I’m delighted President Obama has declared that he supports marriage equality, really I am.  It’s about fucking time, of course, and perhaps it’s a calculated political statement and I don’t care because he’s a politician and that’s what they do.

But it exhausts me that we’ve put this much energy into just getting him to a point where the President of this nation can say, “Yeah, people should be allowed equal rights.”  Setting aside for a moment that I don’t know of a single gay person who has been asked to comment on whether she or he thinks the President should be allowed to be married, we have a lot of real problems in this world.  Serious, real problems that are going to seriously fuck up our future as a species.  That we have to devote this kind of energy to arguing a question like this pisses me off.

I have no doubt that we do need to fight for equal rights if people wish to deny them to others.  But, I can’t understand why people would devote their time and energy to that kind of shit.  Really?  You can’t find a more productive use of your time than trying to stop people you don’t even know from marrying one another?  Is it really more frightening to see two women marrying one another than it is to see thousands of women dying due to inadequate medical care?  Is it really more disturbing to know two men might get married than it is to know that untold numbers of men will get cancer from the air they are forced to breathe?

So, can we stop arguing about this already?  Can we just bow to the inevitable of marriage equality and put our considerable brainpower and resources into, I don’t know, feeding people or cleaning up our water or fighting global climate change?

I wheeled the orange bike onto the driveway after J had finished taking off the training wheels.  I positioned it and turned to Benjamin.  “OK,” I said, and his leg flew over the bike.  His butt was on the seat before I had a chance to stop him.  “No, wait.  First, you need to hold the bike.”  He climbed off, and then I told him the same thing he heard me repeat to Zachary for more than six weeks last summer: “Two hands on the handlebars, leg over, look where you want to be.”

Two hands on the handlebars.  I backed away.  Leg over.  Child on pavement, wrapped up in bike.

“Remember to look where you want to be.”

“Oh, right.  I forgot.”

Two hands on the handlebars, leg over, looking where he wants to be, child on pavement, but this time three feet away from where he started.  “Good.  Now make sure you start pedaling as soon as you get your foot on the pedal.”

Again.

“I forgot to look where I wanted to be.  But I remembered two,” he told me, as I repositioned the pedal for him.

And again.  Each fall, springing right back up.  Not yelling at me or saying it’s impossible or screaming that he’ll never ride his bike again.

Two hands on the handlebars, leg over, looking where he wants to be, pedaling down the driveway.  All the way to the end.  “That was awesome.  Next time, when you get to the road, turn and keep biking.”  Next time he crashed immediately, as well as the time after.  Break for a Band Aid on his ankle.

Back on the bike.  “Don’t forget to pedal once you’re looking where you want to be.”

“Shut up!  You’re an idiot.”

“Benjamin, don’t talk to me like that.”

“Leave me alone.”  He set his face in a scowl to try to hide his frustration and humiliation that he hadn’t already conquered the bike.  If only he knew how lousy his poker face is.

Two hands on the handlebars, leg over, looking where he wants to be, waiting for the damned student driver idling in front of our house.  “Excuse me, but could you guys please move on?  He’s trying to learn to ride his bike.”  I left off, which I’d rather not have him do next to you learning to operate a vehicle, but it was implied.  We stood and waited while she figured out how to put the car into drive.

Now, two hands on the handlebars, leg over, looking where he wants to be, and pedaling down the driveway and out into the street, where he turned his bike around, pedaled back, and promptly collapsed in the driveway.  “That was AMAZING!  You know how to ride your bike!”

If it’s OK with everyone, we’ll leave off the last three minutes, when he crashed again and made gun fingers at me, thus ending our biking lesson.  We’ll instead focus, as we’ve done for the last two days, on the fact that he’s learned how to ride his bike.  It took Zachary two fucking years to learn to ride his bike after the training wheels came off, complete with dramatic declarations of doom, so I was prepared for a great deal of sturm und drang, yet Benjamin figured it out before his father put away the wrench.

Let’s forget the gun fingers and call this one a win.

I’m here, I’m alive, everything’s fine.  I mean, for us.  For the six mice we’ve killed this weekend, not so good.  And by “we,” I mean my husband.  I don’t do mice, mouse traps, or mouse-trap removal.  It’s in our ketubah.  I handle all writing, he handles all rodents.

I’ll write something soon, I promise.

