I have about six million things I've been meaning to update y'all on---most of them wedding-related, because HOOBOY planning a wedding is not for the faint of heart or sober, and I happen to be both---but they will have to wait just a wee bit longer. (Those tidbits will be worth the wait, I think. If I had a nickel for every time someone said to me "ONLY YOU, MIR!"... well, I'd have a whole lot of nickels. Not enough to pay for the wedding, you understand, but a LOT.) Nope, today is not for that, because today I have finally gathered my thoughts (as much as they are ever gathered, anyway) on...
I wanted to share a picture of Chickadee's shoes on her first day of the semester, because for those of you who've stuck around for a long time, shoe pictures and the first day of school are a tradition 'round here, and this would've been a very significant picture, because... it will be the last one (at least for a good long while, anyway). Because---I hope you're sitting down, people who started reading here when my darling Chickie-pie was 6 years old and sassy beyond her years---my once tiny and chirpy firstborn is graduating from college in just a few months. Graduating. From. College....
Otto and I spent most of the spring and part of the summer talking about, planning for, and perhaps-a-little-too-gleefully anticipating our empty nest. It's not that we don't adore the children---of course we do!---it's just that... one, we've never been "just us" the way a traditional first-marriage couple gets to be, and two, have you met my children? They're amazing, but I'm tired. We're tired. It's been a long nineteen something years since I first surrendered myself to motherhood. Raising kids on a completely normal/expected trajectory is hard, I assume. I mean, people tell me that it...
Hello! Greetings from the land of Never What You Planned, But Somehow It More Or Less Works Out Eventually. I feel like I've spent the last 19 years exhorting my kids to be flexible! Go with the flow! But don't be afraid to change course! There are no wrong choices, only "right for right now" choices, and if/when they stop being the right choices, you'll make another choice! It's all part of the journey to where you're supposed to be! A lifetime of trying to convince them that life throws us curveballs and that's okay, and they can handle it, and yet... they struggle with this. I do, too....
Has it been another month? It has! I don't understand how this keeps happening, and yet, here we are. Time has passed, some interesting things have happened and other not-so-interesting, and life marches on, etc. I've made a number of desserts for Nerd Night this year and shared almost none of them with you because I'm a big jerk. Also because they've mostly been fine but unexciting. However! I am the sort of person who buys buttermilk for a recipe and then spends the next however-long trying to find recipes with which to use up said buttermilk, because most of the time when you Google...
Perhaps you remember when Chickadee figured out what she wanted out of a college and then made it happen, and I was over the moon because not just YAY COLLEGE but also YAY LOOK AT YOU ADULTING and YAY YOU MADE IT and such. It was a time of MANY FEELS, many capital letters, and me randomly getting weepy and saying I AM JUST SO PROUD OF YOU to her at the most inopportune and (one assumes) embarrassing times. I'm sure she loved it. All of that was very exciting. It remains exciting, actually. If you think I don't periodically get teary and LOOK AT YOU GO all over again with her, you don't know...
I think I may have mentioned here once or twice or seven billion times that I hate having my picture taken. I am not a photogenic human. (This is not the same, by the way, as saying I'm an unattractive human. This is not a self-esteem issue, merely a "the way my particular features tend to be caught in pictures is not flattering in spite of the fact that I'm an okay-looking person in real life" issue.) My ex-husband is a very photogenic person, and so you can imagine my delight at discovering that nearly every candid photo of our offspring is amazing. Those cheekbones! Those lips! LOOK AT MY...
It's been a pet peeve of mine for forever, the way people sometimes recoil from labels or admitting that there's anything less-than-perfect about themselves or their special snowflakes. So it should come as no surprise that I have some things to say on the topic of whether or not special-needs students should disclose in their college application essays. I know. You're shocked. It's shocking. [Sidebar: Maybe less of a good idea to discuss your laundry habits, as I'm not sure a certain child of mine would've been accepted to her school if they knew that she just didn't do laundry the entire...
It occurred to me that I forgot to tell you about my recent Bread Adventures. If you've been reading here forever and also have an uncanny memory for stupid details of other people's lives, you may recall that many, many years ago I discovered how easy it was to bake bread, and also how DELICIOUS said bread was, and I began baking bread all the time. In fact, I stopped buying sandwich bread altogether, because I just baked it here at home and it was a billion times better. Sandwich loaf bread from the store is---to me---a necessary vehicle for sandwich fillings, but... meh. Homemade bread,...
