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Travels with Toddler

September 16, 2008

In my last post I stressed the importance of bringing along an Elmo DVD if you intend to take a toddler on a four-hour driving trip without another adult in the car who is willing to spend the entire journey twisted around dispensing handfuls of popcorn. I would now like to point out that the [...]

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When Families Happen

September 10, 2008

The remarkable thing about my taking Jake to visit my sister-in-law Maureen last weekend was that it seemed so very unremarkable to me. Mike, you see, had brilliantly realized that even if three of us couldn’t travel to Napa for three days to attend a wedding I had, quite frankly, been dying to attend, he [...]

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Twice Bitten: More of the Wisdom of Toddlers

September 4, 2008

Not long ago, I arrived to pick Jake up from school to find not one but two incident reports awaiting me. “He got bitten,” one of Jake’s teachers said apologetically.  “Twice.” From the deliberately pared-down details they provided — perpetrators’ names and identifying characteristics are omitted from incident reports to protect those too young to [...]

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Careful What You Google For

August 14, 2008

About a week ago I googled an old boyfriend. The one I thought I’d marry but didn’t. It wasn’t a stalker sort of thing. It wasn’t, amazingly, a raging case of misplaced nostalgia brought about by panic over finding myself a work-at-home mom living on a neighborly street in Asheville, North Carolina. I wasn’t feeling [...]

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The Friendship That Doesn’t Change When You Do

August 12, 2008

I took my dearest friend — Kali I’ll call her and she knows why — to the airport this morning. And I started crying — again. Not just because “Carolina in My Mind” was playing on the radio. (That song makes me cry every time, dammit, and not because I live in North Carolina.) I [...]

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What Do I Really Wish For?

August 1, 2008

Jake and I spent the last week with his aunt and uncle and his three teenage cousins. Jake thinks teenagers are wonderful, especially 14-year-old Cousin Jeff who is as happy to throw a ball with him as to hold his hand, even if he draws the line at receiving a big mmmm-wah! kiss on the [...]

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Forget My Mind — I Lost My Cell Phone

July 24, 2008

Actually, “lost” is mother-of-a-toddler code for, “I left my cell phone in the pocket of the shorts I wore to the pool with Jake and ran it through the washing machine.” Raz-r phones, I probably don’t have to tell you, do not like being run through the washing machine. When Mike first announced that he [...]

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The Moment Jake Went Down the Slide by Himself

July 18, 2008

Jake and I decided to go to the park after school on Tuesday. Usually we go home and play with the hounds or draw with chalk on the sidewalk or fast forward through Sesame Street on TiVo until we find good songs about dogs or the beach. But on Tuesday the weather was lovely and [...]

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MIA Part Two: Learning Who You Are

July 9, 2008

So another reason I was missing in action for two weeks (even though, I say again to the empty echo-chamber of a deserted readership, I don’t think anyone really noticed): a visit to Louisville for my grandfather’s funeral. Sad as this sounds — and much as the past couple of posts might, um, bring the [...]

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I’m Really Here, Now (Even in Wal-Mart)

June 23, 2008

What surprised me as I stood in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina, was not so much that I was standing in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina. The exigencies of a Blankie left far behind at school can leave one in some pretty surprising places. What surprised me was that [...]

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Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

June 16, 2008

On Father’s Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville’s local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can’t afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when I hear “Eye of the Tiger” on the radio. Immediately, it was [...]

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At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Actually Can Control

June 10, 2008

Most people probably consider it an obvious choice to eat dinner with your child. It is, after all, the foundation of all those sitcoms we grew up with, isn’t it? Remember Richie Cunningham … eating hamburgers at Arnold’s restaurant with The Fonz. Or … the hijinks taking place in the otherwise unused kitchen during those [...]

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Is There Such a Thing as a Graceful End to Vacation?

June 9, 2008

I can’t say I remember ever having had a graceful end to any vacation in my life. I tend to be the type who gets stuck somewhere between the utter relaxation that is, to me, the whole point of a vacation (soldier on, you exploring, traveling, learn-something-on-vacation types, but do it without me) and the [...]

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A Little Grey’s Anatomy, a Little Kindness

May 30, 2008

I know how this sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway. Yesterday I paid more attention to Grey’s Anatomy than to my child. Just a little bit more. And just for a little while. And only because I really, really needed to. It had, you see, been a rough week. Jake’s allergies were keeping [...]

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Booster Seats and Boosting Yourself

May 25, 2008

Thursday’s life lesson took place in the unlikely location of a Babies R Us in a strip mall off the exit just past the Asheville Mall, second-rate real estate where the stores squat sadly as if aware they have been banished. I entered already full of the anxiety large, glowing box stores induce in me, [...]

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Letting My Child’s Inner Beauty Shine Past the Tests

May 20, 2008

At Jake’s school this morning one of his teachers showed me the developmental evaluation they had filled out for him. It was a standardized list of questions — a la “Can the child pick up a Cheerio between his thumb and forefinger?” — in such categories as Communication, Gross Motor Skills, Fine Motor Skills, and [...]

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Geez, I Haven’t Had the Hip Replacement Yet, or Thoughts on Age and Youth

May 14, 2008

Something occurred to me yesterday in yoga class as I observed the places where I feel just a tad tighter and achier than I did before my pregnancy. “Maybe,” I thought with a rush of horror threaded through with an unsettling warmth of acceptance, “I’m just getting older.” For the past couple of years I’ve [...]

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Trust with a Capital T: How’s That for a Mother’s Day Gift?

May 12, 2008

“Think of what you’d like to do tomorrow,” Mike said Saturday night. “I want to do something special for you for Mother’s Day.” A perfectly reasonable request. But I am not, as it turns out, a perfectly reasonable person when it comes to being feted on Mother’s Day. As Mike headed off for an evening [...]

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Jake and My Heart Free Me From a Scary Rat’s Maze

May 5, 2008

I had one of those moments yesterday, the kind where suddenly everything feels completely wrong. It begins with a weird sense of displacement — in my case, sitting on the floor of my yoga room/office in the middle of my asana practice. “What am I doing here?” or something like it started the internal conversation. [...]

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How Losing a Little Bit of What’s Central to You Can Be Kind of Centering

April 26, 2008

It hit me somewhere around the time I was half-heartedly kicking my right foot up toward a handstand in the middle of the room. Something had radically changed in my life. Part of it was that I wasn’t trying very hard. I had resigned myself to never, ever having the courage to attempt a handstand [...]

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