As alert readers know, tomorrow is the last newspaper edition of The Washington Examiner. Beginning next week, the work of my colleagues who write about politics and policy will appear on the Internet, which is now the heart of our culture, and in a weekly magazine. This fact is melancholy to some, exciting to others; but in a way, it doesn't really matter what we think. Time surges on, things change, and we either change with the times or --

Well, in my case, we leave our family and move to Paris with a much younger man. As I write this, gentle reader, I am living in a tiny flat on the top floor of a crumbly apartment building in a fashionable arrondissement. There is no sound in this place, apart from the gurgling of the tiny Euro-fridge behind me that is sufficient only to hold a bottle of wine and a few wedges of pungent cheese. Do not make me laugh, Americans, with your Costco portions, with your expectation of ice! Hah!

The tub here also does not hold water, so to bathe one must choose to: a) sit shivering, spraying oneself with a hand-held spigot like the English, b) wrap the plug with a plastic bag to create a seal, American-style, and pray that the thing fills faster than it drains, or c) go native and embark on the whole soap-and-water rigmarole only rarely. Judge if you must, but I am beginning to understand the European popularity of option three.

Fortunately, like almost all Americans here, I am better dressed than I am at home. I have learned to know my compatriots by their scarves, objects of adornment sometimes seen on Parisian women but universally sported here by our own. We are also easily spotted by the absence of cigarettes between our fingers and the funny scrunched-up faces we make in cafes where we're trying to taste our steak tartare amid the blue clouds of foreign people's tobacco.

Yes, it's pretty much nonstop vie en rose, though I have experienced the odd disappointment. The younger man, for instance, is my 16-year-old son, and his reaction to many of the grand sites has suited his age more than mine. To be precise, his honest responses to world-famous sights sometimes threaten to expose me as a pretentious prat.

"Isn't she exquisite?" I asked him breathlessly, as he and I and 200 other museumgoers jostled around the "Venus de Milo."

"I don't know," he said. "Her face is kind of like a sloth's."

Furthermore, to my chagrin, information I gained in adolescence has not wholly stood the test of time. I have had wonderful episodes of twittering and trilling in high school French, sometimes comprehensibly, but fatigue has a way of fooling with fluency. At one point, believing myself to be asking a waitress for the bill, I requested a plate. Another time, I suddenly and unexpectedly told a cashier that I was American. It was apropos of absolutely nothing, but the phrase plopped out, and there was no way to retrieve it. Having declared my nationality and completed my purchase, I writhed away in silent mortification.

So, as elegant, refined and beautiful as Paris may be, obviously I can't stay: My son and I have return tickets in a few days, and we will slink back home to the family we love with sore feet, some Chanel duty-free, a few contraband Kinder Eggs and happy memories of lost time.

I will miss this place, even the gurgling Euro-fridge. And you, dear Washington Examiner reader -- I will miss you, too! Au revoir.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Sensible shoes so gaudy, but they make your feet happy

Meghan Cox Gurdon

June 10, 12:00 AM June 10, 09:10 PM

"Hey, those look good."

"Mmmm, well, they feel good."

"They look good, too."

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," I winced. "They're ghastly!"

The salesman laughed. "Yeah, I hear that a lot."

Together we stood before a full-length mirror and regarded the spectacle of my feet in what used to be called "sensible" shoes.

In this case, sensible had mated with something from a robot transport in a galaxy far, far away to produce a pair of sandals with monstrous cork soles, orth-o-rama arch support and horrific metallic leather straps embedded with faux gems.

The sandals looked terrible. There was nothing fashionable about them, nothing elegant or classic or refined, in fact, nothing to recommend them -- except that they felt heavenly.

Oh, they were comfortable! A person's toes could breathe in sandals like these! A woman could walk for days in such footwear and scarcely know it, for the gazellelike lightness the shoes conveyed.

"The thing is," I told the salesman, whose name was Fred, "I'm going to be doing a lot of city walking next week. So I really do need to be able to walk comfortably, but these are just -- blech."

Fred laughed.

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to insult your products. It's just ..."

"I know," he said kindly. "Believe me, a lot of people have the same issue. Especially women."

"Well, it's hard for us!"

It is. It is! Probably everyone knows the saying about how, at a certain point in life, every woman must choose between her face and her backside, that she must choose either the combination of slim hindquarters and haggard face or fuller face and bigger bottom.

