Stealing The Halloween Candy: It's Proust's Fault!

I confess.

I did it.

After the kids were abed, I made my way to the plastic jack-o-lantern buckets on the kitchen counter, and dumped out both kids' hauls on the floor, on the pretext of sorting through any loose, unwrapped candy or candy they could choke on. 

Looking at the bounty before me, childhood memories flooding back, mouth starting to water, suddenly craving artificial-tasting, factory-made, non-artisan treats, I lost all willpower.  Within seconds, I'd unwrapped and devoured my first Fun-Size Nestle's Crunch bar in perhaps a decade.  The Mounds Bar, we're probably talking 25 years.  And this wasn't my first transgression.  At the Halloween party, I ate one of the ghost-shaped cookies too -- smothered in orange frosting.

It's not that I haven't eaten any candy in years.  

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When Is The Make-The-Lunch Fairy Coming To My House?

The kids were tucked all snug in their beds, visions of lunchboxes packed with delicious food filled their heads ... and I was standing in the kitchen, post-work day, after supervising homework/showers/changing into PJs/picking clothes for tomorrow/eating dinner/brushing teeth/reading books, and finally tucking them in, with some help from Late Blooming Dad.  But now I was alone in the kitchen, eyes scanning the fridge forlornly, searching for inspiration.   What to make them?  What to make them they'd actually eat some tomorrow if I made it for their lunch boxes tonight?  It's then I had a vision:  a vision of the Make-The-Lunch Fairy.

Our kids get visits from the Tooth Fairy whenever they lose a tooth.  Why can't we weary moms get a visit from the Make-The-Lunch Fairy whenever we are overwhelmed by life, and underwhelmed by the prospect of making yet another round of lunch box lunches?

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Don't Let The Kids Hold The Menu Hostage

The other day, Late Blooming Dad said, after justifying the choice of a certain restaurant for Sunday brunch that didn't have much in the way of kid fare, "I'm not going to hold the family hostage to kid food."

So off we went to this place, even though the few kid items on the menu didn't fall into the usual list of foods acceptable to Thing 1, aka The Picky One.  Thank goodness Thing 2 has a broader palate and can be more easily assauged.  Thing 1 doesn't go much beyond dry cereal, muffins, pancakes, French toast, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, plain roast chicken and potatoes, cucumbers, pizza, grapes, pears, and only two forms of mac n' cheese:  Koo Koo Roo's or the Annie's kind that comes in the shape of Arthur.  Not a terrible diet, but a dull, dull, dull one if you're not a small and stubborn being.

At first the meal went pretty well.

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Love Means Having To Drive Past Monterey Park

With all due respect to the late pop novelist Eric Segal, who penned the ridiculously inaccurate yet often quoted line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry," I submit the above definition, which proved its validity last night.

Late Blooming Mom, Dad and five-year-old twins were driving on Interstate 10 around dinnertime, heading back to Los Angeles from an overnight trip to see visiting relatives in the Palm Springs area. The drive between L.A. and P.S. is pretty much a culinary wasteland of Denny's, TGI Friday's, Mickey D's, the slightly more tolerable In-n-Out Burger, etc. But after you get through the strip-malled communities of Pomona, West Covina, El Monte, etc., you come to a culinary mecca for some of the best Hong Kong-style Chinese food outside of Hong Kong. It's called Monterey Park, and even the most casual reader of the Pulitzer-prize-winning L.A. Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold knows that a u-shaped segment composed of Atlantic Avenue, Garfield Avenue, and San Gabriel Blvd. contains a large number of excellent Chinese food establishments.

Sadly, Late Blooming Mom does not get out to Monterey Park very often, even though it is, traffic permitting, maybe 10-15 minutes east of downtown L.A.

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Date Night Pizza In The Theater Lobby: A Tale Of Two Desperate Parents

Once a month, the kids' preschool, which is part of a temple, hosts an event called "Parents' Night Out." For a reasonable fee, a bit less than it would cost you for a regular night of babysitting, you drop your wee ones at school in their PJs with their sleeping bags, and they're entertained with arts and crafts, toys, pizza, and a couple of movies. We usually persuade our kids to do this by calling it "Kids' Night Out," an idea I shamefully stole from another preschool mom (thank you, Christine).

So while you're kids are getting settled in for an exciting evening outside the confines of your home, you and your spouse escape into the fresh night air, grab some dinner, and if the movie theater gods align with your schedule, catch a movie. But the movie theater gods really do have to align, because unless your timing is well-nigh perfect, you won't have time to dine and watch -- remember, this isn't an open-ended evening, and you don't have the option of telling the sitter to come early or stay late.

Still, it's a chance to eat something out that isn't kid food, and look at your spouse and perhaps focus on what they're saying rather than getting your kids to eat what you've put in front of them without fighting or getting side-tracked into making up an entire song about dinosaur tushies. (Yes, that really happened, though in the car, rather than at dinner, but you get the idea. I bet you never thought about dinosaurs having tushies).

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Home Cookin' For Little Tummies

The kids made Mother's Day cards at school for me, and the teachers glued on typed slips of things the kids said about me. One of the things my daughter mentioned was, "We go to fun restaurants. Thank you for us going to a restaurant." I felt a little guilty when I read this, because the kids do get out to a restaurant about once a week during the school week, and at least twice on the weekend. One of their at-home meals tends to involve frozen pizzas, boxed mac n' cheese, or chicken nuggets, albeit the sans-trans-fats, "healthier" varieties. These make-do meals happen because I can't manage a home-cooked meal every weeknight due to work demands, and on the weekends, when we're out and about, it's often easier to grab lunch out than to pack a lunch in advance. But I felt a lot better when I read something on the card my son made: "Mommy cooks good food for me."