A few years ago, many of us thought the abortion issue was resolved.  A red herring in the electoral process, designed to distract us from larger issues.  Who votes based on abortion rights anymore?

Well, while we were lounging by the door, the religious right was sneaking in the window.  A lot of scary-ass laws have been passed lately on the state level, including (but not limited to) forced ultrasounds and required counseling.  And let’s not even get into the Arizona thing.

Abortion’s not the only thing being discussed.  For reasons quite unclear to me, there was that whole brouhaha over religious employers not having to pay for contraception.

I can sort of get it, although I disagree rather strongly.  There are people who, for whatever reason, can’t wrap their heads around abortion and contraception.

But they aren’t the majority, nor should they have the right to make decisions for other people.  It’s that simple.  And don’t start on, “You’re making decisions for the fetus,” because pregnant women make decisions for fetuses all the time.  Unless you’re planning on arresting women who drink coffee, consume alcohol, smoke, and eat sushi while pregnant, you can’t really make that argument.

Unfortunately, I get the feeling some people would like broader powers to control what women do, so maybe the sushi law is next.

The War on Women, however, is not just about abortion and contraception.  It’s also about the definition of rape, which seems to be under fire lately.  And then there’s equal pay, which we’ve never accomplished, and thank you so much Scott Walker.  Then there’s the Violence Against Women Act, which must be a threat to someone or another, because there’s a fight against reauthorizing it.

On the one hand, it’s confusing.  How can these kinds of things pass?  Why would women, who are 50% of the population, give or take, accept this kind of backslide?  Even women who are virulently anti-choice on abortion should be anti-violence against women.  If you add in the one or two men who might also think hurting women is a bad idea, that one should be a no-brainer, right?

On the other hand, though, it makes perfect sense.  Because it’s not really about all women, is it?  It’s about undocumented women getting protection from abuse.  You know, women who are poor, don’t speak a lot of English, and might not be white.

Equal pay?  That’s just for the loser women who didn’t have the sense to find a good breadwinner to support them.

And the whole contraception thing?  Well, no one was trying to BAN contraception, of course.  They just didn’t want to make anyone pay for it.  Women can have contraception, as long as they foot the bill themselves.  Don’t have enough money to pay for your pills?  That’s cool.  Just don’t have sex.  Unless of course you’re married to a good breadwinner because you can’t have an abortion without having an ultrasound wand stuck up your vagina and if you try to raise a child on your own, you’re at best a slut and at worst a child abuser.

In other words, only have sex if you’re a) rich enough to buy birth control, b) married, or c) a man.

I really could go on, but that’s not the point of this post.  The point of this post is that we’re being too quiet.  Sure, we’re letting the politicians talk about the War on Women, but we’re not doing jack shit to make our voices heard.

There’s a nationwide rally this weekend.  I’m going to the one in Boston and I’m bringing two of my kids.  They don’t understand so much why they’re going, but I think it’s important for them to see that we fight for what’s right.

I also think it’s important to show that, even though I had my kids by choice, I’m not apathetic.  I’m not the target of this onslaught.  I’m white, upper middle class, and married.  Which means that from my place of privilege, I’d best make a little noise on behalf of the women who really are the target of the War on Women.

Please share information about the rally in your area, and please consider attending.  It’s time to make some noise.

I’m standing outside the Museum of Fine Arts at 8:50 AM, not 100 yards from the spot where, yesterday morning, some guy called me out for yelling at Benjamin.  I’m not yelling now, and Benjamin is happily running up the steps and down the ramp.  Lilah is balancing on a stone curb.

Zachary is half a block behind us, now 36 minutes into a meltdown that started as we pulled out of the driveway, continued all the way past the mall and Dunkin’ Donuts, through upwards of twelve major intersections, and into the city.  It continued after I parked the car and got the younger two children out.  It persisted even after I coaxed him out of the car and halfway down the sidewalk, where I think he realized the potential shame of sobbing in front of his friends but could not stop the crying and so instead refused to come any closer to the museum entrance.

I kept walking, leaving him and his backpack in the middle of the sidewalk in hopes it would burn out without an audience.  Now, an audience materializes in the form of one of his classmates with his grandmother, who is dropping him off for the morning.  Arrested by the sight of a small child standing alone in a sidewalk in tears, she stops to ask if he was OK, which gives him an audience and also fuels his frustration.  Damn it, I think as I watch her talk to him.  That’s going to add a couple more minutes back on.