Well, there's a foot version of this dilemma, and I was right in the middle of it. Somewhere around the midpoint in almost every woman's life, she must begin to reckon with another painful calculus. Will she continue wearing dainty, fashionable, feminine footwear, and suffer foot pain? Or will she whisk about effortlessly on happy feet enclosed in wide, supportive, mortifying ortho shoes? With faux gems?

Thanks to the baby boom generation, this transition is getting easier, for sure. A woman certainly has many more options now than to wear dowdy nurse shoes -- no offense, nurses -- and technology is continually bringing us springier soles and more merciful fit.

As I stood there contemplating the metallic robot sandals, I could draw comfort from the knowledge that when my own daughters reach this point, Jimmy Choo's successors will have figured out how to pair exquisite style with glorious comfort. We just aren't there yet.

"I don't want wear them," I told Fred, "but to be honest, I don't want to take them off, either."

"May I suggest a solution?" he asked. "Wear them. But just don't look down!"

We looked at each other in the mirror and laughed out loud together. It was the perfect way out, and I took it.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washington examiner.com.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Recreation trumps the other three Rs

Meghan Cox Gurdon

June 05, 12:00 AM June 05, 08:40 PM

It was late afternoon, and the children were shooting the breeze with one another in the kitchen.

"Only seven more days," a daughter exulted, "and then summer!"

"Hah, suckers, I get out before you," said her brother.

"Why, how long do you have?"

"Six days," he replied.

"Oh, big whoop."

"Anyway," put in another sister, "we're basically only watching movies now."

"I'm watching 'The Sound of Music' in music class," said the youngest girl.

"I'm watching movies in three classes."

"We're watching movies in, like, five classes -- "

"What?"

I had only been half-aware of their conversation, but the last few exchanges had grabbed my attention. If someone had drawn a cartoon of the scene at that moment, I would have had a thundercloud over my head.

"Seriously, we're paying for that? For you to watch movies at school?"

"It's OK, Mummy -- !"

"Yeah, we like it -- !"

"They're educational -- !"

"These are a few of my favorite things," sang the youngest, to show what she'd learned.

"Humph," I said.

"Guys," said one of the girls, with a meaning look at her siblings, "Let's go do our homework now so that we finish the year nice and strong!"

This was an echo of the exhortations that her father and I have been delivering with tedious regularity. The children grabbed their backpacks and disappeared up the stairs.

"Humph," I said again and felt a surge of the peculiar helplessness that afflicts parents of schoolchildren. Whether you pay once for their public school education, through your taxes, or twice for private or religious school with after-tax dollars, moments arise when you must recognize the limits of your influence. For every parent distressed by raunchy books on a public high school reading list, there's another upset by the expensive bacchanals of private school.

Still feeling dyspeptic, I complained the next day to a couple of friends. "My daughters are watching movies in class," I humphed. "Seriously, I'm paying for that?"

One woman gave a wintry smile. "The teachers just took my son's entire eighth-grade class out for lunch," she said. "A restaurant lunch. A nice restaurant lunch. I was like, 'I'm paying for that?' "

"You guys are both pikers," scoffed a third woman. "You know what I just paid for? A fun fair. The school hired an ice cream truck, a pizza guy, face painting, moon bounces and pony rides. They even had a freaking petting zoo!"

We all laughed. "At our last elementary school there was Greek Day," this woman went on. "The teachers actually wore flowing Grecian robes, there was a tent for food, and a caterer was grilling kebabs on an open pit. Oh boy, were we paying for it."

I began to feel better about the movies.

"Maybe," I speculated, "it's not just spending gone wild, or time being squandered, but a valuable tool to build morale so that children who are excited to get out of school are just as psyched to return in the fall."

Everyone considered this.

"Nah," said the third friend.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Mom and daughter fall into the doughnut hole

Meghan Cox Gurdon

June 02, 12:00 AM June 02, 06:45 PM

In retrospect, the doughnuts were a bad idea. Like other things that at the time seem reasonable -- one more straw on the camel's back, a wafer-thin mint -- the doughnuts turned what should have been a day of serene domesticity into a fat-spattered race against time.

