Normally, having the boys on my own for the evening would be nothing remarkable; Tony and I got in the habit as soon as Eli was weaned of giving each other the night off whenever we could. So when I got Tony tickets for tonight’s Warriors game, I didn’t even think twice about the long spell on my own. Maybe I’d take the boys out to dinner, maybe we’d have friends over. Who knew? It’d be fine.

I wasn’t counting on getting sick, of course, and on losing my voice. I’ve lost my voice only once before since having kids, when Ben was about two, and it seriously freaked him out. He kept crying and pulling on me, acting as if I was torturing him on purpose. When I woke up this morning with only a whispery squeak, I wondered what Eli’s reaction might be. Typically different from his brother, he just got mad at me. “Mama! MaMA!” he kept shouting, as if the louder he got the louder I would get. No dice, kid.

I whispered my way through the morning, till Ben went to school and Tony took Eli off to the playground. I slept my way through the afternoon, hoping I’d feel better when everyone got home. I woke up when they returned, took my temperature (100), took some advil, and headed downstairs to take over. Tony staying home wasn’t a possibility for me; he doesn’t get out too often, and it’s not every day Dwayne Wade comes to town. I’d have the next 3 hours on my own.

4:30 Tony leaves the house. The boys look at me expectantly. I wonder if it’s too early for dinner. Ben, who’s been whispering all day himself, the way people do around those with laryngitis even when they don’t have sore throats, asks quietly, “Computer time?” I nod, and he trots off and loads up the San Francisco Symphony website. One down.

4:33 I get out the playdoh bin for Eli. I liked playing playdoh with Ben; he would sit quietly at the table and roll out plates and plates of soft cookies for me. But poor Eli, second kid, I’m over playdoh. So he’s positively thrilled that I’ve volunteered this, and we push rolls of dough through the playdoh “table saw” for several minutes.

4:43 We’ve worked up a thirst. Eli and I practice drinking from a cup. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m better.

4:45 Snack time. Eli pulls the stool up to the pantry shelves and we while away several minutes rummaging. I reject the luna bar, but let him eat a small pack of peanuts and then a pack of airplane crackers (saved just for such times like this). He’s delighted. He shares with Ben. I’m thinking the evening might be ok.

4:55 Too early for dinner? Maybe snack was a strategic error. Eli and I have a tea party; Ben continues composing music on the symphony website.

5:04 OK, it’s not too early to get dinner started. I offer Ben scrambled eggs or leftover stir fry from last night. He chooses stir fry. Somehow it takes me more than 10 minutes to reheat it in the microwave.

5:15 Dinner time! Ben’s new job is setting the table, and he makes painstakingly careful choices of fork and spoon (for the rice) while Eli hangs from the silverware drawer, rummaging blindly and getting in the way. By the time we get to the table, the food is lukewarm. No one cares.

5:25 A quiet dinner. Eli’s frustrated that he can’t stab hunks of tofu with his plastic fork and tries spearing them with his spoon instead. Sometimes I wonder about his instincts.

5:32 “Dessert?” whispers Ben. I nod and head to the kitchen: ice cream with chocolate syrup for everyone, extra bonus candied orange peel for Ben and me.

5:35 Dinner’s over; what next? I sit on the floor and Eli clambers onto my back. OK, that’ll do. For the next half hour, I give myself over to rough-housing. All I have to do is lie on the floor and make sure the boys don’t hurt each other climbing over and onto me.

6:05 “Circus time!” shouts Ben. “What do I do?” I whisper. “Oh, Mama, you’re the audience.” I’m suffused with love for my firstborn. I sit on the floor while Ben and Eli take turns “surprising” me with the jack in the box toy. I could do this for hours, really.

6:20 “Can we have a bath?” Ben asks. “Ba! Ba! Ba!” shouts Eli, running for the stairs. I guess it’s a bath night.

6:25 Boys happily splashing in the bath, mostly obeying the one rule: Don’t Get Mama Wet.

6:45 Out of the bath, into pj’s, time for books. I’ve been wondering how this would go, and of course this is one of those nights when they want a bunch. It’s been a nice few hours, so we cuddle up in Eli’s room and I summon up my loudest squeak to read them a pile: In the Night Kitchen, The Baby Goes Beep, Rolie Polie Olie, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, George and Martha. Ben helps me out a bit with the big words.

7:05 Maybe my favorite part of the night: the boys run down the hall to Ben’s room and leap onto his bed, cuddling up together like puppies. When Eli outgrows the crib, we’re planning to put the boys together in this huge room and reclaim Eli’s room as an office; I wonder if we should even bother buying Eli his own bed, he likes Ben’s so much. Once when we mentioned bunkbeds, Ben became probably the only older sibling in history to claim the bottom bunk.

7:10 Goodnight, Ben. Time to settle Eli. I grab my computer and settle into the glider to start this post while Eli drifts off.

7:25 One down. I go peek in on Ben. Still awake. I cuddle up with him. He’s quiet and drifty, but asks, as usual, that I tell him the story of the day he was born. “When you were in my belly, I was a teacher,” I begin. My labor with him was quick, but still, he’s asleep before the story’s over.

7:35 Two down. I made it!

Several months ago, Ben announced that his bike was “too tippy” and stopped riding. We hadn’t taken the training wheels off, he hadn’t fallen down; something just changed in his thinking about bike riding and he was not to be budged.

