Category Archives: Parenting

Time That You Love

By now, many of you are wondering if I’ve taken a serious turn for the worst. Or is it worse? I’m never sure about that, and I don’t feel like looking it up. It’s true that my body continues to weaken, and it’s getting harder to breathe. My speaking voice is really quiet, which means that Otto just laughs at me when I tell him not to do things (he openly mocked me by eating my peanut butter sandwich off the counter last week while I looked on, and later he acted all innocent like he just hadn’t heard me telling him no. I hope he gets diarrhea.)

My intention was to blog twice a week when I started in 2014. Now my intention is to blog today, and we’ll just see what happens after that. Summer was good, although as usual it went by so quickly that I feel like I went to sleep in June and woke up in September. Scarlett got prescription glasses and went to her first sleep away camp for one week. The glasses are already broken. I mean, did I really even need to say that? We didn’t even send them to camp with her, because it’s not like we’re amateurs here. But we did think she should wear them to school, and clearly that is where we went wrong.

Sleep away camp was a great success, and when we picked her up she informed us that Read More>

|Categories: Doctors, Faces, Life, Parenting, Progression | Tags: , , , | Permalink

Away game

All right, all right. It’s been too long since I put words on a page. I swear I’ve tried, but everything sounded so trite that I wanted to punch myself in the face. But my hands don’t work. So no punching or posting.

Scarlett was trying to drag Otto around yesterday when he wasn’t listening to her.

“Use your commands, not your hands,” I said, instantly inventing a genius rhyme that has probably already been invented. It made me think of something my friend Stephen wrote to me when I was feeling particularly down about not being able to run my household in a more physical way. I’m not talking about inflicting bodily harm on the child or the dog, but simply having the option to move things along with more than just my voice.

Stephen reminded me of a passage from the Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me. If I could flip through my copy right now, I would get the quote right. But essentially it was the author telling his son that words are more important than hands when it comes to raising a child. If all I had over you were my hands, he writes (and I’m pretty sure I’m getting this right), then I had nothing at all. Read More>

|Categories: Life, Parenting, Relationships | Tags: , , , | Permalink

Jackie Wilson Said

“Let it all hang out.” – Van Morrison

I often open my computer to write a blog post, and then become distracted by every other possibility that my computer provides. Maybe I should FaceTime people. Perhaps it is imperative that I complete a New York Times crossword puzzle. Seth Meyers clips? Look up words I think I should know, but don’t? Order things?

Because all of those options seem pretty attractive right now, this is me confessing that I am ripping this post out of myself, and I’m not sure where we’re going to end up.

Scarlett has been particularly amusing lately, in a cheeky, tweeny sort of way. She starts a lot of sentences with the phrase “Just to tell you.”

Here is a recent example: “Just to tell you, Otto was having sex with his new stuffed animal yesterday.”

To which I responded with a denial so swift it seemed Freudian, “No he wasn’t. That’s his baby.”

She gave me a look like I was a little bit slow in the head. “Well… He was having it.” Read More>

|Categories: Life, Parenting | Tags: , , , | Permalink