Our youngest daughter, suffering from allergies, had stayed home from school. She and I had appointments and errands scattered throughout the day, but they were nothing much. The only really important thing was to arrive punctually at carpool pickup so that the other children could get to after-school jobs and sports practices. And carpool pickup, well, it was hours away!

We had plenty of time to make homemade doughnuts.

"Are doughnuts complicated?"

"No ... the recipe looks surprisingly straightforward," I said, running my eyes down the first page about doughnuts in "The Joy of Cooking." I flipped to "About Fat Frying," scanned that section too, and put on an apron.

"You're not going to put in flax seeds, are you?" asked the child suspiciously.

"No, we're going to go for the full-fat, full-sugar, full-white-flour treatment," I assured her. "Though it goes against everything I believe."

"Well, everyone loves doughnuts," she reasoned. "Even yoga moms."

We began poking through the cupboards. The phone rang a couple of times and the dog needed a walk, and pretty soon, with one thing and another, the morning got away from us. By the time we dashed out for a noon appointment we'd managed to double-sift the flour, to take the eggs out of the fridge, and to disinter an ancient tub of Crisco that looked as fresh and repulsive as it had the day I'd bought it.

Returning home a couple of hours later, it became clear that we no longer had a solid block of time left.

It was then that, like a man loading straw on to the back of a camel, I saw how productive it was possible to be. If I interspersed the steps of doughnut making with my other obligations -- showering, dressing and editing an article -- everything would fit and we would get to carpool on time. The margins were slim, but how sleek and excellent the efficiency!

"Here's the plan," I said briskly, laying it out.

Together we quickly mixed the dough, rolled it out, and cut it into shapes. While the raw doughnuts rested, in accordance with the recipe, I put the oil on to heat and sent the 7-year-old into the next room to play.

"I'll be down in three shakes!" I told her, and sprinted up to the shower, pausing only to make a few edits.

Three shakes later, I was back. The oil was shimmering and terrible. The kitchen stank like a fast-food restaurant.

A drop of water rolled down my cheek. It dawned on me that it was reckless to have wet hair while deep fat frying, so I raced upstairs again to the laptop and blow-dryer.

Another three shakes later, I was back.

"Mummy, are we going to be late?"

"No, no!" I cried, "No we have plenty of time" -- a panicked glance at the clock -- "to make doughnuts. I promised you we'd make 'em, and we're going to make 'em!"

Reader, you should have seen how beautifully the plump, tender parcels began bubbling as they made contact with the hot oil. The pale dough turned golden, then a richer gold, and within an instant completely black. Fishing the doughnuts out, I found them perfectly charcoaled on the outside, and perfectly raw within.

"Too hot! Too hot!" I cried, turning down the heat, and slipping more dough into the pan.

Removing the briquettes a few moments later, I saw that it was time to leave for the carpool pickup. We still had not produced edible doughnuts but if we didn't leave now, we were doomed: We'd hit worse traffic, the other children would be late for their engagements, and I'd never make it to the dry cleaners in time. Prudence dictated that I turn off the heat that very minute and try again later.

Unfortunately, I wasn't listening to Prudence. I couldn't hear Prudence through the roar of the extractor fan and the miasma of hot oil that filled the house. And so as the clock ticked onward, the margin disappeared. I stood at the stove furiously frying doughnuts like a short-order cook gone mad. "ROAR!" went the fan and "KSSSHH!" went the oil and, silently, fatally, the clock ticked inexorably onward.

We were doomed.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Monday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Bathroom humor causes young boys to shriek, sometimes in pain

Meghan Cox Gurdon

May 29, 12:00 AM May 29, 12:50 PM

Three little boys were riding in the back of a family car. The windows were open, warm air was whipping around them, and the boys were shouting with pleasure at the genius of their own wit.

Readers with delicate sensibilities may want to stop here, because the boys in question ranged from 5 to 7 years in age, and everyone knows what they think is humorous.

"Poopy diaper!" yelled one of the boys, with wild originality.

"Poopy diaper head!" yelled another.

"Poopy poopster diaper head pooper!" yelled the third.

"Poo -- look!" shrieked the first. All three boys screeched. They rocked back and forth, falling over each other. It was unbelievable. There, right beside their car, was a flatbed truck carrying portable lavatories. It was traveling at their speed. They were right next to it! Could anything be funnier?

