she's back.

i have three kids.

 the eldest is 19 and going on twenty. i love her to death. and she perplexes the hell out of me. 

i really NEVER thought that i would either run out of stuff to talk about here. 

so if you think i have, tune out safely now.

 i may have and just don't recognize it yet. 

 the smallest and most unplanned sentence uttered, can inspire me to blather on forever about it... 

ask those 3 kids if this is true... they will do synchronized gymnastics in the eye rolling event 

and moan loudly enough 

so  that you can hear it through the internet. 

years ago, and by this, i mean nearing 28 of 'em....i had a diary.

i was much more mature and was into my second college degree, 

living just on the fringed edge of harvard square

{i even had a tee shirt that said, 02138 on its front...

on its back, it said "the most opinionated zip code on earth"}.

i wore black clothes and joan & david shoes.

i had deep thoughts. 

{ROFL}

and my diary was called 

"A Journal". 

if i am poncey now, pity my friends and family way back then. 

it was  just when i had just met my husband. 

he thought that it was fair game to read that diary and then grouse about things i wrote about in it. 

well now i am safe. i can just write and write and write about all sorts of stuff. 

and i can post it all right here!!!!

sadly, ironically, amusingly, sadistically,  

the best part is that NO ONE in this family will ever know what i have to say. 

Nary a one of them ever reads this blog!

heaven knows they ask a ton of questions and when i am willing to answer some of them, 

they ignore me. 

it is fine with me to be able to "share" my thoughts, and go completely sub rosa.

how much fun is that i ask you?

well let me return to my starting premise. 

my daughter just finished her freshman year at northeastern university. 

she traipsed around Boston alone and with friends. 

she investigated the rage of wearing 'jeggings'.

(if you don't know what those are, you really are better off. they only look good on Cindy Crawford. 

she has too much taste to wear them anyways.  no real person should put them on, especially my daughter).

she went to bed at mostly sensible hours. 

she liked actually talking on the phone  to us every danged day. 

she invited us to visit her at school or would come home to get her braces tightened and stay the weekend. 

she took to eating a pretty repetitive diet. 

included were bagels for breakfast, hamburgers, pizza or soups for lunch or dinner and  salad sometimes. 

she accidentally drank mocha for a month before she realized it had coffee in it. 

and she liked it. i do not believe what she said to the contrary. 

often there was cereal and instant oatmeal consumed during non-dining hall hours, 

since she could make them in her dorm room. 

now that she is home, she is a force to be reckoned with. 

the first two weeks were spent looking for a job. 

ironically, what with her enormous distaste for  all things coffee related,

she works at a national  cafe chain location, near brown university. 

good thing too, since they carry bagels and chowder. 

she can enjoy some of her favorite foods without me having to deal with restocking her preferred foods.

and some of her friends have been spotted visiting her there.

my husband has his own dietary needs to meet. 

these  seemingly include a lot of different foods... at least different from the ones we used to eat. 

i call it the post "event" diet. 

i am worn out by it. 

it is low in sodium and high in fiber. 

and my son is often heard commiserating that he would be really cranky too

 if he never had any flavor in his food.

i wish i could establish this as the cause of my husband's crabby appleton attitude.  

i know it isn't though. 

so we have a lot of crackers here now. 

and hummus. 

and yogurt. 

and olive oil. 

i dare not go on. i feel myself drifting into sleep out of boredom. 

and when i am not supposed to be looking, the big girl, who is the smallest person in the house now, 

other than the dog, 

is noshing on dad's supply of cracker foods. 

she eats saltines by nibbling at the edge of these and going around in circles doing so. 

i eat them like potato chips. 

freaking gluttonously. 

(i feel desperate for crunch and salt and am ensconsed in the ongoing "where's waldo" search for flavor.)

last night we had pasta and sauce and a salad. 

the sauce came from a can. i always amend the canned sauce 

and i can do so because we buy the "traditional flavor". 

since my husband is loathe to cook anything ever,,, 

he has NO idea what i do to make food taste like food. 

so he thinks if he changes it up when he shops, it is a good thing. 

well he is wrong. 

he bought the kind with garlic and herbs last time he was out on a hummus run. 

"she who nibbles" made the sauce and pasta and washed the veg for the salad. 

then whimpered ad nauseum for hours about all the garlic in the sauce. 

i just would love to report that it was minced and she cooked the pasta into the sauce. 

finding minced, twice cooked garlic bits would be a challenge for a scientist with an electron microscope. 

yet on the flat base of her pasta bowl, was a neat little pile of uneaten bits. 

{FYI}

when i make the sauce,

 i sautee hot pepper flakes, some red pepper sauce and about 5 or6 cloves of garlic in olive oil. then i add the can of tomatoey processed sauce, a teensy pinch of sugar, a couple of shakes of dried oregano, some freshly ground pepper (no salt) and at the end, some dried flakes or torn fresh basil. 

i am sure i do more to assault her delicate sensibilities than she is willing to vocalize. 

and that is a very good thing for her self preservation. 

surprisingly, she never picks out the garlic when i make it this way, i cut and mince things erratically to avoid this  insane and picky scene whenever possible. 

once a long time ago, i made some scalloped potatoes au gratin. 

she managed to pull the pureed onion out of that delish dish as well. 

she was seven then. 

things have not changed as much as i would have thought they could. 

she tests me. 

still. 

and then she eats popsicles.

there are a freshly hatched series of the sticks and white wrappers everywhere. 

she sleeps late, 

she wakes later.

her biological  internal clock allows her to stay up very late and sleep enough.

unless there is a firm appointment to make, she can be very fluid about this waking up process. 

she is a night person. 

she always has been one since infancy. 

no getting around that one, it is what i have passed down to her. 

i am truly sorry about that. 

oh and her funky little toes. seriously, they are totally funky in shaping. 

i adore them. 

but i am legally bound to. 

98% 

of her time with us family so far this summer has been dedicated to reading comics on line. 

she is after all, an art student. 

one with honored writing skills. 

one with a 2220 on her SAT's. 

one with not one, but two national latin exam silver medals 

and a gold medal for a third year. 

she has a voracious mind. 

she has always been a lot smarter than us mortals here. 

and i have begged her not to be an art student. 

but here i am... 

with a funky toed, intelligent, quietly extraordinarily witty and beautiful girl....

for the next couple of months. 

and i will undoubtedly be screaming at the top of my lungs inside the walls of my tiny skull. 

she will perhaps be the undoing of me yet. 

and i love her the best. 

 as i tell all three of them. 

i have my fingers crossed that all of us make it through this summer. 

xoxo. 

w.