“I'm never ready for Inky to be awake, because, although she knows that I need coffee, she has yet to figure out why. I can't help shinking of Io, the Greek maiden whom the gods turned into a calf and bedeviled with a pestilential cloud of flies. Whenever she stopped running, the flies bit her mercilessly. From the moment she wakes me the morning, I am Io and Inky is the flies. The flies want vitamins, breakfast and a stack of books read aloud. Theyn need to know what we're doing today. The flies don't like to listen to National Public Radio.”

 

Twenty tears ago, a mother named Erma Bombeck brought the suburban family out of the closet-dust bunnies and all. Her candid, hilarious accounts of family life became more than mere books; they became a philosophy.

Meet Ayun Halliday, a new generation's urban Bombeck. Creator of the underground parenting magazine THE EAST VILLAGE INKY, Halliday's words and drawings detail the quirks and everday travails of a young Brooklyn family, warts and all. Honest in her parenting foibles and fixed in her opinions on public breastfeeding and the perfect Halloween costume, Halliday validates the complex, absurd wondrousness of being the unpaid caregiver of small children and celebrates the stranger-than-fiction, real-life existence of one American family.