This is Emma Grace and her friend Gillian and one of our kittens, Smokey, who is wearing (in case you can’t tell) a Terrible Towel. And to the party we attended tonight, Bill and I both wore our Palamalou jerseys, and Bill also wore Will’s Steelers ball cap, under which he wore the Palamalou “wig” […]
Read moreHow does it come to this? It’s a half hour before we have to be at Sam and Daniele’s house, and I haven’t made the salad, and I don’t have the cheese. Emma and I made it home in plenty of time: we would do her reading assignment and her narration; she would put away […]
Read moreToday, for the first time in months, I could watch the football game on the screen of my neighbor’s television in the house behind ours, the house that, for all the months of summer, is screened from us by leaves. Today Emma Grace and I went for a bike-ride/walk. She created a basket for her […]
Read moreWe carved pumpkins tonight. I know, I know. We were supposed to do this about a week and a half ago. But the weekend before Halloween found me grading papers and writing mid-term comments, and then Halloween had to go and fall on a Friday, and who has time to carve pumpkins on a weeknight? […]
Read moreLife feels new to me today. We closed our play last night, you see (and this word, “closed” makes it seem a Much Bigger Deal than it was, as it only ran two nights. But we are, for now, a small school), and so the day feels less compressed, less hemmed-in than the last weeks […]
Read moreEmma Grace received her first American Girls catalog today. We looked through it together (after she looked through it while she was waiting for me to look through it with her), and then we looked through it again, this time with a Sharpie marker wielded perilously by her hand, circling the (many) items she might […]
Read moreExhibit 7,182: “I brang it in the car with me, and I brang it to the store.” “I ‘brought’ it, Emma.” “I like my sentences the way they are. And I don’t need any corrections.”
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It was her first sleep-over invitation, forcing us to confront the line we had drawn some time ago: Absolutely No Sleep-overs Until You Are Eight Years Old. By all accounting, she is seven. Okay, seven and a half, but Still. She is Not Eight. Yes, the invitation came. A birthday party sleep-over with a very […]
Read moreToday we had rain. I bought umbrellas for Bill and me way back in January, when the drought we had been suffering all fall and winter appeared to be abating. It had been so long since we’d needed an umbrella, I didn’t remember ever seeing one in house or car, and when the January display […]
Read moreis a repeat of this. And if you’re going to have a repeat of this, then you Really Don’t want the water to leak beyond the concrete pad underneath the washer and dryer and out to the (newly replaced) carpet of the playroom floor. But if you do indeed have a repeat of this— or […]
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