Friday, I sent off the completed manuscript for my new novel, GOOD LUCK. And then I collapsed on the sofa, while I rested my fingers, cramped from weeks of furious typing, and thought about all the things I could do now that I’d finished the book. The walks I’d take on the beach. Playground trips with Sam. Catching up with friends.

I woke up on Monday with the best of intentions to relax. I took Lulu for a long walk on the beach. I worked through my backlog of emails. I read a stack of books to Sam. I made chicken nachos for George.

By Tuesday, the novelty of this leisure had completely worn off and I decided I couldn’t take one more minute of not having a project to work on. So I marched off to the Home Depot, bought a gallon of sapphire blue paint, and spent the rest of the day slapping it up on the kitchen wall.

“What do you think?” I asked George excitedly when he came home that evening. “Don’t you love it? Isn’t it pretty?”

George just stared, first at the walls and then at me.

“What?” I asked defensively.

“It’s just so . . . bright. It actually hurts my eyes,” he said.

“So you really don’t like it?”

“If this color was a noise, it would be an eight-year-old playing the trumpet,” George pronounced.

(Back in our younger, wilder days, George and I lived in a duplex occupied on the other side by a family with an eight-year-old who played the trumpet. He was not good. In fact, he was so bad, his parents used to make him go outside to practice. This would have been bad enough, but was made worse by the fact that they would tell him to stand on our side of the house, by our back door, while he played. And then they had the nerve to act offended when I complained about this to them.)

And now that I’ve had a few days to consider my rashly chosen paint color, I have to admit George does have a point. It is . . . bright. Very, very bright. So today I’m heading back to the Home Depot to buy more paint. And primer, to cover my earlier mistake.

ME: Do you think we need to buy a kit for making swan ice sculptures at home?

GEORGE: No.

And yet, I’m not convinced.

Doesn’t everyone need one of these?

Apparently, there was an asshole convention at the park today.

First, there were the lazy moms who parked themselves on a bench 40 feet away from the actual playground. I’m assuming they did this in order to abdicate all control over their children, who proceeded to act out Lord of the Flies in its entirety.

Then there were the snotty moms, who chose to sit on the only two swings on a playground crowded with children, and gabbed away about elementary school wait lists, oblivious to the kids who kept looking wistfully at the swings. (The playground fathers all told their kids to wait until the ladies cleared off. I’m not as nice. I loudly asked Sam, “YOU WANT TO SWING? WELL, LET’S GO ASK THESE LADIES IF THEY’LL LET US HAVE A TURN!” Seriously . . . why are men so averse to a little conflict?)

Then there was the jackass who drove his SUV up onto the park lawn, opened all the doors and back hatch, and began to blast us all with his ill-advised choices in music.

As the snooty maître d’ said in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, “I weep for the future.”

Speaking of weeping for the future, we got Ding Dong Ditched last night. I blame the boy who lives next door, nick-named (by me) The Pestilence a la P.G. Woodhouse. The boy – known as Jon-Jon, if you can believe that – has a vacant eyed, shifty look about him, and is reputed to spend his afternoons shooting at birds with a B.B. gun. Why not just arrest him now, and safe the police the trouble down the line?

One of the amazing things about parenthood is the things that you hear yourself say. And I don’t just mean the perennial favorite Because I said so.
The other day, Sam, my mom and I were at Gymboree. I was trying to persuade Sam to try on a hoodie sweater with a picture of a dump truck on it; he was more interested in hiding in the middle of a clothing rounder.
(Sam likes hiding in clothes racks. He especially likes bursting out from between the hangers, hopefully scaring someone in the process. I’ve tried telling him that this is really only funny until someone keels over with a heart attack, but that isn’t the most persuasive line to take with a four-year-old.)
Anyway. After five minutes of trying to coax Sam out of his rounder, I finally gave up and said, “If you come out, I’ll let you play with your knife.”
Instant silence fell over the Gymboree mothers. Shocked faces turned toward me. The air was thick with judgment.
Only my mother laughed. “You know, that just doesn’t sound right,” she said.
“It’s a foam knife,” I explained to the now silent crowd. “Peter Pan’s dagger. From the Disney Store. See?” I took the foam knife out of its Disney Store bag to illustrate my point. The staring continued. I became defensive. “Hey, don’t judge me! He just really likes Peter Pan!”
So, yeah, I’m now known as the mom who arms her son. Sure, it’s a foam dagger. (A really cool foam dagger that makes chink-chink-chink sounds when you press a little button on the handle. He has the Captain Hook sword and hook, too, so we can duel and yell, “Say you’re a codfish!”) But I guess from now on it’s probably not something I should announce in the middle of Gymboree.

“Happy Book Day, Mama!” Sam announced this morning (with lots of prompting from his dad).

And today is an official Book Day! My new Young Adult book, GEEK HIGH (written under my pen name, Piper Banks) is now available!

At this school, everyone’s a geek. And Miranda Bloom still can’t fit in…

Miranda is a math genius with divorced parents, an evil stepmother, and no boyfriend in sight. She can’t even fit in with the other geeks at the Nottingham Independent School for high-IQ students, because they actually have useful talents. Miranda, on the other hand, is known as “The Human Calculator,” which doesn’t amount to much when people have, you know, their own calculators.

Then Miranda gets stuck planning the school’s Snowflake Gala. And as she struggles to find a date and drum up some school spirit at Nottingham-aka “Geek High”-she finds that who you are means more than where you fit in.

Buy it for your favorite teen/tween here or here.