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"The Kitchen Is Closed!" And Other Tales Of Feeding Four-Year-Olds

They're still too small to get their own cereal, milk, or juice, let alone reheat yesterday's pancakes. So breakfast means "Service, please!" for Late Blooming Mom, and so do the other meals.

Whatever I put in front of them, they invariably ask for something else. Despite my attempt to enforce the "You get what you get, and you don't get upset" rule, there is often much whining around the dining room table. I try not to give in, but sometimes, you just can't get 'em to eat, and if you refuse to put anything in front of them they want, then later, they're going to whine that they're hungry. Then there's another chance to stand fast, but I often wind up crumbling because by then, the whining has worn me down.

So I've taken to informing my kids, after I've gotten them food and perhaps acceded to a few requests WITHIN REASON, that "The Kitchen Is Closed."

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Boats, Kitsch, And Old School Fun

When I was a kid growing up in Manhattan, my dad would take us to the New York Boat Show every other year or so. It may seem incongruous going to a convention hall filled with pleasure boats and motor yachts in the middle of New York City. We didn't get on boats very often, save the Staten Island Ferry, or the occasional jaunt on the yacht leased by the radio station where my dad worked. And on the latter, we basically cruised up and down the Hudson and East River. So we weren't exactly big boaters.

But the boat show was a kids' delight.

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Late Blooming Parents Mean Late Blooming Grandparents

You don't plan to be a Late Blooming Mom or Dad, it just happens.

Soon after, you come to realize that, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell's BOTH SIDES NOW, something's lost, but something's gained.

Sure, you're getting to parent after establishing yourself in a profession, gaining some financial stability, and having attained the wisdom and maturity that come with being around 35-plus (or in my case, 40-plus) years.

But when it comes to grandparents, your kids may get short shrift. My kids got only one set of living grandparents. They're lucky that Grandma and Grandpa are way into them, and still healthy enough to enjoy them. But Grandma and Grandpa are also older than a lot of their peers' grandparents, and not quite as fit and nimble and game for babysitting as others. It's not their fault they can't bend and lift thirty-plus pound preschoolers, nor chase after them if they run into trouble. They can't wrestle a recalcitrant grandkid into a car seat, and they don't have the stamina to handle two of them alone for any length of time.

The other Grandparent problem that can come with being a Late Blooming Parent -- or any parent of this generation, I suppose -- is that many parents don't live in the same city or state as their elderly parents. This necessitates a lot of travel on somebody's, or even everybody's, part once the grandkids show up. Late Blooming Mom and Dad spend a big chunk of what little vacation time they have traveling east to make sure Thing 1 and Thing 2 get quality Grandparent time. Grandma and Grandpa make the trek west even more often, reciprocating more thanks to the freedom of being retired.

But the distance thing can be hard on everyone. This morning, Thing 1 and Thing 2 could not bring themselves to say goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa, who were scheduled to leave for the airport. Saying goodbye meant acknowledging that it'll be a while before they see the grandparents again, and when you're not quite four years old, your sense of time isn't exactly well-defined. They don't understand the difference between Monday and Tuesday, this week or next, let alone waiting months into next year before they get to see Grandma and Grandpa again.

Late Blooming Mom and Dad sometimes think about how nice it would be to live in the same state or city as the grandparents. But then we realize a host of reasons why we can't relocate -- jobs and the home we're paying off (who wants to sell in this market?) and the lives we've built here. We do the best we can, pooling the frequent flier miles and carting Thing 1 and Thing 2 across country when we can, hosting the grandparents here when they can come. It's never enough.

Still, there's something sweet about seeing the kids starting to remember their last trip to Grandma and Grandpa's house, anticipating the next one ... and speculating about the next time the folks will come visit us.

When I grew up, my living grandparents were a borough away -- Brooklyn -- and we went back and forth nearly every weekend. One grandma even slept over in my room on occasion, and babysat when she could. Going to visit grandparents was full of rituals. There were things I could play with that were found only at the grandparents' apartments. There was a recliner chair at Grandma Esther's, and she always gave me money to go across to the candy store and buy penny candy that they didn't seem to sell in Manhattan anymore. At Grandpa Bill and Grandma Ceil's, there was a high-rise view from which, if you craned your neck, you could sorta see Manhattan ... and there were dinners at Garguilio's, the kind of red sauce Italian place where every waiter looked and sounded like Billy Joel. When the grandparents came to Manhattan, there were crullers and chocolate blackout cake from Ebbinger's Bakery, and toasted, buttered raisin bread. Grandpa Bill used to swing me with both arms, in what he called "the grandpa swing." Grandma Ceil always tried to feed me, and had more cans of condensed milk and rolls of toilet paper in her house than she could ever need. She'd brush my hair one hundred strokes, and she was the only person who called Grandpa Bill "William."

