Awwwww…. Taye Diggs and Indina Menzel introduce their new son, Walker.

My son is a first-grader.

Wow, it feels very weird to write that, and even weirder to have so many hours of the day without him here. Hours in which I should be folding laundry/cleaning/writing the Next Great American Novel, but yet find myself parked on some sort of soft seating device eating bon-bons.

Really though, I’m just waiting for the inevitable chaos that will hit when the newborn arrives and I don’t have time to take a shower or go to the bathroom. I know it’s coming, and I’m enjoying the short interlude of peace that I’m getting.

I was looking through some of the Munchkin’s classwork yesterday, and a math worksheet caught my eye. Mainly because the teacher had written in big red letters, “Re-do #’s 4, 5.”

And what, praytell, had my son done to warrant this?

The instructions on the sheet said to show the different ways in which colored cubes could be combined to make the sum of 7. Easy enough, right?

Except my child, always on the lookout for the easiest way to do something had this:

7 + 0 = 7

0 + 7 = 7

In his fevered six year old mind, those equations qualified as “different” because hey, they are in a different order! Thus totally qualifying as two different equations!

Help me.

“Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

What young woman, or older woman for that matter, didn’t swoon when Patrick Swayze uttered those immortal words?

This has been a bad year for former teen icons, what with Patrick’s death yesterday from pancreatic cancer.

I remember “Dirty Dancing” being a bit more, uh, arousing than a lot of the other movies targeted at teens at that time.  There was something so deliciously wrong about someone as old as Johnny Castle being involved with someone as young as Baby, but that was where I got my vicarious thrill.  I was fourteen or so at the time this came out, and it was definitely one of the sexiest movies my Catholic-school bred eyes had yet to see.

I also got my thrills from watching Patrick Swayze’s fantastic physique. And even better, married and stayed married to his young sweetheart, being together for 34 years.

So let us remember Mr. Swayze in all of his former glory.  Rest in peace.