And when I say “practically,” I mean “forcefully.”

Oh, that’s right—I have a blog. I knew there was something I was forgetting.

We’re back from scenic Salt Lake City, where my brother- and sister-in-law live with my brand spanking new niece. Conveniently, Heather and Jon also live there, so when we weren’t gorging on sweet, sweet New Baby, we were hanging out with them, begging them to move to Jersey. (Their responses: “No, thanks. Really, no. No. No. Please let go of me.” I think they’re coming around!)

Of course they won’t come here, because there’s no reason anyone should ever leave Salt Lake. Damn it, we should all have such low humidity. Maybe some people find zero percent humidity to be a bad thing, but I am squarely in the Hooray For Desert Climate camp. Not to mention, it’s sunny all the damn time, and there’s all this, like, space, and everyone is friendly. Crazily friendly. I was suspicious, but they seemed like they meant it. I had to find a doctor for this sore throat that I was sure was strep and that I would kill the baby (it wasn’t, and I didn’t), and I was calling all kinds of doctors and urgent care places, trying to figure out where to go, and everyone I talked to was so lovely and genuinely concerned and not trying to hang up on me, I just wanted to cry. At the urgent care clinic, the nurse put me in an examining room, and then returned five minutes later to apologize because the doctor was late. Five minutes. I practically humped her. And then the doctor arrived, and he was hot. They think of everything there!

When we weren’t ogling the baby, we were leering at my brother- and sister-in-law’s nice house, with its plants that are alive and its stuff that isn’t broken. Scott and I would ask questions like, “So how do you, uh, keep plants from being all dead and you know?” and “How much did you pay for, like, this thing that works and also is pretty?” We got some answers, but all we wanted is for them to come live here with us and do everything we’re too lazy to do.

So once my sore throat was better, I decided to throw myself down some stairs. That’s what I did at 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday (we were leaving at 5:30 a.m., and I figured I’d ruin any chances of sleep with an injury or two). And I’m bruised in so, so many ways. My arm has this fascinating lump on it that if you touch it I scream. It hurt so much that I didn’t even notice the broken pinky toe until 12 hours later, when I was all why does my toe hurt? And what’s that purple stuff on my foot? And then I took my shoe off (NEVER TAKE THE SHOE OFF) and saw the horror therein. I honestly saw stars. If I had had a tiny tiny saw in my purse, I might have just sheared the thing off. Just to never look at it again.

I'd do it all over again, bruises and all, to see Henry holding his new cousin and kissing her soft little head. If my baby niece and her lovely parents were to come move here they could beat me up every day. And if that doesn’t get them here, nothing will.

If this doesn’t brighten your day, then whoops, you have no soul.

This, my friends, is why having a child is a worthwhile endeavor: yes, it’s hard, and it’s smelly, and you miss all that sleep you used to get. And then the years pass, and you have to deal with grades, and heartaches, and driving tests. But then! (Stay with me, here.) Then one day you wake up, and your behemoth of a man-child has left a CD for you, and you listen to this song that he wrote. And you realize that however big you thought your boy’s heart is, it’s actually ten times bigger. (Metaphorically speaking.)

If you’re even luckier, though, you get your reward early—say, when your child is three and a half, and you hear the song that your nephew wrote for your little boy.

(Incidentally, I have two nephews, both of whom are too amazing to be true—I think they may in fact be holograms—but, ahem, only one of them wrote a song for Henry. So, Dave, if you want equal airtime, may I suggest an oil portrait? Or how about a little interpretative dance? Just a thought.)

Here, without further ado, is “Underwater Batman (Song for Henry).”

(EDITED TO ADD: Hey, do you see the link up at the upper right? The one that casually suggests that you might want to take a survey? This is from the people at Blogads, and will help me get more money in the future, so I won't whine as much about my lack of money. If you could take it, that would be nice. Okay. Thank you.)

Hello, we must be going.

So we’re going to Italy tomorrow, and did I brush up on my Italian? I did not. Zut alors! Wait, that’s wrong.

