I read a magazine article today about a new type of portable pool you can install in the back of a truck. It’s called a Pick-Up Pool, and it looks like a sleeker version of a waterproof mattress cover sized to fit perfectly in the back of a pick-up truck. I can’t wait to show the article to my dad, who was apparently way ahead of his time when, in the late 1970s, he turned his new dump truck into a swimming pool in our backyard. Judging by family photos, I must have been about 6 years old, and my brother was 12. The forest green dump truck was new – Dad’s big investment in his one-man landscaping business. But […]

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I went to Wal-Mart yesterday while the kids were at school and glanced longingly over at the new, fun-sized shopping carts lined up outside the automatic doors. Have you seen them yet? They’re about half the size of the regular carts and they have an upper and lower deck. If shopping carts were cars, this new cart is the cute convertible – easily navigating around those tired old minivan carts we usually drive down the aisles. It’s the perfect cart to use when you’re popping into the store for “just a few things.” I grabbed one of the “cute carts” about a month ago during what I thought would be a quick errand. I zipped down the bread aisle and […]

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Ours is not what you’d call a “sports family.” We like to watch college football and basketball and our kids compete in a few swim meets during the summer, but we’re not hard-core about it. We don’t take the kids to a practice every day, and we don’t do travel teams. In the South, that almost makes us weird. Most parents we know have the opposite situation. They’re constantly shuttling one or more kids to practice, and on weekends they go from one game or tournament to the next. During spring, there are some “baseball mom” friends I don’t see for months, unless I track them down at a ball field or a game gets rained out. But last weekend […]

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Every year about this time, I wish there was a fast-forward button for life. I wouldn’t skip much – just a few days or so. Like most families, mine has an anniversary we don’t celebrate – one we dread the approach of because it renews the grief we felt the day we got the news. Even though it has been 16 years since it happened, we remember with painful clarity how devastating it was when my 34-year-old, larger-than-life big brother died suddenly in his sleep on April 20th. Loss imprints on people in a way that often includes the season in which it happened. Even though I love Spring’s warmer temperatures and blooms, I doubt there will ever be another […]

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Of all the questions Americans grapple with, there’s one that pops up more frequently than the rest: “Where do you want to go eat?” Deciding should be easy. There are plenty of restaurants to choose from. But when two or more people are involved in the restaurant-picking decision, things can easily go off the rails. The problem has everything to do with “food moods.” Finding two people in the mood for the same food at any given time is tricky. The more people you have in the car, the harder it is. I’ll demonstrate with the following conversation: “Where do you want to go eat?” “I don’t really care. What do you want?” “I’m kind of in the mood for […]

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As most parents know, one of the requirements of the job is to drive. Especially as kids get older and have more activities, the driving demands go way up. Often, time alone in the car with a kid can produce some of the best conversations a parent ever has. But sometimes, the miles are long and the conversations are either brutally brief or non-existent. During one of my recent trips, I started wondering what it would be like if moms and kids could post reviews of each other – much like drivers and riders do on transportation apps like Lyft and Uber. Here are a few of the reviews I imagine you’d see from both sides of the car. Review […]

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Well, we did it. We thought about it for a long time but something always held us back – vanity, frugality, perhaps a desperate grip on the last remaining scraps of our youth. But now that we’ve done it, we love it so much we don’t even care what it says about us. We are the proud new owners of an adjustable bed. The first time I saw a remote-control bed was during the 1980s. There was a TV commercial showing a white-haired couple lying in bed looking about 200 years old. Then with the touch of a button, their magic bed slowly raised them to an almost-sitting position so they could eat stewed prunes and watch the Lawrence Welk […]

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Last week I wrote a column called “Ways to know someone has been raised right,” and I added three things to the list. Here are three more “raised right” behaviors I bet you’ve seen on the open road. No. 1: People who have been raised right let people in. When you’re stuck in the turn lane and there’s an impossibly long line of cars coming in the opposite direction, you pray someone will take mercy on you and let you out of your turn-lane purgatory. Someone who has been raised right will stop and (if it’s safe) wave you through. I have no scientific proof, but I like to believe in “driving karma.” If you’re the kind of person who […]

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We went to dinner recently with my parents at a restaurant where you place an order at the counter and then get your own drink. Tom and I were pulling extra chairs up to a table for the seven of us when we noticed a man put a cup of water down in front of my mother. He asked if she’d like a lemon and she said “Yes, please,” so he went back to the drink station and fetched a lemon wedge for her. He didn’t work at the restaurant, and I didn’t recognize him. I assumed maybe he was a friend my mother knew from work or one of the many people she has met during her job as […]

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People say that, not only do you start looking like your spouse over time, you also start looking like your dog. In an experiment, people can often match up dogs with their owners simply by looking at their pictures. And now, researchers say even our personalities mirror our dogs in significant ways. This information worries me, mainly because our dog, Charlie, is a borderline menace to society. So what does that say about us? Thankfully, what Charlie lacks in basic rule-following, he makes up for in cuteness. He’s a tri-color dog with velvety soft ears and a pointy black nose. He is a true “mixed breed” rescue dog. Our veterinarian’s best guess is that he’s part Beagle and part Italian […]

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