In case you haven’t heard me blathering on about it, I’m off to Los Angeles tomorrow morning to spend three nights in Hollywood. Through luck or some rare convergence of the cosmos, I have tickets to Oprah’s Post Oscar Party at the Kodak Theater. My first thought when I first found out I was one […]
parenting
Spoonerisms, Speaking, and Swearing
I love Spoonerisms, mostly because I misspeak a lot. For those who don’t know the pleasure of mixing their words up as frequently as Sarah Palin says Tea Party, let me explain. A Spoonerism is when you confuse the beginning sounds of two nearby words. As a kid, for example, I babysat for a couple […]
Super Bowl XLV, the Women’s Movement, and Broken Dishes
On Super Bowl Sunday, I subjected our six-year-old twins to ten minutes of the big game as well as the halftime show. I don’t usually make William and Vivian watch TV, though I may have done this one or two hundred times on Saturday mornings when I’ve been trying to read the newspaper. On this […]
Tigger, sick children, and exercising
In a previous post, I compared my daughter, Vivian, to Tigger. Like Pooh’s psychotic sidekick, Vivian does not so much sit as vibrate. She even moves when she sleeps, kicking imaginary bandits and wrestling with blankets. But now she’s sick. Not seriously ill, but sick nonetheless, either with a nasty flu, an ear infection or […]
Pizza, Wine, and Fine Motor Skills
Instead of spending the evening of my 40th birthday wining and dining at a lovely restaurant in Banff (which was the plan until the temperature crashed and a foot of snow fell), we spend it in a suburban Boston Pizza. After all, any restaurant that is less than five minutes from our house and gives […]
When Kids Learn Hip Hop
Yesterday, my kids had Hip Hop lessons at school. This interesting tidbit came out at dinner, after my kids pushed away their bowls of Thai soup and looked around for their favourite food group: chicken nuggets. While I was slurping the coconut milk out of their rice, Vivian and William treated us to a Hip […]
Chaos and Blood Loss: 20 Minutes with Twins
Every now and then, time bends, and the events of twenty minutes seem more like twenty-four hours. Last January, I posted about a chaotic twenty-minute dinner involving musical chairs, India, and the Village People. A month prior to that, I posted the twenty-minute vomit-a-thon. Here is a new twenty-minute installment, which involves the usual chaos […]
Imagination, Logic and Magic Wands
I can see how a few centuries ago, it was common belief that fairies and spirits came out in the dark. Little Pucks, Peaseblossoms and Mustard Seeds flitting about, one moment blessing beds, the next causing mischief. In our household at least, the crazies always seem to happen after sunset. If it’s not the full […]
More Epic Fail Parenting: Advent Calendars
I like to buy my kids advent calendars. I think it’s fun to count down to the gift frenzy known as Christmas Day, that glorious morning where a Parental Time Zone exists: thanks to our children, we’re up three hours earlier than any other person on holidays. I grew up with an advent calendar. We […]