One of the best things about writing a daily blog is you can pour out your heart, express your frustrations, confess your weaknesses and occasionally, when you’re in the mood, embarrass your family.
 

You can talk about your son’s piano lessons, your daughter’s new bed and your sister’s old boyfriend, and not get fired.
 

“Just, whatever you do, can you leave me out of it?” my daughter Amanda begged tonight as I ran a made-up quote by her. “I think you need to keep your personal and professional lives separate.”
 

“But I don’t have a professional life,” I reminded her, which is about when she ran away from me trailed by her little brother, who was afraid I would follow up the piano lesson blog with an inspired piece about his tuba.
 

As a professional newspaper reporter, writing about women I observed in restaurants not wearing pants was not encouraged. Neither was writing about my loss of memory, naked men or my co-ed softball team.
 

I think that must be why I have written with more frequency and more joy in the last three months than I had in a long while. If I could make a living at this, I’d be the happiest woman in the world.
 

Not that I am not happy writing sports. I am. After a few months of seriously wondering whether I would ever return to sportswriting, I am happy to report that in writing about women in restaurants without pants, I have also re-discovered how much I truly enjoy being a sportswriter in my new duties for ESPN.
 

If I hadn’t returned to sports, I may have forgotten all those off-hand remarks people make when you interview them that never quite find their way into your stories because they just don’t fit, but that never quite leave you either.
 

Like when you’re finished talking to Cubs manager Lou Piniella about Ryan Dempster and the pitcher’s infant daughter’s health crisis, the interview is finished and Piniella slowly shakes his head.
 

“You don’t get it back,” he says quietly, talking in general about how the baseball culture has changed from the days when he was allowed a day off for the birth of only one of his three children. “Kids don’t forget about not being there for their birthdays and mothers don’t forget about not being there for their babies.”
 

Or when you’re sitting in the dugout one morning waiting out a blinding rainstorm with Dempster and your sportscaster friend Peggy Kusinski, and it’s just the three of you, three parents, talking about how much you love your kids.
 

“You know that movie “Taken?” says Dempster, whose baby is still in the hospital at this point, still with a tracheal tube because she is unable to swallow on her own some three months after her birth.
 

Peggy and I nod, though I doubt she knows the movie any better than I do.
 

“Liam Neeson is in France looking for his daughter,” Dempster tells us, “and the chief of police there says, ‘I’d help you but you’re tearing down the city.’ And Liam Niesen looks at him and says, ‘I’d tear down the Eiffel Tower to save my daughter,’ and that’s the way I feel about this. I’ve always felt that way about my son but seeing my daughter sick and in bed and going through this, I’ll do whatever I have to. I just want to get her better.”
 

It was for the same story that I spoke to White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, who as always delivered with comments uniquely Ozzie. But then you turn off your tape recorder and he adds:
 

“The only thing in life you have is your kids. As soon as you leave this game, they’ll remember you when you die and if you ever go to the Hall of Fame. The only time they bring you back here is if they can make some money. But when you talk about your kids, that’s the only thing that’s really yours. Your wife, your mom, they’re not yours. If one of my kids gets sick, [screw] baseball, I’ll go be with them.”
 

Those are the best moments, even when you can’t always work them into print.
 

And that’s why I love my blog, because I just did.

Heard from Marty Biviano. This made my sister nearly choke when I called. I’d like to say, being the communications professional that I am, that I was not surprised. But I choked a little too.

I mentioned Marty Biviano in a blog I wrote several entries ago on coed dorm rooms now being allowed at the University of Chicago.

I was trying to illustrate how much dorm life has changed from when my sister attended Lincoln College in the late 1960s and men had to sign in with the dorm mother. Men like Marty Biviano, my sister’s boyfriend her freshman year in college.

I did not have to mention Marty by name or really talk about him at all. But I liked the story about her having to rush their goodnight kissing to make it in by the 10 p.m. curfew, another feature of dorm life in the 60’s.

And I liked his name. Marty Biviano. I mean, it’s a great name and I thought it gave the story a little added color and credibility.

I called my sister back to tell her this and she thought I was a little more nuts than usual.

“You’re writing about Marty Biviano?” she asked. “Are you sure it’s OK to use his name?”

“Why?” I asked. “Was he secretly married as a freshman at Lincoln College? Was he leading a double-life and really part of a religious sect that did not permit kissing?”

