We have a rule in our family about Halloween. If it involves any help or purchasing from me, you must decide on your Halloween costume by October 1. (Or, in Anna’s case, her Halloween costume was decided for her six years before she was born when my mom bought David this toddler-sized dragon costume.) Komodo
When our cat was an adolescent — not a kitten, an adolescent. It’s an important distinction because kittens are adorable imps and adolescents are adorable jerks. So as I was saying, when our cat was an adolescent he spent all day being cute and all night demolishing our house. We were living in a house
This Easter I decided to make a scavenger hunt for the kids’ Easter baskets. It was really fun, really easy (thanks to millions of pre-written scavenger hunts on Pinterest), and will likely become a tradition. David read the clues aloud and then he and Mary ran to find the next one. It took Thomas a
My kids had a day off school for Good Friday and we planned to spend the day, among other things, dyeing Easter eggs, and using Sweet Frog coupons they got from school. Thursday night I looked at the weather and realized we were supposed to get rain, which was frustrating because I was planning to
Last year, right around this time of year, David sat down at the table with construction paper, scissors, and glue, and independently handcrafted a valentine for his best friend. I was really, really impressed. I hadn’t given much thought to the valentines he was going to give out to his class, but right then and
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 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
Now that I’m an adult, I often think back to events from my childhood and I realize I never had any sort of appreciation for the work my parents did to make them happen. Pumpkin carving fits squarely in that category. Looking back to my own childhood, I do not remember my parents finding time
Thomas had a field trip to the pumpkin patch last week. It was a cold day, so I packed two jacket options for each child, hats, and a blanket just in case. A few days earlier my phone’s camera broke, so as I packed I made a mental note to ask one of the adults to take