So, we haven’t been riding bikes. He sees his friends bike and trike and scoot about, in parks and at playgrounds, with and without training wheels, but Ben’s never been one to bow to peer pressure. He was happy to watch.

Then the other day, as we were driving home past Crissy Field, I suggested that maybe we could go bike riding there again someday. “But my bike is too tippy,” came the expected reply. And I didn’t have an answer different than I’d ever had — “That’s just how bikes are, sweetie, they’re a little tippy, but you don’t fall off”– but somehow that day, it led to more discussion.

“Why can’t bikes have a little wall around the seat, that keeps you from falling off?”

“I don’t think it’d be a bike then, anymore, would it? With a little wall, it’d be more like a car. And besides, you don’t need a little wall to keep you on the seat; you’ve got good balance.”

He fell silent for the rest of the drive home. But when we got home, he said, “Mama, it’s such a nice sunny day, why don’t we ride bikes?”

And we’ve been riding every day since.

Normally, photographs of politicians with children bring out the cynic in me, but this photograph made my day. I’m feeling incredibly optimistic about the possibilities for change represented by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the array of children who stood with her as she took the gavel for the first time yesterday. Let’s hope that the needs of children and families take precedence in the new government.

And it doesn’t hurt to keep them honest by supporting MomsRising.

1781
Richmond, Virginia is burned by British naval forces led by Benedict Arnold.

1884
Princess Ida, written by Gilbert & Sullivan, is first performed at the Savoy Theater in London.

1914
Ford Motor Company sets a precedent by introducing an eight-hour working day and a minimum daily wage of $5.

1925
Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes the first female governor in the United States.

1932
Umberto Eco is born. So is my dad, Christopher Webber–poet, priest, farmer, husband, father– in Cuba, New York.

1933
Construction starts on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, U.S.A.

Happy birthday, Dad! You’re a year older than the Golden Gate Bridge, and you look every bit as strong.

Sadly, I didn’t think to take a picture of our party buffet (which was happily augmented by a batch of last-minute chocolate croissants, as well as a berry coffee cake, a dozen doughnuts, pear-ginger muffins, chocolate truffles, and white bean crostini brought by guests…) before it became unphotogenic.

However, here’s a picture of the other spread the party produced as friends arrived at our no-shoes-in-the-house house.

It was a good party.

Recipe for a lovely day:

1 morning playing at home

1 trip to Target for party supplies (and bonus: new party shirts for both kids!)

1 trip to the playground, where the boys demonstrated their new sliding skills: Eli, feet first on his belly down the curly slide; Ben, head first on his belly down the double-bump.

1 dinner at the local Japanese restaurant, where good friends happened to show up just as we were finishing. We visited for a bit, and fed their two boys some of our extra yaki soba.

1 stop for gelato on the way home (it’s good to end the year with a taste of something sweet.)

1 quiet pair, stuffing peppers and filling dumplings for tomorrow’s party, sharing a half-bottle of champagne and a small box of truffles.

Four or five years ago, Tony and I started holding a New Year’s Day party. We can’t remember exactly when it began; we could chalk it up to Ben’s birth and a sleep-deprived reluctance to stay out late on New Year’s Eve, but in fact we’d never been big NYE revellers. It used to be a work night for Tony, back when he ran light shows at dance parties, and he’s more than had his fill of drunken party-goers. Meanwhile, my most memorable New Year’s Eves had involved arguing with my old boyfriend while we searched Manhattan fruitlessly for the kind of unrealistically glamorous party you see in When Harry Met Sally.

So Tony and I hunker down. Pre-Ben, we’d have people over for a fancy New Year’s Eve dinner. One fabulous year, we were in Williamsburg visiting friends. We drank a 1990 Dom Perignon (one of their wedding gifts) and ate homemade napoleon, then stayed up very late watching an Iron Chef marathon.

And now we host a New Year’s Day open house. We make a ton of food and invite all our friends and their increasing numbers of kids. Often we are still jet lagged from our Christmas visit east, but we still hold the party. We’ve carried on when Ben was recovering from pneumonia and also when we’d only been back in our house, post-renovation, for three days and didn’t really know where the serving dishes were. One year, New Year’s Day brought a huge rainstorm, and my Dad, proud New Englander that he is, watched admiringly as the water rushed down the street, rising high enough to float a canoe.

This year, I started some of the New Year’s cooking before we left for Christmas, putting the dough for pistachio-cranberry cookies and cheddar crackers in the freezer. I’ve baked those (the crackers aren’t worth the effort, fyi) and also made brownies, banana-coconut muffins and addictive parmesan-black pepper biscotti (to make up for the lame crackers). We’ll make strata (for which I no longer follow a recipe, sorry), and Tony’s mini stuffed peppers and shitake mushroom dumplings (two things he’s made up, but I’ll work on him to write down the recipes), and maybe some gougeres and polenta bites. There’ll be candied peel (some plain, some dipped in chocolate) and satsumas and sweet potato fries and lots of different things to drink.

One year toward the end of the party, a friend noticed me rummaging in the pantry for something else to serve. “You know, Caroline,” she said, “If you stop putting out food, we’ll all go home.” But of course, as she well knew, that’s not the idea at all! I can’t think of a finer way to ring in the new year than by gathering up as many good friends as possible and feeding them well. And to those of you who can’t be with us, may the new year bring you peace, happiness, and many good things to eat.