Gia had school pictures taken. They arrived last week. There are two of them, both of her. Unless I’m missing something, there is no ‘class picture.’ Maybe they couldn’t get the room full of 3 year olds to cooperate. For $45 a set (the least expensive option), they should have had those kids standing at attention. Of course, we ‘have to do it,’ since it is, after all, Gia’s first official class photo. That’s how they get you. Tug those heart strings. Never mind that we have our own website with upwards of 15,000 family photos. Never mind that ours look better and more professional. (I don’t know who they had taking these pictures. They’re cute and all, but that’s only because Gia is quite possibly the most adorable child on the face of this Earth aside from her baby sister.) Never mind that we’re spending a fortune on tuition, on top of which is the constant barrage of fundraising requests. It never ends with these people. Gia herself could have taken better pictures. Maybe Nikki and I should volunteer our own photography services (naturally at a premium price). We could pay for a couple of months of school for Gia inside of an hour.

Had a sort-of-surprise family gathering on Sunday, a rare combination of related and nearly related people at my house. It’s extremely rare to have any combination of people aside from our immediate family at our house ever. Maybe this is a good thing, because it always seems to be followed by shell shock. I don’t know if that would change if we got to see our respective families more. Maybe the fact that it’s so rare is what makes it such a shock to our systems. This last visit was a relatively short one compared to the few before, but I still needed yesterday to relax afterwards. Luckily, it was a Jewish holiday. Good timing.

Despite the exhaustion, it’s always nice to have external validation of our parenting abilities. My brother said something like, “Looks like you’re doing a terrible job raising kids,” as Gia looked up at him smiling from ear to ear. “If you ever get tired of ‘em, let us know.”

I was speaking with a business associate earlier today, and he asked me what my plans were for the weekend. I told him probably not much, since everyone’s sick, it’s basically been a snotfest. He laughed and asked if I thought there could ever be that much mucous. I said it’s actually more than their body weight. I don’t know how this happens.

Ava’s been in good spirits despite the rivers of yellow and green boogers. You can see a smile in there if you squint. She’s a trouper. We’re probably just playing pinball with the germs, bouncing the sickness back and forth between all of us. We’ve all heard about what happens when your child starts school, but we never thought it would be like this. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Gia started just a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been downhill ever since. I don’t know what kind of mutant strains are lurking in that school, but they’re no joke.

We’ve been told that Gia’s the one going around hugging everyone. I wonder if a full body suit and a gas mask would offend anyone.

Barely noticed the summertime. I think it came around for a few days, long enough for me to throw our air conditioner into the living room window and run up one electric bill. I’ll have to rip it out of the window before we get the house powerwashed. Despite all the global warming, the A/C was almost more trouble than it was worth this year, and it feels like the hot weather’s history. Maybe the change of seasons is partly to blame for Ava’s refusal to let us sleep. She’s been waking up throughout the night, screaming at the top of her lungs, which seems to be her standard procedure for letting us know she’s either uncomfortable, or wants something, or who knows. She’s got one of those screams that can shatter a human skull. I’m surprised the neighbors haven’t called the cops yet. If we were still living in our apartment, I’m sure we’d have been visited repeatedly by now. It must sound like there’s torture going on, and in fact there is, but we’re the ones getting beaten up.

On the bright side, Gia seems to be enjoying preschool. It’s almost a month already. So far so good. I think she’s the only one getting any sleep at all.

Gia starts preschool officially in nine days. One week from today, she begins her ‘Phase-In,’ and that same night, there’s a ‘Parents Orientation.’ This is one more affirmation that I am really a parent. I wonder how many other parents at this shindig will feel as disoriented as I feel. I still haven’t come to grips with the fact that I have offspring. In my professional life, I grapple with the feeling that I’ll be discovered as some kind of impostor, that someone someday soon will wake up and realize that I know absolutely nothing. I’ve expressed this to some of my associates, and happily, they’ve laughed at me, so for now, the snow job continues. What will it be like when I’m surrounded by a bunch of other parents, at a very parent-focused event? I’ve been around parents before. I even had parents myself. What’s the story here? Why the apprehension? I don’t even have long hair any more, so there’s even less reason for people to look at me like I’m some kind of freak. Really, I’m looking forward to the experience. It’s all part of my big experiment in adulthood. I’m trying to remain very selective with it though. Wouldn’t want to be an adult all the time. What a waste of time that would be. I can see how my kids look at me when I even try. They know better, much better. They are both much wiser than I ever was.

I’ve been pushing the siesta concept for years. Looks like these people are capitalizing on it. (Goodbye, yet another window of entrepreneurial opportunity for yours truly.) Their website even has a nifty little graph which supposedly illustrates how ‘Cognitive Performance Deteriorates Without Naps.’

The graph is nifty, I think, because at first glance, I have no idea what it’s showing me. I’ve even looked at it two or three times. Still I have no clue. I see a couple of lines and numbers and dots there, and there’s some kind of footnote saying where these statistics came from. There’s even Sara Mednick, I mean DOCTOR Sara Mednick, who has a PhD or something from some prestigious college somewhere, who supposedly did studies, and I guess she looks nice enough based on her picture, and the website people say her college was prestigious, and I’m sure her parents or someone was proud when she got that PhD from, oh wait, HARVARD, and I’m getting dizzy because I’m so delirious from not having a nap today that their nifty graph is making me stare into it, deeper, deeper, your eyes are getting sleepy, deeper, deeper, thank you Sara Mednick, thank you so much for spending time and lots of money scientifically researching something that the rest of the world didn’t need a college to tell them, and now things are coming around full circle, just like doctors prescribing Yoga, that’s it, I’m going back to school to study… ummm… ZZZZZZZZZZZ

