Our Christmas tree is laying in our front yard. It sort of died after it fell down in mid-December and it started dropping a lot of needles, so getting it out of the house was a priority. We meant to deal with it immediately, but then I got mastitis and Tom got a bad cold, and we
The 52 Project: A photo of my children, once a week, every week, in 2019 David / He doesn’t want pointers and he doesn’t want to play one-on-one. He does want me to take pictures until I get one of the ball going in the hoop. Mary / We had a snow day at the beginning of
Recently we visited a friend one afternoon, and when we got home I exhaled dramatically, “WHEW! That was crazy! That house is NOT set up for a toddler!” We’d spent the entire evening chasing Anna around their house, keeping her from the stairs, out of the toilet, away from drawers and cabinets and from pulling
On Sunday we had a little snow and ice storm. It didn’t really amount to much, but the roads were covered enough that it wasn’t safe for the buses in the morning. Do you remember how you found out about school closings as a kid? The radio? The news? These days, the school superintendent texts,
The 52 Project: A photo of my children, once a week, every week, in 2019. David / We got David a book light for Christmas so he can read in bed, and now he falls asleep reading every night. So my new bedtime routine is going into his room to turn off his light, slide
On January 1, I completed my annual tradition of Googling the correct way to write “New Year’s resolutions.” Capital N, capital Y, apostrophe s, lowercase r. Did you know you can do that? You can Google punctuation and grammar rules. I’ve worked alongside a lot of copy editors and I promise you that most of
I’m not the type to make New Year’s resolutions. I’m also not the type to set goals or make to do lists or schedule things in advance. What enneagram does that make me? It’s most certainly the one that has a tendency to roll their eyes at personality tests. Anyway. I’m not really setting resolutions
I was grumpy all day Christmas Eve. The kids were acting like children, how dare they. They were overly excited and a little tired and do you know what excited, tired children do? They take the cushions off the couch even though their mother told them not to. They ping pong between being silly and
Playing Santa is, without a doubt, one of the most fun gigs I’ve ever had. Shopping, wrapping, imagining the joy when they open the gift. It is all so very wonderful. Sometime in November, Tom’s mom, Peggy, called me from Costco. She was shopping, and there was one MaryEllen American Girl doll left. Should she
What to get the girl who has everything? No, literally. She has everything. She has blocks and dolls and markers — and a LOT of things she shouldn’t have. Anna is surrounded by hundreds of knick knacks and tchotchkes that are all age inappropriate. She likes her siblings’ toys but they don’t really engage her the