When I was a kid, my Dad was away a lot. As a good Navy family, my Mom, Grandmother, brother, and I would adapt our holidays as needed to when Dad was around. Celebrate a birthday a few months late. Hunt for eggs on an odd day. The calendar was secondary [...]

Sung to the tune “Close to You” by the Carpenters
__
Why does Paul look at me and frown
when he hears that hacking sound?
It’s just my luck, that I’m stuck
with a cold.
Why do the kids crawl in bed with me
when in truth, they should flee?
Don’t they know, Mommy is so
sick with a cold.
On the day that we [...]

The election has much of our attention these days.  The disbelief over the undecided (really, people, grow a pair), the shock over those who think Palin is just the best thing since sliced bread (wow, just… wow).  And now, after all the ‘Obama pals around with terrorists’ and ‘Obama hates white people’ and blahblahblah ridiculousness, [...]

We’re in the beautiful northern suburbs of Pittsburgh, near where my parents grew up across the street from each other.  The past day and a half have been a blur of fantastic public parks, fun museums, nostalgic family stories, friendly people, and Eat-n-Park.  Will loves the mountains.  Paul finally explained that ‘we can’t afford mountains [...]

Violet sent me this interesting video, and while watching it, the catchy title above caught my eye.  You see, I can’t resist the urge to recite “I am the Very Model of Modern Major General”.  Once I clicked over, the article itself was so fun and so very-meme worthy, that I couldn’t help but re-post [...]

I’ve already made the $11 investment in toilet seat covers for Will’s costume, so it’s too late for this Halloween.  But I am placing our order of four in for Mardi Gras.  I wonder what kind of alterations we’ll have to make for it to fit Kate?

And while we’re on the subject of the minds [...]

It’s 2 days until we leave for yet-another-trip.  Which means that we’ve picked up a time sensitive renovation project that must be finished before it rains OR ELSE.  Because we are predictable like that.
While we picked pumpkins and played in corn mazes and rode on hay, a student from the summer’s Peru course took the [...]

Yesterday was Blog Action Day AND Love Your Body Day.
Augh!  Both things I wanted to blog about.  If this were back to the excuse letter, I’d say that I was at a Board Meeting last night for a nonprofit serving the under- and un-insured, and well, doesn’t that give me a little slack?  “No,” says [...]

At Will’s first camp performance this summer, I brought our video camera to record the class song.  The camera was bought new in November 2003, the week before Will was born.  While sitting in the audience waiting for the class to file in, a grade-school age boy turned around, saw the recorder in my hand, [...]