Dalai Mama Dishes

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

If I'd married my brother Rob, I trust we'd still be sitting together in the back seat of the car, taking turns laying a single tormenting finger on the other person's side and screaming with indignation. "You're on my side! Mom! Rob's on my side!" Maybe we'd lay our wedding-ringed finger on the other person's side, just to be extra annoying! At least this is what I'm imagining while Birdy presumes aloud that she and Ben will be partners one day. I'm imagining their wedded bliss expressed conversationally: "Benny, that's not fair!" and "Well, Birdy, it is fair? I mean, I got those three rubber bands myself from Whole Foods? And I was actually very nice to give you one."...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Because we moved in the dead of winter, the warming days have brought us a string of beautiful surprises: Oh! we say about the tree we've been watching for months now as round, ice-encased buds burst into flat, waxy blooms. That's a dogwood! A bed of little chive-like clumps turns out to be grape hyacinths; another bed of little chive-like clumps turns out to be chives. We've got mint and bleeding hearts, yellow tulips and daffodils, violets and dandelions and lilacs and a cherry tree with some kind of disease that makes it look like it's been decorated by a pooping cat. Most of it is a little bit wild, and all of it is a gift we didn't know we were getting from an ancestry of gardeners we didn't know at all....

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

I have nearly all of my best conversations in bed. Not with friends as a rule — unless we're lucky enough to have captured someone in the house for a sleepover. Usually friendship conversations happen now in deeply condensed bursts, and although I miss the languorous chitchat of pre-kid days, I treasure the way intimacy is as reduced as a glazy, delicious sauce. Even just yesterday, I was dropping the kids off with a close friend, and in our five minutes together, I confessed what an ogre I'd been on the drive over (I'd actually pulled the car to the side of the road to accuse sweet Ben of being a brat); I burst into tears and was comforted; I comforted her in turn; we...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

If Birdy suddenly cocks her elbows in the air and starts wagging her bottom back and forth with that kind of look on her face a puppy might get when she's sprinting past with your underpants in her mouth, well, you can guess what'll happen next. Oh — you can't? Then I'll tell you: you're about to be treated to a song. You know, just a regular song, only with all the regular lyrics swapped out for their scatological doppelgangers. For instance, the Sesame Street classic "Your Face," might go like this: "Your poop, your poop. No one has your poop." Which is funny enough, even before the clinchingly hilarious second verse: "Your pee, your pee. No one has your pee." It'll be...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Once you learn to ride a bike, the idea is that you are still constantly making all the little adjustments you need in order to keep your balance — but you learn to make them unconsciously: you lean a bit this way, a bit that way, you tip the handlebars, turn your head a fraction of an inch, and stay effortlessly aloft. And I have actually found this to be true: watching Ben and Birdy tilt and overcompensate and tumble off into the shrubbery, I've realized how much I take for granted not only just my balance but even something like a kind of grace....

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}