July 2010
1 post
On Love, and Heartbreak, and Pets
A dear friend of mine lost her cat of 18 years last week. She wrote me asking, essentially, whether she will ever love again. I thought about what we’ve been experiencing here, these last six months, and I told her this.
***
I cried for a solid two months, I think, after we put Sully to sleep — every night I’d crawl into bed and just weep. It was truly awful. And then I...
June 2010
1 post
Ideas for a bed (by Stella)
Ideeas for a bed. By Stella.
1. Bed that has munkee bars.
2. Bed that is mad of pilos.
3. Bed edabel. [“Made of lollipops,” Stella explains.]
4. Bed for a hog.
May 2010
1 post
Ick. Oh, and ICK. Did I mention ICK!?
When I picked up Stella at school today, she opened her hand to show me a tiny baby tooth. “Stella!” I cooed. “You lost a tooth today, sweetie?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. ”It’s not mine.”
I stopped in my tracks. ”What do you mean it’s not yours?”
“It’s Emmet’s.” (A boy in her kindergarten...
April 2010
10 posts
Overheard
Lila: We had a substitute today.
Stella: Who was she?
Lila: I don’t remember her name.
Stella: What did she look like? Was she fat?
Lila: (pause) I wouldn’t call her fat…
Stella: Well, I mean, was she kind of like Mommy?
****
In other news, the cat seems to feel quite at home now.
What a cat isn't
What a cat isn’t is a dog. I miss Sullivan, our adorable naughty puppy, so sharply it still takes me by surprise. I haven’t written about her death because, frankly, it’s too hard. I start, I cry, I stop. Suffice to say: We’ve been grieving. And I knew if I tried to get another dog, we would be comparing that dog to Sullivan, probably unfairly.
But we need something furry...
A little shout-out
FYI, this is not where my kids will be going to camp. They’re going to attend these fantastic new summer programs — a week of cooking and a week of art — and a couple weeks of Mass Audubon camp, also known as Trial by Mosquitoes. But, if they weren’t attending those camps, they’d be going here.
Have you ever wondered where yarn comes from? Would you like to know...
Everything I ever wanted
This afternoon — standing at the kitchen counter, glancing up to look at my daughters playing in the afternoon sunshine, kneading a hunk of pizza dough for their dinner, vaguely aware of an NPR commentator intoning in the background — this afternoon, I felt a sudden realization. This is everything I ever wanted.
It’s a feeling that can’t be forced, I find. I remember...
April, come she will
The weather today is insanely beautiful. Too hot, even, but I know it’s fleeting, and so I appreciate it for what it is. Why can’t I do this in the dead of summer — recognize the brevity of the season, and accept it for its beautiful, ephemeral self?
Less thinking. More sunning.
(Photo taken today by my friend Rachel on the Hipstamatic for iPhone. ‘Cause if...
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
My dear friend Pam McMahon is a portraitist. Her rendition of Stella takes my breath away.
March 2010
9 posts
Ixnay on the ampooshay
I realize I’m going to gross a lot of people out by posting this. But: I stopped shampooing my hair about two weeks ago.
No, really. I shower every day, and condition my hair every day, too. I massage my scalp with the conditioner and rinse my hair well. But…no more shampoo. My hair is very thick and wavy, and tends toward dry; my scalp had been itchy and flaky lately, too.
What...
Birthday Par-tay
It was a tropical party. This meant flowered leis, umbrellas in the pink lemonade, and (of course) the limbo.
And don’t forget birthday cake.
Don’t work too hard, Dad.
Procrastination
Oh, deadlines. I count on you, I need you, and yet I also hate you. Is this the way of all true loves?
Instead of meeting my deadline in a timely fashion, perhaps I will go look at cute videos of kitties online.
I'm guessing it was a disappointing visit
I’m doing a little trolling around Google Analytics this evening, and I decided to see what search terms are bringing people to this site. Among the top ten: “segregation nuts.”
(Number 12: “will planters cashews cure my toothache.”)
WatchIt’s spring, which is the time for bunes. That’s right: Bunes.
Observations
Lila’s birthday was a smashing success. “I had a fabulous birthday,” she sighed as I tucked her into bed. For one thing, it was St. Patrick’s Day, as always. For another, it was a drop-dead gorgeous sunny day:
(Stella’s modeling the appropriate head gear.)
Also, we went to Lila’s favorite Mexican joint for soft tacos, where she demonstrated her imitation of...
Birth-Day
Today marks the ninth anniversary of the day I became a mama.
At 6:27 a.m., twenty-five hours after my water broke, I managed (finally!) to push an eight-pound, nine-and-a-half-ounce baby girl from my tired, fatigued self. When I held her in my arms, she opened her dark almond eyes (different from mine!) and looked at me with such intensity it was hard to believe she was brand-new. Chris, who had...
It's been a while
…but I’m back.
Tonight I was reading Stella Raisel’s Riddle, a twist on Cinderella that stars a Jewish girl in Poland. About halfway through the book it occurred to me to point this out:
“Hey Stella, you know what?”
“What?”
“You know how Raisel is a Jewish girl in Poland?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, you know who else was a Jewish...
December 2009
2 posts
Clarification
Stella was walking slowly down the stairs, thoughtfully sucking her thumb. Suddenly she pulled her thumb from her mouth and turned back toward me.
“If I’m outdoors, is it okay to take spit out of my mouth?”
“No,” I said. ”You always keep your spit inside your mouth.”
“But I mean at trees and plants and stuff,” she said.
I wavered.
...
Snow Day
First big snow of the winter — and it’s heavy, sticky snow. The girls made snowballs, a snowman, and some kind of fort-type piece of snowy real estate before demanding hot chocolate.
