Join a fitness class? No thanks, I’ve got a toddler!

There was no gentle way to say it.
The guy setting up a new fitness program at the Villa Roma wanted me to join his class.
You can’t blame him.
It’s the end of the winter, and I look it.
My thighs are the consistency of curdled milk.
My arms look as though I’m ready to take flight.
Thank goodness I have a secret weapon.
She’s about 3 feet tall, and she can run like the wind.
I don’t need a personal trainer. I’ve got Jillian.
Like the very best of those trained to torture those of us with a little too much junk in the trunk, she starts by rousing me from my precious slumber at an unearthly hour of the morning.
And then she’s off.
After carrying her down the stairs – because, although she can do it herself any other time of the day, in the morning she requires I do the toting – we jet into the bathroom and then out of it.
She’s hungry, naturally, and after preparing a piece of cinnamon toast or bowl of cereal, I form the misguided notion that I’ll be allowed to get comfortable with a book on the couch or – at the very least – putter around the kitchen.
But now that she’s eaten exactly one bite of breakfast, Jillian is thirsty, and it’s up to me to fill the cup she’s already pulled from its drawer before she spills the bottle of Super Grover juice she’s managed to extricate from the fridge.
After watering down the juice to prevent the sugar rush that I can see coming, I head back to the bathroom to brush my own teeth only to be met by Jillian with a book (or movie, or puzzle, or toy teapot) in hand.
Her look says it all. Teeth later. Toys now.
“What do you say?” I ask.
“Please, please, please,” she replies, hopping from one foot to the other while she tries to hold on to the object in her hand and reach the cat’s tail swishing behind the toilet tank.
“Please, please, please!” she repeats.
I make a half-hearted swing with the brush around my mouth, spit, and head to the living room floor. The TV tuned to Noggin for background noise, I set up the Play-Doh on a cookie sheet and start making purple turtles and blue dogs.
With her involved in serious snake- and cake-making, glancing every once in awhile at the screen, I back out of the room.
It’s 7:45 a.m.
I feel like I’ve just run a marathon.
We’re just getting started.
She’ll want to color soon, or have a tea party or eat a box of raisins or pull all the books off of her shelf to find “Mind Your Manners Biscuit” so I can read it seven times in a row.
We’ll play “chase me” with the dog this afternoon, then dive bomb the cat sleeping under the dining room table.
No, I don’t need a fitness program. I don’t have the time!

What you say doesn't stay online

There were plenty of lessons to be learned in the Eliot Spitzer/Client 9 mess earlier this month.
But the one most underreported was the very “what-not-to-do” that serves the media the best.
The minute the identity of the former governor’s alleged call girl slipped into a reporter’s hands, I’d bet he did what we all do – plugged it into Google.
What came back, of course, was the MySpace page of one Ashley Alexandra Dupre.
It proved a veritable gold mine of information – with her sob story in her own words and sexy songs in her own voice.
The pictures that would go on to appear in every major news outlet were picked right off Myspace and distributed to the masses.
Good old-fashioned investigative reporting is alive and well, and it’s being spoon-fed by the almighty Google and its partners at MySpace, Facebook, the Internet Movie Database and hundreds of thousands of others.
I’m as guilty as the reporters at the New York Times, Newsweek and the lot.
If I need to know something, I go online. It’s not always easy to find, but more than half the time, what I want is there.
When online social networking became soccer moms’ new foe, I sided with free speech over the fear mongering. The greater part of my argument was rooted in the need to give kids an outlet, with the proviso that parents keep an eye – and an ear – out for trouble.
The mining of Ms. Dupre’s MySpace page for dirt by the media only cements my point.
Everything you say online can – and will – be used.
Against you.
If it can be.
Considering Ms. Dupre’s site is still online several weeks after it became the go-to spot for the ultra curious and a long list of folks who felt they could pass judgment on the situation – I’d say she’s taking advantage of just how it’s being used.
I doubt the same would be said of the nasty comments left behind on a blog by a 40-something-year-old businessman who thought the vastness of the World Wide Web was protecting him in ways that the regular letters to the editor section of the local paper would not.
What about the lady who logged on to make a list of her favorite books?
Their ho hum, every day news could suddenly become front-page fodder given the right circumstances.
So before you type, just imagine the same words coming out of Katie Couric’s mouth tomorrow night on the evening news.
If it sounds OK, go ahead. If not, well, you might want to rephrase.