I wonder what vivid memories of Grandma and Grandpa my kids are now acquiring on these visits. I know it's different when you don't see each other routinely, the way I did my grandparents. I just hope we're making the best of the situation, and for all the disadvantages of having Late Blooming Grandparents, the kids are getting what they should: hugs, kisses, and a sense of who they came from, at least from Dad's side of the family.

It's not ideal. But it's what we got.

Halloween At The Mall? Sounds Lame, But It Didn't Suck

Last year a neighbor of mine told me she was taking her toddlers to trick-or-treat at the local mall, rather than traipsing around our neighborhood in the dark.

I was skeptical of the whole idea. The mall is already a place we visit too much. And why skip the festively decorated houses on the blocks south of our condo building? (Condos, it must be noted, are rotten places to trick or treat -- they rarely have a critical mass of kids and enough apartment dwellers willing to open their doors and give out treats).

But then I realized, hey, my kids are afraid to go out in the dark, especially on a street filled with costumed people, most of whom are bigger than they are. They also tire quickly, and I'd be forced to carry them home or schlep around strollers, making it hard to hold their hands when crossing the street or just to keep a close watch on them. They're ready to trick or treat as early as four o'clock, yet in most neighborhoods, the fun isn't even getting started by then, as not enough people are home.

I wasn't sure what happened at a mall trick-or-treat, but I was willing to give it a shot.

Sadly, however, when Halloween rolled around last year, both kids were suffering from bad colds, and they'd barely made it through their preschool day. They'd heard about trick-or-treating from classmates, and were determined to do it, despite being tired, cranky, and probably breaking out in low-grade fevers. Only one was willing to don a costume -- Batman pajamas. Yet they wanted to know what all the Halloween fuss was about, and refused to go home until they got their dose of it. Since it was the first year they were actually cognizant of something called Halloween, and some vague notion of what it is, I felt I'd be a lousy mom if I didn't oblige them and satisfy their curiosity, at least a little.

So for about twenty-five minutes, I schlepped them to a mall where most stores had already run out of candy, having been over-run with costumed kids in the first hour the place began its Halloween festivities. I wound up having to go to a candy store in the mall and letting the kids pick their own candy. They were exhausted but at least they felt they hadn't totally missed out.

This year, I vowed it would be different.

I adjusted my work schedule so I could pick them up early from school. I got them to a bigger mall, about half an hour after the proceedings began, so there was still plenty of free candy to be had. And I managed to convince both kids to don costumes, with the explanation that if they wanted candy in their plastic Jack-O-Lantern buckets, they had to wear them. (They picked the costumes, though -- Lightning McQueen Pit Crew Member for Thing 1, Butterfly for Thing 2.) We met my neighbor and her kids, and we were off and running.

I gotta say, it was much more fun than I imagined, if frenetic. There's something very sweet about a three-level mall packed with roaming bands of costumed cuties, mostly under four feet in height. Whole families were dressed up, adults and kids included (I even spotted two grown-ups in Dr. Seuss Thing 1 and Thing 2 outfits, toting a kid wearing the hat from the Cat In The Hat). There were plentiful costumed babies -- a pea in a pod, a lion, a tiger, Superman (or should I say "Superbaby?"). My kids were admired and cooed at by twenty-something sales associates at various stores, all in costume and giving out candy from baskets and buckets. One, in a witch's hat and striped red and black tights, just couldn't get over my son's adorableness: his sweet, plaintive face looking up at her from under his red Pit Crew hat/headset combo, his wee little voice politely and softly intoning, "Twick or tweat?"

We took a couple of candy-eating breaks, and managed to cover all three levels of the mall in an hour. Thing 2 then decided there were too many "scary kids" with "white eyes" (ghost masks), and it was time to go. We drove back to our neighborhood, where quite a few houses had done it up for the season, and clutches of trick-or-treaters, led by parents, were wending their way through the area. But Thing 2, when invited to get out of the car and continue the candy acquisition, declared it was all too scary. So after a brief drive-by of a house with an inflatable witch tending an inflatable cauldron (the kids called her "Witchy-Poo because dad had dubbed her that in honor of Thing 2's witch hat worn on Thing 2's very first Halloween), it was home to dinner, a showing of IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN from our DVD collection, and one more piece of candy before tooth-brushing.

All in all, it was a much more satisfying treat-or-treat experience than last year, and I didn't mind the mall so much. We didn't buy a thing while we were there -- which has got to be a first for us -- and for a couple of preschoolers who clearly aren't ready for the in-the-dark, house-to-house trolling for goodies, it proved a safe and relatively non-scary Halloween haven.

Not Exactly Kodak Moments

She's proud of herself that she wipes from front to back when she goes to the potty. She wants to show mommy how she does it. But when she finishes wiping, she sneezes ... and decides the toilet paper she's just wiped with, and hasn't yet flushed, makes a perfectly fine tissue with which to wipe her nose.

He's proud of himself that he can use the urinal at preschool. He wants to show mommy how he does it. He takes her into the bathroom there and whips it out ... neglecting to pull his underwear and pants out of range. He pees all over himself.

She learns about nail polish from a teacher at preschool and her new thing is getting her nails done, by mommy, nanny, the obliging babysitter. Not one to be left out, even though this is traditionally a girls' activity, he insists on getting his nails done too -- toenails included. The color he chooses? Black. My three-and-a-half-year-old son has unwittingly gone Goth.