“Is he part of your family?” she asks when she reaches me.

“Yes,” I reply.  “I’m watching him from here.  He needs to be left alone when he’s like this.  It’s unfortunate when it happens in public places.”

Somehow, the boy comes closer and I get him up the steps, but he still hasn’t calmed down.  I’m not going to tell you why he is hysterical, because you wouldn’t believe it anyway, but suffice it to say he needs to be separated from his brother as soon as possible.

It is super-awesome when he starts refusing to go up to class.  The grandmother is standing there, watching, while my kid cries and says, “I’m not going.”

“It’s not an option,” I tell him.  “You are going up.”

“I’m not going.”

But, oh, yes he is.  And he does.  And by the time I’ve taken the younger two to the bathroom, the teacher reports that Zach is fine.

Now, at this point I’ve listened to his histrionics for three-quarters of an hour.  I haven’t yelled.  I haven’t threatened.  I have been firm and clear but also sympathetic.  I also have a huge goddamned headache and have completely depleted my stores of patience for the day.

I take the other two across to play in the grass until the museum opens.  On our way back, we run into the grandmother.

“You know,” she says.  “You were great with him.”

“Really?”

“Really.  He’s not an easy kid.  He’s stubborn.  You’ve got your hands full.”

And right there, with that acknowledgement – perhaps 200 yards from where some asshole cut me down just one day ago – she completely refills all those stores of patience.

It’s a damned good thing she does, given that I’m about to spend six hours in an art museum with my children.

Hi, there.  Not sure if you remember me.  I’m the mom who was yelling at her five-year-old today as you walked past with your wife and two grandchildren.  The mom who turned around to set up the stroller and then turned back to find that her son, in his insatiable need to annoy his three-year-old sister, had been poking her behind my back, making her cry and knocking over the snacks sitting between them?  The one who yelled: “You can’t behave for the five seconds it takes for me to set up the stroller!”

Right.  You remember me.  I know you do, because you took it upon yourself to advise me, as you strolled past, “Lady, you need to learn to control yourself.”

Now, you didn’t ask, because you were too busy judging me, but we are five days into an April school break during which my husband is in fucking Barcelona.  The reason I was sitting outside the MFA at 9:52 AM is that seven-year-old Zachary is doing a four-day class at the museum that meets from nine to noon.  He’s doing this class because I know that the boys cannot control themselves together all day long.  I know that Zachary cannot control himself if he is without some sort of structured activity for too long.   I know these things, so I was helping the boys control their behavior by separating them.

The museum, as you know, doesn’t open until 10, so we had an hour to kill after dropping Zach off.  I had taken Benjamin and Lilah to the park across the street to run, because I know that Benjamin cannot control his body without several periods of gross motor activity a day.  Then I had taken them back to the bench near the museum to eat their snack, including whole grains because I know Benjamin cannot control himself when his blood sugar gets low.

Benjamin knew the schedule in advance.  You see, Tuesday and Wednesday we had hosted two rather unsuccessful playdates, by which I mean he called one friend an idiot (seven times by the child’s count) and spent the last five minutes of the other playdate screaming and slamming doors.  So, I decided we would stay at the museum today, because I know that constant cognitive engagement helps Benjamin control himself.  Last night, we sat down together and wrote out a schedule for today, complete with times, because I know that he can control himself better if he knows what’s coming and when.

I did not, however, write in the incident at 9:52.  That was ad libbed.

The reason I was setting up the stroller, in case you were wondering, is that Lilah had already run about a good deal, and I knew she would get weepy as the morning wore on if she were tired.  Which would mean I would be carrying her while chasing Benjamin through the Vermeers.

You know what I didn’t need today?  I didn’t need your asshole mouth opening up and telling me I need to learn to control myself.  In fact, I was controlling myself; I was not hitting him, demeaning him, or using foul language.  I was simply raising my voice.  Perhaps you don’t remember having young children, or perhaps you were fortunate enough to have children without any special needs.  Parents have been known to yell at their kids when they misbehave.

I’m just guessing here, but you’re most likely the shithead who tells parents in diners, “You need to teach your kids to control themselves.”

