On Wednesday, I committed the act of flagrant hope and suspension of all parenting values otherwise known as Taking Small Children on International Flights.

Admittedly, the “international” bit meant flying, via Minneapolis, from Fort Lauderdale to Thunder Bay, but still. Ten hours spent in transit with a five-year-old and his toddler sidekick requires concessions to M&M cookies, portable DVD players, rolling around on the floors of public spaces, and an all-you-can-drink apple-juice bar. (Sidenote: is Isaac, at two and a half, still technically a toddler? Is there a name for this age?)

Every time we get on a plane, the nice people in first class smile at the children as they march on board and make jokey comments to us about how we’ve got “some good little travellers there!” And I smile back and say, “Well, we’re planning on leaving them up here with you, if you don’t mind.” And they smile and laugh some more and then we leave them to their quiet, amenities-laden, seats while we go find ours in coach, children in tow.

In absolute truth, the kids are getting easier and easier to travel with. Or maybe it’s that Rachel and I are getting better and better at travelling with them. Or some combination thereof. Whatever it is, Rowan and Isaac are fairly easy to placate with cartoons and a regular supply of treats, and the adults can be fairly certain of at least skimming a magazine article or two (me) or completing a Sudoku (Rachel) in between fielding requests for blankets and escorting small people to washrooms and reading stories and filling sippy cups and explaining why it’s not good to kick the seat in front of you and retrieving dropped Bakugans and making pillows of laps and turning the overhead lights on and off and on and on and on and off. And on.

And off.

So, we get on our first flight of the day, which coincides precisely with Isaac’s naptime, and we have three seats on one side of the plane, and a fourth across the aisle. And it is my turn to sit with the kids. Which I do. Because it is my turn. And I am one of their mothers. And they’re all excited to turn on the DVD player even though they know they have to wait for it and so I spend a half-hour preflight repeating brightly, over and over, “No, not yet! Not until the lady tells us!”

And then I am paged. Passenger Goldberg is paged. And I press my call button, and not one but two flight attendants come to let me know that I have been selected for an upgrade to first class.

FIRST CLASS! With all the people I threatened to leave my kids with. Except, without my kids. But with free booze. Even though it goes against all my principles, I adore first class. The two times in my life I’ve flown it.

And I can’t do it. I mean, even if it wasn’t my turn to sit with the kids, even if I was snugly ensconced across the aisle, I still couldn’t have done it. In my heart of hearts, I know that I would have never in a hundred years forgiven Rachel if she went off to sit in first class and left me with the kids. I know all that, but that doesn’t stop me from harbouring a brief and utterly unrequited longing that she will look up from her Sudoku and smile and wave me off, saying, “Oh, go for it! Have a great time! We’ll be just fine here — no really, go!”

And so I turn down my upgrade to first class for four hours of Flying with Children. Four hours during which Isaac does not nap, not even for a moment, but instead becomes increasingly cranky and winds up screaming, “I want milk! I WANT MILK! You go away!” for the flight’s final half-hour. (When he finally sleeps, it is as the landing gear is released on the runway as we touch down in Thunder Bay; the bump as we hit the tarmac lulls him into an ever deeper slumber that lasts all the way through customs, where we have to explain to the official how, exactly, we are family, but I digress.)

Four hours. Four full hours of my life that I could’ve been in first class. For hours that I will never get back. Not that I’m not trying.

What can I say? I’ve found my niche. You can read yet another wee snapshot about same-sex, small-town, Jewish-parenting life at InterfaithFamily.com.

I’m thrilled to have an essay published in the current issue of Lilith Magazine. Check out “Four (Same-Sex, Half-Jewish) Weddings and a Funeral,” in which, as the magazine puts it, “the author’s unconventional wedding plans get less conventional as she lets her mother, fighting breast cancer, take over the planning.”

You want talking about death? We got that, plus weddings and babies. What more could you want? If you can’t find the mag in, say, Thunder Bay, you can order it online.

We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Remember when I said that, to him, a reflection was simply that? I misspoke. “Can I have some privacy?” he will say as he clambers onto the bathroom counter and opens the mirrored cabinet doors so that they touch his cheeks. He is talking to his friends, his twins, learning about infinity.

(“Susan, do you have any twin sisters?” he asked me the other night at dinner, and I said, “No, I don’t think so” — but if he only knew for how long and how much I wanted a twin sister, lived with the hope that one might, despite my own mother’s flat denials, miraculously appear, long-lost. If only he knew of the reams of foolscap I devoted to twin-sister short stories, not to mention a 40-page novella that my father took to work and got his secretary to type on an IBM Selectric. But I digress.)

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we have been reading, of late, some Lewis Carroll: Rachel’s childhood copy — actually, make that Rachel’s mother’s childhood copy — of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. “To Wendy, With love from Nan. Christmas 1949,” the book is inscribed. Just below that inscription, Wendy wrote her name, in full, on a fancy bookplate (“This book belongs to…”). And then, just in case, she wrote it again, on the title page, along with her address. A generation later, Rachel’s name and address — and phone number — were painstakingly etched out in pencil opposite her mother’s. All of which by way of saying: Don’t lose this. This is valuable.

