Many mornings I stand in our upstairs bathroom and watch my husband poke around the backyard with one or both children orbiting. He checks the bedraggled garden, pulling weeds and harvesting vegetables. Sometimes I can hear him talking: “These are tomatoes, Ransom. No, don’t eat. It’s not red yet.” He keeps the ragamuffins busy each morning so I can shower… Read more →
One of the greatest moral challenges living in Washington, DC posed to me was the “card check.” Whenever you met people, inevitably the first question after names was, “What do you do?” and your erstwhile correspondent would evaluate how long to talk to you by your professional status. Since I was there on my first job after college, my status… Read more →
Last week, though it feels like a year ago, I spoke at a conference to mothers and their daughters about modesty. It was a surprise topic for me. In coming up with what I would say, I had a lot of assorted thoughts that did not end up making it into the talk. Here’s one set. It’s my list of… Read more →
I do not know how I manage to craft while not managing to blog about it. It must be that crafting puts me at my limit and blogging runs over. At any rate, I wanted to post a blanket I started for Esther back in November. This was before the gift avalanche, when I had nearly no girl things and… Read more →
While pregnant with Esther I wondered how having a daughter would change me and create a different relationship than with our son. Here is one discovery. One of the obsessive worries I and many women have is to be attractive. For me, that usually means not “looking nice enough” but perfection. Which, as you can guess, is impossible. Even so,… Read more →
I know—and probably will continue to know for some time—gobs of pregnant and new mothers. Since I’ve also gotten several asking for advice, I thought I’d condense the vitamin and gadget recommendations into one nice little Amazon list and post it here for easy reference and sharing. These are simple, natural things I found immensely useful for managing this uncomfortable,… Read more →
Long, long ago, on a farm far away, I knew that being a mother was hard. I didn’t know experientially that everything about pregnancy sucked except the baby (which, when it gets out, almost exclusively wants to suck), that the weeks after the hardest thing I have ever done in my life (getting that baby out) would make me look… Read more →
I’ve been thinking about popping in here for weeks and everything else has been instead so pressing. I try to fly through as many professional to-do items as possible during work hours so I can devote evenings and weekends to my men; and many evenings find me composing lesson plans and grading assignments for a group of promising high school… Read more →
I realize my posts of late have devolved into all this baby and mothering talk. My mind is basically occupied by two grand subjects: Work, meaning politics, news, and education, and Family, meaning Ransom and that Man Who Made Me Do It. Pretty much after these, in these later hours of the evening, my brain has ooked into actual oatmeal… Read more →
As you can tell from lack of posts, it’s mad around here. Ransom is sick with heaven knows what (Just a fever? Measles?! Mere crabbiness?) and I’m suddenly running several new initiatives at work as well as writing several articles. I do, however, have a nice little list for you. Maybe everyone already knew these things about motherhood, but they… Read more →
Twitter Feed