Later this week, Michael and I will have our five-year anniversary, and a week after that, Eliot will turn four. (Yeah, go ahead and do the fucking math, Smugley. We were in love, that socially acceptable form of insanity.) So what that means is that after several years of catastrophic missteps, this year we have…
Please sir, may I have some more?
So last weekend, I was at a baby shower where one of the grandfathers-to-be read my palms. This wasn’t some kind of baby-shower game — although Tom was really good and also really earthy. I imagine if it were a baby-shower game and we’d all gotten a lot more sauced up on the delicious rum…
Swine flu changed everything
When it comes to flu shots, as parents, Michael and I are THOSE PEOPLE: the ones who refuse to immunize their children. Now granted, we’re not THOSE PEOPLE, the whole hog, total anti-vaccination nutjobs who think an MMR is behind autism and back fat and low credit scores, or that the Hep B immunization is…
Getting an early start on Christmas
So when I came across these today on the interwebs, I didn’t see a matricidal Sally Draper at an AA meeting in 1977, I saw THE MOTHER OF ALL LAMINATED PLACEMATS: Merry Christmas, girls! Yeahyeah, I know they’re three-and-a-half and two, but expert bartending is like being multilingual — best started in Pull-Ups. Besides, just…
If you touch a hair on her head. . .
With Eliot, I had few sentimental attachments to her babyhood — it was as though infancy and each stage after was something to be endured and raced through on the way to the next (presumably easier) stage. Baby clothes and toys were packed away, bottles were sanitized and stowed in boxes, the Co-Sleeper folded into…
On balance
Me: So you know how last week we had that talk about how I need to take better care of myself, and part of that was taking at least one night off a week for myself? Mike: Jesus, do I ever. Me: Hard to forget, right? What with you just going to a little after-work…
Ladies, kindly STFU already.
As most people close to me know, I have a verrrry testy relationship with marriage. Some aspects of deeply trouble me: its religious foundations, its patriarchal history of a woman being ceded by one man to another, even — I’ll admit it — its permanence. For me, marriage represents a certain end to a narrative…
And so summer ends.
I can’t really say that I knew Celeste, not like everyone else did.
Whoever said getting there was half the fun had a transporter
Last week Mike and I finally got OFF our collective asses and decided to spend a little time ON ’em: a week on the beach, just us and the girls renting a cottage on the rugged, majestic Oregon Coast. It was the perfect getaway: for weeks, I’d envisioned our sun-washed days of building sandcastles and…
Tink’s Box
As any new parent knows, a volume switch on a toy is your best friend, because musical/speaking childrens’ toys are categorically obnoxious and the sole variation in how desperately a toy makes you want to jam an ice pick in your brain is how SCREAMINGLY it wails the alphabet, or “Old MacDonald,” (and Christ, do…