"Don's Johns," read the most literate of the three, for this was the name of the company to which these porta-potties belonged. He started to sing: "Don's Johns, Don's Johns, Don's poopy Johns."

"Poopy poopy Don's Johns," the second boy chimed in.

"Don John is poopy!" cried the first. "Poopy Don John -- "

"Hey," said the third child, who was no longer laughing. "Stop making fun of me."

There was a moment of mystified quiet, which was broken by the driver. In her early days of driving children around, she had enforced a ban on low bathroom humor and would never have let small boys shriek in such a way. But the years had mellowed her -- or broken her -- and now when she transported her youngest child and his friends, she no longer interfered unless someone was getting hurt.

This was the case now, though inadvertently. The third boy was often slightly out of kilter with his peers. Though his peers scarcely seemed to notice, adults did -- in a way that caused them to nod both knowingly and sympathetically. For instance, when other boys turned sticks into swords or lightsabers, he'd be using his as a magic wand. In games of freeze tag, he'd come to a halt with an arm and leg delicately outstretched, like a ballet dancer. And his name was Johnny, a name close to John, which, of course, was the word the boys had been rudely yelling.

"Oh, no, no, no!" said the driver reassuringly, making eye contact with Johnny in the rearview mirror. "No one is calling you names. Everyone was laughing at the porta-potties, not at you or your name. I think," she went on, "that it's mostly just an excuse to keep saying the word 'poopy.' "

"Yeah," said her son, "Poopy poopy. Call me Mr. Poopy!"

"Call me Mr. Poopy!" cried the second boy.

"Call me Mr. Poopy diaper head!" returned the first boy.

"Call me Mr. Poopy head Don John diaper poopy head!" shrieked the second boy.

"Call me ... Helena!" yelled Johnny.

There was another moment of silent confusion. The driver thought: One of these boys is really not like the others. She was about to intervene to protect Johnny's feelings, when, to her great relief, the two boys caught their friend's odd contribution and ran with it.

"OK, Helena poopy face!"

"Helena poopy face diaper head!"

And as the car zoomed along the road, the boys were off again, caterwauling and squealing and killing themselves with laughter.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

"I don't want to go tomorrow."

"No need to think about that now."

"Do I have to go tomorrow?"

"You should go!" came the enthusiastic response.

"But do I have to?"

"Well," said the mother to her miserable, shivering, blue-lipped son, "I think it'll be a lot of fun!"

"I don't like swim practice."

"F-- and V-- will be there, and anyway, by then you'll be all warmed up."

The woman was being deliberately oblique and confusing. She knew from summers with her older children that after the first few grueling weeks of facing a half-hour in the cold water with big, scary teenage coaches, her youngest would not only be comfortable on the swim team SEmD a very gentle, low-level, age-appropriate swim team, it must be said SEmD but probably quite excited about it.

The thing was to stall his objections long enough to get to that point. The phrase people used at her community pool was "keeping it fun," an Orwellian expression that means concealing from the child just how beastly the experience really is of putting one's winter-soft body into cold, chlorinated water and thrashing it around.

Today, her opacity worked.

"F-- will swim with me," the child said, having lost the track of his argument.

"Yes, she will," said his mother, pursuing her victory. "So let's hang up your towel now so it dries and get you into a nice hot bath!"

A few houses down the street, meanwhile, F-- was on the same subject with her own mother.

"My stomach is flipping around, thinking about swim practice," she said.

"Oh, you've got butterflies. That's normal. Don't worry."

"Do I have to go tomorrow?"

"Sure, why not?"

"But what if they make us swim the butterfly?"

"Well, you've got butterflies in your tummy, so that should help, right?"

"But I don't know how to do it!" The poor child was genuinely distraught.

"You don't have to know how, sweetie," her mother said, switching out of Mary Poppins mode into something softer. "The coaches will teach you."

"Yesterday," the girl said solemnly, "I was crying inside my goggles. Nobody could tell, though, because it just looked like water."

And a few houses further along, three children were in protracted negotiations with yet another mother. The eldest of the three had left her first practice in tears, daunted by the churning water and unfamiliar faces, and had not returned. The youngest had sobbed before, during and after his first two practices, overwhelmed by the strangeness of organized swimming. The middle child, a girl, had made it through both sessions in brave form but seemed to feel that she was being disloyal to her siblings. She was now the most vociferous exponent of the notion that none of them should have to go to practice the next day.

