I’m trying a whole new skin care regimen this morning. Yes, this post will be about moisturizer and the fact that I made my 10-year-old touch my face before breakfast. If you don’t like it, you know where the jewelry counter is. I’ll meet you over there in a few.

For my forty-something birthday, I treated myself to the Real Stuff. The Real Stuff being the kind of skin care products for which you have to go to the mall, meet with lab-coat Suzy and hope you have enough on your debit card.

So I did it. But, being new to the dance, there were some mistakes made along the way. (That’s politician-speak for I Made Mistakes.) Let me share them with you so when you turn forty-something and decide to hit the pause button, you won’t make them too. Or, if you do, we’ll have something to laugh about.

1. I beelined to the nearest counter from the door. I ejected myself from the forced heat incubation station between the double doors leading to the perfectly temperate, gloriously smelling and flatteringly lit department store and marched straight for the blessed counter. Time will tell if this is a true mistake or not. (The box says I should see a difference in less than 4 weeks!)

2. I snagged the first lab-coat Suzy I could find. Maybe I could have found someone closer to my age. Maybe even closer to my ethnicity. At least she was my gender, right? To her credit, her skin looked fabulous.

3. I expected my $100+ to give me the Higgs boson for skin. I want that cream to cause subatomic particles to smash together like a cosmic light show in the middle of the night and form a whole new layer of skin. I want to wake up without the wattle. I don’t want to wear turtlenecks anymore. I don’t want to look like I’m frowning when I’m actually smirking. I mean really, people. If the smirk doesn’t come across properly, then what do we have left?

4. Maybe I could have spent more time finding out in what order and at exactly what time I should be using each of the sixty-three bottles in the hand-stitched, quilted bag she gave me. Because I was too scared to ask too many questions, I ended up with this list she wrote for me. It will be laminated, burned to a disk and uploaded to the Cloud in case I lose the original. It’s so important that I’m not even hung up on the fact there’s a misspelling. (Okay, well maybe a little.)

5. Overall, my greatest mistake was not doing it sooner. Even my 10-year-old couldn’t believe how great my skin feels, God bless him. He always knows just what to say.