I’m perfectly happy with a very low key celebration of Mother’s Day. I would rather have my family show their appreciation for me by emptying the dishwasher once a week rather than feel obligated to take me out for an expensive brunch once a year.

And while I’m on the topic of what I would like for Mother’s Day, I would love to open the cabinet under the sink and discover that the once full trash can is now empty. Do kids think that mothers possess some kind of magic so that the lid on the big gray garbage can will open only for us? I guess it’s the same kind of magical powers that makes it possible for only moms to put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder.

So those are the kind of surprises that I would love to get regardless of whether or not it’s Mother’s Day. But there is one supposed indulgence that no one ever, ever, has to give me on Mother’s Day or the other 364 days of the year: breakfast in bed.

Eating in bed sounds only slightly less appealing to me than eating in the shower. Both are places that I don’t really look my best – not that I always have to have my makeup on and the frizz flat-ironed out of my hair to be able to enjoy eating – but generally, I prefer to have applied deodorant within the last 18 hours before sharing a meal with someone.

Plus there’s the whole logistics of eating in bed. Who wants crumbs in their sheets? And eating in bed isn’t particularly conducive to conversation. While mom juggles the tray on her lap, everybody else probably has to sit uncomfortably on the bed. Unless you’ve got a Tempur-Pedic mattress, you had better watch that coffee and OJ bouncing sloshing around every time someone sits down or gets up.

You may have seen the TV commercial for Philadelphia Cream Cheese in which the husband wakes up his wife (at least we think that’s who it is; wedding rings aren’t evident) while a faux indie song plays in the background. Of course, she doesn’t wake up with her hair going in 16 different directions and there aren’t any creases in her skin from the sheets. The couple cozies up while slathering an inch of cream cheese on bagels and teasing each other with strawberries dipped in the creamy white stuff.

Doesn’t look like fun to me. In fact, it makes me cringe. Let me take a shower, brush my teeth and put a couple of layers of fabric between me and the outside world.

I’ll take my cream cheese and bagels at the table, thank you.

The end of the 2012 school year has a special significance for me because it means saying goodbye to the Petaluma school community. Our youngest daughter, Jennifer Lynn has decided to transfer from Petaluma High School to Montgomery High in Santa Rosa for her junior and senior years.

Changing schools – especially midway through high school – was something that I never anticipated doing. All of our three children stayed at the same elementary school  even when the school went through some difficult changes in the administration and many parents were jumping ship left and right. We always felt that if they had good teachers – which they did – that was what really mattered.

But when we moved from Petaluma to Cotati last November, which put us equidistant from both Petaluma and Santa Rosa, Jennifer became interested in checking out some of the specialized programs at Santa Rosa schools that she had heard about from friends. Programs such as ArtQuest at Santa Rosa High and the International Baccalaureate program at Montgomery High.

Jennifer has always been a child who likes to try things out and is more willing to put herself out there much more than her siblings ever would. And thankfully, her experimentation runs in the direction of social and academic outlets rather than risky behavior. She’s tried cheerleading, drama, badminton, public speaking – all just to see if they held any long-term interest for her.

So rather than being intimidated by the prospect of finding her way around a new school and making new friends, she’s excited about it. She feels like it’s a challenge that she would regret passing up.

I also think she wants to get out from under her older sister’s shadow and forge her own path. She’s not like me – I purposefully sought out the same teachers and professors that my older four siblings had had. They were all really good students and I’m sure many of the A’s on my report cards were given to me purely on the basis on my last name. They had set the standard; all I had to do was not screw it up.

But I have to respect Jennifer for not wanting to only be known as “Valerie’s sister” in her remaining time in high school. She wants to achieve something that is unique to her. Is there sibling rivalry in there? Sure, but again, I’m grateful it’s channeled in a positive direction. There are a lot of ways teenagers set themselves apart so if Jennifer is doing it by switching schools so she can take on an academically tough program, I’m ok with that.

As supportive as I am of Jennifer wanting to challenge herself socially and academically, there are many things I will miss about the wonderful Petaluma school community. The PHS Band (thank you, Mr. Eveland), the Herold Mahoney awards, the PEF awards, and Senior Recognition night are just a few of them.

For almost 20 years, one of our kids has been in a Petaluma City School. It’s been a great journey.