“Fine,” she said, only a teeny bit exasperated.

And then Marty Biviano e-mailed me.

From another state nowhere near Lincoln College, nor his hometown.

My sister was blown away.

I was also astounded, as if this was the first time I have ever written anything that appeared on the Internet and was seen by real people I did not personally know who did not live in the Chicagoland area.

Marty could not have been nicer. If we were surprised, imagine how he felt, he wrote, when his son sent him a link to a blog referring to his life more than 42 years ago.

He remembered what my sister had described and he remembered visiting our house and my parents lending them their car for his first drive into Chicago. I’m not sure he remembered my sister trying to pass him off as being Jewish to my father, who cared about such things in 1968 and was clearly easy to fool.

Sadly, Marty didn’t have any stories about the adorable little sister but it must have been a brief visit.

He updated me a little on his life, I updated him a little on my sister’s and now we’re e-mail buddies.

But there was one thing I still had to know. Though I’d like to think this website/blog of mine gets around, and I know it has moved beyond my immediate family, how did it get to Marty?

I wrote him again and he responded that just by chance, his son had Googled his name and it was in the top 5 hits. I was suddenly proud. Top five, wow.

Googling yourself  is not a new phenomenon. It even has some nicknames, like “egosurfing” and “egogoogling.” No name that I know of when you google your loved ones, but I’m sure it’s in the works.

My daughter Amanda once googled herself  and was shocked to learn that she was the author of two “books” – one on the tennis player Anna Kournikova and another on Allen Iverson. She was about seven at time and didn’t recall having written two books. So I had to come clean and admit that I was not all that proud of the rush-job I did for a European publisher (I mean, Anna Kournikova? Need I say more?) and decided they would be ghostwritten by Amanda.

“Oh, great,” my husband said at the time, “now she’ll never get into a good college.”

So amusing. At least she can buy them all up for about eight cents each.

Marty said he’s sure he’ll never hear the end of it from his family regarding his brush with fame. He also told me he was a retired public school band director, which gave me the perfect opening to e-mail him all about our son’s budding music career.

Funny, I haven’t heard back from him in a while.

It’s just a bed.

A little twin bed with a tendency to creak too much for our daughter’s liking.  It’s also way too small, according to Amanda, who is prone to exaggeration and has been dying for a new one for the last few years.

I remember when we all used to be able to fit in that bed. The whole family would  climb in together – Amanda, Rick, me and even Alec, who usually ended up falling into the crack between bed and wall and had to be rescued.

Much thought was put into buying that bed. We went to several different stores, my thought that it had to fit into a little girl’s room but be grown-up enough that if she wanted to take it with her to her first apartment, it would still be OK. I actually thought that.

It’s oak, with a white wash so it sort of matches her dressers, which also seemed important then. And it has an arched headboard and footboard with simple vertical slates and a trundle bed underneath that is concealed by fake drawer fronts. That also seemed important, the sleepovers.

The dressers were already there, one with a dressing table on top, which we bought with a matching crib. Amanda was two and a half and fine with her crib. Never jumped out or even tried. But the new baby was due in a few months and as custom dictated, the transition to the big-girl bed had to be done before little brother arrived (so the older kid wouldn’t resent the baby for pushing her out of babyhood and one day rock him so hard while they were sitting right next to the new bed that he bucked his head back and needed stitches).

Oh wait, that happened anyway.

Amanda was excited when we bought the new bed. Knowing me and the fact that I was eight months pregnant, I’m pretty sure I cried or at least wanted to as Rick dismantled the crib and put this giant piece of adult furniture in my baby’s room. The new baby would get a more neutral hand-me-down dresser and crib from his cousins, so Amanda’s would be packed up and sold.

We bought bright yellow sheets to go with a multi-colored comforter, which also seemed a shock to the system after the pastels of babyhood. Rick took pictures of Amanda lying in the new bed in her purple zip-up footie jammies, arms behind her head on the new yellow pillow, knees propped up and looking like a teenager.

She was so proud.

But not that smart.

In the morning when she woke up, she forgot she was no longer restricted by a crib and like she had been doing, called for us.

“I’m up,” she yelled. “Daaaddy, can I get up?”

Of course, my husband being my husband, couldn’t resist.

