We bought bikes. It was at my insistence, a desperate middle-aged Hail Mary to try to find some form of exercise that I don’t hate so that I don’t end up in a Little Rascal at Walmart before I’m forty. “Let’s get bikes for Christmas!” I told my husband back in October, when we were settling on the notion of not buying Christmas gifts for one another. He agreed, as he is wonderful and actually…
Holden, On your seventh birthday, when I picked you up from your dad’s house, as you were buckling yourself in, I said: “In celebration of your birthday, what song would you like to hear?” “Any song?” you asked. You already had me trapped and I didn’t even know it. “Any song,” I said. You wanted to hear the song on the mixed CD in my car that you heard part of once (before I realized…
1. She has to pee. 2. She wants you to think she has to pee. She does not, sucker! 3. Another dog exists somewhere outside, she’s sure of it. 4. She is a machine that runs on love and attention and if her love input meter runs too low she will die, literally die, at 4 a.m. 5. The best stick chewing happens between 4:30 and 5 a.m. and she needs you to facilitate that…
I started smelling it on Wednesday, at first in quick bursts when the wind blew: The sour, thick stench of death somewhere in the yard. I was down by the driveway gate, putting a trash bag in the bin, and I noticed it and thought ew, something smells dead and got on with my business. The next day, I smelled it again. I was on the deck, watering plants, and it hit me like a…
Right now, in our wrought-iron security door, there is a complex network of webs built by funnel-web spiders. You can get a front-row seat to the action if you watch from inside the house. Sort of like an ant farm, but way creepier. I have counted eight, that’s right, EIGHT funnel web spiders in the network of webs, each perched on the mouth of his or her little funnel porch just behind decorative iron acorns…
About a month ago we took off to Panama City Beach for a week. I’d been wanting to make a beach trip with Holden for a few years now, and it finally seemed like the time to do it. My little waterbirth baby hasn’t spent much time near the ocean or any body of water, for that matter. As a baby and toddler, his dad wasn’t too keen on taking him to public pools. He…
Richard, It has been one year since we married. I am grateful every day for how easy it is to love you. How having a family and a home with you feels at every moment like the right, best thing I could do. I am surprised every day by how easily you smile at me in the morning, in the afternoon, at night in the dark before we fall sleep. How you say sweet things…
A lady I work with died. Just up and died, 48 years old, after a stint in the hospital to have a procedure done. Details are scant. She was a sweet woman, great to work with, and now she is dead. Not because of anything she did, any risk she took or bad decision she made, but because of the unfortunate convergence of some random circumstances. She leaves a husband and a couple of children,…
I need to say this right now: I am happy. I am grateful. I am in love and working hard and creating and thinking and striving and questioning and all the things that make me feel real and human and in progress. I don’t have doubts about the big questions in my life. Once upon a time I feared that I would never love or be loved. I am lucky that I have found someone…
I don’t know if you nonparents know this, but at this very moment there are no less than six dozen Power Rangers iterations available on Netflix, including Power Rangers MegaForce, Power Rangers Super MegaForce, Power Rangers Dino Charge, Power Rangers Super Dino Charge, Power Rangers Ninja Steel, Power Rangers Into the Jungle, Power Rangers Mystic Force … I could keep going. Here is how we like to consume Power Rangers in my house: ALL AT…
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