If you had been eves-dropping on the conversations in our house a couple of years ago, every third word would have been “college” or “application.” For about six months, Valerie’s college application process was the all-consuming topic. We got sucked into the angst of it to such an extent that once Valerie was tucked into her dorm room at Chapman University in Orange County, our younger daughter Jennifer Lynn, who was just starting high school at the time, forbade us from even mentioning the “C word” to her – she was that sick of us talking only about colleges.

For two years, Jennifer Lynn wanted nothing to do with thinking about college. But recently, that has all changed and she dreams about where she wants to go to college. I think part of it has to do with our move last year – she sees college as her ticket out of a 1600 square foot condo in Cotati that she has to share with her “Can I get the senior discount on that?” parents.

Also, once she took the PSAT and marketing materials with photos of ethnically diverse 19-year-olds with perfect teeth lounging and laughing on manicured lawns with ivy-covered buildings in the background started filling our mailbox, her heart leaped at the thought.

So when Steve spotted an ad in the newspaper for a College Fair with representatives from 150 colleges, it sounded like an all-you-can-eat buffet of college opportunities for Jennifer.

When we arrived at the Dominican campus for the College Fair, there was already a line of over-achieving students and competitive parents – like us – waiting to get in. Once we were let inside the gym, there were rows upon rows of rectangular tables covered with a tablecloth bearing the school’s name and if they were smart, the city and state that the school is located in.

We stayed together as a family for the first few tables but it was obvious that Jennifer wanted to ditch us and do the college version of speed dating on her own. That was fine with Steve and me. We were very happy leaning against a door playing a game of “match the student with their parent.”

Jennifer is interested in studying art and quickly picked up that when a school said that their art department was “very small but the students get a lot of individual attention” it was code for “our art department is in the sub-basement under the parking garage and we’re really interested in engineering students.”

She spent several minutes talking to the cute guy at the Cornish College of the Arts table, skipped over the not-hot guys at several public universities and then landed at the table for the Savannah College of Art and Design. One look at their cool brochure and she was smitten. Georgia sounds so exotic to her. “The only thing I know about Georgia are peaches which I really like.” Reason enough to go 3,000 miles away to college.

I was fortunate last week to have the assignment from the Argus to write the follow up story on the winner of the 2012 Small Business of the Year, Drew Hittenberger.

Drew is an orthotist and prosthetist, which must be such an unusual profession that Spellcheck doesn’t even recognize those as legitimate words.

While orthotist and prosthetist don’t exactly roll off my tongue, I’m quite familiar with the terms because our middle daughter, Valerie who is now 19, was born without a left arm below the elbow.

She was fitted with her first prosthesis when she was six months old. It’s really quite a cute little thing. It looks like a doll’s arm hinged to a plastic cuff that slipped over her upper arm. It had a figure eight-type strap that looped over her other shoulder so it would stay on. She still has the arm; it’s packed away with her favorite stuffed animal, yearbooks and other mementos of her childhood.

I had never met Drew before last week because Valerie got all her prostheses from Shriner’s Hospital for Children. I can’t really remember how we originally got connected with Shriner’s; the best I can recall, it was suggested to us that they had a lot of experience working with children. We just got started with them early on and for the most part, Valerie received excellent care from them.

In my interview with Drew, one point that he emphasized was how he listens to his patients. He wants to understand at the deepest level what their heart’s desire is, what about their disability frustrates them, and how he can provide the tool that will help them achieve their vision of themselves.

It made me think back to a couple of our experiences working with prosthetists at Shriners. There was one time we had made an appointment because Valerie’s prosthesis was causing her a lot of pain in her elbow, so much so that she couldn’t wear it. However, she had a rhythmic gymnastics meet coming up the next weekend for which she needed to be able to wear her arm. I remember the white examining room feeling like it was closing in on us as Valerie, me, and the prosthetist sat in silence. He seemed unwilling to offer up any kind of solution to the situation. Eventually he sighed and said he could try one other thing as a last resort. Fortunately, it worked to relieve the pressure and she was able to wear her arm and compete.

The reason I tell this story is because after talking with Drew, I was reminded of the contrast when we worked with a different prosthetist who was much more like Drew in his approach. Instead of making Valerie feel like her discomfort was her fault, his attitude was one of “I know there is a way we can fix this. It may take some experimentation but we’ll get there. If you want to be able to do (fill in the blank), I’ll do everything I can to help you achieve your goal.”