Rowan plays and plays and plays, acting out elaborate scenarios with trains and trucks and Bakugans and the faces and the spaces beyond them in the mirror. The borders of his world are still, utterly permeable, open to possibility. And for this I am grateful. Don’t lose this, I want to tell him: This is valuable.

Hey folks! It’s time for another episode of Talking about Death.

Actually, probably not so much episodes as commercial breaks, small interruptions in our regular programming to discuss life’s big, unanswerable questions in manageable chunks.

Rowan is back on his “figuring out death” focus, looping round as he does to the subject every few months or seasons or so. Last week, he woke me up with a chipper “Rachel and I talked about dead people last night!” In fact, he and I had talked about dead people as I lay with him before he went to sleep — what it means to be dead: that you can’t see, or hear, or feel, or know about the people still living. He had sobbed at the thought of leaving me, Rachel, his brother; missing us too much already; not yet ready to not be. I rubbed his back, held him close, tried to explain about probabilities, how memories and lessons and the wonderful things that we do live on. But mostly I was quiet, letting him have his grief, work through it.

Which he continues to do, in slightly macabre — if generally quite pragmatic — ways.

“I love this cat,” Isaac said on Saturday morning, nuzzling Lola, our increasingly tolerant alpha feline, as she stretched across the kitchen floor. And from the dining room came sound of the voice of five-year-old wisdom, intoning: “You know that cat’s going to die one day.”

I went to sit with Rowan at the table. “Who will you be sadder,” he asked me between bites of oatmeal with milk and brown sugar: “when the cats die or we?”

“When you die,” I told him. Because it’s true.

This morning, on the way to school: “If a giant pancake runned over you, would you get dead?”

“No,” I answer, “I doubt it. It would have to be a really giant pancake.”

“But if a car runned over you, you’d get dead, right?”

“Yes, probably. Or at least very hurt.”

“But you would only get dead if it runned over your heart and your head, right? Your heart or your head?”

“If it ran over your heart or your head, yes, you would probably die.”

Small pause.

“Hey, head, dead! That rhymes!”

Sometimes, these things just write themselves, you know?

Update: It’s a trend! From a friend:

Send me your garpage head photos!

So that quilt I’m making? I’ve been doing the math. Some numbers for you: A queen-sized quilt top measures 83 by 103 inches. That translates into 437 individual blocks, each measuring 4.5 square inches. Each block, in turn, is made up of nine individual pieces. For a total of 3,933 individual pieces of fabric.

Each of those 3,933 individual pieces varies in length, from 1.25 to 5 inches, but they are all 1.25 inches wide. And so, for the past couple of weeks, I have been wielding my trusty Olfa rotary cutter as I watch episodes of True Blood and United States of Tara and Bob the Builder on DVD, cutting those 1.25-inch-wide strips from approximately 12 yards of red and pink fabric. Twelve yards, at approximately 36 inches per yard, means I need to cut approximately 346 strips.

I’m guessing I’m about halfway done.

(We will pause here for a moment to let it sink in, slowly, that my project is, as previously stated, cutting 12 yards of perfectly good fabric into approximately 4,300 pieces and then sewing them all back together again. Got it? Okay, let’s continue.)

It’s all going to add up to something beautiful. I know it is. But, in the short term what it’s added up to is this: My arms and shoulders are shot. My wrists ache and my palms and thumbs tingle. My forearms are dotted with painful little knots.

It’s not like I wasn’t perfectly aware that this could happen. I’ve written before about carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain disorder and the fact that I can no longer knit. Or type. Or bowl (not that that one is a huge loss, to me or to the world, but still). So why I decided that it would be perfectly acceptable to repetitively strain my upper limbs in 22- and 45-minute bursts is beyond me. Although, actually, it’s not. I was in denial. I wanted the quilt so badly, wanted so much to get going on this artistic pursuit, that I pretended I could do it.

Of course, the idea of the quilt is tied to the idea of writing the novel, of the two taking shape simultaneously, of the story, like the fabric, being broken down into its individual parts and breathtakingly reassembled. Yeah, yeah, so romantic. Of course my wrists would get right on board that.

Thing is, I don’t know why I decided I had to make the quilt in the space of a couple months when I’ve given myself permission to work slowly but steadily on the manuscript. My goal for the novel is 250 words each workday. (To put that into perspective, this post is pushing 400 words as of this sentence.) It’s not very much, but it’s doable even on the days when I feel as though, as Ann Lamott might put it, everything I write is “a stupid, self-indulgent sack of spider puke.” And it adds up, over time. Two hundred and fifty words is a page. A page each workday adds up to a manuscript in about a year, give or take. Especially on the days when, as often happens, I write more than 250 words. But not a lot more.

