Dear Blankie,

You may be wondering why I am writing you -- a 28-inch by 39-inch swath of tattered cloth -- a letter. After reading a bunch of articles about how important it is to let folks know just how much they mean to you, I wanted to let you know how I feel about you.

For a moment, picture when you vacuum around your couch. You move it out from the wall about a foot and suck up bits back there, then you return it to its position, and get the area right under the front where the vacuum head thingamajig kind of fits. But there is swath of floor -- maybe four inches wide along the whole the length of the couch -- that doesn’t get touched. I’ve dubbed this land Dustbunny Canyon.

New York Family used this for the "Last Word" section in the October 2013 issue. They had to edit it a bit for print and to make room for the very snazzy illustration, so I've posted the wee-bit longer version here. Head honcho Eric Messinger gave me one of the best comments yet about my writing, calling it maybe "the most deceptively profound personal essay we've ever run about being a parent." 

I entered a contest. A writing contest. Haven’t done that in, well, I can’t remember the last time I did that, so it’s been that long. It was run by the folks at LiteraryMama, a pretty awesome online literary magazine that focuses on moms who are writers…especially those that write about mothering. I didn’t win...but I got an honorable mention. Thing is, it wasn’t about winning.

“How is he doing this?”

The army of 26, sugar-filled, party-crazed five-year-olds have not moved.

For more than 53 minutes now.

He had us all – parents and children — captivated. Justin the Magician, the wunderdude we hired for Kiddo’s birthday party, managed to shock and awe the group of somewhat-cynical NYC parents around me. It wasn’t his magic per se (though it was great), but the fact that he had, somehow, put our children in a giddy party trance. (I’m thinking it was a magical variation on a Vulcan mind-meld.)