“Nooo,” he called back, both of us terribly amused that she didn’t know she could get up on her own.

I believe in some states, this would qualify as child abuse.

Rick was usually the reader and would lie in the bed with Amanda for at least five to 10 minutes before I’d find both asleep. As she got older, that bed was where I’d get all the very important news of the day that she was too busy or too bothered to tell me in her upright hours and would now be too horrified to share in the same detail.

It was also the bed where all the sleepovers took place, the first of them and in truth, most of them, her brother Alec making the trip over from his room next door.

She turned 14 on Saturday, after what we all decided was at least 18-19 months of being 13. And in a weak moment, with no other birthday present to offer and a very good mattress salesman doing his thing, we broke down and bought a new, truly big-girl bed.

This one has no real character, just a queen-sized mattress, box spring, metal frame and a headboard they “threw in” for $89.  And I’ve scarcely seen Amanda more excited.

It arrives tomorrow morning. So tonight, Rick is dismantling her old one and getting it ready for a potential buyer. Last night he took a picture of it for Craig’s List and we both remembered the last one we took with the purple footie jammies.

Hopefully, anyone interested will not mind the little dent where Alec’s head banged into it. Or the glued-in knobs on the head and footboards, so Amanda would stop pulling them out.

Maybe they’ll have sibling sleepovers in it too, and hear the same giggles late into the night as we did.

I will try not to cry as he boxes it up, mostly because everyone in the house will make fun of me.

Or maybe I’ll just go somewhere they won’t hear me.

I kid my son that I miss watching his baseball games (he was finished last month after the house league season ended) in much the same way I looked longingly at the high school gym at my daughter’s orientation until she finally urged me to go in and sign myself up for intramurals.

I remind them, whenever it seems appropriate and sometimes when it’s not, of my athletic prowess at their age. And as much as I am scornful of the kind of parents who live through their children’s usually meager athletic feats, I can’t imagine how I would keep still if I had kids who were gifted in some sport.

My 11-year-old son plays soccer and baseball, enjoys it, is exceedingly coachable and a good athlete. But when the summer comes and travel baseball takes over the fields in town, he enjoys his only few months away from organized sports.

Funny, but he never takes a break from music.

I remember when my daughter was in second grade and all the other girls had seemingly found their niche – they were ice skaters or dancers or soccer players or actresses. And I remember being actually a little nervous that Amanda, at age 7, did not have a chosen vocation yet.

She dabbled in everything, had fun, but she wasn’t specializing in anything. What was to become of her?

Eventually, after she sat me down and urged me to get help, I figured out that if you’re lucky in life, you will be exposed to a lot of different things. But if you’re truly fortunate, you will find your passion as it finds you.

I think Alec may have found his.

I took him to his piano lesson tonight and like I always do when I go, I sat in the room with him and his teacher, a wonderful woman who doesn’t mind the intrusion. I always go with a couple magazines but I rarely read them. Instead, I listen and not just to the music but to them.

As they talk about E-minors and C-majors, four-four counts and five-seven chords and syncopation, I can’t help but think of my piano lessons from Mrs. Carter, a patient woman who spent the better part of a year just barely getting me through “Swaying Silver Birches” and “One Less Bell to Answer” (I was into Burt Bachrach, what can I say?).

Like Alec’s teacher, Mrs. Carter was smart enough to let kids play songs they had actually heard of with the hope that this might sustain their interest in music. But by this time, I was also 14th chair clarinet in the school band and pretty much knew my limitations.

And Mrs. Carter and I never, ever talked music like Alec and Mrs. L. do.  

They seem to get lost in their conversations, their heads tilting toward one another as they nod and laugh in this secret language to which I am a stranger.

After less than two years, I am told Alec can transpose. I do not know what this means but I think it’s good. He came home tonight and as he always does, went directly to the piano where he told me he was composing a song of moderate tempo.

“That’s 120 to the quarter-note,” he explained and I nodded.

I remember when we bought our piano. Alec had just begun lessons about six months before and it was clear that the little keyboard from Costco wasn’t going to cut it. We planned to find the cheapest (used) piano we could get and maybe stick it in the basement.

I actually thought it might be disruptive in the living room.

Of course, we ended up investing in a new one – “Promise you’ll still like piano for at least another year,” I remember saying to him in the piano store – and we put it in the living room where it is a source not of noise, but of graceful melody  that we cannot get enough of.