We are going to a farmhouse in Tuscany with my mother-in-law and brother-in-law and brother-in-law’s new wife whom I now get to call my sister-in-law. For two weeks, we’re going! We’re going to be in the country! With, um, donkeys? I think there might be donkeys. Really I have no idea. I have done very little thinking about this trip. Does it show?

My mother-in-law wishes to celebrate her birthday by taking us on this trip, and who am I to argue? I’m a little nervous about the flight with Henry (read: I’m picturing Henry flinging vomit and feces all about the cabin as he skitters across the ceiling and screeches the Nicene Creed backward) but I’m sure it will be fine! Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! Hurgh!



Anyway, then we’ll be in Italy, so even if the ride is as awful as I can imagine, we’ll still end up in Italy. The last time we were in Italy it was our honeymoon, and it was fantastical and wonderamic, except we flew Air France and therefore we had to deal with the French. On the way there I sat next to an aging, bitter old crone who wore too much makeup and applied smelly salves to her hairy cheeks and then berated me when I suggested that maybe using nail polish remover in a plane wasn’t the most considerate way to go. She actually called me a “spoiled American” and repeatedly sneered, “You want your own plane,maybe?” And oh, how I loathed the French, on that trip.

But not as much as on our way back, when we missed our connecting flight and ended up being put up in a hotel in a town called Bagnolet. Bagnolet, Where the Hookers Are! Actually, maybe it was a nice town, I don’t know—we were too busy hiding in our room from the hookers down in the lobby. They looked mean, those hookers, like they wanted to cut up some Americans. As for the room we were in, there were brown streaks running down the walls out of the vents and the sheets made us itch and the only channel that worked on the television was airing “Men in Black” in French.

But the Italy part, that was nice.

This time we’re taking Lufthansa, so I expect we’ll return with tales of Germanic cruelty. Along with many, many pictures of Henry eating gelato.

If you're wondering where all the liquor in the tri-state area went, here's your answer.

My mother has thousands of cousins, all of whom attended my nephews’ graduation party last weekend. (One nephew graduated from high school, the other from college. My friend J. observed how convenient this was, that they could combine the two parties. Yes, I said, a lot of planning went into that. That’s why she had kids four years apart. Then we made all kinds of tasteless jokes about the many abortions she had to have between the two, to keep alive her dream of the combined graduation party. Ha, ha! )

Anyway, my mother’s parents had hundreds of siblings, and they spawned progeny that numbered somewhere in the millions. And they all attended the party, all these old guys. They are all loud and aggressively jovial; they guffaw at their own jokes and if you don’t laugh, well, you had better laugh. I hadn't seen them since my wedding, and in the past few years it seems they've all become caricatures of themselves. Their heads have become larger than I believed possible. Their tans deeper. Their chains, more plentiful. Their wives younger and then older and then back to the younger ones.

God, their giant heads. They have faces like granite slabs. I said about one cousin, His head is an enormous block, and my dad said, That’s true in so many ways.

One of them calls me “Alison.” He’s known me for 36 years, you’d think he’d have my name right by now. He’s the one who kept telling me at my wedding that my husband “is a real good guy.” Except with his pronunciation it kind of sounded like “goo’ guy,” and that plus the manicured hand gripping the back of your neck sent the clear message: but if he stops being a good guy he’ll end up at the bottom of the river.

I make them sound like criminals, but they’re good guys. Or good fellas! Italians, you see! Crooked, dirty Italians!

No, no. They are clean and nice. And not even very good at bocce. Or maybe they were too drunk to play well. See how I tear down all the old stereotypes.

Henry wisely kept his distance for most of the party, but as things wound down, he ventured out to the deck and introduced himself to a few of them. They stuck their tremendous faces in his and bared their capped teeth. Henry’s response was the same each time: “And what’s your name?” he would ask them, and when they barked out their answer, he would exclaim, “Wow! That’s a lovely name!” He says this to every name, but you couldn’t tell these guys that. They thought that was the greatest thing ever. And then they flew off in their fleet of rocket ships and went off to populate their own galaxy. At least, that’s what I told Henry.