Because we love her

Writers have their own brand of tunnel vision when they lose someone.
We sit in our preferred pose – be it in front of a keyboard or with pen in hand – and try to pour our souls out in words.
Sometimes they come in fits and starts, sometimes in one fluid motion, sometimes not at all. What’s cathartic for us may not be all that interesting to anyone else, but that rarely stops us.
Because what’s important about the people we love the most is that people carry on with their best traits, that we don’t lose sight of why we let people make a mark on our world.
We don’t get to pick our family, it’s true, but we can choose who takes the best pieces of our hearts.
So we write about the memories of a woman with a biting wit – of the sort that could drop a lesser-armed opponent in the war of words with just one.
Memories of a woman who could laugh . . . and laugh . . . and laugh.
We want to tell the world that she was a woman who snuck cookies to her great-grandchildren for the simple reason that children need cookies.
We want you to sneak cookies to your great-grandkids, or your grandkids, or even your own kids because let’s face it – we can’t put them in a bubble.
She was a woman who accepted her grandchildren despite their liberal leanings, not because of them.
And so we want to tell you to accept your children, your grandchildren, for being different – but don’t be afraid to let them know how you feel.
You can pester and badger and tease and still love. And if you want to teach your great-grandchild to say something that will drive their mother crazy, it’s OK, she’ll know you love her.
She was a woman who didn’t believe in doing things she had to, but delighted in doing them because she wanted to.
It’s easy to get caught up in the platitudes that come in the days following a loss – “she’s in a better place,” “these things just happen,” “time will heal.”
None are true and all are true at the same time – and although she was too much of a lady to cross her eyes and stick out her tongue, she would have grinned when I did both.
She was proud, and she was private.
She was proud of me, and she always let me know it.
That’s why, for the first time, I’ve obeyed her wishes – I decided not to include her in my column.
But I realized I couldn’t do it. Because here I am, writing.

Jumping puddles

There’s nothing I would have liked better than to join my daughter in the puddles in front of the small office at the county landfill.
“Come on, splash, Mommy, splash, it’s, splash, fun!!”
Her little pink boots stood out against the brown water like springtime peeking in on the county on a dreary March day.
Her giggles were infectious, and I so wanted to join her.
But with a contract signing later that day with a bride- and groom-to-be, I opted instead to slip into the backseat of my car and pull out my camera.
“Splash.” “Click.” “Sploooosh.” “Click.”
She cavorted, and I captured it.
Her blonde ponytail bouncing, her little knees bending and then jump . . . “Splash.”
I’d like to say I’m the parent who gives in to these moments, who can clearly see the difference between kids being kids and kids being bratty kids.
More often there are a hundred thoughts rushing through my brain as I say “no” to the lollipop at the bank because we’re headed to the newspaper office and I can’t have sticky hands all over my computer or “let’s go” when she just wants one more go-round on the slide when I have to get to Rock Hill for an interview.
Instead I cling fast to the moments when I just let go. When I let her hop from puddle to puddle, ignoring the water wicking up the legs of her jeans, turning a blind eye to the brown spots at the base of her curls.
Reporting is a job that can be done from anywhere – in part because it’s a job that must be done from everywhere.
It led a pregnant me to believe it would be easy to meet the demands of both job and motherhood with style and grace.
It’s led countless people to eye my sweatshirt and jeans, my lack of make-up, my pockets bulging with toys and baggies of pretzels and shake their head.
“Oh, but you’re so lucky,” they tell me. “You just don’t know how lucky you are.”
I am lucky.
You might say I’ve hit the mother load!
Husband, daughter and career I love – well, one can have it all, it seems.
And once in awhile, when the subject of my interview stands outside egging my daughter on with a wide grin as she bounces from one foot to the other in the muddy water, I remember why.

'I Spy' Inspiration

I felt like I was handing over a bit of my soul when I slipped my well-worn copy of “Harriet the Spy” into my friend Jennifer’s hands.
“I want this back,” I warned, but thought better of adding “and take good care of it.”
I wouldn’t have let her have it if I didn’t believe she would.
This, after all, is the woman who carefully pencils on the first page of each book she buys when and where she made the purchase.
Her shelves are lined with more volumes than the case that makes up an entire wall of my living room could handle.
Still, I was uneasy.
The words “well-worn” can’t describe the state the paperback is in after years of reading, rereading and more rereading.
The book is dog-eared, wrinkled, bent and shabby – and no wonder.
Harriet M. Welsch made me crazy for tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise – a passion that befuddles my husband to this day.
Moreover, a character dreamt up by Louise Fitzhugh more than a decade before I was born let the tween-aged me know that it was OK to be nosy as sin.
And as the end of the book proved, it’s even better to write about it.
Most of us can’t remember the exact moment we finally fell upon what we wanted to be when we grew up – after the fantasies, I mean, after drifting from dreams of firemen and ballerinas to lawyers and doctors and back to rocket ships and superman capes.
But somewhere in the fourth or maybe even the 14th read-through, I like to imagine a seed was planted.
When I grow up, I’ll be a spy, only better. Instead of scribbling away in green composition books (15 from the ages of 8 until 11 in Harriet’s case), I’d write my observations for the world to see.
For all intents and purposes, I grew too old for Harriet and her odd nanny, Ole Golly, her friends Sport and Janie and her regular spy route.
Picking through the library shelves in Jeffersonville a few weeks ago, I came across “The Spellman Files,” which quickly proved to be a grown-up version of my beloved Harriet.
I couldn’t wait to share the news with my favorite fellow bookworm.
“Harriet the Spy?” Jennifer asked. “Haven’t read it.”
For a minute I was quiet, then I sputtered, “what do you mean you haven’t read it?”I raced to the bookshelves and pawed through the pile that I just can’t part with: “Anne of Green Gables,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Nanny Diaries.”
There’s some of everything up there, and in the center was my prized possession – the copy of “Harriet the Spy” I’d had since I was 8.
I placed it in her open hands gently, all the while aware that the melodramatic Harriet of the page had nothing on the real, live Jeanne Sager.
To her credit, Jennifer looked down at the well-thumbed tome and promised in an equally serious voice to return it safely – or at least buy me a less wrinkled copy.
She gets me.
I have a feeling she’ll love Harriet.