It just so happens that I tricked Wade into having that third boy in Playa del Carmen.

We thought we were done as I was about to turn 40, but since I was the third in my family, I guess I always felt that a family was not complete without that third child, plus Tucker is a persistent boy and I do believe he willed his existence into being.

My window flew wide open when Wade in an enormously happy drunk state from hanging with the locals in a bar while watching the Superbowl, hand-delivered a quart of ice-cold margarita in a styrofoam cup to my beach chair. “No, no honey, you drink it,” I encouraged, “I’ll just go slip into something less than what I am wearing now.” Nine months later out popped Tucker, otherwise known as Hootie-Hoo throughout the blog for his beautiful big caribbean green eyes.

With each move, we have moved seven times in 15 years, I feel that a part of me is shaved off, revealing a slimmer, less materialistic self. Which I suppose can be perceived as both?a good and a bad thing. If we move to Aspen or Snowmass, I will be enveloped in boy stink, loudness and mess. To keep my peace, I’ll have to get me some wireless Beats by?Dr. Dre headphones so that I can continue to listen to my NPR and drown out the TV and the expletives emitted when my beasts watch sports or murder people on the X Box (I had a weak moment and bought GTA after the boys lied by telling me that my friend, of whose judgement I trust greatly, bought it for her kids).

In the country being friends with one’s neighbors is a matter of necessity, survival even, like those times when you are in the midst of baking cookies after hours for a school function and realize that you have no sugar. In town if you run out of butter or sugar on a freezing day, you wrap yourself up in double down and walk over to the market. No need to intrude on anybody.

With each move we get closer and closer to our neighbors. As social as I am I really don’t like living close to others, not only because we can’t lounge outside naked, but also because I truly am getting tired of getting yelled at. There are benefits though of living close to others who keep tabs on our kids and reprimand them? hen they are whipping lacrosse balls seriously close to their windows or climbing all over the roof of our house.

Recently, our kindly neighbor came outside on the 5th of July at 9pm to rightfully tell Baddy and the boys that in the future to please let her know before lighting off ?bottle rockets so that she could?take her dog out for a ride so as to spare his spending the next five hours shaking under the bed. That dog, by the way, has since received a lovely fence so that he can now bark incessantly outside throughout the day. Baddy threatens that he knows a way to calm him down, and arms himself with a firecracker kept by his bed…. just in case (which I do not approve of BTW).

With rents increasingly rising, to become a victim again by having a landlord scares me. The last time we had to rent, while?meeting?with the owner’s brokering agent for a walk through our new rental home I was determined to make note of every scratch and dent lest we be held responsible for damage caused by the previous renters. Standing there in the kitchen looking out at our new yard and views the agent began to fill me in on our neighbors, their houses so close the kids could make a string telephone and talk to each other from their windows, a closeness I always wished for as a child. And then she managed to fit in a slippery comment through her forked tongue, “thesssse neighborsssss all know the owner VERY well, ssssso if sssssomething ssssstrange goessss on you can be sure that the owner will hear about it before I do,” the string from the telephone wire fell down into the rabbit hole. “We’ll be sure to hide our meth lab,” I wanted to say but I’m working on my charm and gulped back down the words.

But here’s the thing,?time has proven that as long as Baddy and I retain our “happily ever after, with children” countenance, I guess it doesn’t really matter where we live.

To sabotage it all, I’m thinking of getting another puppy. Remember Muki?? Turns out the (over)breeder accidentally sent our highly energetic family the most sensitive one in the litter, an aggressive boy/man-hater, and so we found her a nice sweet couple who took her on as their only child when she was three. But that’s another story….