I really thought that once Chickadee got her license, my life would become less complicated. Like: immediately, and exponentially less complicated. Because everyone knows that just when you feel like your kids have reached an age of relative self-sufficiency, you are then relegated to 24/7 chauffeur status for years while they are too old for you to micromanage their lives but too young to handle their own transportation. To some extent it's true that things are easier now, in the sense that I am no longer driving back and forth to school more often than not, because I can let the kids take...
College sounds like a terrible addition to a chicken and parsnips dish. It would make it taste funny! But I am a poor planner and so I am jamming two wholly unrelated things together, plus I am giving you a recipe I sort of Frankenstein-ed together just because I liked it. Hey, you get what you pay for, here. First, college: It's that magical time of year when everyone with a high school senior is freaking out about college applications, so I wrote about it for Alpha Mom. You should probably go read it if college applications are in your kid's future, because if I learned anything while...
Bananas are a very tricky thing 'round here. They have to be ripe---but not TOO RIPE---and they cannot have any signs of bruising (because that's not a thing that ever happens to bananas... oh, wait...) because that is Completely Unacceptable. This is where people who are new here assume that I have toddlers because HAHA no one over the age of 4 would be this picky about fruit, right? Yeah. No. (For the record, it is really only one child who is super-picky about the state of bananas, but then the OTHER child insists things like, "I don't like watermelon" and WHO DOESN'T LIKE WATERMELON,...
I often refer to our housekeeping style as "tidy with hidden pockets of disaster." We spend most of our family time in the kitchen and family room; those rooms are clean and orderly, for the most part. My office desk tends to suffer from pile-itis, but I'm working on that. I exhort the children to keep their spaces free of clutter, or at least not covered in dirty laundry, which in teenage parlance is the same thing. But I must confess that somewhere along the way, part of how we kept the main areas of the house looking reasonable was to dump anything "to be dealt with later" into our master...
I spent last week in a grudging state of malingering. Malingerment? Whatever. I was not SICK sick, you understand. I was not so ill that I could take to my bed without guilt, but I had a cold (THANKS, KIDS!) and just didn't feel 100%. I got up in the morning and packed lunches and did the other morning routine things, then tried to work for a while and often ended up taking a nap at some point and trying to work some more and then making dinner. And I felt really stupid about it all, because: not sick. Not really. Just a little puny, that's all. [Aside: Now that I am officially Working Less...
Every Christmas, Otto makes his family's traditional Christmas cake, which is actually a recipe that yields TWO bundt cakes. If we have company or are up north visiting, both cakes are consumed. If we're down here with just us four, one cake gets eaten and the other one gets wrapped and put into the freezer in the garage. I liked the Christmas cake well enough when I was still eating wheat, but I did not... how shall we say... hold it in the same reverent esteem as Otto and his siblings do. And this is sacrilege, you understand, not to feel a deep devotion to the sacred Christmas cake. (It's...
So. Kira and I went to Vegas and took the town by storm! Hahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa. Not really. But we had a good time. It started like this: Every summer for the past 10 (!!) years or so, Kira and I have conspired to see one another. As ours is one of those "fake Internet friendships" where we simply met online while both of us were freshly divorced and newly wrecked, we're not REAL friends, of course, but somehow at that first meeting long ago it turned out that neither of us was a pedophile living in a basement, and our friendship turned into a real boy, Geppetto (a real girl?), and we have...
Hey, remember when I painted my office? Like, a million years ago? And I was all excited about it but then we decided to order new flooring and we've been living life with my entire professional life (contents of my office; whatever) strewn all over the dining room and kitchen? The new floor is going in RIGHT NOW as I type. Finally. Of course, I'm leaving town tomorrow. So, uh, either I'll reassemble my office tonight before I go or my family can enjoy having my desk in the middle of the kitchen for a few more days. No biggie, right? Right. Normally I would've been terribly impatient about...
We returned from our whirlwind campus touring trip with the realization that yes, Virginia, this college thing is truly right around the corner and Big Decisions need to be made. That is both exciting and unnerving. And every time I try to remind myself that everything will work out just fine, I remember that once we get Chickadee through this process I have to start it all over again with Monkey, like, immediately. Needless to say, we came home and I said "Oh, we don't have any food!" and went to the store and promptly purchased All The Ice Cream. I think that's reasonable, under the...
