Browsing all 32 posts in Love Your Kids.
08/23/10
I sent my oldest son, Toby, to Kindergarten this morning. The drive to the school took five minutes. Five short minutes to surrender my child to the large and wicked world. I started crying before we even made it through the double doors. It might have been the functionality of his school: the student monitors [...]
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05/21/10
Some days I’m clawing for worth. I mope around, looking under the couch for Charlie’s stuffed Bee while he whines behind me. Suddenly, I’m pining for the self I wanted to be when I was seven. The seven-year-old me wanted to be known, to have some measure of my value etched upon the world like [...]
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11/24/09
Insomania is when another person’s sleeplessness makes you want to gouge out your own eyes. It is the second-hand-smoke of insomnia. For over a month Charlie has taken long, happy drags of his own wakefulness. He sits in his bed talking to himself or singing the ABC’s (minus H-P), and showing off with arbitrary bursts of crying. I am stuck with the unfiltered by-products: staring wildly [...]
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11/10/09
A friend sent me a blog post by a dad whose young son just died of a rare medical condition. I read the whole thing, because it was a beautiful muse for those of us seduced by grief. Grief is my gateway drug, beckoning with a dismal finger until the sadness builds into raging anxiety. [...]
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10/19/09
Sometimes I feel stuck in some sort of Copperfield-ian sphere where nothing is really what it seems. My friend just had a baby and of course I can barely talk about him without lactating into a puddle of nostalgia. Toby and Charlie were babies like last week, right? That’s how it feels anyway, which leaves me scratching my [...]
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07/07/09
I wore the boys out Saturday. Wore them out. It was one of those afternoons that scrapbooks itself involuntarily: the rosy-cheeked children splashing and giggling in sepialike snapshots. I bought them another baby pool, and I kid you not, I have never been so happy with a six dollar sale item. I sat in my [...]
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07/03/09
I know I haven’t written on my blog since, oh I don’t know, the Bush years, but believe me, I’m just saving my Shalom here. Nothing makes mommy grouchier than interrupted concentration. Like the “preschool is out and we can now leech every last drop of your humanity all day” variety. It is really much [...]
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05/17/09
My kids are prone to odd maladies that lack medical urgency, yet still astonish and disgust everyone in their vicinity. Take barfing for example. To this day Toby is the only toddler I have ever seen be personally delivered to his parents in the middle of church service by a gagging, vomit-covered child-care volunteer. If [...]
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05/11/09
Remember your first child? You know, the one who fell asleep in the shopping cart at Target during the Christmas rush? The one who jumped in bed before you got to “two?” The one who kissed you without your having to pretend cry? The one whose bibs went unstained under the threat of mashed yams? [...]
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04/26/09
“My red is coming out!!!!” Toby yells. His alarm is always disproportionate to the actual trauma, so I have no idea if its a hangnail or a severed arm when he summons my highly qualified medical self to come rescue him. I nonchalantly grab a napkin and take it to the living room where he [...]
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