a very Baldo new year And so begins our annual ritual of staying in with Hunan orange beef and trashy movies. We even passed on a party I wanted to attend. My ass is too tired for all this jive, and we are meeting some Buddies of Yore in Driftwood tomorrow for a Giant Potluck Hoedown to commemorate their marriage.

I feel compelled to glut the blogosphere with something summative. But I don't know what to say, so I'll just share that my son has somehow morphed from a Very Fussy Infant to a big kid who likes to sit in his room reading while our Roomba vacuums under his bed. I never thought this would happen. I guess I thought I would eventually have a sixteen-year-old who wanted to be worn in a sling.

He tells me that three kids from preschool are his "friend complex." When he is proud of himself for making a particularly kickass castle out of pillows, he sings "Whatta Man" by Salt N Pepa, which I guess I taught him. Today we were playing the Lyra while we packed up our Christmas tree, and it segued from the Disneyland Pirates of the Caribbean album ("Yo Ho" sung by the parrot) to "March of the Fuckheads."

We are kind of a strange family, I think sometimes, but we have established a groove.

I think next year will be better for us all. I started thinking that when my luck got hot last week (the mystery pie, e.g.), and I still think that, even though I just got pronged hardcore by our auto mechanic and there is a tropical storm developing in January. If not then at least we will all be in the shit together, and I'll pay that mystery pie forward.

People, please. No more sleep wars. There's an article in the Times about co-sleeping. If you co-sleep and it is important that your choices be vindicated in the Times, then good for you. You've made it.

During Baldo's refluxy and colicky infancy, we rotated between every kind of sleep style in the world. Co-sleeping with mom and dad. Co-sleeping with dad while mom cried on the couch. Sleeping in a bassinet next to the bed. Sleeping in a Baby Bjorn (yes, I know chiropractors say it's bad for their spines, but I did it anyway because it actually stopped the crying) while I paced around the living room.

And this is what I have learned. Sleep however the hell your family gets rested, and stop proselytizing your method. If you co-sleep and enjoy it, great. If you crib sleep and enjoy it, great. I watched in horror as a first-time mom of a three-month-old posted innocently about her baby's sleep on a listserve, and she got dogpiled by family-bedders who posted hurtful and manipulative statements--"What Your Baby Is Thinking When You Ignore Her Cries," as if these people have ever met my child or hers--when all she was doing was asking for information. She got a guilt trip and some "us versus them" logic to rival the famous Mommy Wars.

Of course I am likewise bothered to think that people who do co-sleep get dogpiled by people who don't. I live in a hippie town, so I've never seen that happen, personally. I took a lot of shit for eventually resorting to the Ferber book--my son was eighteen months old, and we hadn't slept for shit once, despite being hardcore Searsians--and I decided at that point that I would not engage in another single dialogue about baby sleep. So I shouldn't even be posting this.

People do what they have to do to get through their days and nights as a parent. It's private business, and we have to trust each other to make the choices that are right for our own individual families. I will never, ever advocate a particular parenting method because that is up to particular parents. The only lesson to be learned from all of this uproar is that children are as different from one other as adults are, and there are a bunch of different ways to raise them. They will tell you what they need. You will listen to them. You will be flexible enough to try different things: get the baby in the bed if it appears to be the Right Thing for Her; take the baby out if it appears to be the Right Thing for Her. And you don't have to account for your choice to anyone--not your pediatrician, not your neighbors, not the people in your playgroup. No. One. Ever. That is instinctive parenting: When you set yourself free from "the experts" and make a choice based on listening to yourself and your family.

The happiest day of my life Dear Penthouse Forum:

I never thought these letters were real until it happened to me.

This morning my doorbell rang, and I actually had pants on, so I went to go answer it. Standing there was a twentysomeodd man, very clean-cut, smiling.

"Marrit?" he said.

"Yes?" I said.

"I have something for you," he said. And he extended to me a small white cardboard box.

Somehow I knew. "It's a pie!" I yelled.

"It is a pie," he said. "How did you know?"

"I make no secret of my feelings for pie," I said.

There was a card with it. The pie is from my son's Legos. They said they picked it up while they were running errands, but because they were speeding they got sent to jail, and they haven't made bail yet. So they had the pie delivered. They said the pharmacy wouldn't give them my meds or nicotine gum, but they're working on that from lockup.

This is not a joke.