We saw you a few times today, and I noticed you avoided looking at me.  That’s OK, because I was too busy reading all the descriptions to my more-or-less perfectly behaved kindergartener, who wanted the specifics on every gem in the jewelry section and needed to know exactly which organs went in which jars in the mummy gallery.

As we left the museum today, I said to Benjamin, “You behaved really well here.  I had a very nice time with you.”

“It’s because it was interesting,” he replied, which means we’ll be in the museum all day tomorrow, because when I figure out which context helps my kids control themselves, I go with it.

Since you were kind enough to offer your pearls of wisdom, let me return the favor.  In the future, keep your fucking opinions to yourself.  Until you’ve lived with two very high-needs children, until you’ve spent considerable brain power figuring out how to minimize conflict, until you’ve walked a few yards in my shoes, you have no ground to stand on.

Mind your own fucking business.  Learn how to control yourself.

Sincerely,

Emily

Monday at 12:50 AM found me dropping Lilah off at my friend’s house.  Preschool had gotten out at noon, and we had rushed home to a 20 minute lunch.  While she was eating, I scrubbed the peepee out of her shoes from the accident she’d had at preschool; I was careful to stand back from the sink while I washed, since I’d already dressed in work clothes before picking up Lilah.  I brushed her teeth, scrubbed some of the food off of her face, and strapped her into the car.

I had picked up a freelance project and, as is often the case, had a meeting to discuss the work beforehand.  The meeting wasn’t until 2:00, but Tara lives 20 minutes further out of the city from my house and you never know about traffic and I’m sort of a maniac about being early.

Here’s how it works now that I’m living near Tara again: when she has an afternoon meeting that interferes with her 2:20 elementary school pickup, I get her daughter from school then race back here for our 3:00 elementary school pickup. And vice versa.  I think it was nice of our school districts to stagger it like that for us.

But the problem with a 2:00-2:45 meeting – especially on Mondays and Wednesdays, which are Benjamin’s kindergarten half days – is that I have two children to dispose of and the babysitters are still in school.  Tara is very willing to take them, but she’s working during those hours. I don’t want to ask her to shelve her work so I can take a meeting, and only one of my children will play quietly while she works.  Take a guess which one.

I arranged a playdate for Benjamin with a kid whose mother who doesn’t work on Mondays.

The meeting went great and I could focus because at 2:20, I knew Tara had Lilah in the car while they went to get her daughter, and then at 2:25, they were driving away, fighting traffic to get to my school district.  At 3:00, as I drove away from my meeting, I knew that Tara was picking up Zachary.

As to Benjamin?  Well, the girl he was playing with has an older sister who also gets out at 3:00, so the mom was returning him to the elementary school, where she would meet Tara and make the handoff.

I drove up to my house, where Tara was just driving away to get her youngest child, leaving my three playing with a high school babysitter who had rushed over from her school to be there for the 10-minute gap.

It doesn’t take a village, people.  It takes a fucking spreadsheet.

On Tuesday morning, I started the project before I had to rush back to the preschool and then the babysitter came back for two hours in the afternoon so I could finish and then when the kids went to bed I revised and then Wednesday morning I emailed out the draft to the powers that be and – holy shit – I had a whole hour before preschool pickup and I could go to the damned grocery store.

There was this mother at the grocery store with a toddler and a preschooler.  She was one of those mothers who makes the rest of us feel like assholes because she was so calm and patient and I had screamed like a fishwife to get my kids out of the house that morning.  “You’re so calm!” I marveled to her, as we stood in line.  “I feel like all I did this morning was yell at my kids to put their shoes on.”

“Oh, well, I’m only home today because he’s sick.  I work full time, so I just appreciate the time I have with them,” she purred.  Then she looked at me with that I’m-so-magnanimous-to-you-pampered-SAHMs thing going on and gave a modest shrug.  “There are tradeoffs.”

At which point I wanted to throw my carton of eggs at her one at a time because, dammit lady, if anyone knows about tradeoffs, it’s me.

All of this is to say, in response to the recent kerfuffle about whether stay-at-home parents work, can we please stop with the Working Mom/SAHM dichotomy?  Enough already.  Except for the rare person who is married to a very wealthy governor, very few parents fall neatly into categories anymore.  I know parents working part-time to keep their resumes up while they care for young children.  I know single parents who somehow show up for every school event while also maintaining careers.  I know parents who look like full-time caregivers but spend the hours their kids are at school sending out inquiries and resumes.  I know fathers rushing their kids to school in the morning so mom can get to work early and then pick up the kids at 5:00, when after-care ends.  I know laid-off, underemployed, and freelance parents.  I know people in my boat – we’re able to make it on one salary, but we’re very aware of how dangerous it is for a family to be reliant on the continued employment of one person.  I know very few full stay-at-home parents.

