Have you ever played the Game of Life? My older brother and I played constantly, both of us longing to land on one of the squares at the beginning of the game that entitled us to a career as a lawyer or a doctor (and the $50,000 annual salary that went with it – I [...]
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After Tiny Baby was born, I started a blog to keep our families and long-distance friends abreast of the life and times of our growing family. From the moment I hit “publish” on that first post, I started thinking more and more about what information to broadcast and what details to keep private. Ultimately, I [...]
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Today I present, in no particular order, the second installment of “Six Quick Picks,” a smattering of items on the Interwebs that caught my eye this week: 1. Have you met the Kitchen Witch? In her trademark sweet and spicy way, she honored Anissa and celebrated her own blessings in a lovely post last weekend. [...]
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Aidan posted on Wednesday about the importance of place and, since then, I have been thinking about the idea of home. Husband, the wee ones, and I spent yesterday at home. Our home. Home for the holiday. Here in the Midwest. 600 miles west of – and a cultural world away from – the Connecticut [...]
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Thank you. For being here. For being present. For reading. For connecting. For hearing. For listening. For commenting. For engaging. For communicating. For community. Thank you, friends.
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That’s right, friends. It’s time for another installment of Wednesdays with [Judith] Warner. (Click here for last week’s look at the balancing act between our pre-motherhood and post-motherhood selves.) This week’s topic? Wonderful husbands. This Thanksgiving week, the theme of gratitude is everywhere – we’re grateful to have a bountiful meal to set before our [...]
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Last week BigLittleWolf asked “What’s your style?” Her question got me thinking: Do I even have a style? Am I a style nihilist? And, either way, what does that say about me? The elements of my style were established early on. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade – a Catholic school [...]
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I pace the floor, leaving tracks like tire treads in the thick carpet. Singing doesn’t help, nor does humming, but this whooshing – yes, whooshing – seems to. The song inside of an abandoned shell. The sound of the womb. The sound that is not sound. So I whoosh away, over and over, around and [...]
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Since I posted on Thursday about Freudenschade, the emptiness we’re left with when another’s cup runneth over, I’ve been thinking too about its opposite – that glimmer of glee we feel when something goes wrong for someone else. And I’ve been thinking about Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is the heroine (?) of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest [...]
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Today I present, in no particular order, the first (only?) installment of “Six Quick Picks,” a handful (well, hand + one fingerful) of items on the Interwebs that caught my eye this week: 1. Last Friday Sarah at Momalom proposed a question: “How do you ask people to stop and take a look at your [...]
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This summer I traveled to Washington, DC for a “girls’ weekend” with two beloved friends from my former life. After weeks of planning and pumping and with Husband’s blessing, I prepared to jet off with a light heart, a clear conscience, an out-of-date New Yorker, and a venti iced House Blend. Then I made the [...]
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Please allow me to (re)introduce you to Judith Warner, author, mother, and guru to all people interested in motherhood at this particular social, political, and cultural moment. While I have been a fan of Warner’s writing since I first discovered “Domestic Disturbances,” her blog at the New York Times, I hadn’t discovered her 2005 book, [...]
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Yesterday morning I received an e-mail from BabyCenter announcing, “Your baby is 6 months old! He is now rolling over in both directions!” Oh, he is, is he? Like Big Boy before him, (Not-Really-So) Tiny Baby is off the charts in terms of height and weight (and sheer cuteness, naturally), but is lagging a bit [...]
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This is my hand. It is my worst feature. Says who? Says me. When I look at it, I see a map of past injuries – broken fingers, gashes, a recent scratch. I see the host for my greatest vice: fingernails bitten down to the nub; cuticles frayed and torn; nail polish chipped and picked [...]
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Guiding Light, a soap opera that had been on the air for 72 years, aired its last episode this fall after years of lagging viewership. The news about the end of this program, which I grew up watching during school vacations, got me thinking about the larger cultural shifts that might be signaled by the [...]
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Remember how a normal Saturday morning used to be about sleeping late, taking in a yoga class, or lingering over the weekend inserts of the Sunday Times with a bottomless mug of coffee? Compare that to your Saturday mornings now: Wake up to Tiny Baby’s whimpering – or is that crying? Reason with him that, [...]
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Yesterday Big Boy went to a party, a “princess ball” in honor of the third birthday of one of his regular playmates. The children – mostly 2 and 3 year old girls – were encouraged to dress in costume. In order to be a “knight in shining armor,” Big Boy donned an aluminum foil helmet [...]
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I started babysitting when I was in sixth grade. My first regular gig was with a family with four stair-step kids who were six, four, two, and just a few months old when I started taking care of them. I watched them after school, on Saturday mornings, and weekend evenings while their parents went out [...]
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It occurred to me recently that I opted out before I had the chance to opt out. Let me explain. Many of us have read, or at least heard about, Lisa Belkin‘s controversial 2003 piece in the New York Times Magazine, “The Opt-Out Revolution.” In it, Belkin profiles a number of women who, after graduating [...]
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I am reading and really enjoying Judith Warner‘s Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. (Expect to read more of my reactions to the book in upcoming posts. I know; you’re on tenterhooks.) So far the message that has really resonated with me is the idea of modern women as “a generation of control [...]
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When I saw my OB at my six week check-up after Big Boy was born, I asked her why no one tells you before you have children just how hard it is. Her response? “You wouldn’t have believed me if I had.” John J. Edwards III contributed a thought-provoking post this morning to The Juggle: [...]
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I posted yesterday about my own experiences getting the H1N1 vaccine for my family. This afternoon I discovered a provocative essay on the same topic that Anna Solomon contributed to the “Your Comeback” page at Double X. Solomon points out another layer to the swine flu frustration that I had definitely felt, but hadn’t been [...]
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I was having lunch recently with a friend who is pregnant with her second child. She has just entered the third trimester and we were talking about all of the discomforts that come along with it, at which point she commented, “Well, at least I know that this will be my last pregnancy!” And that [...]
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The doors of the health department wouldn’t open until 8:00 a.m., but there were already 200 people ahead of me when I joined the line at 7:30 a.m., Tiny Baby and his stroller in tow. The county had announced earlier in the week that it would hold its first open H1N1 vaccination clinic for young [...]
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I feel like drawing the shades, locking the doors, turning off the television, the radio, the computer. I want to hold my children close to me – close enough that they will never know the violence that exploded yesterday afternoon at Fort Hood or the unspeakable crimes that befell a 15-year old girl at a [...]
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The Interwebs have been abuzz of late with news of kids and flying. The first story that caught my eye was that of blogger Nic at My Bottle’s Up who posted that her “son was taken from [her] by the TSA agents at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport.” Her post – which detailed a sequence of events [...]
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I hate Daylight Savings Time – or at least the “fall back” part of it. Now don’t get me wrong. In my life BC (before children), I loved the chance to sleep an extra hour just as the Northeast weather was getting crisp and I was six weeks or so into my school year. But [...]
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Last night TLC aired a one hour interview of Kate Gosselin by NBC reporter Natalie Morales. (Don’t worry if you missed it; I’m sure TLC will replay it every third hour for the next several weeks.) Now that Kate’s estranged husband Jon has refused to allow their eight children to appear on their beleaguered show, [...]
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Want an example of a working mom successfully compromising to make her marriage work? Then check out Jodi Kantor’s long portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama in yesterday’s New York Times magazine section. What is so refreshing about this article – or really, what’s refreshing about Michelle Obama in general – is how open it [...]
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