“It was the loudest of times, it was a stretch of silence. It was the age of babies, it was the epoch of earbuds.” This tale of two trips began a decade ago when our boys were 5 and 2 ½ and our baby girl was only a few months old. We were crazy to be taking all three of them to the grocery store, let alone a 10-hour car trip to see grandparents. But sleep deprivation and winter had made us just stir crazy enough to think we could survive it, so we set out on the open road toward Minnesota, with nothing but time and our sanity to kill. Honestly the specific details of that first trip seem […]

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I did it again last night – stayed up way too late in the name of love. A rerun of a romantic comedy I’ve seen at least eight times came on TV, and, even though I can lip-sync all the important lines, I watched until the ending credits rolled. Tom has seen me do this many times during our 18-year marriage. He usually glances at the TV, then looks at me, shakes his head and says “Again? You’ve seen it so many times.” To which I reply “And I enjoy it every time.” Last night after the movie ended, I fell asleep wondering why I’m so easily sucked into a love story. When I’m watching one of these seen-it-a-million-times movies, […]

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This morning was one of those mornings. I woke up with the kind of headache that’s just annoying enough to keep me slightly on edge. I went through the usual routine – dropped the kids off at school and then started the day’s work. But my to-do list kept getting longer. And the caffeine and ibuprofen I swallowed at breakfast didn’t shake the headache. There were so many emails with so many questions and deadlines, and I had nothing – no answers, no completed tasks. It was the kind of morning that makes you want to crawl under the bed and hide from the world. Instead, I did the next best thing and went to lunch. During the drive to […]

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A few days ago, my friend Shannon and I went to lunch. In an attempt to change our ways and counterbalance the sugar-laden excesses of the holidays, we ordered salads. When the waiter brought them to the table, we marveled at the Olympic-size salad bowls. Even during lunch, a salad is a big event in modern America. Do restaurants give us huge salads because they feel sorry for us? Or do they give us an entire field of greens because they need an excuse to charge the same amount we’d pay if we were having a plate full of pork chops? (Something tells me it’s the second reason, but that’s not the point.) The point is that these super-sized salads […]

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I’m a planner by nature, so I understand the need to “get out in front” of something. But when I opened the Target sales circular this Sunday, the only words that came to mind were these: “This is ridiculous.” Two pages past the Valentine’s Day candy, there it was – a splashy double-page spread of models in swimsuits. Swimsuits! In January! The Christmas fruitcake hasn’t even had time to get moldy yet, and already they’re pushing stringy two-pieces for her and Hawaiian board shorts for him. In the wise words of my elementary school crossing guard, “Slow down, people.” What’s the rush? Perhaps I’m missing something. Has it become a tradition to watch the Super Bowl in beachwear? Am I […]

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If you’re on Facebook or save digital pictures online, you probably get the same emails I do – the ones that show photo memories taken on the same calendar date several years ago. Last week I got an email with photos of our youngest when she was only 3-years-old. She was outside playing in one of her first big snowfalls. There’s a picture of her bundled up in a puffy pink coat with a fur-trimmed hood, beaming at the camera with her bright blue eyes and cheeks tinged pink from cold. She was lying down in the snow while her dad moved her arms and legs to teach her the correct snow angel technique. The only thing I don’t like […]

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I don’t have it all together and, most of the time, I feel like an imposter pretending to be a grown-up. But you’d never know it by looking at my spice cabinet. One of my main gripes about a New Year is the pressure to do more, be more, and have more. All the relentless resolution-making wears me out. Just when you think you’re an acceptable human being, January rolls around and makes you feel like a lazy loser in dire need of a life makeover. But I know that any grand promise I make in January often turns out to be an “oh well” by the time I hit March. For me, small changes have the best shot at […]

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Last summer I banished the dog from our bedroom at night. We’d been letting him sleep on a chair by our bed, but he started stirring around and making noise at 2 a.m. each night. So I took Charlie and his doggie bed downstairs to the sunroom and explained that, at my age, I need all the beauty sleep I can get. But the weather has turned bitterly cold the past few nights, and my icy determination to exile the dog has thawed. The sunroom isn’t heated, and Charlie isn’t well-insulated. No matter how much he eats, he stays perpetually skinny. (Some dogs have all the luck.) And he doesn’t have long hair, unlike the cat who has so much […]

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If you’ve ever hated yourself for doing (or not doing) something, you know how I felt today. I sat down on the barstool where I always sit at the diner where my dad and I have breakfast each morning. Waiting on the seat next to me was a woman I’ve met a few times before. She turned to me and said, “I didn’t have your phone number, so I came to tell you… My dad passed away yesterday.” The news hit me like a hard blow to the chest. Her dad, a smart, kind 73-year-old man named Bob, was my friend and my dad’s friend, and the three of us had been having breakfast together at that diner for almost […]

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When I pick up our three kids from school, I ask two questions as soon as they get in the car. The first is “How did it go today?” The answers range anywhere from a grunt to a “Fine” to a lengthy blow-by-blow of the day’s events, depending on which kid I’m asking and how much he or she is willing to indulge Mom’s curiosity on any given day. The second question is “Do you have any homework?” For two of the three kids – the 4th grader and the 7th grader in public school – the answer is almost always “no.” For the 9th grader who goes to a charter school, the answer is almost always “yes.” In fact, […]

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