Ahhhhhhhhhh. I did it. I actually did it. Didn’t think I would. And then

all of the sudden

I read somewhere that Mindy Kaling twitters. And it was a foregone conclusion that I would join too. And it’s worth it. Her Kelly Kapoor page is simply a bonus.

So it turns out right now I can handle Twitter more than Facebook. I can be totally passive and instead laugh out loud, LOUDLY, at the people I am “following”.

A random sampling of some recent faves:

Lo Boswoth (she of The Hills): ..every person deserves access to affordable healthcare..

Rachel Zoe: I am not at one with sweats outside the house or gym, but try harem pants or wide-leg jeans…just as comfy!

Jim Gaffigan: Just saw someone in a fur coat walking a dog. “I love to take care of animals AND wear them!” If only they were holding a burger.

shitmydadsays: “If mom calls, tell her I’m shitting… Son, marriage is about not having to lie about taking a shit.

badbanana: By my count, Jim Carrey only has one more iconic Christmas role to ruin. Two, if you include baby Jesus.

Tracy Morgan: For $15 I’ll induce your labor

OchoCinco (he makes me want to understand football): Dear lord you’re mistake free, please don’t forsake me, i will let your (our) light shine today, luck isn’t needed<–enjoy today’s event and Ravens Prayer: dear lord please forgive me for the sins I’m getting ready commit, for they don’t know I’m one of your children! Amen

Mindy Kaling: it was a terrific day, professionally, personally, and also, i did not shower and ate bacon

Facebook right now for me is the opposite. Completely un-funny, boring, sometimes depressing, and another reminder of my shortcomings. Ugh, I forgot to upload photos of my baby/trip/holiday. My phone is too old-school for mobile uploads. I tagged someone in a bikini and now she is mad. I wrote a status update and no one commented. I looked at 200 photos of someone I haven’t spoken to in 20 years and the pathetic vortex just sucked precious time away from my dwindling maternity leave. Need I go on?

Sure I miss little things like updates from my friends, the email function, birthday reminders and the 5% of photos that I actually wanted to see. And it’s highly likely that I will now never see another photo of my nephews or find out my cousin is pregnant in a timely fashion. But Facebook and I are taking a break. You know what’s cool? You can “deactivate” in about one second and if you ever change your mind, it takes one second to log back in and voila! everything is there. If you want the challenge of life without FB, try it. It’s like a liquid diet, a fast, a colonic. See if you don’t feel a wee bit lighter.

So can you all please join Twitter? Or create a blog? I am boring myself here. Tell me who to follow. I am a novice too.

Saw Wilco last night with friends. Was v. v. v. fun.

But more important than that- I made a Shepherd’s Pie this week. If that, plus the fact that I use the words “ages” and “loads” quite often, does not qualify me for British citizenship then I give up. (It’s because I used Quorn instead of meat/mince, right? Sigh.)

wait, nothing. I didn’t even get a t-shirt.

So Bryan was in NYC for four days over the weekend, mainly to see a Jets game with his friends in the last year the team will play in Giants Stadium (and the last year Bryan’s family will have their sick season tickets). It coincided with the world’s craziest Halloween parade- the one in the Village there.

I stayed in London and saw friends and contemplated how hard it would be to be a single parent. Not even just missing the extra pair of hands and all the attenuating baby and non-baby tasks those hands could accomplish… but missing having that person around that shares in the small and big feats and laughs at what’s funny and commiserates at what’s not. We were glad he came back. After a Halloween party filled with cute roller derby chicks, it wasn’t a given.

People from home ask me a lot if Halloween is “as big here”. I am never sure how to respond but the easiest answer is no. Not even close.

You will find candy in the stores and pumpkins for sale and even a spiderweb decoration in a store if you’re lucky. Adults have fancy dress parties (costume, achem) and a few places make lackluster efforts to do events for kids. Actually, the ones that do are American, like Whole Foods and those weird social clubs I refuse to join that are like sororities for grown-ups.

The best way I can explain that it’s just not the same is to tell you that when I asked the nine mothers from my prenatal class if their kids were dressing up, they all said no and seemed confused. When I brought Jonah to Gymboree dressed as a pumpkin, the staff and other mums had coniptions of cuteness. Because they had never seen such a thing. When I saw a little girl at a store dressed as a lion, I knew she was American before her mom even proved it when she spoke out loud. And so, no, it’s not even remotely the same. In America, I am pretty sure it is illegal to not dress your child up. And if it’s not against the law, I am sure there is some other parent in plastic devil horns willing to extract some vigilante justice on your a**. I miss that about my homeland. I do.

