Category Archives: Parenting

Perfecting the Eye Roll

Scarlett is the Person of the Week at school. Last week she came home with a giant poster board and instructions to decorate it with photos or drawings which she would then present to all three Kindergarten classes.

I was excited about her poster. It made me think of the one I created for her first year of preschool. She was two years old and didn’t help with that one, since it was technically an assignment for the parents. I’ve always loved a good art project and I jumped right into it. I wrote her name across the top in bubble letters, decorated the sides with stickers of ladybugs and butterflies, two of her favorite things, added photos of the family, and wrote a few lines about her love of music, dancing, and cheese.

That seems so long ago. When this Person of the Week poster board came home, my first reaction was to wonder how we would get her name at the top so nicely now that I can’t write anymore. I even called my sister, who was in Chicago for a family wedding, to tell her that I wished she was home to help with this project. It was sometime around then that I recognized how severely I was missing the point. Read More>

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Weekend of Awesome

Fall is a crazy time. Maybe that’s true for everyone, but for some reason this fall seems more chaotic than usual in our house. Or, if not exactly chaotic, then just busy. This past weekend started with the Friday publication of an essay I wrote for CNN. I was so excited, and spent the morning toggling back and forth between different sites, trying to determine if anyone was reading it. They were! At which point I had to question my decision to send CNN that one picture of myself in the ICU with very, very dirty hair.

I then spent the afternoon at a trampoline park with Scarlett and one of her friends. When they got bored of bouncing, they went outside into a grassy field, dumped dirt on each other, and then found some puddles to splash around in. I put my mud monster into the car about an hour later, and the evening was spent trying to find a child beneath the dank exterior of what looked more like one of those dogs with dreadlocks.

So when I say we’re “busy”, I don’t always mean busy in a cool way. Read More>

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Going Places

Scarlett’s school had a very special visitor this week. The legendary Jane Goodall came to speak to the students about realizing her childhood dreams of traveling to Africa to live among wild animals. This is seriously so cool, and among the parent group (who was not invited), the general consensus is that the girls have no idea how lucky they are to have met such an amazing woman.

Scarlett has a great book called Who is Jane Goodall? (thanks Emily G!), and she and I sat down to read it last night. Scarlett was particularly interested in a story about Jane digging up earthworms, then bringing them home and putting them under her pillow so she could sleep with them. Scarlett looked at me with wide eyes. Actually, so did Rob, who immediately interjected with something along the lines of I hope that never happens here, as if by merely reading this passage, I was encouraging Scarlett to snuggle up with live bait.

“That will never happen here,” I assured him. “Jane’s mother explained to her that the worms needed to be in their own homes, and Jane put them back in the garden because she was a good listener.”

Scarlett ignored us, which is one of her finest skills. Read More>

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