Category Archives: Parenting

Kinder Kid

The Great Kindergarten Search of 2015 is over for us, and we are very happy with the results. For the next nine years, Scarlett will be attending a school with tons of outdoor space, great teachers, and a lunch program that makes me jealous.

But she was not initially thrilled by this news, mainly because she is in a contrary phase. “Daddy and I have something exciting to talk to you about!” I said, once our decision was made.

“It’s not exciting!” she yelled, after I had given my spiel, full of warm and fuzzy observations about the school. She dashed out of the room.

“I think you might have oversold that,” Rob said.

Perhaps. First of all, it did not involve Care Bears. Second, Scarlett doesn’t know the details of The Great Search, which included the difficult decision to leave her current school, a wonderful place that offered her a spot through 8th grade. She doesn’t know that we spent months going to tours and open houses, filling out applications and sending emails. She doesn’t know that last weekend was spent trying to determine where she would thrive for the next nine years of her life, a discussion neither Rob nor I took lightly. Read More>

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Trickett

I wrote an essay for The New York Times in 2013, about parenting with ALS. And every time a new comment came in online, I was nervous. I hadn’t talked to many people with ALS and hadn’t ever written something in such a public forum. I felt extremely exposed. Then a comment came through that began with the line “You and I share this journey…”

The poster was Trickett Fewell Wendler, mom to three young kids, who had lost her father to ALS and had been diagnosed herself earlier that year. Trickett’s version of the disease moved fast. She was dancing in March, wheelchair-bound in July. I felt instantly connected to her based on her comment, so I looked her up on Facebook (bless her beautiful and unusual name!) and we made a phone date. She was from Wisconsin and sounded like so many of the people I’d gone to school with there. Like so many members of my midwestern family. She was familiar.

I don’t even know what we talked about, we just talked. I had a three-year-old, but Trickett’s kids were a little older and she had to deal with their growing understanding of her illness. I do remember that she was working on an article for her local chapter of The ALS Association, and she was nervous and excited to see it in print. She was an activist for ALS awareness, and very vocal with ALS organizations about her expectations and frustrations around the work they were doing. People listened to her. Read More>

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

Ski Tripping

Rob and Scarlett spent last weekend skiing in Lake Tahoe. It is well established in my family that Rob would spend every weekend in Tahoe if this were possible. He even announced recently that he would like us to move there for the month of February 2016, which to me sounded bizarre and slightly arbitrary, but to him sounds like living the dream. Never mind that we would have to take Scarlett out of kindergarten for a month, which is totally not happening, unless Rob thinks that she will be home-schooled by squirrels.

But, I mean, not to be a total killjoy. Maybe it could work.

(It could not work.)

This year, to support my husband and his love of all things mountainous, I committed to going to Tahoe once a month for the winter. It’s not very much, but we have a surprisingly busy schedule of visitors and events, so it’s the best we could do.

And then on our first trip there, in January, Rob presented a new idea: A trip to Tahoe for just him and Scarlett. I greeted this proposal with all the maturity of a child who has been told they will not be having dessert for the rest of their life. Read More>

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