I'm afraid I need to interrupt Love Thursday to bring you a much more pressing matter. (Pssst! Do not fret! I am likely to give you Love Friday, instead.) Otto and I are having a small disagreement. I would like some input on our dilemma, and to make it fair I won't even tell you which side of the argument each of us is on. It will be TOTALLY BLIND, because there's NO WAY you'll be able to suss out who is who. What? Oh, look over there! Something SHINY! This is a matter of great importance---I mean, it must be, as it represents the first real argument of our nearly-year of marriage---and...
So last week I had a day where Chickadee was invited on a last-minute playdate and Monkey was just DYING from the injustice of it. I offered up half a dozen different suggestions of things we could do, just the two of us, without her, but the whining went unabated as he insisted that he NEEEEEEDED some time with his FRIIIIIENDS. I did what any good mother would do; I called up a fellow mom and invited us over to her house. (Don't you wish you lived here? I could be eating all the snacks in your pantry RIGHT NOW.) As it happened, they already had an extra boy-child over, so the three of them...
I've written before about our decision to seek a different church, because we just weren't feeling quite at home at the one we'd been attending. This was, you understand, a really difficult decision to make, both because change is hard and we'd been going to that other church for over six months, and also because my ex immediately pounced upon the news as proof that I was a Godless heathen who would soon be decorating the children's rooms with pentagrams. That's just silly, of course---pentagrams would totally disturb the feng shui in there. (I just have them put their voodoo dolls back in...
Do you know what I am? I am a small town girl. I like small town things. Like grass! And trees! And fluffy bunnies! And periodic silence! We are not having much of any of those things here in Manhattan. Go figure. And so I am trying very hard to find my moments of sanity amidst a very exciting, yes, but also very LOUD and BUSTLING and CLOSE environment. There are the people you don't want close to you who seem to always be right up in your face, of course, or banging into you on the street, or lurching drunkenly down the street (Dear UMass boys: You have alcohol back at school. Don't come to...
What do you do after a long week and a horrible day when the worry is eating you up and you wonder if you'll ever get your footing when it comes to this parenting thing? Well, if it's the night before Easter, you have to chat with the Easter Bunny and strategize, of course. But you're probably not feeling much like making trails of eggs to follow, or like writing little cutesy clue-notes. In fact, you may be thinking that you don't much care if the kids find the baskets at all. That's not TRUE, of course, but you're not in a very good mood. But then a thought strikes you, see, and instead of...
Otto has one of these, and this morning I played with it for a while. I wanted to take a picture of something I love that feels like it's hard to grasp, right now, because Lensbabies pictures always look like you've captured something fleeting. Last night I finally gave voice to something I've known for a long time, but I've been wishing really hard for it to not be true. I know I don't talk about it a lot here, because it's a lot more interesting to yammer on about swearing at telemarketers or whatever, but my involvement in church is a big part of my life. A big part of who I am, or at...
We've been having huge problems with our broadband service, lately, possibly because all cable companies are run by soul-sucking incompetents, or possibly because my personal electro-magnetic field has thus far managed to disrupt my internet service, on occasion, everywhere I have ever lived. It matters not, I suppose. And so there have been countless calls to Charter to report the agonizing slowness of our connection speed, and all of the fabulously unrelated questions we get asked when we make those calls. Because, you know, whether or not I have a lot of MUSIC ON MY COMPUTER, that would...
It cracks me up to no end that y'all are so concerned in the comments of this post that perhaps I haven't fully investigated whether the kids' school has an issue with weirdly-colored hair. I just want to point out---and I say this with love in my heart, truly---that when it comes to school, I am perhaps one of the most rule-abiding folks you'd ever hope to meet. Some might even say that I'm hopelessly square in this regard, and to those people I would just like to say "Put a sock in it, and go clean your room." I mean, yes, I will absolutely go to bat for my kids if there's something that...
I'm doing a bit of research this weekend, pretty readers. I thought perhaps you'd like to participate. IF you had a young lady on your hands for whom getting her ears pierced was more or less the pinnacle of all things good and meaningful, and IF you had already laid down the law stating that such piercing would not be happening either A) until middle school or B) until said child could manage to comport herself in such a way that you no longer felt compelled to comment that she would lose her own head if it wasn't attached, and IF said child had a rather large---say, double-digit---birthday...
