So! Happy 2012, everyone! A nice even number, this one. A leap year, even, which I prefer to think of as a year with an extra day when you can eat a lot of cookies and then forget it ever happened. Or something like that. (For those of you with more stalwart, healthier resolutions, what…
When you are the proud owner of an only child, you also find yourself the proud owner of many board games. Granted, this is mostly because playing a board game is infinitely preferable to that “imaginative play” child psychologists are always crowing about, right before they go home to their child-free houses that practically echo…
Since the return from NYC, life has been summertime slow. It’s also been simmering hot, but I promised last winter, the Winter of All That Was Snowy and Horrifyingly Awful Cold, that I wouldn’t complain once it got hot again. So I won’t even comment on how my eyebrows nearly singed off when I went…
By day, they are nothing but playthings, inanimate bits of plastic, their oversized heads lolling all over their stupendously stupid little bodies. By night, they are so much more. Actually, not all that much more, but a little bit more. Maybe not a bit more, either. More like a smidge. Yes. A SMIDGE. A SMIDGE…
When I look at Aura, the vast majority of the time I find her to be a bright, articulate, rather good-looking child. But then there are moments when I gaze upon her and think she might be halfway insane. Granted, I mean halfway insane in the kind, creative sense, more Georgia O’Keefe I-see-vaginas-in-flowers than Charlie…
Even before recent events and funerals, it had not escaped my attention that I was a member of the Amazing Shrinking Family. Mix up a bunch of only children, a healthy dose of familial estrangement, and a dab too many elderly relatives and you eventually end up with a very compact family. On most days,…
Recently, a motley yet somehow charming group of Fisher Price Little People hit the local water park. It was an afternoon as perfect as one spent at a water park can be, complete with intrigue, indecent exposure, and titillating violence. It was much like an especially good episode of “Gossip Girl,” but with less plastic….
One summer day, Mother and Daughter went for an impromptu swimming lesson at a family member’s pool. Afterward, flushed from the exercise and some yelling (AURA, YOU NEED TO LET GO OF ME! THE SWIM BUBBLE WILL HELP YOU FLOAT! IF YOU GRASP THE FRONT OF MY BATHING SUIT AND EXPOSE MY BREASTS ONE MORE…
As I may have mentioned before, we have no yard. We have lots of mulch and tons of weedy stuff and a downright precipitous rock cliff in the back, but zip for grass. I doubt this would bother me in the least except for Aura, who is a child and is having a childhood and…
One afternoon not long ago, in a discount store not far away, Aura may have asked me to buy her the CraZCookn’ Marshmallow Maker, a foul toy that would surely produce foul creations, the likes of which would immediately inspire a Whole Foods employee to start rending his or her fair-trade garments. Fatigued by shopping and weak…