Life Out Loud

"(Michael) Jackson taken to hospital with flu; jury selection delayed a week'' - Associated Press, Feb.

In the beginning, when it came to parenting a daughter, I wasn't exactly in the pink. Sure, I had been a girlie-girl as a child.

Someday your prince will come. Sadly, if you're Camilla Parker Bowles, he'll come with some serious baggage.

It isn't my actual children that are causing me stress these days, but the "maybe baby" that haunts me.

Clearly, the problem is that I expect too much. I expect, for example, that my cellular telephone might actually make telephone calls.

I am raising ingrates. My children, like so many others, are ferried about in the automotive equivalent of a living room.

I have recently received a fair amount of mail asking me if I have, and I quote, "always lived in the country?" What a silly question.

It's hard to know when, exactly, to proclaim an otherwise beautiful family experience a disaster, but that does seem to be the way these things go.

Recently, I have begun to branch out in my daily newspaper reading. Now that I have discovered the birth announcements, I am no longer confined to the police blotter to keep up with the myriad ways humans can commit crimes against the innocent.

I could do the obvious joke about how my New Year's resolution is to quit procrastinating tomorrow. Or I could circulate one of those "Top 10 New Year's resolutions" joke lists that clog up the Internet incessantly and get forwarded to you by everyone you even remotely know (with explicit instruction to forward to 10 friends immediately or you will have horrible luck and probably die).