Last night after the boys were in bed, I was sitting in the glider nursing Baby Sister when I heard the familiar siren song of the ice cream truck as it circumnavigated our neighborhood. But instead of feeling that jolt of adrenaline that normally sends me running for my wallet, ready to dispatch a dollar [...]
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I have dirt under my nails. And that’s remarkable for two reasons: 1. I have nails. I have been a lifelong nail biter. My nails are usually bitten down to the nub, my cuticles a tangly, scraggly mess. But the happy occasion of my beloved sister-in-law’s wedding two weekends ago – along with the help [...]
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A lovely surprise arrived in today’s mail. It was a letter. A genuine, hand-written letter on lined white paper, the sort of which I had forgotten existed in this age of e-greetings. A letter from an old teacher and mentor whom I haven’t seen in years. This letter was from my former basketball coach. He [...]
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During our trip, I was reminded once again that I don’t live “at home” anymore. Four years ago, five months pregnant, Husband and I picked up and moved to a new state. I’ve thought many times along the way that this new place has become home – that any place that houses my man and [...]
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After 17 days on the road with 3 kids under 4, we are back home, grateful to see our beds, our toys, our books, and the 6 succulent strawberries that were ripe, ready, and waiting for us in our small garden patch. On our trip we visited 6 states and slept in 10 different beds. [...]
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Here’s some middle-of-the-night rambling from a nursing session when Baby Sister was two weeks old: You see a newborn’s eyes so rarely, but, when you do, you get the sense that her eyes are the key to some sort of secret ancient wisdom – as though she, despite being two weeks old, knows more than [...]
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I’m looking for your opinion today, friends, on the truth of an observation I made recently: It seems to me that people who are happy are happiest when others are happy, while people who are unhappy are happiest when others are unhappy. What say you, loyal readers: agree or disagree?
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I’ve been catching up on some reading during our road trip and I finally made it to last month’s feature in The New Yorker on Ree Drummond, better known in these parts as the Pioneer Woman. I haven’t read much from the Pioneer Woman, but I found the piece on her to be very interesting, [...]
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I read with interest last winter’s firestorm over Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. But I wasn’t so interested in Chua’s parenting style as I was fascinated by our culture’s seeming obsession with titles. Western parenting. Chinese parenting. Attachment parenting. Free-range parenting. Can any of us really claim to subscribe to any of [...]
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Last week before we set out on our road trip I took Big Brother for a haircut. We arrived at the salon a few minutes before it opened and I, ever a sucker for his pleading, agreed to his request to play a “quarter game” at the neighboring K-Mart. In we walked to the vestibule [...]
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One of my favorite movies as a kid was National Lampoon’s Vacation. You know, the one where the Griswold Family hops in their “Family Truckster” and ambles their way to Los Angeles’s “Walley World” theme park, leaving a dead aunt, a petty crime spree, and a scantily clad Christie Brinkley in their wake. As much [...]
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As you may have gleaned from my brief post after Baby Sister was born, her arrival was the culmination of a long medical adventure. And, moreover, her birth was the cap on the child-bearing part of my life. So, as I’ve moved psychically from child-bearing to child-rearing, I’ve been thinking a lot about my journey [...]
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