We're rolling cookie dough into balls to make "thumbprint" cookies: the idea is to push your thumb down in the cookie's middle, creating a whole for jam. Daddy shows him which finger his thumb is; he happily joins in a rendition of"Where Is Thumbkin?," a song he knows since age one and a half. When presented with the ball of dough and asked to press down with his thumb, he pokes it with his pointer.

She sees daddy feeding jam straight from the makeshift pastry bag he's created out of a plastic bag, straight into her brother's mouth. She insists she wants to try the same thing. She gets the jam in her mouth, and spits it out onto the table where we've been working the dough.

He sneezes all over the dough.

I know what you're thinking: "You must be so proud."

Here's what I'm thinking: I've got great material with which to embarrass them someday at their weddings.

I even got the jam spitting on video.

What was the slogan back in the '70s? "Celebrate the moments of your life."

Though maybe I'm glad I didn't get footage of that tush-to-nose toilet paper moment.

To Treat Or Not To Treat?

Late Blooming Mom is not a treat Nazi. But neither do I hand out sugary snacks regularly and indiscriminately. Still, sometimes it's hard to know just what the best treat policy is.

Growing up, I had a best friend whose mom kept their New York City apartment 100% treat-free. She cooked health foods when the health-food movement was just gaining steam and coming into the main stream. And she made her kids finish what was on their plates. She did the same to me when I was visiting, and I was a frequent sleep-over visitor.

I still recall trying hard to swallow those cottage-cheese-laced pancakes for breakfast.

But I also remember what happened when my best friend came over to MY house for a sleepover.

My mom, who in contrast to hers, viewed life as a banquet to be sampled every day, kept our house stocked with treats. There were Entemann's chocolate or white sugar frosted donuts, Sara Lee yellow cake with chocolate frosting, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, and perhaps most loved by my brother and myself, Drake's Cakes: Devil Dogs, Yodels, and Yankee Doodles.

This stuff was always around, and my best friend knew it. So when she came to visit, she binged. She gorged. She simply could not get enough.

This was in contrast to my brother and myself, who were routinely satisfied with a single donut and a glass of milk.

A binge to us was eating two Yankee Doodle cupcakes instead of one. They came three to a pack, and three were never finished in one sitting.

Though I shudder now to think how much trans fat and hydrogenated oils I consumed as a child, I do know I always ate my treats in moderation.

My best friend, by contrast, has a sweet tooth so strong that to this day, she has to police herself.

So the lesson I learned was that it's okay to give your kids a treat sometimes, and a lot better than making them verboten.

I'm a lot less generous with treats than my mom was, and I tend to buy or make fresh-baked goods that are trans-fat free and missing those evil hydrogenated oils. It's probably better for my kids that Drake's Cakes are unavailable on the West Coast, where we live. And I have my little tricks, like buying those very very small organic, trans-fat free chocolate chip cookies from Trader Joe's, so I can give my kids two, which seems like a lot to them, and still avoid having them eat something the size (and unhealthy composition) of a single Chips Ahoy cookie.

I know many pediatricians and nutritionists would still condemn me for giving them anything made with white flour and refined sugar. But I also know I'm instilling in them a sense of moderation while allowing them some pleasure in treats. I give them plenty of fruit, and try heroically to get them to eat some veggies, despite major resistance. I think their diet is pretty good. So a cookie or a mini-cupcake here or there is just fine with me.

But there's another side to this issue, and that's timing. I've discovered that when you give a treat can mean the difference between a relaxing evening or a jaw-clamping, foot-stomping, give-the-parent-a-time-out-before-he/she-blows night of bedtime battles.

I've let my kids have a scoop of ice cream or frozen yogurt at lunchtime, and amazingly, they go down for their afternoon nap the same as they do any other day.

I've let them have that ice cream or frozen yogurt post-nap, maybe four o'clock in the afternoon ... and by six-thirty, they still have plenty of room for dinner. They've also behaved in their normal way: fits interspersed with mostly pleasant play. That's life with three-and-half-year olds.

But serve them those same treats as dessert at dinnertime, and an evening of hell ensues.

Last night I was a whupped and exhausted working mom. I picked up my kids from preschool around ten after five, after managing to get my work in on deadline even though it was a bear of a project. I'd had no time to make dinner, so offered to take the kids out to one of their favorite restaurants, the Souplantation. I did this knowing full well that the biggest attraction there, after the pizza and the blueberry muffins and paper cups full of raisins, is the miniature ice cream cone.

I got down on the kids' level, looked them both in the eye, and solemnly made them promise that, if I let them have ice cream cones as dessert after dinner, they would promise to be helpful at bedtime. They both agreed.

But, to quote CASABLANCA, "We know what German promises have been worth in the past."

I made sure they each got plenty to eat before the ice cream. I made them reiterate their promises as they ate it.

And once we got home, at first, it seemed as if they remembered their promises. They got into the pajamas and got their teeth brushed, all supervised by dad (who took pity on my end-of-the-week, working mom exhausted self, and took over for a bit). We did puzzles, which we sometimes do as a change from reading stories before bed. Then we put on the wind-down music.

The kids went bonkers. They were literally bouncing off the walls, having giggle fits, running into one another, zig-zagging from bed to bed, and refusing to listen to any request that it was time to calm down, cuddle, and get into bed.

Dad wisely gave me a time-out when I started to lose it.

