​In our house you can imagine, if something is yours, truly yours, whether, edible, inanimate,  dirty, clean, plastic or diamond, and especially if it’s printed on rag paper, you need to guard it with your life. You can pull out one of the drug smugglers tricks and hide it in your underwear or other places, but chances are, just like bomb sniffing dogs, someone will find it and use it.
 
Every morning, I make hot tea with lemon.  I use the lemons later on for my humonogo water jug. Twice a week, I cut up a few lemons and put them in a baggie because I hate slicing, cutting and chopping anything.  Odd for a cook, but I love my Cuisinart.  I keep a citrus based surplus in my fridge in a little baggie hidden in the crisper.   One morning I did this, made my water, and hid the lemons.
 
And there it was, as sure as Restallyn in Kim Kardashian’s lips, the lemons vanished.   And, I was pissed.  Who exactly I was pissed at, I don’t quite know, but it could be any of those interlopers who freeload in my house.  Was it Vale using them for a baking sculpture or to fill a lemon crepe?  Was it Eva making lemon slime?  Was it Federica baking a lemon layer cake?  There were endless possibilities.  “Who took my lemons??”  They looked at me like I had aphasia and nothing was coming out. 
 
That day, I went to pick up.   Camilla walks out of the building and calmly asks me in this little whisper of a voice, “Mom, why did you give me a bag of lemons for snack?”  I stopped for a second and I said, “I gave you what?”  She answered “There was a plastic bag with lemons in my lunchbox.”  Well, so much for multitasking.  I had found my lemons, and there was a bag of pretzels in the crisper.
 
Camilla does like lemons though, and she thought the acidic surprise should continue.   So, it was a win-win.  

My little Camilla, who is a total snacker, junk food junkie and gummy worm addict, and not so little anymore, was a 4lb 4oz weakling.  When she was born, she looked like one of those skinny chickens you see in the poultry store window on Arthur Avenue.
 
I was always so worried about her weight, that it became all consuming.   Since she arrived home, three weeks early, every two hours were spent nursing and pumping and feeding and weighing.   That was MY life for the first three months of HER life, then around four months, she started a speedy gain when we introduced some solids.   I tried not to be, but I am sure I was a hot mess for most of it.I can’t even dig up a pic for you, because I just don’t want to.

One evening, or maybe even early morning, as the routine was, I got up to nurse her and change her diaper.   I did.  You know what that’s like.  You turn the switch on, you make the movements like Rosie on the Jetsons, and proceed with your evening, or morning, or whatever it is at that moment, as if you even have a clue. I snapped up her little onesie pj, and brought her back to bed with me.
 
A few hours later, I picked her up to nurse and change again, and what the *(&^…my bed was soaking in newborn urine.  Well, you know, it was just a puddle under her, which leaked on to me ... you get the picture.  I thought I didn’t have her diaper on securely, or the sticky part didn’t stick…none of the above.  Guess what… NO DIAPER!!!!!!  I never put the diaper on her.  

​I put her down in a stupor on the changing table, took the old diaper off, robotically threw it in the Genie, and just snapped her up and went on my way … back to bed, never being the wiser, until we woke up in baby pee.
 
To this day, I have no idea, or maybe I do, how I just didn’t put a diaper on the kid … she was very cool with it, though.   She just peed as she was supposed to, diaper or sans.  ​