"But why do we have to go?"

"Soon the water will be much warmer," their mother said evasively, "and then you'll want to spend the whole day at the pool."

The fact is, she was right. Experience had taught her and innumerable fellow parents at the pool that it really was only a matter of days (or weeks, at the worst) before their reluctant, coughing, weeping proto-swimmers would become confident, enthusiastic, sleek little porpoises.

But oh! The trick is to get through those days -- or weeks.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Mom wakes up to a birthday song, fresh coffee and a family hug

Meghan Cox Gurdon

May 22, 12:00 AM May 22, 01:25 PM

"Happy birthday to you ... happy birthday to you ... "

The voices were quiet, partly out of consideration for the sleepiness of the birthday girl, who was being roused, and partly because some of the singers were themselves semicatatonic from their own recent awakening.

"Oh — thank you darlings — "

The three girls arrayed themselves at the end and along one side of the bed, looking expectant. The boy smiled wanly, fell across the bed and lapsed into a coma.

"Well, this is nice," I said groggily, struggling to prop myself up under blankets pinned down by 16 years' worth of adolescent male.

A smoky fragrance wafted across the room. "Here's your coffee," said my husband, placing the sacred beverage on my bedside table.

Breakfast in bed may be a great luxury, but when you are a parent and it is your birthday (or Mother's or Father's day), it is an indulgence that requires you to have your wits about you so that everyone has a good time — particularly the young people who are giving you the early morning treat.

It is easy to hurt a child's feelings by failing to be warm or enthusiastic enough when accepting their gifts, as I knew all too well from my own childhood. Once I had presented my mother with a lavish bouquet of flowers made with pink Kleenex and pipe cleaners that, for verisimilitude, I had spritzed heavily with cheap cologne. Thrusting this reeking gift into my mother's face, I had yelled, "Happy Mother's Day!"

How did she react? My mother yields to no parent or grandparent in her ecstasies over handmade cards, macaroni necklaces and lumpy clay pots. But on this occasion, surprised by the aromatic assault, she had reared back and made a face of disgust. Poor her! Poor me! My 11-year-old self burst into tears, ran away and hid outside for a good 45 minutes before I was able to forgive my unhappy parent. The experience, as you can imagine, was formative, and so, on this birthday morning, I was prepared not only genuinely to appreciate my children's gifts, but to make sure they knew it.

"May I go first?" asked the 7-year-old. She held a piece of loose-leaf paper and looked grave.

"Of course, sweetie."

With an expression of deep concentration, she looked at the paper and sang: "Happy birthday ... may this be the best day of the year ... you are so sweet and gentle, too ... I love you so much, I really do ... so let's all join hands because we love you, cha-cha-cha!"

"That's beautiful, thank you!"

"I wrote it myself," she said modestly, handing me the lyrics. (These read, in part: "Lats all jony hans case we love you." )

"I love it."

The teenage boy cracked an eye and said, "Mummy, my present still needs tweaking, so I'll give it to you later."

"Oh no worries, darling," I said lightly, to spare his feelings in case he'd actually forgotten the occasion and was covering it up. As a person for whom other people's birthdays always seem to come as a sudden surprise on the calendar, I knew very well how unpleasant this feels. Still, a future wife might not be as understanding as a current mother, so I made a mental note to emphasize to him the prudence of preparation, for later.

"Now mine," said the 11-year-old. She had made a beautiful card decorated with hearts, flowers, a smiley face and exquisite black-ink line drawings of birds in flight. Inside, the message wished me — bless you, child! — a happy 20th birthday. With this came a hand-lettered promissory note for one Starbucks coffee.

"Yum!" I said, hugging her.

"And mine," said the 13-year-old, whose handmade card appeared to be some kind of contract. When I opened it, coupons fell out.

"Good for 5 strange juices!" said the first coupon, which depicted a glass of sinister carbonated liquid. "Good for 1 yoga class with ME!" said the other.

"What a thoughtful gift," I said, grinning. "So, for my birthday, I get to watch you drink five strange juices from our juicer?"

"Even kale," she said nobly.

"Yecch," said her sister, "you're not getting that present from me!"

