On Monday mornings, AJ and I have been taking this toddler music class together. It�s a small class: just the teacher, three other kids and two other moms (two of the kids are twins, hence the kid:mom ratio). The teacher is great with the kids and comes up with great activities, but she�s totally tone deaf which drives me absolutely mad. Great rhythm, absolutely no sense of pitch. Every week I wonder how on earth she ended up teaching the music class instead of something else. The class rotates through three-week units devoted to a genre. This morning was the last day of Celtic music. I love Celtic music. I�ve spent a lot of time in Ireland and Scotland. I listen to Celtic music a lot and I play Irish fiddle. These classes were especially painful.

Each class includes a segment called the �music story� where the teacher plays a segment engineered for this purpose and tells a story about the sounds. Then she plays it again while the kids act it out, usually with a mix of suggested activities and gestures of their own invention. It�s really a great idea and AJ adores it. He�s still talking about the music story from the last unit on Motown, which included sounds of car horns. This weeks story included water sounds and sheep noises among the music and the teacher told the story of a dancing leprechaun teasing sheep by a stream and conjuring up a rainbow. At some point I looked around the room and realized four grown women were skipping around in circles, hands holding scarves and waving in the air, all singing atonally. One of the other moms in the room must have had the same realization I did, because she leaned over to me and said, �I�m really glad our husbands aren�t here!�

It was funny, but also true. No matter how close we are with our husbands, we are not nearly as willing to act ridiculous with our children when they are around. Or at least, I�m not, not on purpose. But apparently I am completely willing to do it in a room full of virtual strangers. Why is that? I mean, my husband certainly knows that I can be a complete dork. This is the guy who kept me from falling headlong down a flight of stone stairs in my wedding dress when I tripped leaving the church. This is the guy who after I tossed him what I thought was a condom I�d pulled from my bag, held the foil package up so I could see it and asked, �So, you want me to make tea right now?� It�s not like I�ve got something to hide.

And speaking of being a dork, it looks like we�re buying a car tomorrow. I should be excited, but instead it seems to have driven me into a full-blown panic to have to write a check that big. I�m not sure why it�s bugging me so much. I know we can afford it. Sure, it�s a big check, but I�ve gone through two real estate purchases in my life and those checks were a heck of a lot bigger. I think part of it is that a car feels so vulnerable. When you sink thousands of dollars of your hard earned cash into your home, if you�ve done your homework, you know you�ll be getting your money�s worth, and probably then some. But with a car, you could have a bad accident on the way home from the dealership and total the thing before pulling into your driveway. Plus I�m convinced as soon as we hand the guys our check that our roof�s going to fall in or we�ll find termites in the basement or all the kitchen appliances will explode.

Yeah, I�m really fun to have around right now. Give me your parade, and I will give you the rainstorm of a lifetime.

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