A few minutes later, we divided and conquered: I got Thing 2 to bed after some cuddling, while he went off to another room with Thing 1, who had been the most hyper and the true instigator. But it still took until well after nine o'clock before both kids were off to dreamland.

Lesson learned for this mom: no treats at dinnertime, no exceptions.

Except .... we have three families from school coming over for Rosh Hashanah dinner on Tuesday, and there will be honey cake and apples dipped in honey and apple pie, so this lesson is going right out the window that night. I mean, how much of an ogre would I be to deny the kids a traditional holiday treat?

I'm weak, I know it. And I'll have only myself to blame when they're impossible Tuesday night. I guess all I can do is bank on a tough bedtime that night, and put it down to starting the new year on a "sweet" note. I want my kids to remember the sweetness of a family holiday, and sweets are part of that. My guess is, one day we'll forget about the bedtime battle that inevitably followed after, but the sweets will be fondly remembered.

They Put WHAT WHERE?

Just spent twenty minutes using my car key to jimmy pretzel sticks and smushed raisins out of that narrow crack between the bottom of the car window and the passenger door.

This was after Hoover-ing the backseat floor with the DustBuster, sucking up ground Pepperidge Farm Goldfish (did you know they now come in colors? I'm serious. There are green, red and purple Pepperidge Farm Goldfish). The mini vacuum also sucked up discarded Pirate Booty, more pretzel sticks, the clear wrappers for plastic straws that come with vanilla soy milk boxes, and the odd miniature rubber tire from a Matchbox car.

By rights I oughtta be cleaning out the backseat floor and area around the car seats every other day. But because life has more pressing concerns, I wind up doing it oh, say, once a fiscal quarter.

The one saving grace of the car's interior upholstery is that it's leather, so when the kids spill liquid on the seats, I'm able to mop it up without mold setting in. The carpeting, well, that's another matter entirely. I've been known to utilize Nature's Miracle there, a potent potion concocted for the sole purpose of neutralizing cat urine. Clearly the makers of Nature's Miracle are missing their ancillary market: the parents of toddlers.

But lest I think I have it bad, my friend Jenine, mother of three kids -- one set of twin toddlers among them -- tops me with this recent correspondence (hope you don't mind my stealing this for the blog, Jenine):

"What price would you put on a plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex toy? 25 cents? One dollar? How about $209.58? This 4- inch toy is the most expensive toy we own. Two hundred nine dollars and fifty eight cents....in plumbing repairs. It seems that someone in this house likes to stuff things into holes. I'm not pointing fingers, but my guess is N. (The twin boy). Apparently he thought that the toilet would be a good place for this prehistoric monster to live. Or maybe he just thought the dino might like to swim. In any case the thing got lodged in our toilet. Of course it had to happen after unloading a particularly nasty mess into the toilet that R. (the twin girl) made in the bathtub. Eww! Cleaned that up, flushed, and voila, toilet overflow! It took the visit of two different plumbers to get it out. The first one tried to get us to buy a new toilet! At first we thought maybe it was a clog of diaper wipes used when R. decided to unload the contents of her diaper to use as "food" in her play kitchen. But no, it was just one plastic toy living a goldfish's nightmare. The toilet isn't N.'s only target. He really loves to remove the heat registers and put things down into the vent. It took me 3 days to find the TV remote and a good 2 hours to fish it out with plastic straws and packing tape. I wonder if my calculator is down there too? So that's life with twin toddlers. When I'm not clamping my jaws with displeasure I'm laughing until my sides split."

I can't speak for Jenine, but when my toddlers are not creating a general nuisance by trashing a car's interior or gumming up plumbing, they do so by misplacing things.

Case in point: Monday night, before bed, we must've spent fifteen minutes in search of the twin stuffed duckies Thing 2 cannot sleep without. They were discovered in the hamper, where she had dumped them while changing out of school clothes and into her nightgown. She was no help finding them, as she'd forgotten she'd dumped them there (or put on a pretty good act of forgetting, so as to further delay bedtime and watch as mommy, daddy, and an old friend from NYC who was over for dinner, searched the entire place repeatedly with the urgency of the Gestapo in a W.W. II movie looking for escaped P.O.W.s).

This summer, just before we left for the airport and a flight to NYC, Thing 1 lost his binky somewhere in our building lobby, never to be found again, and we were forced to break into the emergency binky stash. Thank goodness we had a spare.

I shudder to think how many hours of my life have already been frittered away searching for things they've put where they shouldn't, or cleaning up a mess so spectacular even the Bush administration can't take credit for it.

Yes, I love them. Yes, I wouldn't replace them. But would it hurt them to put the expensive organic raisins in their mouths and not down the car window crack?

Toddlers Need A Turkey Timer

You know that little plastic thermometer that pops up when the Thanksgiving turkey is done?

This morning, Late Blooming Dad came up with the idea that there should be such a thing for toddlers ... only it should pop up ten minutes before they're done. And by done I mean about to become impossible.

Today we took Thing 1 and Thing 2 to the Brentwood Country Mart, a place most small kids adore. That's because it has coin-operated rides, a toy store, and ample kid-friendly food options, as well as an outdoor courtyard in which to eat adjacent to aforementioned kiddie rides and toy store. You'd think our kids would've been thrilled to be there.

For a little while, they were. They emptied our pockets of spare quarters, and rode the same rides they'd ridden before with no sign of boredom. They eyed the toy store and promised to be good and eat their lunches in exchange for the chance to inside. But somehow, by the time food arrived, their moods had shifted.

