Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

As we were driving into the Holland Tunnel yesterday, Tom entertained himself by staring in the rearview mirror and cackling out a play by play. There was drama behind us. A gigantic gleaming white pickup truck hugged our back bumper, desperate to not let this little black Honda merge. Photo credit: DeenaH   Some background in case you’re unfamiliar: On the Jersey side of the Holland, eight, maybe ten lanes of drivers merge into 2 lanes with a really short runway. To help you picture the scene, most of these drivers are either NJ drivers or NYC drivers and then there’s always that light blue minivan from Pennsylvania or North Carolina or some state where they don’t really know how to drive in traffic. Photo credit: yelp In this merge, if everybody “made like a zipper” as Tom likes to say, meaning one car goes from each lane in an orderly fashion, if everyone just played nice like this, the merge would be perfectly lovely. It would be fast and efficient and no o...

Sometimes when I say words in Swedish, Tom spontaneously responds like a parrot. For example, I just was talking about the book I’m reading: Störst av Allt it’s called. And Tom goes: “Stewart-Is-Bald.” Then I go, “Störst av Allt” and Tom repeats, “Stewart-is-bald.” I’m offering up this example to level-set the challenge I undertook when I thought it would be a great idea to teach Tom to say “Friskis & Svettis sparker” in Swedish. I determined this phrase would be super for Tom when I was reading the aforementioned Störst av Allt. The narrator was describing a chubby teenager in the book named Dennis. Dennis immigrated from Uganda to Sweden and he wore lots of gold chains. The teenaged narrator, aghast at the cognitive dissonance of it all, wrote that “Dennis couldn’t even dance. All he did were these jazzercise kicks.”  I translated “jazzercise kicks” from “Friskis & Svettis sparker” but honestly it's funnier in Swedish. Friskis & Svettis sounds hilarious t...