Tag: mom
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In Defense of Mother’s Day
This morning, I was thinking about Mother’s Day. This is unsurprising, because today is Mother’s Day. This year I think I have encountered more counter-culture reactions to Mother’s Day than I have in past years. It seems like a few crept in each year, but this year I encountered more of them than usual. I…
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Intimately Connected
Tonight I went to a Maundy Thursday service at my church. This day commemorates the Last Supper, when Jesus broke bread with his disciples and washed their feet in a final act of service before his death. I have gone to a Maundy Thursday potluck before, where I ate church food and talked to nice…
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Badge of Beauty
Among the many tasks in my home that should be done daily (maybe several times a day) and yet are done…Weekly? I hope? When did I last do that?…is cleaning off my dining room table. Tonight, I have a moment. Rolling up my sleeves, I wipe off the crumbs and then spray the table down.…
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Sweet and Sour, Black and White
I don’t think of myself as a black-and-white thinker. I try to avoid categorizing people according to bipolar terms like “good” and “bad.” Some things are both a blessing and a curse. There isn’t always a right and a wrong; there isn’t always a victor and a loser. However, somehow in parenting, I think I…
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You Have Your Hands Full…
Yesterday, I went to the train museum with my children. This really warrants its own blog post, but in the meantime, IT happened. Exhausted (remember, another post is coming), I got to the second-floor area with the toy trains children can play with. I sat down next to another woman, and we watched the kids…
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Trees of Christmas Past, Present, and Future
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the other night I was thinking about Christmas trees. I had been trying to figure out what to do on the Christmas-tree front. Way back in college I used to get my own trees on my own, though they tended to be of the smallish variety. The living room of my current house…
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This Is Just to Say: A Halloween Poem
This Is Just to Say I have eaten the Halloween candy that was in your bag and which you are probably old enough to remember exists now Forgive me it was delicious so sweet and so chocolatey I composed this high-quality poem last year after Halloween, in the style of William Carlos Williams. It first…
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The Many Faces of Meltdown, Part II
Practically as soon as I posted my last collection of tantrum photos, I received a number of lovely new pieces. I hope you enjoy these and they help you feel more normal if you or your children sometimes look and feel like this. Aren’t walks supposed to calm babies? Sometimes they don’t. …
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Herding Cats
The other night, I had my three kids post in mind. I asked the children if they would like to eat dinner outdoors. I partly did this because the evening weather was beautiful. I mostly did this because it seemed way too hard to convince the three of them to come indoors and clean up…
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The Spaces Between
Please bear with me. This is a sad post, and it is an attempt to process my grief a little. If you hate complaining, don’t read it. But this is the part I would not have chosen. The part where my kids are going to be gone half the time, all the time. It struck…