It wasn't as if we hadn't fed them breakfast and offered plentiful snacks. They'd had French toast and fruit before attending a one-hour kiddie gym class, and upon arrival at the Country Mart, were given yogurt squeezers (for the uninitiated, that's yogurt in a tube, so it's like a push-up popsicle). We'd also plied them with breakfast bars just before and after gym class, though they'd only nibbled on these. We'd even given them the City Bakery's delectable pretzel croissants to munch on while waiting for their food to be prepared (but they stopped after a couple of bites each).

Food arrived. The grilled cheese for him and eggs on toast for her went mostly uneaten; demands for mommy and daddy's lemonade were incessant; and when daddy procured rotisserie chicken legs, they still had to be coaxed to get protein into their systems. Only the promise of the toy store visit coaxed them to eat the chicken they normally devour. By now, they were unable to sit in one place and wanted to run amok on the courtyard ramp, only there were too many people around to make it sufficiently easy to navigate.

Daddy explained they could go to the toy store on condition that they would not be allowed to get a new toy. Reluctantly, they agreed to this precondition. By now it was getting precariously close to nap time, and here's where that turkey timer popping up would've been most useful.

Unfortunately, though we managed to coax one out of the store peacefully, the other had to be carried out screaming. By the time we arrived at the car, screaming one had calmed and was practically asleep, but the other hit her stride and refused to get into the car seat, prompting an exasperating wrestling match. The ride home was marked by a stop to calm her and re-insert her into the car seat's five-point harness, out of which she had partly wriggled. The top-of-the-lungs protest continued for a few painful minutes, followed by wimpering and at last, when I put a comforting hand on hers while contorting my body in ways no one should to reach the back seat, quiet finally reigned.

It was on this drive that Late Blooming Dad came up with the idea for an early warning Toddler Timer similar to the Turkey timer.

I'm ready to buy stock in the company that first puts these on the market.

Just Like Mom Used To Make

Like more than a few late blooming moms, I don't have my own mom around, but I think about her every day.

Her absence is felt acutely at moments when I watch my kids do something sweet, or try something for the first time, and I don't have her by me to see it. I can't even pick up the phone to tell her about it.

But one way I make sure my kids connect with her -- a grandma they'll never know in person -- is through food.

Today I did something my mom did about once a year, as a treat: I made fried chicken. Like mom, I soaked it in milk first, though I improved upon her recipe a wee bit: I soaked it in buttermilk. Mom's recipes are great but not sacrosanct, and if Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, says to use buttermilk, I use buttermilk (you can find Ina's recipe here). Like mom AND Ina, I only fried the chicken briefly, and finished it off in the oven. And I hope my kids'll dig into it tonight the way my brother, father and I used to dig into my mom's.

Fried chicken was a rarity in mom's repertoire, which was generally more reflective of our Jewish heritage. From her I learned to make a rich and life-restoring chicken soup. Because of her, I developed a taste for home-made chopped chicken liver. I ate home-made latkes at Chanukah. And I've several times duplicated her two-tone cream cheese pie, which is topped with a layer of sweetened sour cream (we grew up in New York City, where cheesecake was a popular dessert at Jewish delis).

Mom also passed on to me an appreciation of home-made lasagna, though made only with meat sauce: bechamel, though typical in Italian-American homes, never made an appearance in ours. She improvised a pretty good faux barbecue chicken utilizing Heinz chili sauce (we lived in an apartment and never had access to a grill). She taught me to make ricotta-stuffed manicotti, home-made chocolate chip cookies, and summer fruit salad.

Occasionally mom's more adventurous attempts at cooking didn't quite work out. She was always cutting recipes out of the New York Times Sunday magazine, and when pesto became all the rage, she attempted a home version that wound up having the consistency of sand.

But she was a good home cook and she took joy in feeding her family, as well as herself. She was something of a foodie long before the term was coined. To her, life was a banquet and she was here to savor it.

When I got old enough to cook with her, she let me help. I still remember one New Year's Eve when we made crab cakes together and filled the apartment with the appetizing smell of just-fried food. They went great with the champagne we drank with dad to ring in the new year.

Mom's food is comfort food to me now. I miss my mom everyday, but when I cook her food for my kids, I feel a connection. I remember the tastes and smells of home, and I want to leave my kids the same kind of yummy memories I hold onto that make me feel mom isn't entirely gone from the world ... and is, in her own way, feeding the grandkids she's never met.

Double Happiness: The Kids Are Chinese Restaurant-Ready

When I became the mother of twins, I learned of the Chinese expression Double Happiness.

When I took my kids to a Chinese restaurant for Sunday night dinner, I experienced it anew.

Like many of today's late blooming moms, I was born in the early 1960s. I grew up in a culturally Jewish, if mostly secular, family on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In families like mine, it was customary, on Sunday nights, to give mom a break with the cooking, and go out to eat Chinese food. I'm not sure how the tradition started, or just how widespread it was. But judging from the many Jewish families filling up the restaurants on Sundays (and always, always, on Christmas Day), we were far from alone.

