As an insomniac fairly allergic to mornings, I feel positively vindicated by the results of a study recently conducted by researchers at Harvard and Mass General Hospital that say “morning blahs” are for real. (Heck, they could’ve just camped out in my kitchen, especially when my kids were younger and I gently shoved them onto the school bus in my robe and pre-Lasix glasses.)

Anyhoo, the study’s findings go on to suggest that seeing flowers in the AM might make morning-phobics like moi happier and more energetic. Okay, sounds like a plan. Tomorrow I’m pouring my high test caffeine into the biggest floral design mug I can find.

Dear Mother Earth,

How are you? Well, actually, I hear you’re not doing too well and that you have a temperature. As for me? Well, I’m feeling kinda guilty. I think I’ve been neglecting you and, you know, taking you for granted. I just assumed that you’d always be there for me and never under the weather. Aren’t that what moms are for?

But now that I’m a little older and maybe even an itsy bit wiser, and with all the talk of going green everywhere I turn, I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf and, as the media says, reduce my carbon footprint. As you know, we’ve been recycling chez moi for several years now, though I put my plastic bottles and aluminum cans in a verboten plastic bag before I put them inside the blue recycle bin we place at the curb (all the recyclables blow all over the street without it). And we’re really big into recycling newspapers, sending all of ‘em into The Hubby’s animal hospital to line the cages. But until recently, that was the extent of my efforts.

With the school year in high gear, can concert season be far behind? I remember school concert burnout well. Yes, of course I was tickled by and proud of my budding little performers. But after years of sitting on creaky auditorium chairs, I began to wonder how many more times I could sit through another command performance where one parent would invariably turn to me and say something like, “I know I am a bit prejudiced here, but don’t they sound really, really good?” without replying “No, they really, really do not.”

The low point of my parental performance career came when one of my budding music phenoms was to play in a third grade recorder concert. Not having gotten the hand of decoding the musical notes just yet, she cheerily informed me that she’d be faking (i.e. not actually playing) during the performance. As an uncomfortable partner in this command performance, I had to sit in the audience and listen to the collective screeching of the instruments and watch my musical prodigy just pretend to play.

The irony? Today she’s pursuing a musical career. Fortunately, the recorder is not her instrument.

File this under “tell us something we don’t already know”: Serious academic types just spent five whole years studying two-career households in three countries—the US, Spain, and Sweden—to determine that the old Ozzy and Harriet-style, circa 1950’s division of labor is alive and well.

This research revealed that (surprise, surprise) even though most women are now employed outside the home, couples still tend to default to the traditional gender roles, with women continuing to do the lioness' share of the laundry, cooking, and other household chores. In other words, not only are we bringing home the bacon, we’re still mircrowaving it, too.

A show of hands, please: who is actually surprised by these groundbreaking findings? (Note to The Hubby: Don’t Even Think Of It.)

No, really. Does anyone’s partner-of-the-male-persuasion do any gender-bending (i.e. not just manly taking-out-the-garbage kinds of stuff) household chores—or vice versa? I won't be jealous (much).

Spanx: What’s up these things anyway? First Oprah says she swears by ‘em and then, the other day, my friend Charlotte, a size 2 sopping wet, tells me she lives in them.

If you’re as clueless as I was, they’re like tummy control pantyhose, and they come in versions with and without feet. The feetless kind stop mid-calf. I get that: you can wear them under pants and longer skirts. But what’s the big deal about the kind with feet? And why are they better than plain old control top pantyhose?

Spanx fans: what gives?

Just 13 shopping days remain before we celebrate the big gorge-fest also known as Halloween. Cheesy rubber pumpkin from Costco out on the front steps? Check. Plastic jack-o-lantern to hold the goodies unearthed from the depths of the basement? Also check. Treats purchased and stored in kitchen cabinets? Uh oh. You see, stocking up on Halloween candy is no simple task chez moi as witnessed by the following recent exchange between The Hubby and me:

ME: “(Blah, blah, blah…) And oh yeah, please do not even think of buying any candy that's remotely chocolate (i.e. too tempting to you-know-who to keep around the house) from Costco.”