I also miss my dad’s roasted pumpkin seeds. I made some myself with Jonah watching from the bjorn. He seemed totally unimpressed with my carving abilities and seed-baking. His favorite part of Halloween was the 30 times I stuck the pacifier back in his mouth.

It also appears that the British take a more traditional approach to the holiday and favor scary costumes like ghouls and goblins and witches and monsters. This bit from a news article here made me laugh:

The other day I was perusing the Halloween section of an American fancy-dress website – as you are probably aware, Halloween in the US permits dressing up in non-spooky clothing, which is just one of the many things I have filed under Things I Shall Never Understand About America, alongside the national passion for Twinkies and the precise point of Los Angeles.

Apparently, Slutoween is an American concept. So, I don’t know- chalk that up as another +1 for the U.S.A. I’ve never been prouder.

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Also, three of my friends ran the New York Marathon yesterday and got amazing race times. You know who you are friends and you just rule.

I am pleased to announce Erin the winner of yesterday’s giveaway. Erin, please enjoy the crap out of your Fiendish Fancies.

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Thanks to a few of his grandmothers and friends, Jonah is ready for All Hallows’ Eve.

Be safe everyone. No razor blades in your candy, mmkay.

Okay, so I am a little buzzed here. We had a babysitter, you know. I will mail you the products shown in this video if I randomly select your name/fake name/anonymous name from the comments during a drawing. Feel free to tell me what I should do in London, what I should blog about, or whether I need to hit the fake tanner and eyebrow threading again (I look so sickly here. Buzzed though. Remember?)

Btw- Best pub name ever: Filthy Macnasty’s.

Will my decade-long boycott of Ugg boots last? I feel it eroding cold winter after cold winter…

Drumroll… Anthropologie just came to Europe!!!! I visited their flagship store on Regent Street this week. It was as beautiful as befits the brand. And as expensive. Who can afford it? I can’t. Makes me think I should have gone into Finance. But then if I was in Finance I wouldn’t wear Anthropologie, you know? That’s the conundrum of it all. But man it was entertaining to watch all the teenage English Topshop basement-dwelling refugees milling around the store, wide-eyed with wonder at the bright lights and boho chic. They didn’t know what to make of the total lack of black pantyhose.

Yesterday Bryan was very excited about his first-ever blog post. He checked it 15 times. Maybe we can throw him a comment or two? Do it for Mark Sanchez.

Yesterday started with brunch with our friend Ari, as a sort of a prelude to football fever in London. Football being the American kind or “American football” as people so affectionately refer to it here. And by affectionately I mean the syllables of the word are over-enunciated in a long, drawn out slightly-less-than sneering sort of way. Right. Our country took the word for the world’s most popular sport and gave it to a totally different sport. Just another F You to all those Redcoats.

The NFL is now in its third consecutive annual visit to Wembley Stadium, a genius idea IMHO. It’s very popular and brings out the football fever among the thousands of Yankee expats but more importantly, all those closeted American football-loving Brits. They do exist. There is nothing more awesome than someone with that fantastic accent talking about Tom Brady.

So we roamed from pub to pub looking for a pre-game spot (the pre-game being a Man U/Liverpool match) and on just about every corner we spotted a Patriots jersey, a Jets tee, a Bengals shirt, a Tampa Bay hat… We booed the Pats fans for all the good it did last night. Then Bryan got to go to the game in that iconic stadium. In his own words:

We walked off the tube into a sea of NFL jerseys.  Unlike an NFL game in the states, the game here attracts “fans” of every NFL team.  The English treat this now annual game as a chance to wear their “favorite” team’s jersey.  And by favorite, I mean the jersey of the team that they saw play on the BBC sometime in 1983.  Who knew there were Jacksonville Jaguars fans in London?  As one fan on the tube informed me, Jacksonville is the largest city in the America (doesn’t it just sound grand when they call it “America”), by landmass.  Look it up.  But I digress…

Entering the stadium was a classic English experience – you had to walk up stairs, then down, then up, then turn around, go back out the stadium, back in, and then up more stairs.  When we finally arrived inside the seats, we were greeted by a wall of red and blue.  Many fans made the trip across the pond and they wore their colors with pride.  The pre-game show was complete with fireworks, giant flames, cheerleaders (The English really seemed to get a kick out of this – no cheerleaders at Arsenal games, sadly) plenty of red, white, and blue, and…wait for it…Toni Braxton!   Not sure where they dusted her off from, but she was in top form.

From there on in, it was pretty much all downhill (I mean, how do you top Toni Braxton?).  The Pats dominated and the English got drunk.  We left early in the 4th quarter, but had a great time.  Another successful year of the NFL in London, and another important moment in the long history between our two great countries.   Go Jets.