There are countless ways we fail to influence our kids. Alec picked the tuba as his first instrument in the school band.

“How about trumpet?” we asked. “The trumpet is nice, and look how you can actually lift it.”

“Nope,” he shook his head.

“How about trombone?” we tried. “It’s bigger, but we can still tell it’s you playing it.”

“Nope,” he said again.

The tuba was the biggest, explained our son, who still can’t see above it. But two years later, he is still loving it and if he doesn’t end up playing piano in the Chicago Symphony, maybe he’ll be the dot above the “i” in the script Ohio in Ohio State’s marching band. Or maybe he’ll just play for his own kids.

Either way, my husband and I are not sure from where this love was born. We can only listen as the music dances under his fingertips, his soul soars and his passion is ignited.

I am writing this on the family p.c. Why, you ask, would I be writing on a big, clunky computer when I have a nice, new laptop I have finally grown accustomed to and even like after weeks of learning how to live without the track ball thing on my old Tribune laptop?
 

The answer is that for the second time in the last month, I left my brand-new power cord to my brand-new laptop in a press box, this time at U.S. Cellular Field after the White Sox game last night. Once again, I got away with it because it was found and I will get it back. But this time, God decided I wasn’t going to get away with it quite so easily and I discovered I have no battery power on my laptop.
 

So there was that to mope about today, along with the phone call from a woman asking if I wanted to subscribe to the Tribune with the pitch: “We’ve made some great changes to the paper recently we think you’ll like.” I guaranteed her that I didn’t like the changes and then I sulked about this continued forgetfulness that would be funny if I wasn’t reasonably sure, given my gene pool, that this portends some approaching form of dementia.
 

Two weeks ago, I left the same power cord in the Wrigley Field press box. And a couple months before that, I left a brand-new (it’s always brand-new) set of noise cancelling headphones in a large black case with a brand-new micro-cassette recorder also inside the case, in the press room at the United Center after a Bulls game.
 

I’m thinking of driving to Soldier Field tomorrow and leaving something valuable there, just to get it over with.
 

I didn’t get the headphones back right away. In fact, after two weeks, I was sure they were gone and I had concluded that the cleaning crew had stolen them, and that all people were inherently bad and dishonest and evil. Then a few weeks later, it popped up in the possession of Blackhawks’ personnel, who were given the headphones by the nice,   responsible cleaning crew and had been kind enough to put it in their office for safekeeping until the unfortunate knucklehead who forgot them thought of contacting the other team that inhabits the United Center.  
 

My brother Barry, he of the same gene pool, and I have a theory for all of this forgetfulness. We have decided that the more you try to remember something, the larger the chance that you will then forget it.
 

It works this way: If someone were to tell you that you had to bring a special package with you to work tomorrow or else you will be fired, you would tell yourself that this is VERY important. Then you would put the package by the front door. Then you would tell yourself again that you must not forget it. And then you would forget it.
 

Why is this? Our theory, if you’re still interested, is that it’s because you have done your job by reminding yourself and by putting it by the front door. It’s so important that you could not possibly forget it. And you have now taken yourself off the hook and ensured you will without question forget it.
 

After forgetting my power cord at Wrigley, NO WAY could it possibly happen again. So I was VERY careful the next few times, going through an exaggerated checklist each time I left a game: Be sure to wrap up the power cord. Check. Put it in computer bag. Check. Is it really in there? Check. Now look back at work area and make sure it’s not there as I walk out. Check.
 

I did this once, twice, realized I was treating myself like a deranged three-year-old and stopped. Of course, this would not happen again. So I took myself off the hook. And it happened again.
 

Pretty good theory, huh? Beats the alternative, too.
 

I can forget anything. When I was pregnant with each child and even now, I still have the nightmare that I forgot to feed my baby or put them in the car. Now that they’re 11 and 14, it’s on them to make sure I don’t forget to feed them or put them in the car. But it still haunts me.
 

It makes me feel slightly better that when I just asked my family for a recent example of forgetting Alec somewhere, no one could remember the particulars. So I’m reasonably sure this is one thing he won’t be able to blame on me in future therapy sessions.
 

But I’m also thinking now that instead of writing about my power cord, I had some other, stunningly clever blog in mind for today. If only I could remember it.