We've got the goon squad and we're coming to town Sometimes you get those little glimpses of how Everything Is Going to Be All Right, such as when your son is returning from his bath, wrapped around the waist with a towel, singing, "Fa-fa-fa-fa-fashion!"

For some reason people younger than I am, people who hope to have children someday but consider themselves not quite ready, sometimes look to us as some kind of model, which I cannot understand, because we are not to be emulated. Anyhow, sometimes they say, "But how can you understand what little kids are saying? Little kids talk to me, and I can't figure out what they're talking about." And I'm here to tell them they can relax because this morning I couldn't figure out what my son was saying to me (despite three cups of coffee), and my son is freakishly articulate.

"Lettuce get in jam!" he yelled.

Lettuce get in jam? I said.

He fell over laughing.

"Was I at all right?" I asked.

Still laughing.

We repeated this several times. I went to the fridge and removed a lettuce and held it in one hand, gesticulating, while holding Aunt K's jar of apricot preserves in the other. "Lettuce get in jam?"

Turns out it was "Legos get in jail." I was so close!

"Why are the Legos going to get in jail?" I wondered.

"They were driving race cars down the street and they broke the law."

I didn't realize our Legos could drive. God, the errands on which I could have sent them!

the twelve days of head meds For the users with no apologies to Tom Cruise.

On the twelfth day of head meds my true love gave to me:
Twelve Ativan
Eleven Klonopin
Ten Lexapro
Nine Paxils popping
Eight St. John's Wort
Seven Celexa
Six Serzones
Five Ambien!
Four tabs of Zoloft
Three Prozac
Two Effexors
And a bottle of 5-HTP.

Merry Christmas.

I'm so blogging this You reach the point where you could be having a perfectly wonderful Actual Experience of some kind, but you will stop having that experience, deliberately, in order to blog about it. I don't even like the verb "blog"--would we for some reason not say "write," because that's what it is, after all?--but if you are excepting yourself from an Actual Experience in order to describe it, then you are most certainly blogging.

I stopped reading to blog about it (and then I started blogging about having stopped reading to blog, thereby not blogging about my Actual Experience at all, which is, like, meta-blogging). I got a bowl of ice cream and stopped eating it in order to blog about it; then the cat ate the ice cream I stopped eating in order to blog about. (I didn't want to end that sentence with a preposition, either. I also had to look up whether chocolate is dangerous for cats because there were a few chocolate chips left in the mint part. Apparently it's not harmful in small doses. Then again I am the person whose dog once ate an entire bag of Hershey kisses, including the foil wrappers. And was fine.)

Sometimes when I am talking to Aunt K. she'll get a weird look and say, "You're going to write on your blog about this," and I'll say yes, that's precisely what I am going to do, and I know that she is my best friend because she can tell exactly when I stop participating in an Actual Experience and start blogging, even if I'm nowhere near my desk.

because you're mine I am probably the last person to see Walk the Line. If I'm not reviewing a movie or showing it to a class, I will never see it. People sometimes ask me, "Hey, have you seen Blah-Blah?" and I'm, like, "No, I was watching Woman Sesame Oil Maker," and they get really huffy at me. But I didn't have an assignment this week, and I had babysitting owed from the, uh, "Ice Day" (whatever) on Thursday.

I am entirely in awe of Reese Witherspoon. She is a mother of two, and she plays her own autoharp. Every time she'd have the autoharp out, I'd start hyperventilating a little. Love that autoharp.

Baldo has recently learned to sing "Egg-Sucking Dog." Someday I'll tell him what it's really about but for now his understanding is entirely literal, as was mine when Johnny Cash performed that song on The Muppet Show when I was little. He sang it with Rowlf, who was properly horrified by "I'm gonna stomp your head in the ground." I'm telling you, life back then was just more candid. You couldn't get "Egg-Sucking Dog" anywhere near a group of children today. You'd have a problem with PETA, first of all. And that's not necessarily here nor there, but now that Richard Pryor and Johnny Cash are both dead, the world is just Too Safe, so safe it's dangerous.

those fucking cookies I didn't think I would, but I like Broadsheet, Salon.com's women's-issues blog. (I guess we'll call it that for lack of a readier term, though they seem like people's-issues to me.) Of course, now the whole site is basically a blog in that it invites people to brawl via user comments; rather than the civilized and moderated (but open and fair, and plenty contentious at times, to keep things interesting) Letters to the Editor we have the electronic equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Octagon. The discussion has inevitably deteriorated into yelling at women: you're too picky with men, you're too slutty, you're too old, you're too young, you're too neurotic, you're too controlling. Maureen Dowd is a shriveled-up hag who's symbolic of What's Wrong With Feminism; no, actually opting-out mothers who DO have husbands and children are symbolic of What's Wrong With Feminism. Mothers hover over their children to meet their own selfish needs! No, wait! Actually, mothers don't hover over their children ENOUGH, which is why those pesky kids are always running around in coffeeshops and bars causing the rest of society to bear the burden of raising them.