We all laughed at that.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

We found the first fallen fledgling this week. I could tell something upsetting was happening the minute I came out of the house, from the loud cheeping and cawing and squawking. The noise came from the children; the tiny bird they'd found on the porch was silent.

"Don't touch it!"

"I'm not going to touch it!"

"You were trying to pick it up!"

"I was not trying to pick it up. I was just going to move it somewhere safer."

"Yeah, a cat could get it here."

"You're not supposed to -- "

"I'm not about to -- "

"Just leave it -- "

"Now, now, darlings, don't yell at each other," I interjected in what I hoped was a soothing voice. "I know it looks sad, but this is completely normal. Leave the little guy. This is what happens with fledglings."

The tiny bird was a piteous sight, with his scanty feathers and heaving sides. He lay on the porch in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. Like the children, I wanted to rescue him, or at least rearrange him so that he wasn't all scrunched up.

But after a recent conversation with an animal rescue specialist, I had new information about the fledgling process, and I was determined to do the right (if difficult) thing and let nature take its course. I had called Jim Monsma, at the Second Chance Wildlife Center in Gaithersburg, after a neighbor of mine had brought him some baby grackles whose nests had been illegally destroyed by workers.

"Wildlife tends to bring out the compassion in people," Monsma told me. Apparently, all manner of good Samaritans drop by the center at this time of year with fragile baby birds: people in business attire, landscapers, passers-by on bikes. Sometimes, as with the baby grackles from my neighborhood, the creatures have been dumped out of their nests purposely; more often, a nest is brought down by accident, to the distress of the unwitting malefactor.

"But some of the saddest cases come because people don't understand" how fledging works, Monsma said.

Many of us have the idea that baby birds are flexing their muscles to prepare for flight while still in the nest and are kicked out by their firm but kindly mothers when it is clear that they are ready to go. The truth is messier: Birds jump out of the nest before they can fly and can spend as much as week floundering around on the ground before finally taking wing. Their parents are still feeding them during this time, which, in human terms, we call the toddler phase.

Alas, Jim Monsma says, "People at that point see the bird and think it has a broken wing, so they kidnap the bird, essentially, and it's very sad. I wish people would understand that a bird hopping around in the bushes is doing what is it is supposed to do."

"So you see," I concluded, having related this conversation to the children, "this is how a fledgling is supposed to do things. It may not look pleasant to us, but that's how it is. His parents will be keeping an eye on him -- "

"There's one of them!" a daughter said, pointing at an angry looking robin in a nearby tree.

"See?" I said, "he's going to be fine.

To be honest, though, I was not sure. Our own robin's nest still had four babies in it, so this infant must have fallen -- or jumped or been pushed -- from someone else's. I didn't think it was a baby robin, either. But there is only so much tooth-and-claw that children need to hear before they go to school, so I decided not to mention any of it.

Later that morning, I noticed that the bird was gone. Hurrah, he'd learned to fly!

My celebration was premature. Late that afternoon, I found its tiny body far down the driveway. It was already cold.

I decided not to mention that, either.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: A small birthday party may be fun, but it comes with a social cost

Meghan Cox Gurdon

May 15, 12:00 AM May 15, 01:40 PM

It was getting late, and the mothers on the playground were beginning to shift on their feet. Conversation was lagging, and eventually one of the women waved to her son.

"C'mon birthday boy!" she called. "Time to go home!"

As the child jumped down from the monkey bars, landing in a group of guffawing classmates, another woman turned to her in surprise.

"It's his birthday? I didn't know it was his birthday."

My friend detected a note of reproach.

"Yes, he's turning 6."

"I hadn't realized," the woman said musingly.

If it was the boy's birthday, then where, pray, was her son's invitation?

"We're not having a big party this year."

"Ah," said the other woman, who had hosted a rather lavish shindig for her own kindergartener not a month or two earlier.

"That is, we're not having any party to speak of this year, really," the woman added, trailing off too late as both their boys approached.

The truth was that she had decided to give her son an extremely small, almost infinitesimal birthday gathering to which she had invited exactly four children, none of whom attended school with the boy and one of whom was out of town, anyway.