I would consider Drew extreme – and I mean that as the highest compliment – in his “can do” approach. He is committed to helping his patients reach their goals but as he put it, “wrapped in reality.” After all, we’re not talking about creating the Bionic Man or woman here. But patients who work with him are very blessed because when you work with someone like him, the world expands with possibilities instead of shrinking with limitations.

I had an experience On Easter that reminded me how spoiled we are in to be able to get almost anything, almost any time we want it,

It was probably mid-week last week on the drive home from picking her up at school when Jennifer Lynn asked me if we could make a trip to Michael’s to buy face paint for a video project for her Spanish class. I was probably barely paying attention; I’m sure I was much more consumed with thinking about whether or not I could scrounge something out of the freezer – hmm, Costco potstickers and pizza, that will work – thereby avoiding going to the grocery store for one more night.

“Sure, we’ll go there sometime over the weekend,” I said and then didn’t give it another moment’s thought.

Even though we passed by Michael’s six more times before the week was over, I was always focused on the next item on my agenda and Jennifer Lynn’s request for face paint wasn’t on it.

I think she mentioned it again on Friday, and I brushed it off with “we’re all going into the city on Saturday so we’ll get it on Sunday.”

Somewhere between home and church on Easter I remembered that she needed it for first period Monday morning. No problem, we can get it this afternoon. Michael’s is open on Thanksgiving; they are certain to be open on Easter. And if not Michaels, there’s always Target which is open way past my bedtime on any given night.

Amazingly enough, Target, Trader Joes, Costco, and Michaels are closed on Easter. It was shocking to seeRohnert Park, which is after all – all shopping centers – looking like a ghost town. Easter and Christmas are the only days that those stores are closed.

You mean there are two days out of the year that I can’t have instant gratification? I can’t buy face paint at the exact moment that is convenient for me? I had to abide by someone else’s schedule? How dare they!

Yes, I was bummed that Michaels was closed but we found an alternative for face paint at CVS that worked just fine – non-toxic, washable Crayola paints.

Am I glad that there are some stores that find a day worthy of being closed? Yes. How would I feel if CVS and Safeway also chose to close on Christmas and Easter and so I wouldn’t have been able to buy the paint?

I would feel a little inconvenienced and I would have to plan ahead better but somehow the generation before us managed without stores being open 24/7.  I think I could too.

Darn, the dryer still isn’t drying.

It’s been two months since our drama with the dryer began. It started with a service call to Sears, followed by a service call by a vent cleaning company, which led to water dripping through the ceiling because the serviceman who was supposedly cleaning the vent didn’t properly reattach the washing machine’s drainage hose.

Then, we had visits by two contractors to assess the water damage and hopefully get the dryer working again but when it came to the terms of payment, our landlord got hotheaded and made them angry. So neither of them would come back to do the work..

We pleaded and one of the contractors agreed to come back. He reattached the dryer vent hose which we’ll pay for on our own nickel. It’s just not worth the hassle of trying to work through the long-distance landlord.

The reason the dryer didn’t work in the first place is because the owners of the condo bought a dryer that is too big for the closet-type space that it sits in. The one they bought I’m sure would fit perfectly in their 3,500 square foot house with a separate laundry room but it barely squeezes into the 1,600 square foot condo.

We’ve taken off the louvered doors and moved the dryer six inches into the hallway so that the foil hose that leads from the dryer to the vent wouldn’t be kinked. But the hose still has to have a loop in it and that seems to restrict the air flow to the point that the clothes get dizzy from hours of tumbling but they never get dry.

It’s inconvenient to schlep garbage bags of wet clothes to the Laundromat but in the spectrum of household chores, it’s not all that bad. The Laundromat closest to our house has dryers that even on “low” are so hot that I practically need an oven mitt to take the clothes out after my two quarters worth of time. And since I’ve discovered podcasts, I have actually come to look forward to going. I put the clothes in, hop up on the counter in front of the dryer, and listen a broadcast of “Fresh Air” on NPR or a sermon from a favorite pastor.

