Thought for the day: Like every morning, I was telling little Gregory how much I love him when suddenly today he held his hand up, palm out, fingers extended. "Stop!" he demanded. "What means 'love'?" Rather than impose my own silly notions, I turned it on him. "What do you think 'love' means?"

"O.K.!" I declared. "What else?"

"Oatmeal and eggies," he said of the meal prepared by his dad each morning.

"Right on," I agreed. "Anything else?"

"Reading books. Playing outside together."

Nodding, I prodded, "Go on."

"Getting my bath for me, and my jammies." With a wiggle and a self-hug, he added, "Cozy!"

I'm thinking: This little boy knows more about love than most adults. "Anything else?"

"Going to the mall," he said, "and buying me cars."

"Wow!" I said. "I think you already know a thing or two about what 'love' means. But what if we didn't have enough money to buy cars at the mall? You understand that we would still love each other if we didn't have much money, right?"

"Yes," he said cautiously. "But we could put some money in the sink, and turn the water on, and make more money!"

At first, I thought: This kid's a little money launderer! Then I realized: All I had to do was open Gregory's tap, and out poured a lifetime's worth of love.

Quote of the day: Despite a basement full of toys, a decent backyard, 200 satellite television channels and an endless supply of web sites (that's a scary thought), Bradley wandered around the house in search of something to do. He moaned in full voice, "Mom, I'm bored!" "Hmmm," I thought to myself, "I don't seem to remember a chapter on 'boredom prevention' in my mothers' manual." Still, I offered the 9-year-old some boredom-busting ideas: "You could write a story for me. I love your stories. Or, I could give you a math test. You could use some practice on that. Oh, I know! You could read a book! And then you could write a book report! Or you could create an illustrated chart detailing everything you know about the sea! Or, here's a great idea. You could start the laundry for me, or put away the dishes, or vacuum the floor. The floor really needs to be vacuumed."

Bradley stared at me, his gaping mouth closing only to gulp. "Let's see," he finally said, tapping his index finger on his chin as if to contemplate which of those sounded most appealing, "Uh . . . NO!" (Predictably, the child has not uttered the word "bored" in my presence since.)

Quote of the day: This is one of those "only in New York" stories.

THE SETTING: Midnight in a restroom literally inches off Broadway. Two women are primping in a large mirror.

WOMAN 1: (exasperated) Ugh! How do you keep your hair looking fluffy
so late at night?

WOMAN 2: Hairspray.

WOMAN 1: Wow! You're in a Broadway show? I just saw that show last
week! Loved it, honey!

WOMAN 2: Not "Hairspray, The Musical." Hairspray, the SPRAY.

Quote of the day: 9-year-old Bradley was watching Sponge Bob on Nickelodeon when a fashion commercial targeted at pre-teen girls interrupted. The ad showed girls dancing, primping and talking on the phone while the commercial's announcer advised listeners that "being stylish is all about being original."

Bradley argued hopelessly with the television. "It is NOT! Being stylish is about wearing what all the cool kids are wearing." Turning to me, he said quietly, "Those people obviously don't go to my school."

Quote of the day: Growing annoyed at constantly having a little brother tagging along, 9-year-old Bradley is desperate for a place to call his own. The other day Bradley asked, "Do you think we could build a huge hole in the backyard and put a trap door on top?" (I'm not quite sure whether he wanted a place to get away from it all, or a place where he could lock his little brother away.)

Quote of the day: One day last week Gregory found me curled up on the couch wrapped in a blanket. A frown on his face, my 3-year-old child said, "What's wrong, mommy?" With a sniffle, I replied, "I have a cold." "Oh!" he exclaimed. "I'll go get you a sweater!" (One day, I'm afraid, he'll come to understand that there's a difference between the phrases "I have a cold" and "I am cold.")

Quote of the day: The vocabulary words Bradley was to study for homework were actually quite difficult for third grade work. "I'm impressed with the lessons you're learning in your vocabulary classes," I told him as I studied the list of words. "It's going to be challenging for you to discern the subtle differences between the synonyms here:  reveal, expose, deceit, betray."

Bradley smiled at having heard a compliment in there somewhere, then said, "Mom? What's 'vocabulary' mean?"

Quote of the day: My son gives compliments in a peculiar way sometimes. "Hey mom," Bradley said when I picked him up from school the other day, "for an old woman, you sure are active!"

Quote of the day: The purple leaf plum was christened "Gregory's tree" two and a half years ago at planting time. Smattering the ground under it now are splotches of dried burgundy atop emerald blades of grass and a ring of chocolate mulch. Gregory, the namesake, waddles through the cast-off leaves, circling the trunk with hands clasped behind his back. He squats, picks up a leaf, then stands on tippy toes in a futile attempt to reach the lowest branch. "Mommy," he says in desperation, "come over here and help me put these leaves back on my tree."

