Musings and Memoir
It’s January in Oregon, and raining relentlessly. The Christmas decorations are gone, the tree and its ornaments boxed and in the attic. At this writing, my son is under the weather with a cough that won’t seem to abate, partly because he is asthmatic. We are treating the
Parenting
His first-grade teacher sent us a message on the classroom app while I was working at the office. School was about to let out for the day, so my son was headed for his after-care program. The teacher let me know that he was having a “very very hard time”
Parenting
I love to sing. I’ve got a large bank of songs in memory, and every day I come across something that evokes a line or a melody. It’s hard for me not to vocalize what tickles my brain at that moment. My husband uses the phrase “our house”
Parenting
In 2017, a girlfriend and I went to visit our mutual bestie in Colorado. We drove through the Rockies, drank microbrews, ambled along the pedestrian mall in Boulder, and visited the Denver Botanical Garden. In downtown Denver, we stopped by a game store to look for a new board game
Parenting
My son has reached a lot of development milestones this year, but one of my favorite is that he’s willing to sit down and watching baking shows with me. He decided to join me when he caught a glimpse of Halloween Baking Championship as the contestants were making something
Parenting
My son turned a wooden toy fishing rod into a sniper rifle, using paper cutouts and a lot of that clear heavy tape we try to save for wrapping packages. It has a couple of grips on the bottom and a sight on the top. I sort of hate it.
Parenting
There were raging arguments in the house last week. I almost couldn’t get my weekly essay finished, and am late on this one, because my writing domain at home is an office with a thin door that is almost splashing distance from the bathroom, where my son has been
Parenting
I think the term “threenager” is misleading. It implies that three is the only age that comes with teenage-style attitude. Maybe we all know it, parents, and the term only came about because “three” happens to provide a slant rhyme with “teen”. If there was a similarly rhyming word for
Parenting
School has been out for a week and we’re descending into YouTube Hell. There’s no day camp this week, and my husband and I are mostly working, so the kiddo gets left to his own devices quite a bit. “Devices” is literal. I can’t tell which is
Parenting
\My son doesn’t get enough sleep, and it’s probably our fault. It drives me up the wall to be trying to relax in the living room at a decidedly late hour and hear the intermittent snap of Legos being put together, or the hollow sound of his closet
Parenting
There has been a slow shift in our household, and the child that was once a nearly uncontrollable tornado of impulses has become a rangy kid. A kid who is almost at the end of his kindergarten year, who still clings to me when given the chance but also runs
Parenting
In case it isn’t clear from, well, everything I write about, I am a person with a lot on her mind. I can scarcely do a task without thinking about the next one, or about what I’d rather be doing instead. In fact, those things I’d rather