I slid the wrapper off the straw, blew air through it and stabbed it through the plastic lid of my Chick-fil-A tea. Eleven-year-old Jack questioned the move he has likely seen me do a thousand times. “Why do you always blow air through the straw before you put it in the drink?” “Because that’s what Aunt Eunice always did.” (Aunt Eunice was my smart, witty great aunt who taught me how to diagram sentences when I was a kid, just for fun. She also gave me a can of Lipton tea every Sunday afternoon when I’d visit her. She’d pop the top of the can, pull a straw out of her cupboard, and blow air through it before sticking it […]

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We women have an obligation to the young men in our lives. We must teach them how to keep their manly feet out of their big mouths while talking to women. Sometimes a man runs into trouble not because of the specific words he does or does not say but because his body language says things without him even knowing it. Our sons, ages 14 and 11, recently witnessed an example of this. I’d just tried on a new pair of jeans I was unsure about. I found Tom cooking burgers in the kitchen and asked for his opinion on whether or not I should return the jeans or keep them. Him: “No. I don’t like them. Not at all. […]

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Eighteen years ago, I got a call from my best friend, Jennifer. I was sitting at my desk in the newsroom, surrounded by the chatter of other reporters, ringing phones and humming computers. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said. We’d been friends since fifth grade so I could tell by her voice it was big news, maybe even bigger than when we turned 16 and she called to say she was coming over because her parents had just handed her the keys to A RED CAR! (We put a lot of miles on her car that day, most of which happened while cruising Main Street and circling Sonic so that as many people as possible could witness our […]

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As a mom of three, part of my job is to buy clothes for whichever kid happens to be in the midst of a growth spurt. Right now it’s 9-year-old Kate, who will probably be another inch taller by the time you finish reading this column. Last weekend, Kate and I went to the mall to find shirts and pants. With the weather warming up, she wanted some shorts, too. As we walked through several stores, I felt a quiet rage growing in my gut, just like it did last Spring and the one before that. I’d hoped that by now the fashion pendulum would have swung back the other way – away from the kind of shorts that are […]

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Now and then something rare and remarkable happens, like a solar eclipse, or the birth of a hamster with two noses, or a mother of three who gets completely caught up on the laundry. That last one happened to me over the weekend and it felt great – for about five minutes. I surveyed the empty laundry baskets and congratulated myself because, for once, I seemed to be on top of things. Then I realized that, despite my total laundry domination, I was behind in at least half a dozen other areas. (Insert heavy sigh here.) Normal people probably resign themselves to the reality of an overflowing inbox and an always-growing “to-do” list that never gets done. But I’m just […]

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Chocolate chip cookies, the Slinky, Play-Doh, Post-It notes, and potato chips. The one thing they all have in common is this: They’re losers. Big fat mistakes. Accidents. Epic fails. None of them turned out to be the thing they were intentionally meant to be, and yet they’ve become household names. How did the thing we all fear so much – failure – turn into a lucky break for the people behind the inventions? For the cookie, it was a simple matter of “failure to melt.” In 1930, a woman named Ruth Wakefield, who was co-owner of the Toll House Inn, was trying to make a chocolate dessert when she ran out of the chocolate she normally used. As a substitute, […]

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There’s a bird chirping outside my office window today, announcing the start of spring. I’ve gone to the window to see if I can spot her – and to make sure she keeps her distance. The last time I let a bird get too cozy, I got burned. It was the spring of 1995 and I was about to graduate from college. I had a one-bedroom apartment, an old but reliable Honda Accord and a part-time job as a bank teller, which made perfect sense seeing as how I was about to graduate with an English degree. One morning as I left for class, I noticed a few stray twigs hanging off the grapevine wreath I’d hung on my apartment […]

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I knew it was a Monday when Tom woke me up with two words: “We overslept.” We sprang out of bed and flew around the house, rushing three groggy kids to dress for school in record time. Five minutes into the morning chaos, the youngest kid arrived at our bedroom door to announce that she had no pants, triggering a frantic search through jumbled laundry baskets to find a pair. In the end, she settled for leggings and a long sweater. Once downstairs, I groaned at the sink that was still full of last night’s dishes, and the only bread in the kitchen was that weird heel piece no one ever wants. Then the oldest kid, the one who’s supposed […]

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Surprised. That’s how I look in my new driver’s license picture. I laughed when the woman at the DMV handed me the new card because that happy yet slightly startled look on my face is exactly how I feel about turning a year older tomorrow. Right before the photo, I reminded myself to smile and open my eyes wider so I wouldn’t look tired in the picture. But I obviously overcompensated because the result looks more like a woman who is middle-aged, shocked and a little bit crazy. As I waited for my mugshot, I thought about my late Aunt Eunice and the last time she stood in line at the DMV. She was 97 at the time, and she […]

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As I mentioned last week, Tom and I recently drove our three kids 18 hours to the happiest place on Earth where we spent four days vacationing ourselves to the point of exhaustion. Why? Because Disneyworld is not cheap, and therefore “vacation math” must apply. Vacation math states that, if you’ve paid to experience a Disney park but then don’t see it all, you’ve left money on the table. So we laced up our tennis shoes and got an early start each day, determined to soak up as much magic as possible. Even though it wasn’t our first trip to Disney, it was the first one all three kids will remember. Like many parents, we took our kids to Magic […]

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