Quote of the day: A security guard accompanied me down 43rd Street to my car at 2 a.m. On the way, I accidentally hit the panic button on my keys, causing my car's horn to go nuts, and me to panic at the thought of making such a racket at 2 in the morning. Once I managed to get the incessant beeping stopped, the security guard asked to hold my keys as we walked the rest of the way. I thought he wanted to play it safe by keeping my sticky fingers away from the panic trigger, which sounded like a pretty good idea to me, but once he had my keys in his hand, he jiggled them around for a second, then hit the panic button again! Yikes! I grimaced and asked loudly, "Why did you do THAT?" "With all that beeping," he said, "it'll be easier to find your car." "But it's 2 a.m.," I argued, trying to get the keys from his hands so I could stop the beeping. "So what?" he said. "This is Times Square. Ain't nobody sleeping."

Quote of the day: Seconds after a maintenance guy dumped the trash
from my waste basket, I cleared the nights' worth of debris from my desk, filling my trash can again. By then, he was standing on the other side of my cubicle, dumping a colleague's basket. But when he saw what I was doing, he stopped, tilted his head to one side and glowered at me. (I know from experience that a supervisor sometimes follows by an hour or so, checking to see that the cans have all been emptied.) "Oh, I'm so sorry," I said, adding as I made my way to the large yellow bin into which he had been throwing all the trash, "I'll dump my own." In mid-dump, I noticed that he had been discarding the contents of the large blue recycling containers into the same bin as the regular trash. Scenes flashed of sorting through co-workers' unneeded source material night after night *flash* for 13 years *flash* painstakingly removing paper clips, *flash* staples, *flash* binder clips, *flash* folders with metal fasteners, *flash, flash, flash!* Stunned, I titled my head and glowered back at him, demanding, "Aren't you going to recycle that stuff?" His response: "We recycle here?"

Quote of the day: Bradley was doing homework at the kitchen table while I was making dinner. Gregory, 3, also sat at the table, patiently for a while, and then he started asking for things -- juice, a cookie, crayons, anything to call attention to the fact that he was bored, and being ignored by both Bradley and me. He finally got our attention by shouting, "MOM! I COMMAND YOU TO GET OVER HERE RIGHT NOW AND GET ME SOME JUICE!" Bradley, being the senior brother with years of experience in disciplinary procedures, must have instantly known the wrath that would befall his sometimes annoying little brother, for my older son fell off his chair raucously laughing, "Bwaaa! Greggy! You're gonna get it now!"

Quote of the day: Our mother-son tradition on Bradley's birthday, Halloween, is to go out after dark alone for trick-or-treating. This would be after he has spent the afternoon out with his friends, and already come home with a bag full of candy. So it's pitch dark on my son's 9th birthday, well after 8 o'clock, when we make our way down the block and up to a house on a hill. A jack-o-lantern nears burn-out on the stoop; a paper skeleton hangs on the door, lit by the light above the porch. I stand on the bottom step while Bradley bounds to the top in his Alien costume, rings the bell and waits. Just as I'm saying, "Let's go, there's no one home," a woman opens the door holding a bowl. Bradley cheers, "Trick or treat!" But she frowns and turns the bowl upside down. "I'm so sorry," she says. "I've run out of candy." I instantly think to myself: "This should be fun; now he's got to trick her!" He, however, responds in a way that takes me totally by surprise. Holding his bountiful bag open for her inspection, he offers, "Here, I've got plenty. You can have some of mine."

Thought for the day: For nearly a week, a post-it on the bathroom mirror has beckoned the owner of a "pair of earrings found on the floor in one of the stalls" to call an extension and describe the lost jewelry. I think: maybe the owner doesn't want them back. Oh the germs earrings left on the floor of a public bathroom must perpetually harbor. And then there's the fact that not one, but both earrings were found. She was disposing of them, I think. They were, perhaps, a gift from . . . him. (I say this as I flip my head around and puff away a lock of hair fallen in my eyes.) Or could it be that the earrings were not gold, not diamond, not even silver; the kind sold three-to-a-pack for $8.95 plus tax, and therefore: disposable.

Or perhaps they were ugly, uncomfortable, itchy, uncoordinated. Maybe the office Style Diva who only wears Little Blue Box dangles said she saw our girl's earrings on sale at Dress Barn last week for a buck-fifty. Maybe her studly boss told her the earrings were inappropriate for work -- "better worn out on the corner, honey." Or worse, someone she loathes had on the same, exact, buck-fifty Dress Barn pair.

