The kids have spent about 75 percent of their waking hours this past week screaming. Esther is teething and snuffly, insisting on being held constantly, and Ransom is just a bear. I don’t even have to mind the varmints during work hours, mostly, because Nathaniel does, but it still frays my mind and nerves. That’s a cover-up for the truth:… 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 →
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 →
Waking every two hours at night with Esther has altered the cycle of days for me. Watching the street and heaven’s lights fade and brighten in their slow waltz means each morning seems no longer a fresh dawn but the old dawn renewed. I am more conscious of this cycle, though I would rather be unconscious. And the light shone… 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 →
There’s a dichotomy between the public policy I’m likely to advocate and what I know to be a real education: Generally, I think it a good idea for schools to begin incorporating online instruction, particularly for classes they can’t offer like AP courses or Ancient Greek, and even support full-time virtual schooling for those students that may do better with… 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 →
So, especially after Jessica sent me this ridiculous article (Where do you even find that stuff?) and an acquaintance and I conversed about his wife wanting no more children because their second was “exhausting,” and because I’m having the second of two sort-of-surprise children, I have been thinking about babies. It is very likely that I cannot continue to work… Read more →
The web is alive with news that Apple’s iPhone and Google Android smartphones regularly send unencrypted information about users’ locations back to Google and Apple. This means that, for years, these companies have been logging where we are, and when, and not telling us about it. It took a stumble-upon by researchers playing with stored cellphone data to discover the… Read more →
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