Why I will have veto power over everything my daughter wears

"There's nothing slutty about, like, showing your stomach. It's not like it's a private part or anything." -A pre-teen girl in Forever 21, giving fashion advice to her BFF

Apparently, they actually DO say things like this.

"What color are your eyes?"

"Hazel."

"What a coincidence! That's the same color as my Porsche."

"Really."

Most days, I miss Paris

"The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken, confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river-only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still...you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't seen before, either.

It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away."

-Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon

Old peoples is funny.

Elderly lady in the Spring Valley SuperFresh:

"Oooh look, Walter. SpongeBob chocolate coins." (Pause.) "I didn't know he was Jewish!"

Holiday

This is where I come from:

"Oh. I guess we'll be getting you some Crest white strips for Christmas." -my grandmother's first words to my brother after not seeing him for four months

"Teri Hatcher." -my father's answer when asked his favorite Disney character

"Lindsay Lohan, tattoos, dark chocolate, the color black." -my 6-year-old cousin's list of dislikes on her "All About Me" poster for her first grade class

The Soulja Boy Dance - what my 9-year-old cousin taught me this evening

"I guess my favorite thing about myself is that...I'm hot." -a direct quote from the Soulja Boy-dancing 9-year-old

Four - the number of times I was asked if I have a boyfriend in a two-hour timespan

A typical exchange:

"Do you taste the Cointreau in those cranberries?"

"The potatoes?"

"No, the cranberries."

"I don't taste any cilantro in those cranberries."

"Nooo Mom, Cointreau."

"What's Cointreau?"

"It's orange-flavored liqueur."

"Ooooh give me some more cranberries, then."

You can't make this stuff up, folks. May the wine flow freely and may your family be as entertaining as mine.