I remember well those evenings at the now long-gone Great Shanghai, or the Harbin Inn, places where I had my first introduction to duck sauce and crispy noodles, egg rolls, chicken and snow peas, and wonton soup. Because my family was, as I mentioned, secular, we ate plenty of "traif" at these meals: shrimp in lobster sauce, mu-shu pork. We ate mountains of sticky white rice, and learned to use chopsticks. We over-sweetened our tea and loved drinking from the tea cups. We savored the crunchy sweet fortune cookies.

It wasn't all culinary delight. My brother and I ended most meals mixing a little of each dish in a water glass and daring each other -- or my father -- to drink it. No doubt we left the floor littered with red cloth napkins and spilled rice.

But we left with our childish palates made a little more adventurous.

In later years, when the Szechuan and Hunan restaurants replaced those that featured Mandarin and Cantonese, we enjoyed spicier fare: prawns in garlic sauce, General Tso's chicken (not exactly authentic Chinese -- like many of our favorite dishes, it was probably invented in the U.S. for Western palates). We developed a taste for peanut-ty cold sesame noodles. We spent our Sundays a little further uptown, in the West nineties, at the Hunan Balcony or the Empire Szechuan.

When I moved to Los Angeles, it took a long time for me to find Chinese food that tasted like what I remembered in New York. But eventually I did -- and knowing where to get it was one of the things that won me my future husband, another New York transplant.

Naturally, once we had children, I hoped to revive the Sunday night Jews-eat-Chinese-food family tradition. But our first attempt to do so, on a wildly overcrowded Christmas night at the Westside branch of an L.A. Chinatown institution, was an unmitigated disaster. The noise level was defeaning: every Jew on the Westside had apparently shown up to eat and schmooze. The service was agonizingly slow. I can't quite pin down the memory because I've clearly tried to block it out, so I'm not sure how old the kids were: about to turn one? Two? But I remember they started the meal in high chairs, then quickly insisted on sitting in parental laps. I know my brother, sister-in-law and niece were in town visiting, and witness to the horror. I have one vivid memory of trying to pick rice off Thing 1's hands, face, and the folds of his clothes. And I know for sure that most of the meal wound up at home with us in take-out containers, after a hasty exit and much wailing from both children, who were traumatized by the entire experience.

So we stayed away from Chinese restaurants, and I put aside hopes of reviving family custom.

Then, this past Sunday, after nap, inspiration hit me. At three-and-a-half, the kids might be ready for a re-introduction to Chinese cuisine. It wasn't Christmas, so the restaurants wouldn't likely be so packed. And the fortune cookie could be used as incentive to make the kids sit through an entire restaurant meal. Maybe it was time to try again.

So we piled into the car, prepping the kids by telling them we were going to have an adventure. We drove across L.A. to Chinatown, and parked right by the old Central Plaza, where as luck would have it, a free Shaolin self-defense demonstration was underway. The kids were mesmerized ... for about five minutes. But then it was off to see the lion statues, the pond with a waterfall and Buddhas, the coin-operated rides, the chotchke shops, the bakeries. The walk to the restaurant was full of unfamiliar but fascinating sights -- the Gold Line train station, pagoda-like rooftops, orange-red cooked ducks hanging in restaurant windows -- and new smells -- chicken and fish frying in savory/sweet sauces. The restaurant had a koi pond and live fish tanks brimming with crab, shrimp, cod, etc. The main dining room was huge, and decorated with a gilt golden Phoenix facing a gilt golden dragon. And there on the wall was that sign: the one for double happiness.

It was a good omen. The kids were fascinated with everything and though there was no pizza, no mac n' cheese, no pasta, nothing resembling a peanut butter sandwich, they actually ate. Thing 1 became a green bean and broccoli eating champ; Thing 2 slurped Chicken and corn soup, and both gobbled down the tender beef in the beef and broccoli. Lemon Chicken was a bit suspect, and we cringed every time they spilled water out of their teacups, but as expected, the fortune cookies went over big. Sure, the restaurant staff hovered over us as if we were going to break something precious, but we all got through it unscathed.

After the meal, we stopped on the steps of an old Chinese Benevolent Association, where the kids romped among the lion statues and columns, running off their energy in gleeful delight.

As I watched them I was transported back to the Upper West Side Sunday night Chinese dinners of my childhood ... and though I doubt we'll be having Chinese dinner every Sunday, we've established a beachhead.

My fortune that night told of a peaceful, happy future. But I was thinking about the past. Somewhere I bet mom and dad are smiling.

Will I Ever Again Get To Eat My Food When It's Hot?

Mealtimes are the worst lately.

Just when I've taken one bite of the meal I worked hard to cook between incessant interruptions from Thing 1 and Thing 2, one of them is likely to announce "I have to go potty," followed by, "I want mommy's help."

Either that, or one of them spills a)milk, b)tomato sauce, or c)yogurt (it has to be something difficult to clean up) at the exact moment I've taken the bite.

Of course, there's another option too: if we're in a restaurant, that bite coincides with Thing 1 or Thing 2 -- who have already been served their kids' meals and gotten bored with them -- announcing "I want to go for a walk," having reached the official LIMIT OF SITTING TIME that all three-and-half-year-olds seem to know as if they've met in a secret cabal and settled on it.

It's as if some internal alarm clock goes off in my kids when I take that bite of delicious hot sustenance, likely the first I've had for hours after catering to their needs.

It's so predictable I've begun to wonder why we still bother going to restaurants -- invariably a chore with preschoolers, no matter how many crayons and coloring-book-like place mats or kids' menus the restaurant provides. (Crayons, by the way, which I keep discovering in pockets, jackets, backpacks and diaper bags.)

