From the category archives:

the bigger picture

My Toddler Teaches Me When to Say “I’m Sorry”

January 5, 2009

Jake has picked up a rather impressive and useful new habit.  He now frequently says, “I’m sorry.”
The thing is, I’m not entirely certain whether he’s saying it when he’s the one who has something to be sorry for.  More often, I fear, he’s merely pointing out my own lack of social graces.
When, for example, I [...]

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Why I Was Crying in the Target Parking Lot, and Why I Probably Will Again

December 18, 2008

I thought I was doing really well on Tuesday.  Last of the holiday packages mailed?  Check.  Requisite single container for the lunches Jake will take with him when he moves up to the big kids’ preschool after the holidays finally located and purchased?  Check.  Checks deposited?  Check, checks.
I was aware that in order to add [...]

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Giving and Receiving Toddler Style — In the Bathtub

November 21, 2008

Jake took a bath last night for the first time in a week.
This fact is notable for three reasons.  First, he is generally quite fond of the tub, so a one-week boycott is a serious thing indeed.  Second, the fact that I was able to ease him back into the tub wearing a swim diaper [...]

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Travels with Toddler (Low Country Edition)

October 14, 2008

“Elmo!” Jake crowed the second he saw the portable DVD player set up in the back seat of the car.  Plainly, he was ready for a driving trip, as long as we had Elmo’s Big Outdoors at the ready.
As was I.  After a year of living in the mountains, I was craving some beach time [...]

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Let the Comparisons Begin, or How Much Control Do I Really Have?

October 6, 2008

We had our anatomy-screen ultrasound last week, and, inevitably, the comparisons began.
“This is an active one,” the technician commented, as she tried, unsuccessfully, to snap a picture of the wiggling baby’s heart before it shifted out of view again.
I told her about the time Jake wouldn’t wake up for his ultrasound.  And about how everyone [...]

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Shouldn’t My Sick Child Be Crying for His Mommy?

September 21, 2008

Mike and I had one of those glorious Asheville Saturdays yesterday.  We took Jake to Plow Day at Warren Wilson College, a small school just outside of town with — as the Plow Day moniker would suggest — a working farm.
Yes, one year of living here, and I consider Plow Day at Warren Wilson College [...]

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Could Yoga Really Have Led Me to the Americans with Disabilities Act?

September 18, 2008

Yoga, I have always thought, saved me from the law.
I became a lawyer, in the narrative I have set up of my life, because I was blind to my heart.  It was the path my mind led me down, the safe, manageable world of knowledge and surface communication and clear organizing principles.
Sure, I told myself [...]

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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 Elmo [...]

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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 deserve the [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Why Practicing Yoga Is as Simple as Sleeping with a Sick Child

July 15, 2008

I’m assuming there are women checking out the YogaMamaMe community who don’t practice asanas, don’t know what the word means (it designates the physical poses you see people practicing on the cover of Yoga Journal when you’re waiting in the check-out line at Whole Foods), don’t intend ever to practice them, and yet are kind [...]

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Monday Mornings, Sleeping Late, and the Clash of the “Should Do’s”

July 14, 2008

Jake slept in this Monday morning. I did too, for a while. Until Mike told me it was eight o’clock and suddenly my eyes were wide open like a Bush voter who finds out for the first time that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. One minute I was dozing blissfully, [...]

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MIA Part Three: Not Doubting Your Path

July 11, 2008

Sometimes there are good reasons you don’t have time to, say, write a YogaMamaMe post for two weeks. And I don’t mean “good” in the “eat your spinach, it’s good for you” sense of good. I mean good, like good for my soul, happy, fun.
I mean, to get to the point, Coon Dog [...]

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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 [...]

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Driving with the Brakes On

June 12, 2008

I had a Very Bad Moment walking Jake home from school yesterday.
We were strolling down a moderately trafficked street — the kind of residential road motorists use inappropriately as a through-way, inducing the residents to have cement traffic calmers installed which end up acting only as a challenge to the faster drivers but at least [...]

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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, determined [...]

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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, [...]

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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 had these [...]

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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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