What we’re doing lately: Swim lessons. The little boys started yesterday. Nicholas amazed me. I don’t think he lost anything over the last year. Michael refused to go in the water. Fortunately, the inimitable founder of the swim school, who’s been teaching kids to swim for decades, was in the pool with another class and…
Read MoreAll articles filed in busy-ness
Ruminating On The Rat Race
The weeks fly by so quickly, and every moment under pressure to accomplish as much as humanly possible. More than is humanly possible, to tell the truth. No matter how much I accomplish, it never feels like enough. I’ve always viewed myself as a juggler, but nobody can keep this many balls in the air.…
Read MoreGoing Dark
I have quite a few projects in the hopper right now, and some of them are pretty big. More and more lately I have been finding myself searching for the quick post rather than the substantive, just to make sure I have something up. But while I was trying to figure out what to blog…
Read MoreRespite
There is no such thing as a truly quiet day (holiday or otherwise) in a house with four children, three of them boys. And yet something unexpected happened on Christmas day this year. I made a sort of off-the-cuff, vague decision that wasn’t so much a decision as a shrug and a “whatever.” I never…
Read MoreDown Time
There are days when you can feel it barreling down the highway from behind, like a Mack truck loaded down, an unstoppable force just waiting to flatten you. That’s how I was feeling last week. Don’t get me wrong; many good things happened last week. I got started querying my novel. I had a flash…
Read MoreIt Is What It Is
When I was a kid, I thought it would be great to be a grownup, because grownups got to do whatever they wanted to do, whenever they wanted to do it. Now don’t laugh, I know you all thought it too. We all know better now. As adults, we get to direct the big picture…
Read MoreCars and Vans And Things That Go
When Alex was a baby, the time I felt most secure in my role as a mother (outside of nursing) was bath time. At bath time, I knew what I was supposed to do. There was a structure to it, and he loved it, so I felt confident that I was seeing to both his…
Read MoreOn The Need For A Recovery Day
It started out so well. We’d had two days of solid-packed family fun, with the promise of another coming up on Sunday, and we’d prepped all the kids that Saturday, the day in between, was the put-the-house-back-together day. So while Alex and I mowed the yard, Nicholas helped Christian in the house. When I finished,…
Read MoreIt’s Been A Rough Summer
It’s time to admit it out loud: This has been a rough summer. This is the first summer since Julianna came along that I haven’t had regular “respite” care. Our county provides services to people with special needs and to their families, and until last year, the biggest things they’d given us were the iPad…
Read MoreIt’s Organization Week
At 3:30 this morning I woke up when Christian got up briefly. No big deal…he interrupted a terrible, vivid dream in which my mother was cooking dinner in my childhood home while I stood in the living room with my children, both adults keenly aware that five miles to the north was a pack of…
Read More
Kathleen M. Basi 