Whew.

As of this writing, the cakes are all made, the ten-year-old boy sleepover party is over (at 2:30 am when I morphed into a screaming battleaxe), three baseball games have been played, and five loads of laundry are folded and put away.

I'll leave you with scenes from the party:

Pre-party dancing

The Big O can dance --

Henry and his buddy Noah

In the interest of people's privacy, I won't post pictures of the boys who attended the party except in a general sense -- but they were all WILD. They hung from the trees, ran around with toy guns playing cops and robbers and war, opened their mouths and screamed war cries incessantly and generally tore up the neighborhood. I stood in the doorway to my house and made feeble efforts at control.

Henry's homemade death-defying zip line

Thank God -- another use for the Halloween costume -- (I'm such a good mother)

 What about cake?

We started with a chocolate cake with plain white butter-cream frosting. Lots of candy in bowls all around:

Oliver gave orders to begin the decorating process:

All hands necessary to push in the ten candles 

String licorice -- Pollack style

Do your teeth hurt, yet?

Happy Birthday Oliver!

How to make Los Angeles drivers happy:

walk home from the grocery store with your beautiful girl and 2 dozen birthday balloons --

Well, of course it is -- Friday the 13th --

Sophie is home from school and I've got two million cakes to make and finish for clients. Oliver is having a birthday party tonight and I locked myself out of the house when the FedEx guy delivered the diapers and the dog squeezed through the door and the wind blew it shut. Blogger was down for two days and lost two of my posts -- one of which highlighted my new mug and mantra:

So that's what I'm doing. Eating cake (although I'm still on The Cleanse and doing well!) and moving on. Sophie is now awake. The cakes are all but finished, and I'm going to get the house ready for an army of boys.

Last day of work chocolate cupcakes with chocolate and regular cream cheese icing

White Cake with Raspberry Filling and Vanilla Frosting

Double Chocolate Cupcakes

Another photo because I'm pleased with these

Chocolate Extravaganza Cake with Chocolate Buttercream Filling
and Chocolate Ganache Glaze

Perhaps it's just as well

that Blogger has been down for nearly two full days, wiping out the last post -- at least for me. My last post was a recounting of a terrible moment with Sophie as she seized outside of a tennis court where Oliver was having a lesson. Sophie had been doing very well -- the new medication appeared to be helping her immensely. During the last couple of weeks, though, the big seizures have returned, and while it's still not that bad, in the scheme of things, we decided to raise the medication and see if that helps. She's now on about the biggest dose that she could be on which makes me half-hopeful and half-insane. As she reached for her drink this morning and overshot, I wondered if she saw double. I helped her back to her room after breakfast this morning and she literally fell into bed and sleep. She's still sleeping now, and I'm wondering if we're poisoning her. I'm wondering if the medication will kick in and the seizures will stop. I'm wondering if she'll become tolerant of the side effects or not.

I'm wondering if I'll ever stop wondering.

eyes wide shut

Do you need some help? the lady had gotten out of her car and walked over the grass toward Sophie and me. Sophie lay twitching in the sun, her face in my lap, her seizure as sudden as usual, a toppling over from where she sat cross-legged and then a long, low groan as her arms and legs stiffened and jerked and I cradled her as best I could thinking there were grass stains on her and on me and still I waved to Oliver as he hit tennis balls with his teacher. It's all right, I said to the lady, she has them all the time. And I turned my head away from Sophie and up toward her, I'm used to it, smiling reassuringly at her broad, concerned face. The hem of her dress rested on Sophie's staring face, it was purple and white and cheap. Thank you, though, thank you so much for asking, I added, and turned my face back to Sophie. She turned then and left, pulling her car out into the street and I felt that old dread descend upon me, the dread of questions and uncertainty, the resignation, the pulling away from now, movement down an endless path. Tonight, I lay in bed with Sophie, wide awake, her hands clammy, her eyes open, her brain scrambled. I stroked the hair off her face and rubbed her temples: I willed the energy of my desire into her head, I closed my eyes.

The Crossroads

The great Robert Johnson who claimed to have sold his soul to the Devil

My sidebar has been shifted around, mainly because I was accepted into the almighty BlogHer advertising network, and while I shirk at the commercial aspects of the whole thing and waffled back and forth on whether or not to display that rather large ad and adhere to their rules and regulations and agonized (a tiny bit) about using the blog for not just writing and musing but for making money -- well, the money won out. If anyone objects, I'm sorry. I really am. Nothing would please me more than to come to this site and not see a single promotion for a single product or service. But, here's the thing. I need extra money, mainly for childcare so that I can get more breaks from the 24/7 required as CEO of Sophie, Inc.

If this helps, hallelujah.

