Welcome to the blog
August 29, 2015
There’s something about babies. It’s not just their own cuteness–their soft skin and nice smell and the way they look so squeezable in jammies. Babies do something to the people around them. They make stress lines melt away from preoccupied faces, they put a ceasefire on arguments, they elicit a smile from someone who’s down. […]
August 22, 2015
A few days ago our girl poured herself a glass of milk, and she (accidentally) poured way too much. Since this only happens, like, twelve times a day, it came as no surprise. (What DOES come as a surprise is the fact that I keep letting her pour her own drinks, like I’m some kind […]
August 12, 2015
I was recently talking to a gal I’d just met, and she asked me if our girl gets along well with all the boys. “Yeeeeessss…?” I responded. She didn’t seem to detect the hesitation in my voice, and she smiled and said “oh, that’s good.” So sweet, so earnest, so very much how I used […]
July 22, 2015
There is a piece of underwear in my living room, and it has been there for upwards of two weeks. It’s a little boy’s underwear, with Avengers characters all over it, and it doesn’t belong to any of my kids. I have no idea who it belongs to. A little over a week ago, I […]
July 16, 2015
Something is happening to our girl. She is imploding and combusting and flailing and wandering; her circumstances are confusing and frustrating and she’s dressing to match; her life is the tide, sometimes low and calm, sometimes high and mighty, but moving ceaselessly, relentlessly, and recently the moon is always new or always full or always […]
July 3, 2015
There was a while during which I seriously wondered whether our decision to foster had forever changed my second oldest son, and not for the better. I avoid names except for Todd’s and mine here on this blog, but since I’ll be talking about him quite a bit in this post, let’s call him Maverick. […]
May 29, 2015
She looked at us and her eyes filled with tears–real tears, not the crocodile variety we so often see–because the words “I’m going to pop the tangerine-sized blister on the back of your hand with a needle” are scary. The poor girl is suffering the effects of a second-degree burn (an incident that occurred while […]
May 26, 2015
The last few weeks have brought their share of sadness in the lives of many people I know. Diagnoses of cancer–in family I love, in children my friends love, and stage four in a young mom I know, just two days after the birth of her fourth child. The death of children in unexpected accidents, […]
May 17, 2015
A couple weeks ago, as we were closing in on bedtime, we decided to be fun parents and let the kids stay up late to watch a movie and eat candy. Because we’re fun. The problem is, one member of our household didn’t see it that way. Would you be shocked if I told you […]
May 1, 2015
When we were preparing to foster, I thought happily of all the baking therapy that would take place in our home. My love language is baked goods (that’s the sixth love language, the book doesn’t talk about it for some reason), and I planned to show our child love primarily through chocolate chip cookies. I […]