I snapped this photo with my cell phone, loved it, and decided this should be our holiday card this year (yes, I’m this late ordering our holiday cards; it’s like this every year). But...
November 2009
2 posts
Haircuts
The girls got haircuts on Saturday. This is a more loaded statement than it may appear, on first reading. Allow me to elaborate.
I happen to be the kind of mom who is mellow about some things — like TV on Saturday mornings, and snacks before dinner — and uptight about others, like the way my children appear in public. My pet peeves include sleeves with snot trails on the arms,...
NaNoWhatNow?
I’m not writing because I’m too busy writing. To put it another way: The blog is taking a backseat at the moment to the novel. The novel which is bound to be bloody awful, mind you, because I am writing it in thirty days; see nanowrimo.org for the backstory on that. Still. I haven’t flexed my fiction-writing muscles in a looooong time, and I have to say, it feels pret-ty...
October 2009
7 posts
Kitchen time
Lila has recently started wanting to help me more in the kitchen. Now that she’s tall enough to reach the counter and old enough to follow a recipe, her involvement has moved from “help” to genuine help. She can peel veggies, mix batter, knead dough — almost everything except wield a knife. An interesting side effect is that when we start cooking, she starts talking....
Sunday morning
The girls were up at seven, and so was the dog. I fed and let out Sully; the girls helped themselves to the TV. Everyone seemed okay to me so I went back to my warm bed — and didn’t wake up again until nine, which is pretty much unheard of in these parts, these days. The girls had been left alone with the television so long they actually grew sick of it, turned it off, and began...
This is one sick puppy
Sullivan ate something wrong. Something very, very wrong, judging from the fact that she ignored her breakfast this morning and ran straight outside to start gnawing on grass. She’s now sitting on my lap, despite the alarming sounds she’s emitting. I think she’d jump off before crapping all over me, but perhaps this is overly optimistic. Having had two infants, it’s not...
Hot yoga
I’m pretty sure today was my last day of hot yoga. I bought a punch card for ten visits when my usual yoga classes were unavailable, after the Y fire. And today was number ten. I’m not buying another anytime soon.
I never really could come to terms with the amount of sweat in that studio — my own (a shocking, unprecedented amount) and everyone else’s (slipping and...
Truth fairy
Here’s how the conversation went. We were walking out of Cedar Chest Kids and heading back to the parking garage when Lila said, “Mommy, is the tooth fairy real? Tell me the truth.”
I stalled. “What do you mean? Did somebody say something?”
“Some kids on the playground were saying that the tooth fairy isn’t real, that it’s really moms and dads. Is...
Nut desegregation
Stella is allergic to nuts… OR IS SHE?
Backing up a bit: When Stella was a toddler, she ate some cashews. Quite a few cashews, in fact, before I caught up with her and took away the bag. And a few hours later she broke out in a set of angry hives, all over her little baby body, and we landed in the Cooley Dickinson ER at nine o’clock p.m. for a shot of epinephrine and good ol’...
Layoffs
Magazines have been dropping like flies for a couple years now. When I was at Wondertime it seemed like every couple weeks we learned about another title that was folding. And then of course it was our title that folded.
Today it was announced that Conde Nast is closing several more titles, including Cookie. This one is particularly noteworthy to us Wondertimers. We saw Cookie as one of our...
September 2009
8 posts
And who shall I say is calling?
Tomorrow night’s Kol Nidre, and Monday is Yom Kippur.
There have been times in my life when I’ve felt more observant than others. Preparing to become a bat mitzvah, for example, was a time when I felt very in touch with my Jewishness. In graduate school I began going to Friday night services every week. But mostly Judaism is a backdrop for me. Some years it has been a very pale,...
If you say so
Lila’s sick. Third day out of school. It’s the kind of sickness that I find especially confounding — she seems fine during the day, but once she goes to bed she spikes a fever. The especially cruel irony is that Lila wants nothing more than to be at school. Stella, meanwhile, would be overjoyed to have a legit reason to skip kindergarten. She has fun once she’s there,...
Apple pickin'
Fall in New England means school field trips to apple orchards. It’s unavoidable—not that I’d try to avoid it. I volunteered to “be one of the mommies” on Stella’s class trip today. I somehow managed to get lost (which upset one of my riders greatly — Stella kept telling him her mommy would be able to fix the situation, but he clearly had little faith),...
9/3/09
And then some days I hardly see anyone at all. Days like today, where I go so long without talking that when I do finally speak, I have to clear my throat to get my voice going again. I could probably do with more days like that. The weather has been most unfair this year in that just as the kids have gone back to school, the weather has turned effin’ gorgeous. Low 80s, no humidity,...
9/2/09
Dropped the kids for their first day at school — and suddenly the morning feels quiet and still. Not in a bad way — there’s just a calm, expectant feeling hanging in the air. Chris and I come home, toss the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, and I walk downtown to meet my old coworker Laura for coffee. A project from St. Martin’s awaits me on my desk, but…you...
9/1/09
Last day of summer vacation. It was crisp, clear, and sunny, and it put me in mind of a similar day eight Septembers ago. That day I walked downtown, too, with six-month-old Lila in the stroller. I had spent the morning frantically trying to get ahold of all my family and friends in NYC. After everyone was accounted for, I went out for a walk, hoping to clear my head. All along the way, people...
8/31/09
End of summer, two days before school begins again. The girls are at each other’s throats; I’m thinking lunch at Bueno Y Sano is cheaper than hiring a short-notice nanny. I toss Stella in the stroller, even though she’s well past five years old; I don’t want to dally, and I don’t want to listen to whines about how much farther. Lila grabs her scooter and we’re...