And then there's the fact that nearly a week has gone by and the post-it is still there. How long will the post-it putter-upper hold on to her precious find? Is she biding her time? How long must one wait before hawking someone else's jewelry? Then will she discover, to her embarrassment, that the diamonds are fake? Will she wash her hands after touching someone else's earrings that were hanging out on the bathroom floor for who knows how long before she came along and picked them up? Eew! Come to think of it, why is it that so many women don't wash their hands after using public restrooms?!

This whole thing, this whole earrings-on-the-bathroom-floor thing, just has me so grossed out! Would somebody please call that extension and describe these germ-laden baubles so that the post-it will go away and I can stop being disgusted at the thought of anyone actually ever wearing bathroom-floor earrings? Please? There's not enough disinfectant in the western hemisphere to . . . I am discussing this with my editor when he brings to my attention the story of the man who dropped his cellphone in the toilet of a Metro-North train just last week. (I can't believe I missed this story.) The train had to be stopped, stranding thousands of commuters, to allow rescuers to use the jaws of life to free the man's arm, which had become stuck in the toilet after he tried to retrieve the phone. I think: as if the man would have USED the phone again! Eew! Some things are just better left lost.

Thought for the day: Winding through the streets of Hoboken and Jersey City on my way toward Manhattan, a late-model sedan decorated with bullet holes, tattered risqué bumper stickers and rusty dents waited at a traffic light in front of me. In the back window, along with two faded Rottweiler dolls positioned for a menacing glare, a crawling lighted sign advertised what was apparently the car owner's business: "Available for house sitting. Call..." (I am guilty. I judged the book by its cover. Forgive me.)

Quote of the day: Bradley is convinced that one of his third grade classmates has a crush on him. "How do you know that?" I asked. "Because when you're in the front of the lunch line, and this girl is in the back, and she's jumping up and down and shouting, 'There's Bradley! There's Bradley!,' you don't have to be a genius to figure out she likes you."

Quote of the day: Bradley and Gregory were playing in the basement while I ironed clothes nearby. After one leg of a particularly wrinkly pair of khakis was completed, I held up the pants so the boys could see the difference between the ready-for-a-summer-garden-party look and the spent-six-hours-in-the-dryer look. Still, the little brother seemed perplexed, so the big brother explained the concept of ironing: "The iron is so hot," Bradley instructed, "that it burns the wrinkles -- ouch! -- and the wrinkles don't like that, so they run away." Bradley then began to run around the basement, shouting, "See? I'm a wrinkle! Ouchy, ouchy, ouchy! You're not gonna get me, you hot iron! Me and my wrinkly friends are outta here!"

Quote of the day: Since Bradley's 9th birthday is coming up next week, I asked 3-year-old Gregory what gift he would like to get for his big brother. Without hesitation Gregory responded, "You know that Skeleton Lego set Bradley has? Well, if I got him another one, then he would have two, and he could have one, and he could give the other one to me."

Quote of the day: Crickets were chirping loudly, as they are famous for doing in fall, while Bradley and I were walking home from school. But as we passed by any particular clump of bushes, the chirping would fall silent. "I think the crickets all know me," Bradley said. "They know that I go around catching crickets, so when they see me coming, they stop making noise. Word must have gotten out all over town: Avoid Bradley at all cost!"

ME: "Of course. What's the problem?"

EDITOR: "See where that headline on the graphic about the new fonts in the Times says, 'A Modest Face Lift'?"

ME: "Yeah."

EDITOR: "We need a hyphen in 'face-lift!' "

ME: "And this is an EMERGENCY?"

EDITOR: "It is when it's The Times."

"Yes," he said sadly.

"Sometimes, I wish I could be a child," I said. "It seems to me that children have it pretty easy. You don't have to go to work!"

"But mom," Gregory shouted back, "that's WHY I want to be an adult. I WANT to go to work!"

Quote of the day: Following yesterday's list of things at which 8-year-old Bradley says he is "imperfect," he was told to make a list of things at which he is "perfect." The first item on his list: "Losing things."

Quote of the day: After reading a book in his third grade class about how no one should ever aspire to be perfect (because to be perfect would be "boring"), Bradley made a list of things he does imperfectly: "Homework, baseball, making my bed, not spilling things, climbing trees, making capitals at the beginning of sentences, being a big brother, reading big long words, making sure to eat my vitamin, finding things, packing my back pack, drawing, and lots, lots more!" A few hours later, he added parenthetically: "includes using chopsticks."