PregnancyFamilyEducation Blogs
July 1st, 2008
Birthday wisdom
I have a party to plan this week--L.'s 8th (8 years old!) birthday party. I think this one will be, by far, the easiest party we've ever had for L. He wants things simple this year--no friends, just his four North Carolina cousins and an assortment of grandparents and aunts and uncles. We're having our first ever pool party, which I wouldn't have undertaken at all if L. had wanted to invite several of his school friends. [more]
June 23rd, 2008
No easy way out
We have cycled into a rut of poor sleep around here lately. Not too long ago, it seems, we were enjoying some lazy mornings and relatively seamless nights, but now we're back to middle-of-the night sleep issues rearing their ugly heads all over again. The other night I was awakened by bloodcurdling screams coming from L.'s room, and then heard the rushing of his feet. He burst into our bedroom, with the dog right behind him (wondering, I'm sure, what middle-of-the-night games were afoot). [more]
June 20th, 2008
Arms and the boy
Ever since my son discovered Avi a few weeks ago, and Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and The Famous Five, it's been all spies and good guys vs. bad guys, and intricate scenes of smuggling and treasure-snatching being enacted all across his bedroom floor. [more]
June 3rd, 2008
Golden times
At the pool this past weekend we met an interesting couple who also live in the neighborhood (thanks to T., who ended up joined at the hips with their two kids--the same ones who were frog hunting with her the other day). We've been meeting a lot of interesting people at the pool lately--people we click with immediately and have engaging conversations with. This couple appeared in deck chairs last weekend, as if blown in by the breeze, leaving us to wonder where on earth they were last summer, these interesting people, because it would have been nice to have known them then. [more]
May 16th, 2008
What matters
I have a favorite children's book I used to read when I was a child, and I read through it recently with T. It's set a long time ago, in the 1900s, and in the book the mother, a writer, is always telling her kids to "be good dearies and play" while she sits and does an hour or two of writing. Then, when she's done, she sends her stories off to her editor and devotes herself to playing with her children – who, all the while, have been keeping nicely to themselves while their courageous and talented mother earns her livelihood writing.
Are you laughing, yet? [more]
May 12th, 2008
Doing it their way
T. has her own way of doing everything. You can show her the "right" way--or the way YOU think things ought to be done--but then she'll turn around and give the task her own personal trademark spin. If I give her a plastic bag, for instance, and ask her to help me empty the bathroom wastebaskets, she'll dump the trash onto the floor first, then spend her time picking it all up off the floor and placing it into the bag. [more]
May 2nd, 2008
The spacing game
Last night, while dozing and resting with the kids during their respective bedtime routines (rituals), I realized yet another one of the many marvelous things about being a parent: It must be the only job (vocation? state-of-being?) where you can spend a solid 10 minutes with one child at bath time discussing the virtues of various body parts and, 45 minutes later when that child has drifted off to sleep, spend 20 minutes in a darkened room with the older child discussing evolution, the possibility of life in outer space, and the Big Bang theory.
********** [more]
April 30th, 2008
Even dogs need to shop
Yesterday T. and I took the dog shopping. Because, of course, even dogs need shopping therapy. T. was thrilled about the idea of taking Willa into an actual store, especially a pet store, one of her favorite places to go. She loves to watch the birds flutter up and down on their perches, and she dreams of one day owning her very own fuzzy dwarf hamster and one of those extensive plastic habitrail things that turn an ordinary hamster cage into a multi-level theme park. [more]
April 16th, 2008
The day after
On Monday we had to make the difficult and painful decision to have our cat put to sleep. We had been wrestling with the very idea of having to make a decision like this for two weeks, yet when the time came it was clear to us that we weren't making an actual decision; instead, we were simply doing what had to be done. In the end, all the agonizing about how and when and what to tell the kids led to a very brief and almost anticlimactic moment in the kitchen. Both kids simply said "oh" and fled immediately to the family room--L. to take apart a flashlight, and T. [more]
March 21st, 2008
Out with the bad, in with the good
I thought I'd be too tapped out to write anything today--or anything in the slightest bit substantive, that is. This past week was a hectic, not-so-great week--you know the kind, where the fates seem to be conspiring against you from the minute your alarm goes off and you think--maybe I should just call it quits? [more]
