I just sat there and thought Is this guy for real? People actually live this way? This is a job? I knew the answers were “maybe,” “yes,” and “most certainly,” but I still marveled.

Back when I used to read the New York Times wedding announcements religiously, my favorite part (except for spotting people I knew, including, once, an ex) was reading about people’s jobs. Tons of lawyers and doctors and Wall Street types, of course. But every once in awhile one of the JDs or MDs marries a dolphin trainer or a waste-water engineer or a professional BMX biker. And I’d remember there are a lot of ways to make a living (or at least a few bucks).

What’s the weirdest job you ever had, or heard of?

A few  more details at About Family Fitness.

The information I am about to reveal may shock you. It may amaze you and anger you. It may, in fact, confirm your own suspicions.

Through careful observation, sophisticated information-gathering technology, and top-secret intelligence techniques, I have answered the question that children have been asking for generations.

What happens after kids go to bed? There’s a reason we are being held prisoner in our bedrooms, isn’t there? I know there is.

Kids of the world, I must answer with an emphatic yes. My investigation has revealed the following practices by our parents:

• Consumption of contraband foods, including but not limited to desserts and candy, multiple servings thereof; chips; French fries; and other so-called “not good for you” items (In fact, “not good for kids” seems to be code for “just fine for adults especially in large quantities.”)
• Consumption of contraband beverages (including a substance that looks remarkably like grape juice but most certainly doesn’t taste like it)
• Consumption of said items while sitting on the good furniture
• Watching of television, including entire movies
• “Working” on the computer (alleged)
• Use of the so-called “work” telephone for game-playing
• Telephone conversations which we children have no ability to intercept or interrupt
• Bathroom visits which we children have no ability to intercept or interrupt

Kids of the world, I urge you to conduct your own investigations into these sinister practices. Share your results using the UnderPlayGround Network. Plans to defeat these unfair bedtime restrictions are underway. Stay tuned for further instruction.

One of the quirks of our old house is the second-floor layout. At the top of the stairs, there is a wide hallway with five doors visible: two on the left, two on the right, one straight ahead. On the left is the bathroom and one bedroom. On the right is a little storage room (we have no attic) and another bedroom. If you open the straight-ahead door, you enter an odd little anteroom where you’ll find another three doors. To the left, there is a small bedroom/office. Forward is another odd-shaped closet, and on the right is another bedroom which adjoins, via a connecting door, to the adjacent bedroom (the one on the right from before, you follow?).

When we first moved in, Jo was just turning two and of course Opie wasn’t born yet, although we hoped we’d have another child in the next few years. We were a little stumped, at first, about how to allocate the bedrooms. Except for the office, they are all about the same size. The stand-alone one was already painted an incredibly girlie shade of pink. Of the adjoined rooms, one is a bit brighter (it has two exposures) but its closet is outside the room and doesn’t have much hanging space. Also (see below) it had this crazy coral-with-white-stencils thing going on which mayyyyybe could have worked for an adult room but not a kid’s. The neighboring room–it was yellow then–has some nice built-ins and a good closet. We thought about making it the master and giving Jo the pink room, and turning the tangerine!! room into some kind of den or sitting room. But then what would happen if/when we had another kid? Or we could give Jo the sunny room (who cares if a two-year-old has a closet) and keep the yellow one for ourselves. We’d be right next to each other, but could still close the adjoining doors, and we’d save the pink room for another child.

In the end, we took the pink room for ourselves (but painted it pronto) and for a year, Jo had herself a two-room suite. The yellow room, equipped with closet, became her bedroom, and the sunny room became a playroom.

I told you the paint job was wacky.

These days, that yellow room is–surprise!–pink. Opie has the adjoining, once-coral playroom (and no place to hang his clothes, but that’s yet to become an issue). You can see part of the set of connecting doors at that pink link. The kids get to be very close,  but still have their own separate spaces. Tonight, we’ve dragged one of the mattresses from his trundle bed onto the floor of her room, and he’s sleeping in there. When we first put up that trundle bed, Jo slept in it for months, alongside her little brother. Lately, they’ve designated the spot behind the big armchair in his room their “office”; they sit back there and read books together and eat contraband candy. They haven’t yet learned to hide the wrappers.

I don’t know what we’ve done, if anything, to foster their closeness. Maybe they’re just different enough not to grate on each other too much: one boy, one girl, three years apart in age. Maybe we said some magic words once upon a time that have kept rivalry largely at bay, thus far (universe, please notice my caveats). Maybe they were just born with compatible temperaments. Maybe we’re just lucky.