You won't see any ads for conservative political and religious causes. There won't be any ads to save your souls because Jesus is coming next week. I'll probably make enough to pay for Mary Poppins to visit for all of five minutes or so, but I've noticed that a lot of very beautiful blogs are part of the BlogHer network, and if you knew me back in seventh and eighth grade when I peaked out at my very ugliest and most awkward and incredibly un-cool -- well, I feel like I've made it now. But I remember my origins and won't scorn you if you adhere to your strict principles and just keep writing beautiful prose and poetry on your own blogs, unsullied by capitalism. You'll still be my friend, and I hope I can be yours even though my soul has been sold.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight another new thing on my sidebar:

My dear friend Suzy gave it to me last week, and it's my new mantra.

Street Tonglen

Alley near Melrose and LaBrea, Los Angeles 2011

I saw this painted on a wall in an alley right next to some gang tagging and thought immediately of Tonglen (I posted about Tonglen here).

Birthday

Requested birthday dinner: "The Godfather" Sandwich at All About the Bread

Tres Leches Birthday Cake (the real birthday cake on Friday at party!)

Singing Happy birthday -- to himself!

The rare family photo -- I should have taken off my glasses!

Double Digit Dessert

Oliver, Ollie, The Big O, My Dessert is now TEN YEARS OLD. 

He went to bed last night saying that his last day as a nine year old wasn't so good. There had been arguments at school about handball and one kid mouthed the "F" word at him when Oliver objected to his idea for their group project. Today is the first day of California standardized testing at school -- who wants to take tests all day when you've been alive for a decade? When Henry reminded him that he was born at 1:15 in the afternoon on the 10th which technically gave him at least another morning until mid-afternoon to be nine years old, he perked up. Do you have a watch I can wear, he asked me. I want to tell the teacher when I'm ten.

Oliver, Ollie, The Big O was my Dessert, my little last baby who nestled his baby head in the space between my chin and shoulder and rested there for what seemed like years until he pushed himself down and became the fired-up, nearly impossible, brilliantly funny, thrilling child he is today. I've written about him here and here if you're new to my blog and need some dessert.

Happy Birthday, Oliver!

I love you so much it's outrageous.

Cake

Yellow Cake with Lemon Zest
Lemon Curd Cream Filling
Lemon Cream Cheese Icing
White Chocolate Curls

Tonglen

Mother's Day, Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 2011

Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.

I had tea yesterday with a dear friend who shares many of the same problems that I have -- balancing a life of one's own with a family, a husband, financial difficulties, a child with special needs and the siblings of that child. We also share a similar sense of humor. We joked about the circus aspect of our lives, about our roles as ringmasters, about how impossible it all is and seems and how relentless. We even joked about gassing ourselves, pantomiming the method. At one point in our conversation, she looked at me and asked Do you ever wonder why it's so hard for us? I know she meant why our lives are so much harder than many of those we know -- many of our friends and most of our families -- and I don't have an answer other than a deep, abiding knowing that life is hard. It's hard, anyway. 


Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.


Those words are the great Pema Chodron's, a Buddhist teacher whose essay about Tonglen, the Tibetan word for giving and taking, a meditation practice, sustains me when I'm feeling down or overwhelmed, when life's suffering threatens to muffle its joy. 


Tonglen is a practice where one works with our tendency to avoid suffering and resist pain, a habit that also causes us to armor ourselves, separate ourselves from both interior experiences and those of others. It is a practice of compassion where you use your own suffering to alleviate the sufferings of others. Instead of resisting your feelings of anger, fear, despair, grief, pain, etc., you acknowledge them with your breath -- you even embrace them with your breath. And then you breathe out. When you breathe in again, you might acknowledge all the suffering of all the people you know and embrace that, too. And then you breathe out. When I am near to despair over Sophie's seizures I practice tonglen by breathing in the sufferings of all the mothers I know who have children that seize and all the mothers I don't know who have children that seize. And then I breathe out. I breathe out love and compassion and health and happiness for all those mothers and all those children.

I believe that embracing suffering, meeting it, accepting it and even embracing it might lead to understanding it, and that understanding connects me, deeply, to others.

Tonglen reverses the usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure and, in the process, we become liberated from a very ancient prison of selfishness. We begin to feel love both for ourselves and others and also we begin to take care of ourselves and others. It awakens our compassion and it also introduces us to a far larger view of reality. It introduces us to the unlimited spaciousness that Buddhists call shunyata. By doing the practice, we begin to connect with the open dimension of our being. At first we experience this as things not being such a big deal or so solid as they seemed before. 
--Pema Chodron

Postcards from Paradise

Me, my mother and my sister Melissa (sister Jennifer wasn't born!)
Florida, 1966 

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

See other Postcards from Paradise at rebecca's. 

There'll probably be at least a million of these posted, but

when I first read this poem in The New Yorker, I loved it completely.

Here you go, and

Happy Mother's Day!

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.


--Billy Collins

Listen to him read it here.

Cupcakes and Sophie

I'm busy baking today -- birthday parties and wedding showers -- grateful for the business and feeling wackadoodle. 

Vanilla Cupcakes with Pale Violet Frosting
Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

This is one of Sophie's favorite poses -- she's folded herself up like an origami swan since she was a tiny girl. We used to joke that the caption for that pose should be my life is shit and leave me alone. (Even in the early days, a sense of humor prevailed!)