Other than on an occasional date-night, I can't remember the last meal I had out, or at home for that matter, that was eaten without interruption, at a leisurely pace, and allowed me to enjoy what I was eating for more than a moment.

Moms who've been at it longer than me tell me there IS light at the end of the tunnel: one day, the kids will be able to putter about the kitchen fixing themselves bowls of cereal, peanut butter sandwiches, pieces of fruit. They'll clean up after themselves without being told. They won't require a separate meal from the one the rest of the family is eating, or change their minds mid-way through the meal.

Maybe there will, indeed, come a time when my son will stop saying "I want something else," even if I've just cooked him the precise item he asked for incessantly half an hour ago.

But right now, I as I contemplate a fridge full of cold leftovers I never got to eat when they were actually warm from the stove, I can't see it.

Anyone for cold pizza?

Will They Ever Eat Anything Besides Mac N' Cheese?

Sometimes I have a Kafka-esque vision of myself standing over a hot stove, cooking up a box of Annie's Mac N' Cheese ... for eighteen-year-old twins.

At some point or other, will they stop being so insistent on eating this oozing, creamy yellow/orange concoction? Will they ever stop asking for the pasta in the bunny shapes? Will they be able to go more than three nights straight without eating some of it?

To be fair, Thing 2 is quite the culinary adventuress. Tonight, when she saw Late Blooming Mom and Daddy dining on pesto angel hair, she demanded her own plate of the stuff -- and promptly slurped down three helpings. She will gladly devour roast salmon or baked Dover sole. She loves dipping bread in olive oil and good balsamic. (One thing about being a Late Blooming Mom: your palate's a bit more sophisticated, perhaps a bit more Alice Waters-influenced, than that of your average standard-age mom, so your kids get exposed to foodie-level food at a tender age.) But put Annie's Mac N' Cheese in front of her, and she's going to demolish it.

Thing 1 on the other hand, is the picky eater. The only way to get him to try new things is to slip them directly in his mouth surreptitiously while he's focused on the latest adventures of Disney Channel animated handy man HANDY MANNY. Thing 1 is so addicted to M & C, he'd be happy to eat it every night. He's also got his favorite M&C, from our local Koo Koo Roo. He's nuts for it, though Annie's Curly Mac N' Cheese runs a close second. Then there's the curly rotini (or is it fusili? you know, the corkscrew pasta) he gets at CPK: that's currently holding down third place in the M&C pantheon.

Somehow I've got a son who actually prefers M & C to pizza.

This is astonishing to me because until a few years ago, I'd never eaten the stuff. Not out of a box, let alone the gourmet comfort food versions with four cheeses showing up at foodie restaurants.

I got through my entire childhood and a good chunk of adulthood -- even the early, post-college, impoverished years where I sometimes ate stir-fried hot dogs with sliced carrots, white rice and soy sauce -- without cracking open a box of M & C.

Now that my kids eat it, I have to admit, it's pleasant-tasting stuff -- as long as you avoid the stuff with Velveeta. I've been known to dive into a box of Annie's myself when I'm desperate for a quick lunch.

But still: every night?

I can only hope Thing 2's proclivity for tastier, more interesting fare at some point rubs off on Thing 1.

The day I most look forward to -- to quote one of the moms at my kids' preschool -- is the day I can cook one meal all of us will eat.

Until then, it's all-you-can-eat M&C buffet at our house.

Late Blooming Mom Law #1: The More Time You Spend On Cooking Dinner, The Less They'll Eat

As a working mom, it's not easy to get home-cooked meals on the table every night. But I try, at least most nights.

This week I was inspired by some late-night Food Network viewing, and browsing through some cookbooks. I was all set with my Mark Bittman-inspired tray-roasted salmon with herb butter & olive oil; my Barefoot Contessa take on broccoli with garlic; my classic steamed sweet corn with butter. I managed to get it all prepped and at least some of it cooked BEFORE picking up the kids from preschool (over my sacred, prized, usually restful lunch hour, since most days, I'm lucky enough to work at home). That way, once I got the kids home, save for popping the fish in the oven, and warming up the rest, there was nothing else to do.

Except make a Plan B.

Seems Thing 1, who normally eats salmon enthusiastically (though mysteriously insists it's chicken no matter how often he's told it's fish) would be pacificied with nothing but mac n' cheese from a box, in the shape of bunnies.

Seems Thing2 refused to nap at preschool, so she fell asleep on the sofa in front of the Disney Channel's HANDY MANNY in the fifteen minutes or so it took me to cook the mac n' cheese and set the table for Thing 1.

Thing 2 wound up eating a decent amount of pasta bunnies, but eating maybe two bites of fish; zero broccoli (though he chows down on garlic broccoli at that mall when it's purchased from Sbarro), and barely gnawed on the corn, despite it being his usual favorite.

Thing 1 had to be transferred to bed, where she promptly slept for something like twelve hours, skipping dinner entirely.

The husband and I did enjoy the meal, so my efforts weren't entirely for naught.

But still: I'd made the food -- rich in fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, and antioxidants -- to nourish my children. Mission NOT accomplished.

It's enough to make a working mom wanna order take-out every night. Or better yet, let 'em loose at Koo Koo Roo. At least then, I wouldn't have to clean up.