If the first two days of the New Year are any indication of what is to come, I am due for a year�s worth of sloth, junk food, and general decadence. Not that I�m complaining. Our New Year�s Eve dinner was a success. After we did the dishes, we repaired with what was left of our champagne to the family room and watched Francois Truffaut�s �Tirez sur le pianiste,� which was strange and funny and tragic and bizarre in that peculiarly French way. It also was startlingly contemporary, given that it was made in 1960. It also made me want to rewatch �Diva�, which was a near obsession of mine during my high school and early college years. For years I wanted to live in a French New Wave film. Part of me still does, I think. That�s the part of me that tends to wear all black and who loves walking around under the el tracks at night. Apparently my French New Wave side also wants very badly to be run over by a bus.

Yesterday afternoon, we had my husband�s mother, siblings, and nieces over for our annual New Year�s Day celebration, which involved obscene amounts of food, including three entrees, 6 kinds of cheese, three kinds of bread, and at least 12 different kinds of cookies plus an ice cream cake. I should mention that there were 9 people in attendance, including AJ who doesn�t eat anything (I recently read an article that referred to preschoolers with eating habits like AJ�s as �airitarians,� which I love and have wholeheartedly adopted into daily use.). Needless to say there are leftovers. But did we dine on leftovers today? Oh, no, we did not. Instead, we took AJ to a basketball game at Loyola (we lost) and treated him to his first ever (but surely not his last) visit to Superdawg, and I�m proud to say that he is a total convert. Strangely, it was not the giant Tarzan and Jane hot dogs on the roof, their eyes flashing creepily, nor was it the tray that clips onto the window of the car. No, it wasn�t even the chocolate shake so thick that not one of us could get any through the straw until it had thawed for a full five minutes. AJ was raving about the hot dog. I don�t believe I have ever heard AJ rave about food the way he raved about that hot dog, not even about dessert. Superdawg, this parent of a picky eater thanks you �from the bottom of [her] pure beef heart.� I celebrated by eating a boxful of fries. And I will need to run a marathon tomorrow to make up for it. But was it worth it? Hell, yes.

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