Lately I’ve been wanting to bottle my daughter. Or freeze her. Or stop feeding her. Whatever it takes to stop her from growing and keep her this age forever. Nina Bean is super tall for her age. I’m talking the 99th percentile among 6 year-olds for height. In other words, she looks like a 3rd grader. It’s a challenge to find my girlie girl the dresses and skirts she still loves to wear, let alone anything that isn’t hootchie. All they ever seem to have in her size are skinny jeans, daisy dukes and halter tops. What is up with all the big girl clothes looking like they come with a stripper …

My dad’s birthday is December 30th.  Exactly five days after Christmas and one day before New Year’s Eve. Which means, for his entire childhood and adult life, the poor man has been getting screwed. No separate party in his honor. No expensive gifts. Nobody taking a special trip just to see him on the day he was born. The man is lucky if we throw candles on a fruitcake and sing to him, or toast him with our New Year’s champagne. Sucks to be born so close to a major holiday. But ever since the birth of my twins, I finally feel my Dad’s pain. Jack and Nina came into this world on December 18th…

It’s resolution time again, and everyone I know is concocting their admirable, if not impossible, goals for the New Year: “I’m going to lose 50 pounds. By February.” “I’m going to climb Mt. Kiliminjaro. Twice.” ”I’m going to stop drunk online shopping.” Whew. All these lofty goals make me wanna veg on my couch with a bag of chips and a martini, surfing the net for sales. This year, I’m proposing a simpler change: how about we all make a vow to stop whining and start thinking positive? As an amateur optimist, I can tell you, a little tweak in the old attitude can go a long way to creating a …

This time of year, some folks have visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Others dream of Christmas cookies, eggnog or pie. But what really does it for me is a little honey-dipped dough slice of heaven we Italians call struffoli. Pronounced 'Stroo-Fa-La,' it sounds like you’re singing a Christmas carol with a mouthful of, well, struffoli. Kinda fitting since, if you’ve ever had one, you know it’s music to your mouth. My mom and dad have made struffoli for Christmas ever since I can remember, and once I was old enough to help, child labor laws be damned, they put me to work too –- for …

Last year, five days before Christmas, my oldest son Luke came home from school saying he really wanted an "Elf on the Shelf" from Santa. This is a kid with zero interest in toys, who, a month earlier, had to be hogtied to sit down and come up with an actual Christmas list. And now, with Santa’s workshop winding down, and all of the presents made and wrapped, here he was offering up something that he truly wanted. Dagnabbit. An Elf on the What? “He’s one of Santa’s helpers who comes to live with you and tells Santa if you’re naughty or nice,” Luke informed me. “Nicholas in my class has one, …

Recently, I volunteered to help out at Native American Day at my twindergartners’ school. Which is way more interesting if you know that I went to see Guns N’ Roses with some gal pals the night before, and they played until TWO IN THE MORNING. Needless to say, I got home obscenely late for a school night and only slept two hours, so the next day I was hurting. But, unlike my childless girlfriend Michele who’d taken the whole next day off and was able to sleep in, I had to drag myself out of bed to go herd a tribe of 23 kindergartners around a makeshift Indian village. Ouch. I really can’t …

We’ve nicknamed my daughter “Ms. More” because, since the day she was born, Nina’s always angled to get more than she has. If I agree to let her have one cookie, she immediately wants two. Before I’m even done reading her a bedtime story, she’s already asking for another. Recently, I was discussing plans for her 6th birthday with my husband when he remarked, “It doesn’t matter what you do. She won’t appreciate it anyway.” Touché. And a little bit true. I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that my children won’t fully appreciate all that I do for them until they have kids of their own. And…

Recently, my kids realized that we never (GASP!) made it to Point Pleasant this past summer. We’d had an action-packed crazy two months and somehow never found the time to hit the rides and walk the boardwalk like we normally do. Now that Point Pleasant is a chilly ghost town, they’ll have to wait until next year for this little bit of Jersey Shore fun and I know what you’re thinking: “Boo Frickin’ Hoo!” Poor babies. How in America will I keep them amused? Just in the nick of time, a new indoor amusement park has opened its doors in Freehold, giving families across the Garden State a year-…

I used to think I was in great shape. I run or work out almost every day (P90X anyone?) and I still play soccer once a week. Then I ran into my brother’s best friend at the ING New York City Marathon Expo last Saturday. I was there to check out some work I just did for New York Road Runners (NYRR), organizers of the famous footrace. Steve and his wife Sara were there to pick up their numbers. To race. The next day. In the marathon. Alongside 47,000 other superhumans. In case your math is fuzzy from too much time spent horizontal on a couch, we’re talking 26.2 miles. In a row.   Kenyans and …

Through a series of fortuitous events, my husband and I are coaching our 8-year old son’s soccer team. Which means no one else wanted to do it. The rec league was short coaches and sent out an e-mail looking for volunteers. Dennis responded that he would help out as an assistant if they couldn’t find anyone else. Exactly two seconds later, he got the reply: “You’re head coach of the Aberdeen Arsenal. Here’s a roster of your players.” Okay then. Since no other parent stepped up to assist, I told Dennis I’d be co-coach. But what were we getting ourselves into? We were worried that our son Luke …