There had been big birthday parties in the past, certainly. The family's house and/or yard had been filled many times with happy shrieking hordes of children and grown-ups standing around with tight, awkward birthday party smiles. There had been pizzas and hotdogs and cakes and those piles of baby carrots that no self-respecting child ever eats at a party but which responsible parents always put out on platters nonetheless. Indeed, over the years, for this child or for his siblings, she and her husband had hosted laser tag parties, paint ball parties, art-project parties, Mad Science parties and parties featuring inflatable moon bounces. They had taken groups of boys and girls to concerts and movies. Many times they had invited entire classes, because that's what you do.

Yet not one of these events had ever been as jolly in reality as it had seemed in prospect; certainly never as fun as a small gathering of good friends. So that was the plan this year, attached to which, she now realized, there was going to be a small social cost.

The birthday boy was looking up at her in confusion.

"You said I am having my party tonight," he said.

"I am having my party tonight," he explained to his friend, who had not been invited.

"Well, kind of," his mother said, feeling like an idiot. She reached down and cuddled the boy's head against her, which gave her the opportunity to make a wry face for the other woman and her child. "Just a few neighborhood friends," she mouthed apologetically.

"Sounds fun!" the woman said brightly, and perhaps even sincerely. Parents who host big birthday bashes have been known to look with scorn on those who do not, and she may have been in their number.

Her son, to his credit, didn't seem bothered by the news. His attention had been drawn back to the monkey bars.

"Neeeawrgh!" he yelled, and flinging his arms out like aircraft wings, he zoomed back to where everyone else was playing.

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: How to assure Mother's Day meets your expectations

Meghan Cox Gurdon

May 11, 12:00 AM May 10, 06:50 PM

Possibly the best piece of advice I ever received, as a mother, came from the humane and insightful Marguerite Kelly. I met the author of "The Mother's Almanac" when my first two children were small, and I turned up at her Capitol Hill house with a tape recorder to do a magazine interview.

I arrived thinking that I'd get something useful for my readers. I left having pocketed a piece of sagacity that has informed my life ever since and, for reasons that will become clear, has also transformed my experience of Mother's Day.

Mrs. Kelly's advice to young parents went like this: Look lovingly at your children and lower your expectations of them. Lower your expectations a second time. Then, when you really think that your expectations are as low as they can get, lower them one more time.

Then, she said, you will see who they really are and you will love them all the more because you see them clearly and not through the thicket of your own ideas about them, your own hopes for who they are, or your own ambitions for who they ought to be.

The technique is brilliant, simple and it works wonders in family life. I later learned that Mrs. Kelly advises applying the same balm to other areas of domestic tenderness, from marriage to grandparenting.

The lower a person's expectations, the more he or she is able to appreciate and enjoy what actually is rather than measuring the distance between it and what might be. Furthermore, the object of those expectations is released from having to follow someone else's invisible script. Everyone wins!

And that, dear reader, brings me to Mother's Day, with its vats of guilt, cauldrons of disappointment and 55-gallon-drums full of dashed expectations.

Mother's Day ought to be an interlude of family happiness, with sweet hand-made cards, a posy of spring blossoms, and perhaps a child-assembled breakfast in bed. It ought to involve jewelry boxes, and a lavish brunch on a patio fragrant with flowering vines. It ought to arrive with the ring of a doorbell, and a deliveryman carrying a huge bouquet. It ought to involve a card, a sonnet, a limerick or at least a haiku.

Ok, how about a simple phone call, or is that too much to ask?

Mother's Day is nothing if not an event wreathed in "oughts." So hyped has it become, that I don't suppose there's a mother anywhere in the country who has not at one time or another had to swallow feelings of self-pity because her family's celebration has not matched her hopes.

A few weeks after I interviewed Marguerite Kelly, I was sitting on a blanket in a Georgetown park with my toddlers, feeling sorry for myself.

It was Mother's Day. My children were too young to have prepared anything for me, and my husband was at work. I'd packed the picnic myself.

"But it's Mother's Day!" I had protested.

"So? You're not my mother," my husband had said, the brute.

There I sat in the sunshine, washed with sadness, when I suddenly remembered the interview. It made me laugh. I was letting my expectations ruin this lovely day - how silly was that? The weather was glorious, the children were happy and I was blessed to be where I was.

Happy Mother's Day, dear readers, and may your expectations be low!

Meghan Cox Gurdon's column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washingtonexaminer.com.