Turned 40 last week. Today’s 40 is yesterday’s 20, or something like that. I feel pretty good aside from the general malaise, which is also a good thing, I think. Self reflection is inevitable at this point. Maybe it’s not inevitable, but here it is. I’m reflecting. Crain’s NY Business Magazine, which I often read because it’s left on the bathroom floor at work, has its “Forty Under 40″ piece listing those wildly successful “Under 40″ people who, we would assume, have managed to make boatloads of money and earned the respect of the community and gobbled up millions of acres of prime real estate and have the words “Chief” and “Officer” in their titles. I’ll have to put Made it into the Crain’s ‘Forty Under 40′ on my list of things I didn’t do before I was 40. Thankfully, it wasn’t one of my life’s ambitions. On the other list, however, I’m finding there are some truly great things. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Got married
• Became a dad… TWICE!!
• Bought my first house
• Got a real estate license
• Got a college degree
• Took the LSAT
• Played music onstage

OK, so it’s not exactly a comprehensive list, but it’ll have to do for now. I’ve got to go make plans. There’s plenty to do before I turn… 40 1/2.

We needed to fix the bathroom. Gia ripped the soapdish out of the wall a month or so ago, and since then, it’s been patched up with duct tape and a plastic trash bag. Shortly thereafter, we found a flyer in the mail advertising one of those one-shot, shower/tub shell deals, so we decided to give it a try. The owner of the place showed up last Saturday to give his shpiel. We liked him. He made the sale. They were due this morning.

Nikki called me after I got to the office. She was there with Jose, the one guy they sent to do the job. When he started pulling down tiles, it became apparent that the job was going to be a little more complicated. I asked her if Jose was panicking. I heard her ask him, “Are you panicking?”

“Yes, I’m Spanish,” he replied.

Turns out Jose did a great job. Of course, it rained all day, so he had to do his sawing and bending and whatever else in our living room, so Nikki’s busy cleaning up toxic dust right now. We’ll also have to fix the brand new gaping hole in our outside wall before a rainstorm comes and… well, I won’t know that until I get home. It was Jose’s first week, so he probably worked extra hard to make a good impression, so at least we have that going for us. That, and the fact that the house hasn’t caved in. I guess we still have a bathroom, so that’s also a plus.

Gia is starting preschool in a few weeks. We also found a daycare center right around the corner from our house. I know it’s all for the best. There’s still a part of me that gets choked up thinking of her not being with us for any length of time. It’s got to be a control issue. We have a decent degree of control over her environment right now. She’s safe. She’s with us. The world can be a harsh place, and I want her never to have to be exposed to its harsh side. I want her to be all cuddly and cozy forever. As much as I’m repulsed by the images of spoiled rich celebrity kids all over the media these days, I can understand the motivation behind spoiling them. It’s a natural impulse, at least for me. I just wish Gia was a black belt already. That might put me at ease. Anyway, Gia needs to get out and socialize with some kids her age. I think they’re too young to be intentionally cruel to each other. Isn’t that a few years away? I’m not sure anymore. I keep hearing that kids are maturing much earlier these days. This doesn’t make sense to me. If we’re living longer, shouldn’t we be maturing later?

An associate of mine spent two hours one morning being pissed off. These were a couple of hours which began with a mere minute of checking e-mail first thing, one of the most routine of daily activities. There it was, sitting there: the vague one liner. The sender of this e-mail was not around to explain what it was all about. So, thanks to the wonders of the human imagination, it festered. It caused stress. It painted a person’s entire day a nasty shade. Of course, when the sender showed up, it turned out there was nothing to be stressed about after all. In fact, the entire subject was dismissed with barely even a hand gesture. The power of the e-mail has rarely been more apparent to me. I’ve spent plenty of time myself simmering about this kind of thing, but witnessing firsthand someone else’s stress really brought the point home. Nothing worse than those sentence fragments. The least you can do when you’re abandoning the rules of grammar is make some effort to spell correctly. Now, let’s do some math. Take those two hours of stress caused by four short words (not counting the mangled punctuation) and multiply that by everyone who has made the unfortunate decision to join the legions of Blackberry users.

Apparently, this guy seems to agree with me. He’s even backed his point of view up with some links to statistics. He calls his lecture “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable”, and from what I gather, he blames the Internet for a lot of the misery. I think he’s onto something. For a long time now, I’ve felt e-mail is one of the most overused and abused forms of communication. It’s great for some things, like getting back in touch with long lost family and friends, but it’s a poor substitute for face to face discussion. The fact is, most communication occurs with non-verbal cues. With e-mail (and text messaging, for that matter), we’re restricted to only the words we see. It’s all too easy to misinterpret these words, especially if we want to misinterpret them. An aggravated person can have a field day. Considering how reliant we are on e-mail in day-to-day business, it’s amazing to me that there’s not far more e-mail related violence in the workplace.

I’ve used e-mail and instant messaging in one form or another for years now. I try to be extra sensitive to people who are on the receiving end of my e-mails. That means an extra word or sentence here and there to at least attempt to make things clear. Unfortunately, this can have a negative effect when someone’s trying to read your long-winded e-mail from a Blackberry. I’m always tempted to make my e-mails twice as long to further drive home the point that Blackberries are inherently wrong, but I resist this urge. It’s all about being considerate.

I also use instant messaging. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that people get intimidated by my instant messages because I type so fast and tend to be critical about things like spelling and grammar. So, not only have I managed to intimidate people when we’re face to face, I can actually freak people out with my typing ability and stunning command of the English language. Oh well. I also avoid using all those cutesy abbreviations and smiley faces like LOL and , all except for WTF. I like that one a lot. Blackberries. WTF.