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And now one of my little interesting (yes, interesting) facts to share: the number 0 is frequently referred to by the British as “nought” to mean nothing and in a sports score is referred to as “nil”. I have never heard a single UK national say the word “zero” but that’s not to say they don’t all secretly use the word when I’m not around.

Although the on-line dictionary will say something else, the way I hear chav used in the UK is like how an American might use WT. Now that we have learned ourselves something…

Yesterday I actually took Jonah to Selfridges so I could see Katie Price in the flesh during her book signing. This is a clear sign I should no longer be on maternity leave. For those unaware of Katie, she is “Jordan” (omg, she lowered the price on her official fan club membership because of the “current financial crisis”!!) and is inexplicably what is called in the UK a “glamour model”. Now I am on Team Pete after their nasty split (and holy, is he HOT), but for some reason I have a low-level obsession with this woman. The boobs, the fake tan, the three kids (one with severe disabilities), the candor, the fact that she rides horses (only in Britain such incongruity in a person!), the down-to-earth persona, the empire she has created from her “brand”, the velour tracksuits, the accent, the outfits… oh I could go on. She is my pop culture beacon in an otherwise wasteland of material (royals = boring; children of Bob Geldof = YAWN).

So in typical Jordan fashion, she arrived to her book signing late and in bizarre dress with an entourage of men dressed as women, including her current boyfriend who has admitted in the press he enjoys cross-dressing (and incidentally, he is a cagefighter). I felt sorry for Selfridges. I am pretty sure it has a higher class rep than that and I could almost hear the disdain in the voice of the girl on the PA: Attention shoppers, if you want to meet Katie Price, please head to the Lower Ground level. (And then shoot me.)

So it was me and a large gathering of maladjusted and sorry individuals. Definitely a fire code violation and definitely not a place for a baby. Oops. And of course I was too short to see anything.

When Katie had departed, I started flipping through her new book and found myself surprisingly sucked in. When a tourist next to me asked who Katie Price was, I gave her a mini-education on the UK’s finest. All the while an English girl was giving me the stink eye, as if to say “don’t you try and drop knowledge on our native daughter, you, American, you.” Look, I can’t help my hobby.

P.S. I looked up “chav” and it reminds me of something that always amuses me. In the UK, when the youth are up to no good like, um selling drugs or getting in pub brawls, it’s called “anti-social behaviour”. I love it. What Americans would use to refer to a quiet person at a cocktail party, the British apply to teenagers who push pregnant women onto train tracks. So antisocial!

But first… so long, Phil. Was great having you here. Phil’s new Boston Terrier puppy, Wilson, arrives off a plane Friday in Virginia and I almost feel as though I am getting a dog too. Or maybe not. But I can dream. Of the day. Also, Phil got Jonah a really cute little tee with the hammer and sickle on it. Because when they were young, they called Bryan’s dad “Stalin”. I am wondering if it’s in the DNA.

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Back to the new and increasingly important term that is bringing people to my blog from search engines:

spaghetti.

Now, spaghetti doesn’t scare me. There isn’t as much pressure as the old favorites, “American slavery” and “British breakfast”- two concepts so rife with misunderstanding and human divide.

But still. Spaghetti?? How, what, who, when, where? It’s like finding out people have found your blog via the search term “water”. I just mean, isn’t there a better source for information than moi? Better question: who the hell Googles spaghetti?? But I have almost 5,000 page views from that term alone- possibly more than all others combined.

I could riff a bit on spaghetti, but I have a feeling Wikipedia has it all cleared up. In fact, if you came here because of a deep-rooted interest in spaghetti, check this or this. And bon appetit.

But I will say this where spaghetti is concerned. Recently I made my old standby for dinner- spaghetti and meatballs. I take a lot of pride in caring for a baby all day- with all his insistence at tearing my hair out in chunks, setting new records for decibel shriekiness and my rapid-fire memorized mental inventory of each item of clothing he owns and gifted from whom. And after all this, I prepare Bryan a home-cooked meal while multi-tasking at least half a dozen other hare-brained schemes of mine, often involving a printer or at least decoupage glue. On this particular occasion I sort of threw in the oregano, some panko breadcrumbs, blah blah blah. At the end of the meal I noticed a mash of meatballs in Bryan’s bowl. Now he eats like a bird, fine, but this appeared to be one of those juvenile efforts at disguising non-eating with strategically placed bits around a bowl.

I said, in all my regrettable Jewish preemptive guilt way, “Yeah, I overcooked the meatballs and pasta, huh?” And I’ll be damned if for the first time in ten years, the man didn’t agree with me. “I mean, you cook for me honey and so who am I to complain? But they weren’t your best.”

So I bought myself some new black boots.