This week I’m registering my five-year-old for kindergarten. Like everything these days, the registration will be completely different. It’s truncated and sterile. I’ll wear a mask, there will be no colorful room with blocks and crayons, and I won’t even take my kid with me. (In fact, unlike the other two times when I showed
Several times a day I reflect on how different I am with my fourth child than I was with my first child. A friend of mine just posted a video of her firstborn — a two-year-old — drinking out of a normal cup for the first time. David didn’t drink out of a lid-less, straw-less
Sometimes I wish I could teleport every now and then, to be lifted out of a particularly draining moment of monotony and placed into a different phase of life. Maybe if I spent a day or two as the elderly lady in the grocery store, telling young moms to “enjoy it because it goes so
If you’d like a quick lesson on the lunacy of Confederate monuments, you should explain them to kids. Pare it down as much as possible, don’t let your bias cloud the water. There was a war — the north versus the south. The south lost. These statues are to commemorate the soldiers that fought for the
On my very first night home with my first baby, I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life. Jump off a bridge? Sure! Scale a rock face? No problem! But leave me alone with this tiny, beautiful person? No thank you. I had a fistful of worksheets, clinging to the vague
One of the things I love about having a blog for this long is that on any holiday or season, I can easily look back and see how my family has grown and changed through the years. Easter egg dyeing is a great example. This is a tradition that dramatically changes as your kids get
We celebrated two friends’ birthdays this week. They were both distant celebrations — gifts left in the driveway, and a drive-by “party.” My kids liked loved being a part of these celebrations, but they made the wheels start turning. “I’m glad my birthday is in the summer…” I heard someone say from the backseat on
After Anna’s speech therapy evaluation, the therapist told us that she would probably have a “language explosion” in the next few months. That was a little more than a month ago, and while I think we’re still waiting on the explosion, she’s definitely had a speech…spark. Her pronunciation is still her weakest area, but she’s
We had a weekend with back-to-back-to-back activities with our kids. We had a basketball game, an awards reception, a playdate. But the marquee event, the one we were all waiting for, was the Father Daughter Dance. You might remember the Father Daughter Dance from years past. Mary has gone several times (2016, 2017, 2019, and
Anna calls David “DayDay.” She calls Mary “MayMay.” She calls Brigham “Ma,” and she knows the names of several neighborhood dogs. In an ultimate little sister power move, she doesn’t even attempt to say Thomas’s name. There are actually a lot of words Anna doesn’t attempt. She has a decent vocabulary, but she’s almost impossible