Watching dryer drum spin the jeans rhythmically around, listening to a message about God, inhaling the fragrance of Bounce dryer sheets…it’s all a rather Zen experience, if it’s not sacrilegious describe it that way. Laundry and enlightenment – it’s a pretty good combination.

Snip, snip and it’s off. And it feels so good.

You see, for the past three years, I’ve been growing out my hair. When it was still short, my daughters told me that it looked stiff and old-lady-ish. That was motivation enough to have me cancel my next haircut and start trying to get some length to my hair. Then, I started looking at other women my age to see what my hairstyle options were. There was a beautiful woman I saw at church whose haircut I admired. She had a lovely chin-length bob. So why not go for that look, I thought?

The problem is that she has good hair and I don’t. When the Bible says that “the very hairs on your head are numbered,” God wouldn’t even need to get into five digits for me, it’s that thin. And saying my hair is in a “pony tail” when it’s pulled back is a misnomer. Mine is much closer to a rat tail in thickness.

So after repeating the long, short, long, short, long cycle of hair length one more time in my life, I have come to the conclusion that short is going to be the way I wear my hair for the rest of my life. As much as I fantasize about having hair like Sonya Vergara, my German heritage just isn’t going to pull it off. If you’ve seen photos of Angela Merkel, you’ll know what I mean.

Like the mortgage that we couldn’t afford, my hair was weighing me down. We lightened up by reducing our living space by about 1000 square feet. Why not do it personally too and lighten up by cutting a few inches off my hair? Once Kim at Solo Hair Design had done her magic and six inches of hair lay on the floor, I felt great.

When Kim cut it, it was like she cut off three years of recession that had been weighing me down. My neck immediately felt longer, I felt like a burden had been lifted from me.

I’m hoping that this lighter feeling translates into a lighter, brighter outlook on life no matter what the headlines say.

Since graduating from San Francisco State last May with a degree in Cinema, our son has been able to cover most of his expenses with part-time work. His most recent gig was with a very small video production company – it was him and one other guy – in Oakland.

The owner didn’t like doing business development, so Ethan was tasked with making cold calls to nonprofits with the goal of generating enough work to keep the business afloat.

He got tips from Steve on how to respond to the typical answers such as “we do all our video in-house” or “we already have someone who handles that for us.” Ethan gave it his best shot and got them some meetings. But new business – at least in the near future – wasn’t forthcoming, so he got laid off.

Then a job prospect appeared; after thinking that he had really fumbled the phone interview for a job at a video game company, he got called back to do a shadowing day. He was shocked and ecstatic.

We checked in with him briefly after he had spent the day at the company. He felt good about how the day had gone; they said they would let him know on Monday.

So on Monday evening when we hadn’t heard from him, I decided to give him a call and see what the news was. As I suspected since he hadn’t called, he didn’t get the job.

He was angry and hurt. “I should have stayed for another year at SF State because then I would have gotten an additional degree in film production that would have really meant something. When I pointed out that this would add at least another $10,000 to his already compounding student loans, he didn’t want to hear it. “Nothing I did is worth anything.”

In the spectrum of the many challenges that life can throw at a person, not getting a job that you had hoped to get – when you’re only 23 – is disappointing but certainly not tragic. But it’s so tough to see you’re child in pain. As a parent, you can’t help but wish you could rush over, give the “owie” a kiss and make it all better. Being a bit of a worry wart, I’m already dreading the day one of our daughters gets dumped by a boy.

Before I sank into a sea of depression with him, Steve got on the phone and tried to help him put things into perspective; to remind him that there will be other opportunities, that God has a plan for him, and it is persevering through the difficulties in life that builds character and humility.

Was he able to hear us at the time? Probably not, but when we checked back in with him a few days later, he was back on the hunt for a job and doing it with more determination and less arrogance. He is willing to take any job that will allow him to not have to move back home and sleep on our couch. With one exception: he can’t bring himself to work at Starbucks for a third time. Oh well, there’s always Peets.

One of the bright spots in selling our house and becoming renters was that we wouldn’t be the ones responsible for maintenance issues in our home. The thought that we could just call the landlord when the disposal quit working or the fence needed repairing sounded really good to us.

There was one factor we didn’t take into account in our thinking, and that was the type of landlord we might have.