Or maybe it’s that double door, the one that lets them have their own special relationship, different from any other they have with parents or teachers or friends or other relatives. They’re a team within a team, and they have the clubhouse to prove it.

So that made me happy.

And lovely Wendy from Midwest Green has given me the Happy 101 award. The rules are to list 10 things that make me happy, which seems like a good idea after the last two whingy posts, and then pay it forward to 10 more bloggers who make me happy.

Things that take me to a happy place

• A cup of tea
• A new Sunday Times magazine and crossword
• A little boy still small enough to carry on my hip
• The beginning of a yoga class
• The end of a yoga class
• Making travel plans
• My kids making each other laugh
• Lexulous
• Reading my daughter’s creative spelling/writing (she and a friend have been exchanging emails using my account and you would die from the cute.)
• My tweet stream during figure skating events. I am reading all the best stuff aloud to my husband, who is suitably impressed.

(A selection of the) bloggers that make me happy

• Binkytown, for her balance of sweetness and snark
• Greeblemonkey, generous Renaissance woman
• Lady M, another generous Renaissance woman (high-tech! vintage ballroom! Star Wars!)
• Lovely Listing, for many LOLz
• Magpie Musing, for cleverness online and via snail mail
• Mamapop, for its recaps of Top Chef and Project Runway
• Julie at The Mom Slant, for knowing all about ahpeeahpeeahpeeland
• Nonlinear Girl, for (among much else) giving me and my Room of Your Own session a good boost (one more week left to vote!)
• The Shredheads, for launching a fitness movement online
• Slouchy, for pure poetry.

ME: Thank god my husband makes good money selling toilet paper, is all I can say.

ME: Opie: “Mommy, you are a writer. And Daddy is a paper towel maker.”

HER: I just pictured Jeff sitting in a workshop sewing paper towels together. Quilting them.

ME: And he would have a little inkpad, and stamp on the bottom of each roll, “quilted with love by JEFF H.”

1. My boots.
2. My other boots.
3. My coat.
4. All my shoes, sad and lonely and unworn.
5. My bike, sad and lonely and unridden.
6. My dirty car.
7. Not being able to see lines in parking lots.
8. Wincing every time I dress or undress.
9. “Where are your boots? Where are your mittens? Where are your snowpants?”
10. Tasteless produce.

And you?

10:47 p.m.: Decide I’ve done enough even though project is not complete; sleep more important.

11:03 p.m.: Actually shut down computer. 16 minutes: Possibly a record.

11:04 p.m.: Contemplate starting load of laundry. Determine that is crazy talk.

11:05 p.m.: Arrive upstairs to discover child in my bed. Haul 50 lbs. of resistant kid across hall to designated sleeping environment.

11:07 – 11:21 p.m.: Brush, floss, moisturize, NY Times Sunday Magazine.

11:22 p.m.: Bed.

11:27 p.m.: Suspicious retching sound. Did dog just barf? Get up to check.

11:28 p.m.: Nope.

11:31 p.m.: Enter child (35-lb version), stage left.

11:32 – 11:41 p.m. Impassioned debate with self. Return child to bed (requires getting out of bed) or defer to apathy? Child’s knees pinning my right arm against my body; child’s flannely arm thrown across my throat.

11:42 p.m.: Dude, talking in your sleep = automatic eviction.

11: 47 p.m.: Back in bed, sans child.

12:01 a.m.: Crying. Yeah, I heard it even before my husband elbowed me in the back.

12:01 – 12:17 a.m.: Impassioned debate with self. Wait one or both of them out? Get out of bed (definitely faster)?

12:18 a.m.: Guess which one I picked. It was the “please *whimper* come here *whimper* Moooommmmmmy” that finally got to me.

12:31 a.m. Back in bed. Notice it is now nearly two hours after I decided I should go to bed “early.”

P.S. I know exactly why this happened. The night before, I said, out loud, that bedtime had “gotten much better for us recently.” Kiss. of. death.

So close that a four-year-old kid could pick one up.

And stash it in his backpack.

And keep it there for several hours.

And wait until he was halfway home, somewhere around Milwaukee, to announce its presence to his parents.

Who made arrangements to drop off the bird at the Milwaukee Zoo.

March of the penguins, indeed!

Photo: Shedd Aquarium