So, I’m backing off with the quilting. I’ll schedule a few emergency appointments with the acupuncturist. And then I’ll cut a few strips a day. I’ll write my few words a day. And I will complete both projects without compromising my body, or my sanity. At least, no more than they’re already compromised.

I’m envisioning this as an ongoing series.

It was bound to happen, and now it’s official: Isaac likes Rachel better, too. Just like his big brother! At least this time, I was somewhat prepared for the sea change, having already had the experience of Rowan stomping all over my heart with his toddler feet before kicking it out the door.

So, it’s Mama non Grata all over again around here. Actually, it’s been this way for at least a full season. In the summer, Isaac was still chanting, plaintively, “I want Susan!” if anyone besides me so much as glanced at him. But now, he’s Rachel’s boy, all the way, and I have been relegated to a device designed to convey him to her.

Yesterday, for example, he woke up from his nap in what has become his new, signature style: bellowing from his big-boy bed, “I don’t want to sleep!” When I went to get him, he burst into tears at the sight of me and commenced with the “I want Rachel! I want to wake up with Rachel!” shtick. Since she wasn’t around — having taken Rowan to a puppet show — Isaac was stuck with me. And, let me tell you, he was none too gracious about that, and vented by telling me off resoundingly for idiotically getting him milk in a glass instead of a sippy cup.

When Rachel arrived home, about ten minutes later, he was still pissed. “I wanted to wake up with yoooouuuuu,” he told her, leaning from me into her arms and snuggling up on her shoulder. “Well, let’s go do that then,” she told him. And, in an act of what can only be described as overindulgence of titanic proportions, she toted him back upstairs and into his bed so that they could REENACT HIS AWAKENING. Except, of course, with her there instead of me. Jeez. Pun intended. They returned downstairs, him all smiles, not fazed in the least by my stink eye.

Oddly, Isaac’s newfound infatuation with Rachel means that I am the only one who can get him to sleep. If she tries to put him down for his nap or to bed, he becomes so overwrought with grief at the prospect of her leaving that she simply can’t, at least not without a vale of tears and 15 minutes worth of screaming.

Me? A couple of stories and a quick cuddle and, meh, okay, you can go. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, now.

In the middle of the night, if he wakes up, it’s up to me to get him back down. Which I usually do by saying, “If you just lie down now, sweetie, I’ll go see if Rachel wants to cuddle you.” By the time I’m back in bed, he’s fast asleep.

“At least Rowan likes us both the same now,” I said to Rachel this afternoon.

“Yeah,” she said, trailing off in that way she has that makes it clear that there’s more coming. “Except in the middle of the night.”

This is true. Even though I sleep closest to the door, should Rowan wake in the night, he will come into our room and walk all the way around the bed to Rachel’s side in order to get some Mama comfort. My theory is that Rowan’s habit is a combination of two things: first, he got used to Rachel’s presence in the night when Isaac was a nursing baby and Rachel and I pragmatically divided up the children according to who could most easily meet their needs in the middle of the night. Since I was the one with the milk, I got the baby, and she got Rowan. Second, Rachel does not mind sleeping with Rowan in his bed, whereas I, well, don’t love it so much. Not because I am a bad person, but because I prefer not to be elbowed in the stomach at regular intervals. Call me crazy.

Rachel’s theory is that she is nicer than I am to wake up in the middle of the night, which may or may not be true, but I will point out for the record that this theory did not stop her, two mornings ago, from rolling over at 5 AM and jostling me fully awake. “What?” I said, panicked, “What? Is it Isaac?” But by then she had already turned over. It took me a few seconds to realize she’d done it in her sleep. And then I lay awake until 6:13 AM, when Isaac woke up and I went to get him.

“I want to wake up with Rachel,” he told me.

“Yeah, well, I just did an hour ago, and it was none too pretty,” I told him. And we went downstairs to make tea.

And, if you come inside, he might “throw you in the garbage.” In fact, if you do just about anything these days, he will, he says, throw you in the garbage. Or, for the more environmentally minded of you, “in the compost.” Or “out the window.” Which, I suppose, is better than, “I flush you down the toilet,” or, heaven forbid, “I put you in the oven and it be hot and I burn you all up and make cookies and you be yummy.”

Still, it’s not like it’s all fun and games for him, always throwing people out of windows and burning them up in ovens and all. He suffers, too. “Do you remember?” he’ll ask: “You remember when the lion bite me? In my bed? At the zoo?” And if you think the lions are bad, just wait until you hear about the fishies, biting his fingers in the night, giving him owies. “I don’t like that doggie,” he says, pointing to a picture in a book. “He bite me.”

He’s working something through that exploding little brain of his, is our Isaac. Cheerfully navigating our most violent demises and attacks to his person by wild (and domesticated) animals while planting kisses on our knees and mucking about with syntax. “I love you,” he says, over and over: “I love you too much.”