Mind you, our landlord is not evil. In fact, they are a perfectly delightful couple – a retired HP software engineer and a surgeon – it’s just that they have a lot of other things going on in their lives and tending to a 1600 square foot condo 100 miles away from them isn’t as much a priority as caring for the horses on their ranch.

When we signed our rental agreement, we were actually dealing with their 19-year-old daughter. At the time, she wanted to go into property management so I suppose having her act as our landlord seemed like an ideal opportunity for some on-the-job training. But there was obviously tension between her and her mother about items on the rental agreement.

After not having my phone calls and emails returned, it was apparent that real estate was a passing fancy for her – she’s now studying to be an EMT – and mom and dad are reluctantly back in the landlord role.

So we’re at their mercy for getting the dryer, all the lights in the kitchen and eating area, and downstairs toilet fixed.

When the washing machine spewed water that dripped from the second floor to the first, they called the contractor they had used a couple of years ago when a similar incident happened. The landlord, the contractor and I all met at our house to assess the damage and when everyone left, I felt confident that I would be hearing from the contractor shortly to get the dryer properly vented and make sure there wasn’t any lasting water damage.

Well, it turns out that the contractor had been holding a grudge against our landlord for the past two years over $400 that he said he was owed but never paid. The contractor said he wasn’t going to do any work until he was paid what was owed him. The landlord has paid the disputed amount but is furious about it.  So who is actually going to come and take care of the growing list of maintenance issues is very much TBD.

I haven’t felt so squeezed in the middle since I sat between my two daughters on the Scrambler at last year’s fair.

In the meantime, I have gotten to know all the Laundromats within three miles of our house, we have moved a pole lamp from the bedroom to the kitchen so we have some light downstairs, and we have two other bathrooms that have working plumbing.

A little inconvenient but not unworkable for now. We may be glad we only signed a six month lease.

The one thing that our daughter, Jennifer, misses about our old house is the color of her room. She and her older sister spent hours pouring over paint chips at Lowe’s until Jennifer settled on a Martha Stewart color called “Lavender Soap.” When she picked it out, I thought it seemed a little gray and dull. But she proved her good taste because once it was on the walls of her room, it was beautiful. Lavender’s calming qualities seemed to overtake the room in spite of the swirling chaos of books, papers, clothes and shoes spread across her floor and desk.

The color of her room in our new place is sort of a bleached yellow. It’s not objectionable; it’s just not reflective of her taste. So ever since we moved almost four months ago, I have promised her a trip to IKEA so she could pick out some accessories to make her room feel more like her own and less like a Hampton Inn.

For Steve, an afternoon at IKEA sounded like even less fun than an afternoon at Nordstrom Rack so he decided to make it a work day. I was happy to have a reason to procrastinate doing the taxes so President’s Day seemed like the ideal day for Jennifer and I to have a shopping excursion.

I really enjoy going to IKEA because it might be the closest I’ll ever get to visiting a foreign country. When I’m there, I can pretend I’m in Europe; all the signs are in a different language and I hardly ever hear anyone speaking English. Who cares that all the words are made up and they throw umlauts over every vowel?

After fortifying ourselves with Swedish meatballs and elderflower juice at the IKEA café when we got there, we entered the labyrinth. That place has more nooks and crannies than a Thomas’s English Muffin.

One thing I love about IKEA is the slightly scaled-down size of everything. It has the same feel as Main Street USA inDisneylandwhere all the buildings are three-quarters of actual size. It’s all so cute and cozy, like I’m in a little girls playhouse – especially the pink kitchen with the faux bonbons. It makes me want to transplant the whole set up right into my house.

IKEA is one of those places that you can feel like you’ve been taken into another dimension when you finally re-emerge into sunlight, so knowing that we could loose all track of time if we weren’t careful, we sped pretty quickly through the rooms and into the downstairs Marketplace.

As Jennifer said, so many patterns! How to achieve the right zen between bold and delicate for a new duvet cover and pillows. But Jennifer did it – a big circular pattern on the coverlet and a complementary, more colorful small print on the throw pillows. Then it was onto Lamp Land…that’s when I called Steve and said he had better send a search and rescue party with a St. Bernard with a cask of Aquavit into the bowels of IKEA lest my shriveled corpse be found with my fingers still clasping the “Rodd” (that’s the “Swedish” name for the pole lamp) on Tuesday morning.

I barely escaped with my life and a bag of frozen meatballs.