If the Mommy Wars are truly revving back up again – and I hope they aren’t – I’d like someone to tell me which side I’m on.  Not that I’ll have time to do battle, because revisions will come in and the kids need new shoes and we all need to exercise and at some point Downton Abbey will start back up and there’ll go another hour of my week.

One thing I’ve learned about kids: figure out what works with one child so that you can be quite sure what absolutely will never work with the next one.

Advice books on parenting are baffling.  If there isn’t one sure-fire method to getting two children within the same family to go to sleep/eat their veggies/fucking listen when I’m talking to you, how in the world can someone write a book on how to get all children to go to sleep/eat their veggies/fucking listen when I’m talking to you?

Going to sleep is the biggie, right?  One kid needs momma to read her a story, another needs one of his mothers to scratch his back followed by the other mother singing him a lullaby, and yet another child needs mommy to lie with her while daddy polishes the silver hanging upside down from the ceiling.  There’s just no sure-fire method to get all children to settle down and go to sleep.

Here at Casa Rosenbaum, Lilah brushes her pony’s hair before bed while Zachary reads under the covers with a nightlight until we catch him and tell him to put the damned book away. You may have children like this, or you may have little angels who fall asleep to gentle music or white noise machines.

Benjamin, on the other hand, falls asleep to this song, blared at a volume usually found only at Def Leopard concerts:

I’m wondering why I never saw a chapter on that method in all those sleep-training books.

“What do you like to read?” he asked.

“She has three kids; she doesn’t have time to read.”

But I do.  I do read.  I read the paper at the table, fighting my daughter for the front section of the New York Times.  I spend extra time in the bathroom to finish an article in Brain, Child.  I’ll stay on the elliptical because it’s where I read Ms. It’s been well over a decade since I last finished an entire issue of The New Yorker, but I keep trying.

At night, no matter what, I read a book in bed. It used to be tensensible minutes. But it’s grown and grown, and I don’t really get enough sleep any night and sure as hell not enough last week when I was reading The Hunger Games.  I maintain a book blog that no one reads – my private labor of love.

My TBR shelf is thirty books long, and yet I keep buying them.  There is possibility in a new book, in a library card.  There is the promise of time to sit and read, even though I know I won’t have it.

****

Yesterday was Literacy Day at the boys’ school.  The school literacy guru got up and talked to us about helping promote literacy.  I sat there thinking What I really need is advice on where the hell to put all the books.

“I have this handout on how to start a home library!” she offered at the end, as parents shuffled out to head to their children’s classrooms.

I caught up with her near the door.  “My second grader, Zachary, just finished organizing his books on his shelves,” I told her.  “He decided he needed a TBR shelf like mine.”

She smiled.  “Would you like a handout on how to start a home library?”  Clearly, she didn’t realize she was talking to a woman who organizes her books into categories like “Memoir,” “American Literature,” and “Random Shit My Husband Bought That’s Not Allowed In With My Books.”

We’re all about promoting literacy around here.  Zachary has taken to making long lists of verbs, nouns, and adjectives.  He spends hours a day reading, for which I envy him a little.  He came into the kitchen last week moaning: “Oooooh… If I could just think of a topic for a book, maybe I could get published.”  Right, kid.  Because it’s just that easy.

He’s been nagging me about those damned companies where a parent can pay for her kid’s work to be published into a book.  “Writing grows with experience,” I told him.  “Now is the time for you to be honing your craft.”

Translation: read.  Read all the time.  Read everything you can find, touch, smell.  Live with words.

Last night I caught him with his nightlight long after bedtime, rereading The Son of Neptune.  The rebellious reader, living with words.

****

I have a Kindle.  I tried.  It didn’t work.  You could call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the term “fetishist.”

****

Lilah has hit the Berenstain Bears age.  It happens to them all.  They give up quality shit about ducks in Boston and become obsessed with those moronic, sexist bears.  What’s with the goddamned pink hairbow and polka-dotted blouse, Sister?  Don’t you animals ever want to put on a different outfit?