I’ll never forget the Season Two episode of Mad Men where Don Draper and his family have just finished an idyllic 1960’s picnic in the park.  As wife Betty cleans off their blanket, shaking all their trash onto the ground, Don crumples up his empty beer can and tosses it onto the grass. It was horrifying yet funny to see, and jogged me back to my early childhood when folks didn’t think twice about flinging a cigarette (or a soda bottle!) out their car window while driving. Thanks to the whole 1970’s “Don’t be a litterbug!” campaign and subsequent environmental movement, our own kids are much …

Last summer, my son and I chickened out of visiting Ripley’s Haunted Adventure at the very last minute. We had already bought the tickets, ridden up the rickety elevator to the entrance, and were being read a list of rules by a convincingly attired mutant zombie/Ripley’s employee. Apparently, the live actors inside could touch us, but we weren’t allowed to touch them, and once we entered a room we were not allowed to turn back. Anyone wishing to bail had to do so now. I could see the fear in Luke’s little face (at the time, he was 7) and felt a little claustrophobic myself in that dark, …

The past two years, Halloween fell on a weekend so all the little ghouls got to start trick-or-treating at noon. But this year, October 31st falls on a Monday and my kids are bummed that they have to go to school. Jack and Luke actually asked if they can stay home that day. I had to explain that, no, Halloween is NOT a national holiday like Christmas or Labor Day, so people don’t get off of school or work for it. Besides, if they stayed home, they would miss out on their school’s costume parade, which tops off a month-long string of events and celebrations. First, we have the Cub Scouts …

Ever since I saw David Copperfield in the horror flick Terror Train back in the day, I’ve kind of thought magicians were a little scary.  Maybe it was the calm, methodical way he made his assistant disappear while all around him, college kids were getting butchered? So whenever I go to a party where the birthday kid gets freaked out by the magician his parents have hired for him, I secretly side with the crying kid. Even though I know his folks shelled out good money to make him happy. But I recently saw a magician who was not only NOT CREEPY, he actually made the kids and their parents laugh…

Every time I angle for an invite to any of my friends’ swim clubs, they all look at me like I’ve gone off the deep end and cracked my head on the side of my diving board. They ask, “Why on earth would you want to leave a perfectly good pool?!!” Thing is, as most pool owners know, this summer I’ve already hosted 7 BBQ’S and 2 dozen swimdates, plus spent countless hours supervising my own kids out back. By the time August rolls around, they and I are ready for a change of aquatic scenery. So last Thursday, we decided to hit Runaway Rapids for a little water action that wouldn’t involve me …

My first date with my now husband was at Six Flags Great Adventure, back in the late nineties, a few years after Batman: The Ride opened up. Since we were still somewhat young and single, we were hung over, and the ride’s intense G-forces literally threw us for a loop. We both walked off the coaster nauseous, with headaches and the realization that the kind of rides we loved as season-pass holding kids feel different now that we're adults. Who would’ve thought then that one day we would return to the park with our own family, the next generation of thrill-seeking coaster lovers? Fortunately, …

I was recently at a Sandy Hook Beach Concert with my parents when my mom said she heard that bands no longer get requests to play Fifties music. That audience is dead. “Your father and I,” she said, “have outlived our music.” Which I thought was quite funny. Which is a messy but passable segue way into my story: Two weeks ago my girlfriends and I went to see our '80s idol Pat Benatar play at Count Basie, accompanied by bandmate Neil Giraldo, the guitarist who is also her husband.  And I can skip to the punchline and tell you that the first female rocker ever to appear on MTV absolutely rocked…

On a beautiful Sunday not too long ago, during a family barbecue, my brother John sat in my dark basement watching the Women’s World Cup Soccer Finals on the big screen. It was weird because John is a die-hard spectator of “guy” sports like football and baseball, and, to my knowledge, had never before viewed any soccer, let alone the kind played by chicks. But the U.S. Women’s Soccer team’s impressive performance this summer in Germany got him, and the rest of America watching. It was a beautiful day indeed. If you thought seeing soccer on TV was exciting, you should watch it live. No, …

My children are getting older and finally capable of doing much of the feeding, dressing and butt wiping that consumed my free time for years. Which means, slowly, I am finding my way back to the old Michelle — the one who had a totally different–and totally awesome — life before kids. It also means my children are slowly getting to know the woman who gave birth to them. Last weekend, I took Luke, Jack & Nina to see my favorite Jersey Shore cover band, The Nerds, in hopes of sharing an old love with the lovely little terrorists who stole it from me. The geeky, bespectacled rockers were …

When last we left the rookie gardeners, they had planted too early and were hoping frost wouldn’t hurt their crops. But most of the things we fear never happen. Instead, we are blindsided by the unimaginable, like a groundhog the size of a small child, with the appetite of a sumo wrestler. At least two of you might recall from my previous gardening story that my husband had carefully built a five-foot wire fence around our garden to keep out the ravenous deer who treat our yard like their personal salad bar. For the first month, it seemed to be working, and we watched our tiny plants grow …