My name is Gwen Rockwood and it’s been two hours since I accidentally left my phone at home. I realized it roughly 20 minutes after it happened, and by that time I was already 15 miles from home with no time to drive back and get it. When I reached over to the passenger’s side seat to grab it, I found nothing but a lifeless charger cord with no phone attached to it. I hoped that perhaps it had slid off the seat and onto the floorboard. I searched the cracks and crevices around the center console. “Please be here. Please be here,” I chanted. But it wasn’t. My phone was home alone. I wanted to slap my hands against […]

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Remodeling your house is a little like having a baby. It’s wonderful and exciting – right up until the sledgehammer smashes into the first wall. Then it becomes like childbirth itself – messy, scary and painful. We’ve remodeled a kitchen before, but this time around we’re moving our washer and dryer out of their tiny closet and into a new room of their own. (You know you’ve been married with kids for a long time when the idea of a new laundry room gets you this excited.) But the biggest part of the remodeling project is a new bathroom that will be used by 8-year-old Kate. She’s wildly excited about the idea of not sharing space with her two older […]

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There’s a big bag of candy on the kitchen counter and no one is eating it. In a house with three kids and a chocolate-loving husband, this is bizarre. Candy and treats usually only last as long as it takes to rip them from their paper wrappers. So why is it still languishing here, three weeks after arrival? Two reasons. First off, the Easter Bunny overdid it. He shopped for candy when he was hungry and ended up getting enough stuff to put a small country into a sugar coma. You would think the Easter Bunny would have learned this lesson by now, as this is not the first time he’s gone overboard. But I’m not one to blame a […]

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Dear Greg, April sucks. It really does. Each year as the calendar creeps closer to April 20th, the knot in my throat gets a little bigger each day until I’m nearly choking on the reality that I’ve missed you for another whole year. It’s been 14 years now since I got that phone call that changed everything for me and for Mom and Dad. If I let myself, I can almost replay the conversation line by line. I can hear exactly how the police officer sounded when he told me you’d died. “That can’t be right,” I said. “Are you sure? Are you sure?” “We’re sure, ma’am. I’m sorry, but we’re sure.” The days and months after that phone call […]

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I opened my eyes and fought my way up toward the surface of consciousness after a deep, blissful sleep. The first thing I saw was 10-year-old Jack’s face, and I instantly recognized his expression of mildly frustrated disappointment. I recognized it because, when I was his age, I felt and probably looked exactly the same way when my parents spent part of a weekend afternoon doing what I’d just done – sleep. I remember stomping around our house hoping the louder-than-usual footsteps would get my parents up from their comfortable positions on the sofa or in the recliner. Weren’t they bored by all this time doing nothing? Didn’t they know there were about a million more interesting things to do […]

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The world that exists inside your own head is a much kinder, gentler world than the one outside. I know this because, inside my head, I’m younger, I’m better looking and I’m physically and mentally tough. Outside my head? Not so much. What happened this week has made that much painfully clear. Yesterday was the first day of our kids’ week-long Spring break from school. The sun was shining, the temperatures were rising and I was determined to get us all out of the house to embrace the day. So we laced up our tennis shoes, strapped on our bike helmets and headed toward the closest bike trail. The first few minutes of the bike ride were lovely. The sun […]

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A remarkable thing happened this month. The Sound of Music (the movie) turned 50 years old and readers all over the world celebrated the birthday of the late Dr. Seuss on the very same day, March 2nd. It’s perfectly fitting that those two things happened simultaneously because, for many reasons, the movie and the books should be required viewing and reading for every kid on the planet. Usually I don’t even like musicals. When I see one, I always end up thinking it’d be a better movie if people would just stop singing at each other all the time. But The Sound of Music is different. Even after 50 years, it still works. I’ve already had my kids watch the […]

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This week’s column, as well as many of the conversations around my house lately, are rated PG-13. Be aware that the following material may not be suitable for children, pre-teens or anyone who’s easily offended. Consider yourself forewarned. For those readers curious enough to move on to this second paragraph, let me explain. Our oldest kid turned 13 two months ago. This milestone, in and of itself, is enough to rattle parents who feel like it was just yesterday that we brought him home from the hospital wrapped up like a baby burrito with nothing but his tiny, blue-capped head peeking out. A lightning-fast 13 years later, our first “baby” is now in middle school, where the traditional three R’s […]

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This week, after taking the second of my three kids to a consultation appointment at the orthodontist’s office, I saw the reality of our situation in black, white and shades of grey when the doctor put two x-rays on the computer screen side by side. One showed an x-ray from a year ago which the doctor said looked pretty normal. The x-ray next to it was the one he’d just taken and it was…a dental disaster. It looked like a cluster of bumper cars all pointing in different directions. The orthodontist pointed at two impacted teeth that had somehow taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and were now headed in the opposite direction. They’d need to be re-routed first with […]

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One of the great things about being young and broke is that it forces you into new situations. After my second year of college, I decided I was old enough to get my own apartment and stay in my college town instead of going home for the summer. My parents agreed. They also thought that, given my grown-up decision-making ability, I was also grown-up enough to get a summer job and pay my own grown-up rent. So I filled out applications and one of the first places to call me for an interview was a newly opened Wal-Mart Supercenter. Back then, the Supercenter had a few workers who sped around the store on roller skates to make fetching items quicker. […]

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