I have always been quite happy to be a woman. Never in my life have I thought that my life would be better in any way if I had only been born a man.

But suddenly, for the first time in my life, I am finding myself a little bit jealous of the male anatomy.

Why? Well, our family has spent the last several weekends in the woods, camping and hiking and having a blast. It's been great, up until the moment when one of the girls looks at me and announces, "I have to go potty." When you're 50 miles from nearest toilet, this simple statement suddenly takes on a whole new level of complication.


Let me walk you through the steps of outdoor peeing for the two genders, just in case you haven't had the pleasure yourself.

Men:
Step One: Find a tree, any tree.
Step Two: Unzip.
Step Three: Pee.
Step Four: Re-zip (step four optional).

Women:
Step One: Walk through the forest until you find an extremely large bush, fallen log, or tree.
Step Two: Ponder whether or not said bush or tree is really large/leafy/secluded enough to ensure complete privacy from other hikers who may happen to pass by.
Step Three: Conclude that it is not, and wander farther away from the trail. Repeat Steps 1-3 as needed.
Step Four: Unzip and push your pants and undies way down around your ankles, completely exposing your naked bottom.
Step Five: Maneuver yourself into an awkward squatting/crouching/reclining position, making sure that you are leaned waaaay back so that in no case are your feet ever actually positioned directly below yourself. (Failure to comply with the completely awkward and uncomfortable position described in Step Five means that pee will simply flow straight down and soak the pants and undies around your ankles.)
Step Six: Pee as fast as you can, hoping all the while that no one will come along and get an eyeful of your naked rear, and that you have positioned yourself appropriately and you're not going to pee on your pants, and that no pee splashes up onto you as you're going.
Step Seven: Pull your clothes up, try not to step in the puddle you've made, and wonder whether you can find your way back to the trail.

Peeing in the woods is an awkward manuever for any woman, one that I don't really love doing myself. Taking my daughters to pee in the woods is even worse. You have to do all the above steps, except that you have to coax an reluctant apprentice through all of them and literally hold her hand as she does it. After years of training on *only peeing in the toilet* we're suddenly reversing courses. It weirds them out. As one daughter said to me as I helped her go behind a bush, "I just don't feel very comfortable with this. "

In the past three weeks, while attempting to help my daughters pee in the woods,  I have been peed upon, I've had girls say they need to go and then get stage fright and refuse when faced with the prospect of actually peeing behind a tree, and I've had the whole process simply take too long for a small bladder to handle and had to carry backpack full of stinky, wet clothes around with me the rest of the day.

This doesn't mean that I don't love getting outdoors with my children. Or that I wish I had boys. But I am wishing that there were an easier way. Women of the world, help me out here. How do you handle taking your daughters potty in the woods?

I have a love/hate relationship with my digital camera. With digital photography in general, actually. So let's be positive and start with the love, shall we?

I love the fact that the cameras we have nowadays are so gosh-darn GOOD. With the zooming ability and different flash/lighting settings, not to mention computer photo-editing software, it is so easy for even the most untrained of amateurs to get really good pictures. You can see the photos you took instantly, and then take another if you don't like the way it looks. And then another, and another, and another, because you have a memory card that lets you store hundreds of shots with no problem. As a mom, it is now easier than ever to have stunning pictures of even the most mundane moments of your kids' childhoods.

Which brings us to the reason I hate digital cameras. Now that digital photography has come along, I feel like I *should* have stunning pictures of even the most mundane moments of my kids' childhoods. I feel the urge to bring the camera along whenever we're going to the park. Who knows when I might have the chance to get a great candid shot of my kids' little toes in the green grass, or their smile of pride as they swing across the monkey bars? And let's not even get started on the "special" moments. At Christmastime or at a school play I can't stop--I find myself snapping shot after shot after shot.

I took fourteen pictures during the approximately one minute my kid was on stage pretending to be a fish. And that's not even counting the dozens of other pictures I took when she was just standing in the background singing as a part of the chorus. I think there's something wrong with that picture. And it's not the kid in the fish mask.

It came to me, at a recent school production, as I crouched in the aisle next to my seat, madly fiddling with the settings on my camera so I could get a good shot in low-light without the flash, then zoomed in and zoomed out, trying to find the best way to frame my daughter's face, then I had gone too far.

I wasn't actually watching her performance. I was there at her performance. My eyes were taking it in. But I wasn't paying any attention to it. All I was focusing on was whether I was getting a good picture of her performance. And for what? So I could later on, one day, look back on a picture of said performance, which I wouldn't even recall because my brain never focused in on the details of it long enough to form a memory?

Back in the day, my parents attended all my school performances. They raised their regular old film camera when I came on stage, snapped a couple of shots, and then put it away. They didn't get picture after picture after picture, because who would want to waste a whole roll of film on the school play? And then one day, months later, when we did finish a roll of film, maybe we'd remember to take it to the drugstore to get it developed, and then maybe another month after that we'd remember to stop by and pick it up. The shots would be kind of far away, but that was okay. You could still see us kids up on the stage, and it was enough. No one expected the parents to be taking professional-quality pictures, because the parents were not professionals. Just folks watching their kids put on a mask and dance around pretending to be a fish.

And you know what? That's okay. It's okay to not document every moment of your child's life. It's okay to fully experience the present, rather than sacrificing the moment so that you can have a perfectly preserved memento. One that will sit on your computer forever, clogging up the hard drive without ever being looked at again.

I need to remind myself that I'm there so I can be enjoying life with my kids, not making a documentary about them. That sometimes it's okay for me to put the camera down, sit back in my uncomfortable metal folding chair, and just enjoy the show.

Rainy summer morning. Three antsy children. Brilliant idea: get them involved in a fun project.

Twenty minutes later, all three girls are sitting on an old plastic tablecloth stretched out across the kitchen floor, happily painting with home-made finger paint. I am in the adjacent bathroom, scrubbing the shower, mentally congratulating myself on what a fun mother/domestic goddess I am being on this rainy morning.

Suddenly, I hear peals of laughter. The devilishly delighted kind of laughter that can mean nothing good. "Look! Look! Charlie made a paw print on my page!' Beth squeals, and my heart just about stops.

I rush in to see the cat walking away from the loud, giggling girls...and that there are, indeed, little green kitty footprints on Beth's painting.

I think I yelled, despite my pact. "No! You can't let the kitty walk in the paint!"

Then I realized that getting loud might actually scare the kitty. Visions of a startled kitty, dashing through the house, leaping from couch to chair to bookshelf, covering it all in green paint, rushed to my mind. And I changed my tactic.

"Goooood kitty. Come here, Charlie. C'mere, boy."

He glared at me, turned his tail and trotted out of the kitchen, heading for the living room (the location of couches and chairs and bookshelves!), and I followed, tiptoeing my way gently around the giggling girls and wet paint.

Charlie hopped up onto a mercifully non-upholstered dining room chair and begin to lick himself. I swooped in, picked him up, dashed to the door and tossed him outside, where I figured he could dance around and make footprints in the grass all day long without hurting anything.

I warned the girls sternly about not letting him back in until their paintings were dry, and explained to them in full detail about what would happen were they ever to attempt mixing cats and paint again. I wiped up the short trail of still-wet green kitty footprints he had left on the floor and the dining room chair.

And then I thanked my lucky stars, one more time, that I live in a house will nearly all hard-surface floors. Non-staining, easily wipable, easy to clean.

I swear I will never live in a carpeted house again. They're just too risky.