What does a blogger do when she’s feeling frustrated, stretched, and simultaneously directionless? She pulls out all the posts she’s started and dumps them into a single post. 1. At the end of the school year, I took my four plus the two from carpool to the library. Their mother said they could bring home…
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Anatomy of a Pseudo-Foodie Family
Item: one of Alex’s first words was “creme brulee.” Item: when our kids go over to other people’s houses and get asked what they want for dinner, they have been known to ask for “crab quiche.” Item: we’ve started doing cheese tastings with the kids. We love food in our house. And over the years,…
Read MoreIn Which I Visit A Wind Farm and Alex Rolls His Eyes Repeatedly
What shall I say about wind turbines? The way Alex geeks out about Percy Jackson and Star Wars is the way I geek out about wind farms. I think they are really cool. (Alex says I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, geek out about wind farms. He says I don’t know anything about…
Read MoreMercy In The Age of Facebook
Because the spiritual works of mercy have always been a little tough to pin down, I offer this today: The Spiritual Works of Mercy – in the Age of Facebook Mark Piper 🔶 To Give Counsel to the Doubtful, in person, without a shield of anonymity, with charity and goodwill as your motivation 🔶 To Instruct…
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Summer Vacation!
See you next week! (Photo credit: Sayed Mostafa Zamani, via Flickr)
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Growing Up Musical
When kids grow up with musical parents…especially ones who lead a choir (“conduct” might be a wee bit too glamorous a word for either of us)…you get this… …and you get this… …which leads, most adorably to all, to a 4-year-old who says seriously, “Mom, look at my invisible trombone!” Which, when he is interrupted in playing to…
Read MoreRabbit Holes
The things you find when going down rabbit holes researching a new novel. Novelists are always joking that we hope the FBI doesn’t investigate our browser search history, because we look up some seriously twisted things. But not entirely twisted. I recently found out there’s an area 13,000 square miles in West Virgina, Virginia and a…
Read MoreStained Glass, A Strong-Willed Breakthrough, and Learning to ride a bike in a week (theoretically)
It’s been a pretty intense week, with Julianna in iCanBike camp in a nearby town. I’ve had to pull her and Nicholas from school early every day so we could make the half-hour drive to the camp. They begin with this gizmo, which is sort of barrel-shaped, so it’s narrower and less stable than training…
Read MoreMore Proof That Boys Are Just Different
Default: Happy
There are two basic states of being: default happy and default unhappy. This is the insight that leaped out at me me almost as soon as I started reading Chade-Meng Tan last week. Some people are happy all the time, except when something bad happens to them. Other people are unhappy always, unless something good…
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