We had brunch Sunday about forty minutes from where we live, at a wonderful co-op market with open-air seating out on a lively little green, in a funky, atmosphere-filled little town that years ago I ached and ached to live in. Now, though, I was okay with the fact that we didn't in fact live there, and I didn't feel envious of all those funky families who get to live a mere stone's throw away from all that open-air hipness and the co-op with the wide array of vegetarian food and the live music every weekend.

For my first Mother's Day (the first Mother's Day when I had a child out there in the world--my very first Mother's Day I was seven months pregnant), when L. was just 10 months old, my mom sent me a white t-shirt with "Mom" printed on the front. This was an unlikely gift, actually, for both the giver and the recipient (I'm not a t-shirt person), but she'd gotten the T-shirt for free and I was, after all, a "Mom" finally. I still have the shirt. I keep it folded in my drawer and it's moved with me three times now.

Someone asked me my age recently (how could they?) and I told them I was forty. The word still doesn't roll off my tongue well, and I still wince when I say it. In my mind I'm still stuck somewhere around age 25, or maybe 26, at the oldest. Sometimes I'll have flashes of my nine-year old self, too, or me at sixteen. I'm sure, twenty years down the road, I'll think about forty-year old me and wonder how I was ever bothered about being that age--forty will seem so much younger, of course, than sixty.

In the walk-up line outside of L.'s school yesterday I heard one frazzled parent tell a friend, "I hardly slept a wink last night I was so worried about the EOG's."

Another parent said: "We've implemented EOG boot camp all month--I think we're in good shape."

Last night I had one of those surreal conversations you have when you're a parent--the type of conversation you never imagine yourself having with anyone, but then, there you go, it happens, and you're standing in the bathroom with your six-year old, talking about the toilet.

It started this way:

I ushered T. into the bathroom at bedtime so we could do teeth and her bath. Someone had stopped up the sink at some point during the day and it was full to the top with soapy bubbles.

"Who filled up the sink?" I asked.

T. laughed at the memory. "I did! I was washing my hands!"

My cell phone rang yesterday while I was battling it out with the copy machine on the second floor. I was trying to finish number 7 on a long, long work-related to-do list, and I'd been plugging away at the list all morning--with a brief 75 minute break in-between to teach a class. When I answered the phone it was Scott, checking in.

You have to view the ups and downs of any trip with kids in an out-of-body-experience way, as if it's all happening to someone else; even huge diaper blowouts on a beach chair miles from a hotel room and with no public restroom in sight, or meltdowns at restaurants, or your child locking all your shoes into the hotel room safe and forgetting the combination, are happening to some other person—someone with a sense of humor, someone who will turn it all into a humorous tale to be retold years down the road--you, but the you in some type of television sitcom.

Travelling with children is never dull, that much is for sure. You learn this VERY quickly as a parent, and you also learn—in a sink or swim kind of way—that you’d better develop a sense of humor about it all pretty quickly.

It’s do or die, really.

Three years ago, when T. was three, and L. was almost seven, we took a trip to Atlanta. We went there so I could go to a conference, but Scott and the kids tagged along. While I went to conference workshops Scott took the kids to the aquarium, and to see the sights of downtown Atlanta. I missed my family during the day, and I still remember that twinge of abandonment I felt when I stood outside the hotel steps that first morning, and watched Scott wheel away the stroller, with L.

In bed on Sunday night, after yet another chapter of Really, Truly Ruthie, T. and I lay in bed talking about family and growing up. We went through a lenghty list of all the various family members out there, and she counted them on all her fingers, and started over again. Then she asked, "What is YOUR family, Mama?"

I was confused. "My family is your family: you and L. and Papa, of course," I told her.