HIM: “But what'll we give all the kids?”

“Was that big scratch and dent on your car before you went into that store?” asked the nice woman with the charming Scottish burr as I went to open the door of my car, parked at a shopping center not far from my home. Whoo-boy. You just know nothing good can come out of this kind of opening conversational gambit, I recall thinking to myself.

A closer look at my just one-month-old car revealed that yes indeedy, it sported a brand new scratch/dent on the driver’s side. Seems the nice lady’s elderly mother, whom she was visiting in the states, had accidentally “bumped” my vehicle with her own. The nice lady had patiently waited for me to return to my car to talk about settling up the damages, affirming my belief in the basic goodness of the people with whom I share the roads and parking lots as I ply my trade as a suburban mom, schlepping here, there, and yonder.

“Is your handbag killing you?” screams the cover of the October issue of O magazine. Because my day (i.e. non-blog) gig is as a magazine editor, I know well the power of sensational cover lines like this one to make an issue fly off the supermarket rack and into the shopping cart. And I’m able to immediately decode this one as: “Is your purse hurting your back because it weighs too much?”

Well, we all know the answer to that one: probably. My sister-in-law was here for dinner (and not a week's visit) recently and I made the mistake of picking up her handbag to put it in the kitchen. I swear it weighed at least as much as a colicky nine-month-old who screams when you put him down. And I know she’s not the only one carrying a behemoth bag. Yes, pocketbooks-on-steroids are all the fashion rage. Even so, lugging around the contents of my closet is just not my style.

October means Halloween, of course. And that means it’s time for me to dust off the old jack-o-lantern. Yup, you read that one right. Dust off, as in wipe down the faux pumpkin from Costco that lives in our garage for the other eleven months of the year. We’ve had it for so long now that I consider it vintage décor, rather than merely my own cheap and lazy approach to the season. And unlike the pink sparkly Xmas trees, our pumpkin looks so like the real thing the neighborhood deer nibble on it.

If this makes me sound like the wicked witch of Halloween, it wasn’t always thus. In the old days when my kids trick-or-treated as bunnies and pirates, I went the whole nine yards. First we took a family trip to the pumpkin patch and then I helped them carve out their own personal jack-o-lanterns on the kitchen table. Then we toasted up the seeds with lotsa salt and baked muffins from all the leftover inside goop.

Overheard on the ten-and-under supermarket checkout line yesterday:
Mom 1: “How’s Anastasia doing at college?”
Mom 2: (accompanied by ‘tween-aged daughter): “Terrific. Just went to see her for Parent’s Weekend. The roommate’s a little, huh, weird, you know, piercings and things…”
Thought bubble over head of Mom 3 (moi): “Gee, I wonder what the roomie’s mom is saying about her daughter?”

I mean really, isn’t that the whole point of living away from home: branching out and meeting all kinds of people, some your type and some not, but hey, what the heck? Broadening one’s horizons, and yadda yadda yaddah? What disturbed me most of all about this exchange is what Mom 2’s younger daughter was picking up about how we talk about people who are different than us.

Out here in the ‘burbs, kids and lawns garner the biggest bragging rights. But because my kids are old enough to read this blog, they’re not big on me touting their accomplishments in print (and for the record and our relationship, there are lots of 'em, not even including the time one of them was elected Classroom Line Leader in third grade). Fortunately for moi, my lawn feels no such compunction. So brag away I did when it was selected as a finalist for a national lawn care company TV commercial.

Yup, our patch of earth was up for the role of “verdant, lush lawn.” Alas, we just found out that another front yard was cast in the part. And every proud mother knows that drill: when your oh-so-special progeny gets passed over, you feel their pain. (Not to mention that our gardener, The Hubby, is distraught.)

And, we have contact. I sent my first ever text-message to my daughter yesterday. It said: “Test” and it only took me and the rep in my local Verizon store (who discovered my number was blocked for texting purposes and the only way to unblock it was for me to call India) a mere 70 minutes to send it.

Her response?
“OMG. U sent me a txt?”

After exchanging a few of these scintillating messages back and forth, I received yet another text later that afternoon:
“Dont get usd 2 txting me all the time.”