On Keeping A Relationship Fresh.

Sometimes you can live with someone your whole life and still not really know them. You might think you have them pegged – especially if they share DNA – and know exactly what decisions they’ll make in each scenario. But then some random recessive gene will pop up and shock your socks off. Such has […]

When Children Are Like Salt in a Wound.

Ali lost her fourth tooth in a month on Thursday night. Okay, “lost” doesn’t accurately portray the traitorous and forceful separation of tooth and child that had to take place. Unlike the three previous teeth, this one wasn’t eager to turn loose, and I didn’t exactly achieve stellar parental ranking by a) insisting on removing […]

Pinterest and The Potato Substitute.

Pinterest has all of these freakin’ crazy ideas about food substitutions that will make you look just like the well-toned scantily-clad ab-crunching extremely photoshopped girls that are unfortunately plastered on way too many pins. “Broccoli so good it tastes like steak!” “Baked Zucchini sticks that are better than French fries!” “Whipped Eggplant that you will […]
Bubblegum Lies

Bubblegum Lies.

Saturday night, we met my Mom and brother at Rusty’s BBQ. It’s the only place we ever meet them, because it’s halfway between our houses and is exactly what you want in a good, off-the-path Southern BBQ place: without pretense, containing random kitsch (I especially like their license plate map of the United States), booths […]

Bad Answers to Good Questions: Christmas Edition.

Sometimes my kid asks me a question for which I have no answer. I vaguely speak a bunch of hogwash and then change the subject, hoping she’ll move on. But my mind cannot. It is a continuity issue that must be addressed. And so it spins in the background, using up my RAM memory and […]

How The Disney Stole Christmas.

“Pick something from Disney,” Chris said. “It’ll be a safe choice.” I was desperately thumbing through NetFlix, looking for something, anything to entertain our children for the last hour before bedtime on the worst parenting day of our lives. Chris and I had both woken up with the stomach virus Saturday morning. We were incapacitated, […]

Gaming the System.

Sometimes I lie to Ali. I say things like, “I’ve got a game for us to play today!!” When the truth is that I’m banging my brain against the inside of my skull trying to hurry up and concoct an idea to make school into a game while she asks repeatedly, “What?? What is the […]

On Lying to the Children.

There are many things about parenthood that look much more romantic on the front side than they actually turn out to be. Rocking your newborn back to sleep in the middle of the night, for one. Go ahead…take a minute to reminisce on what your pre-childbearing image was: long white silk nightgown, perfectly rolled hair, […]

How to Sell Football to a Girl.

As mentioned, I was in Mississippi last Saturday, which means that Chris had the kids on his own. The only reason this worked was that Alabama was playing an away game, so he only had to figure out how to properly watch the game on television while singlehandedly raising our offspring in a proper manner. […]

Parenting and the Art of SpellTalk.

Originally Posted March 7, 2010.  SpellTalk (n): A language that parents use to hide the most important parts of conversations from their kids. Unfortunately, kids eventually learn this language so that they can spy on their parents, so parents must find a new and original way to secretively communicate. When do you use SpellTalk? 1. […]