Summer is here and classes are over! Well, for most of us that is. We’ve got school-aged kids revving up for camp or neighborhood play, vacations in the works, and likely a list of activities awaiting. Then again, we may have teenagers milling about – snatching up the car keys, leaving a trail of dirty […]
Small House Record (Seventeen!)
Seventeen. The magic number, apparently. One backyard, one clear night, 1100 square feet, and seventeen kids. No, this is not a commercial announcement for a crazy new reality TV show, though maybe it ought to be. No, this time I didn’t “just say no”. I said yes – to… count ’em… seventeen sleeping in my […]
Report Card
It’s approaching the end of the school year, and as my son prepares for a variety of exams and final papers, I think about the report card. Not his. Mine. As he continues his last push toward graduation, I find myself wondering what sort of marks I would receive as his parent. Of course, I […]
Lost Keys
It was about ten days ago. The phone call. He had forgotten or misplaced his key. Again. I took a deep breath, dropped what I was doing, and went to the rescue. Again. I’ve been told repeatedly not to stress over the fact that my son loses his keys, and I’m constantly running to the […]
The College Countdown
This past weekend, my morning reading brought me to a blog post on the New York Times, written by a high school senior, Michael Campbell, about his college search process. As he counts down to receiving decision letters, everywhere he goes he is asked “Where are you going to college?” And of course, it’s too […]
Getting Down to Business
Work ethic is one thing. Never enjoying success is another.
Role Reversal
There’s little question that if you ask me what my job is, I’ll answer “parent.” That doesn’t preclude the fact that I am a writer, and many other things; that my professional endeavors predated my maternal duties by more than a decade. But my primary job these days – as it has been for years […]
Backups
We’ve experienced our share of nasty computer issues this past year; recovery was slow and expensive – money I could ill afford. But given that I make my way through life tap-tapping on a keyboard, and my kid needed to finish out his high school years tap-tapping as well, costly or not, fixing and replacing […]
Top 10 Reasons My Teens ROCK!
My teens? The best on the planet, naturally. One is a bit of a world wanderer – give him a backpack and a cheap ticket to Europe, and he’s a happy camper. A little factory work, a little office work, a few music festivals… and plenty of adventure, some of which he tells me about, […]
Free Range… Chicken
Last night I came across this – on Free Range Kids, about an incident in which the authorities were called when a mother allowed her 8-year old to play in a nearby park, alone. I was struck by how much has changed in a generation. I grew up “set loose” in the afternoon after school, […]