I have had it up to here with the Bears after three children.  There was a time when I amused myself by making up titles to imaginary Berenstain Bears books: The Berenstain Bears Try Smoking Dope, The Berenstain Bears and the Swingers, and my personal favorite, The Berenstain Bears and the Dykes Next Door.  It made those books more palatable to have a bit of fun at Mama Bear’s expense.  At this point, though, I’m done.

“I’m going to pick a book, too,” I said tonight.  I sat in front of her shelf, scanning the spines of hundreds of picture books, the collection of a bibliophile on her third kid.  What to choose?  She’s too old for Please, Baby, Please and Send It. She’s moved beyond so many of my favorites.

Benjamin, at five, is reading us The Magic Treehouse, and when we read to him, it’s all chapter books with the occasional scientific treatise on crystals thrown in.  I can stomach the bad grammar and inane plotlines of Magic Treehouse because I still have one child in picture books.

But as I sat in front of Lilah’s books, I realized my days with The Gruffalo and I’ll Love You Forever are numbered.  There are a finite number of evenings – 200? 450? – before I’ll one day cull Blueberries for Sal and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel from her shelf.  I need to make every night count.

I chose Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

****

I’m not a patient mother.  Some days, I manage.  And then there are days like today.  Benjamin seemed determined to find and push every button I had.  There were the toys he took from his sister and the call I had to make to AAA because he’d left the light on over his seat and the fight over half a stick with his brother.  And then he dumped out all the shaved Parmesan cheese at dinner and I cracked.  I just cracked.  I haven’t lost it like this in a very, very long time.

It’s through books and stories that I can connect to my kids, show them that I respect them through all of our combined imperfections.  When Zachary comes downstairs when he’s supposed to be sleeping and says, “Which book is it when the arm comes out of the fire?” I know he’s talking about Dolores Umbridge and I know he wants me to remove The Order of the Phoenix from his room before he can sleep.  When we’re having a rough morning, I can tell Benjamin the story of Les Miserables on the walk to school.  When Lilah chortles at the picture of Papa Bear running from the bees or shouts out “Swiper, no Swiping” on the last page of a Dora book, it goes a long way to helping me forgive myself for losing my temper with her for hiding in her closet giggling when it was time to get her teeth brushed because her brothers had sapped every last ounce of patience out of me and all I had left were the coffee grounds at the bottom of my sanity.

Some days are like that.  Even in Australia.

Rick Santorum, you may have heard, stopped off at a Wisconsin bowling alley in order to strut his stuff in those snazzy shoes while gettin’ real with the voters.  When a boy reached for a pink bowling ball, Santorum chided him: “You’re not going to use the pink ball.  We’re not going to let you do that.  Not on camera.”  Maybe in private you can roll pink bowling balls around, but out in public, you’ve got an image to preserve.

OK, so we all know Santorum is a homophobic, small-minded turkey buzzard who knows less about what it takes to run this country than my five-year-old, who will never become President because he was born abroad but that’s OK because he’s declared himself Chinese and has set his sights on the job of running China.  I’ve hated Santorum for years, before all the cool kids started doing it.  But, now he’s mocking boys who like pink.

Fucker, you just made this personal.

My seven-year-old son likes pink; it’s been his favorite color since before he could talk.  He has braved teasing and (possibly worse) tolerance, but he has stuck to his guns for years now. Something deep inside of him just loves the color pink, and he marches off to school in pink socks and pink mittens.  It’s not easy for him, don’t get me wrong.  He wants to fit in very badly.  But – just like I love chocolate and peanut butter – he is hardwired to like pink.

It doesn’t mean he’s destined to be gay or straight or an eight-foot-tall Slovakian nun.  It just means he likes pink.  Also Percy Jackson and Captain Underpants.

Boys who wear pink – boys who love pink – are not sissies.  They’re brave because they go out in the world knowing they will be mocked but stick to their guns.  They buck gender norms because they are smart enough to know idiocy when they see it. They don’t pander to the audience like some Presidential candidates we might name.

I told Zachary about the Presidential candidate who mocked a kid for choosing a pink bowling ball, and now every time I say Rick Santorum’s name, he boos.  If I gave him a grogger, he’d spin it.  Now even my seven-year-old thinks Santorum is a dickwad.