The Christmas Countdown.

According to Chris, the best part of vacation is the anticipation. I don’t exactly agree with him, because being the logical person that I am, if anticipating something is better than the something you’re anticipating, then you’re obviously over-anticipating and therefore setting yourself up for failure. Not that I would ever overphilosophize the minutia of […]

The Art of Storytelling.

Ali has begun filling all of our car rides with long, meandering stories with intensely complicated and slightly psychedelic plots, characters popping in and out with no introduction, and with endless subplots with no resolve.  She has graciously offered to guest blog one of these high quality stories, with the stipulation that I do the […]

On Meeting The Party Friends.

Ali loves to play on our Wii.  She especially loves it because not only have we created a Mii for her, myself, and Chris, but  we have dozens of our friends in there also, which she easily recognizes as they pop in and out of her games because I am, if I may say so […]

The Chuck.

E. Cheese, that is. Chris and I made it four years, ten months, and three days into our parenting career without crossing his threshold.  And we were well pleased with ourselves. Then we received an invitation to a good friend’s son’s birthday party.  A friend that Ali would be disappointed to miss his celebration. (A […]

Treasure Heads.

My Mom has a special sort of Homeschool-Mom-Genius-Gene that I really, really hope I inherited.  She was able to expertly turn everything into a learning experience, yet somehow make it extraordinarily fun at the same time. (Okay, most things were fun.  Finding my little brother’s dissected frogs in brown paper bags in the fridge was […]

Smashing Misconceptions Right and Left.

I was around six years old. I was hanging out at the ball park with my group of little friends – aka all of the little sisters who were bored to death while their older brothers played YET ANOTHER baseball game. We were standing around behind the concession stand and admiring the clouds. One of […]

Ali, on Fanciness.

Naturally, a lot of our life revolves around Noah right now. His often and stringent nap schedule, His crappy diapers, His need for food, His obsession with putting everything in his mouth and therefore preventing his sister from freely playing with all of her favorite little things, Him, him, him. Due to this unbalanced state […]

Geography Geektasticness.

Disclaimer: Nerdalicious Homeschooling Post ahead.  Feel free to skip if you don’t give a flip. After Ali learned all of her states (and a lot of countries) a couple of years ago, she lost interest in geography (or maybe I did…or both), and so she forgot many of them. However, thanks to some of her […]

The Elevator Incident.

So my friend Christen and I went to the mall on Wednesday. …along with our two strollers and five kids. …ages 4, 3, 2, 10 months, and 8 months. (Each child, by the way, adds degree of difficulty points in the classical mall game Avoid the Kiosk Predators.) We began by eating Chick-Fil-A – our […]

An Unexpected Undertaking of the Camping Variety.

Saturday Night, 6:51 PM: I. AM. SUPERMOM. The overwhelming emotions of victory and exultation washed over me. At a time when I should have been exhausted and comatose, I was instead cheering for myself with gusto and pride. It all started last week… 10 days ago: Ali randomly popped out from the backseat, “I want […]