needless to say, the weight is just falling off of me.

There is always at least one resolution (especially since Leo came along) in the genre of cutting myself some slack and just loving me for me. Slow down. Breathe. No mother is perfect. This year it is *Enjoy these times.
But directly below that is *Stop spending and save more (yeah, that’s enjoyable).

Knowing I suck at keeping any of these promises to myself, I tried a new approach this year: I added after each one the name of a friend or family member who exemplifies the desired behavior. A model, if you will. My inspiration. A shout-out to Brandy, Julie, Audrey, Maria, and Kelsi, who are named multiple times.

I included a few that I look forward to, like *Learn to knit. For Christmas I asked for knitting classes and all the stuff I’d need to get started. Peter hooked me up.

Really, I should just try to be more like my husband, who never has a mean word for me, laughs all the time, provides a seemingly bottomless well of patience, love, and energy to our son, is kind to his in-laws (number 7), always gets Leo to school early, and would never, ever waste his time writing up a stupid New Year’s Resolutions list.

By: Tosha Woronov

I am not the sort of woman who has a problem with football, or who doesn’t “get” it. Born and raised in Colorado, I grew up with the Broncos. As much as I hated Sundays – homework, the end of the weekend, the end of fun – the sounds of the game coming from the 2 or 3 televisions in the house offered solace. While writing a book report I could, without looking up, follow the game by the occasional whoo-hoos! or damnits! coming from my parents.

And then I met Peter, who brought a whole new level -or, division -of football to my world. It wasn’t just the Broncos anymore, it was the Giants. And it wasn’t just Sunday, but, because of Syracuse, it was any day or night of the week. (Ok, I have to admit, during this phase, I played the irritated girlfriend and later wife, annoyed that I was supposed to suddenly care about the, gulp, Big East on a, c’mon!, Wednesday!)

When Leo was born, wishing that he would love sports (even though his parents do) was not at the top of my list. I hoped more that he would be healthy, happy, smart, somewhat calm, sociable, silly, maybe artistic. We are lucky, because Leo is all of those things and more (wickedly funny, sweeter than sweet, cautious, brave, insightful, intuitive, sensitive, nuts).

But suddenly, this year – oh my. He is a football fan! He has been taught to consider the NY Giants (daddy) and the Denver Broncos (mommy), and he does, definitely. But because he loves the game in general, he watches all of them, picking a team to root for each time. He cheers wildly for the Green Bay Packers (huh?) and the Baltimore Ravens (wha?). I had to remind him once, while wiping his tears, that it was ok that the Lions lost, because he is not from Detroit. He cried for the Bengals and the unexpected death of 26 year-old wide receiver Chris Henry (wondering aloud yesterday during the game when Henry would be back to play). I allowed us to sit in the bar of an Italian restaurant the other night so he, along with about 12 other men, could watch the undefeated New Orleans Saints be defeated by the Cowboys. (Excited by the whole perfect record thing, how crushed he was by their fall from grace.) He knows every team’s record, which can be a little scary. Over Thanksgiving, he wowed his grandfather – and kept him company – catching every minute of every game, both pro and college. He checks the NFL television schedule on my iPhone and knows that SEA means the Seattle Seahawks, CHI means the Bears, and NE the Patriots. He is bummed when a much-anticipated game is not carried on one of our cable channels. If he knew to ask for it, the only thing on his Santa list would be DirectTV. I must remind you that he is tiny, barely five years old. I’m not sure what is more fun to watch: his concentration (”Mom! They sacked the quarterback!” “Dad! It’s second and five!”) or his enthusiasm (”Let’s go Giants, let’s go!” clap-clap-clap! – repeat 300 times).

Like his daddy, he doesn’t just watch. The kid can throw a spiral 20 yards and will slam his little body on the ground to catch a pass. He even taught me to throw a football – the right way – the way I always wished I could. I never thought I’d hear my child say “Good job mom! That was a bullet!” My favorite thing to do each night is watch my husband and my son throw the football back and forth in the living room, Leo diving wildly into the end zone (the couch). I am happy that I am a mom who allows footballs to be thrown in the house (no punts though. I immediately put the stop to punting).

It’s funny to me, now that he has become this fan, that I never thought to want it for him in the first place. It’s who he is, and we are having a blast. And isn’t that what football is all about?