This is probably why I dreamed last night that I was frantically baking cookies. I had thirty sheets of cookies, maybe. And my cookies were burning and everyone was going to be so pissed off.

Per usual, the answer is perhaps a middle path between the extremes of our cultural schizophrenia. Of course parents of young children belong in bars sometimes. No one will admit this, but the parents at Chuck E. Cheese? Yeah. Their drinks are totally spiked, especially since the Chuckster stopped serving beer. How else could an adult human being endure that experience?

If you don't want kids in your neighborhood dive bar, I'm fine with that, and I'll see you later, okay? Now here's the windup and the pitch: Somebody get some capital together and make a clean, bright, inviting national-franchise Baby Brewpub, like Laurelwood (in Portland, Oregon) where there is a train table next to the tanks. That way parents and their children can take a break from lacing shapes and string cheese and tantrums at the park, toilet struggles, separation anxiety, and all the other hell which accompanies the joyous parts of life, and we can have a microbrew and feel for once the pleasure of not being unwelcome in public. Just as the world's crusty barflies need a break from their own life hell. Everybody needs a break from their own personal life hell, or at least a change of scenery. Did we learn nothing from our collective experiences over the past year? I (and all the parents I know) do our best to socialize our children, but everybody deserves a little help sometimes--help for which we are of course prepared to pay and tip, just like every other person in the Big Machine. And if my kid throws a snitfit we'll leave. I assure you.

ring ring A word to the publishers of Total 180!: Vicki Iovine is calling, and she wants her schtick back.

the internets When you get a $100 haircut and have a professional photograph taken (in which you are wearing a waterbra) you will attract strange mojo from the internets. Even if you are me. People out there in the world are just that desperate. Such as the gentleman from MySpace who contacted me as part of his search for "discreet playful friends." And I fell out of my chair laughing. Another time a person wrote to me seeking redheads for his harem. I thought that was funny enough for a response. I said, "Okay. But before I commit you need to know that I don't really look like that, I smell like ass because I never shower, and I've been ruined by childbirth and pie. That's a waterbra." And he was like, "Well, okay. You still up for it?" And I said sure, because as far as I can tell it's a virtual harem and nobody actually does anything. It's like collecting trading cards.

I really don't understand these impulses anymore. I don't understand any type of human interaction that is not predicated upon The Magic School Bus. "So...now do we learn about how the municipal water supply is filtered and redistributed? And then when we're done with that, I should make a snack? I have some pears that are probably ripe since I left them out last night."

When I did the Texas Book Festival I met a person in the author's lounge who happened to have the program turned to the page with my picture in it. I introduced myself and we shook hands. "Wow," she said next. "You really don't look anything like that." Because I have not yet figured out how to Photoshop myself in all three dimensions.

still waiting to get better When mothers say, "It gets better," when exactly do they mean? See, I've already waited too long, and all my hope is gone.

bosom buddies As a child of the eighties I am saddened to hear that Wendi Jo Sperber died on Tuesday after battling breast cancer. I always related to her onscreen: She was a big woman with a squeaky voice, and she was always kind of a schlemiel. The popular culture of Reagan's America was unkind to big, squeaky women, but she had grace and good humor even when she was cast as a castrating shrew; watch Bachelor Party or Stewardess School if you don't believe me. Girls like me knew we weren't going to grow up and magically turn into Donna Dixon. We were going to be the Wendi Jo Sperbers of the world. We were going to work at ad agencies with Peter Scolari and smuggle him and Tom Hanks into our building in drag, and we would love Peter Scolari to no avail from afar. And of course we were pretty sad about that, but part of growing up is that you come to understand that there's nothing automatically wrong with being Wendi Jo Sperber. You get to be resourceful and funny and honest, and people will tell you their secrets, and you will defend them. There is virtue in these things. You get to decide how to feel about who you are, and other people's opinions are simply less significant than your own.