Happy Thanksgiving

How are you planning on spending your Turkey Day?  I am celebrating at home with family.  My brother and his partner flew in from NYC yesterday, and my mother and stepdad will be arriving this morning.
My husband’s in charge of preparing the turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and an apple pie with the crust rolled out from scratch.  My Mom’s [...]

“Things to Do Before Dying” Revisited

I recently took a look over my ”20 Things to Do Before I Die” list that I wrote as a post for this blog back in January 2008.  I’m happy to report that I’ve made some progress in checking things off the list — Not that I intend to kick the bucket any time soon, mind you, but it’s nice [...]

Tots and Thai Food

My parents-in-law are in town this weekend, and they treated us to dinner at our favorite local Thai food restaurant.  My two-year-old ate all of the calamari and fish out of the Tom Kha soup, while my five-year-old ate all of the eggs and tofu out of her Pad Thai, but left the noodles.  She [...]

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

This was the first poem that I ever memorized, thanks to my third grade teacher, Mr. Lightburn, who had an affinity for poetry.  He encouraged me to memorize over 100 poems that year, as well as write poetry of my own.  When I was in fourth grade, Mr. Lightburn retired from teaching, and I wrote [...]

Boots

I put on some knee-high black boots one day as I was getting ready to take my daughter to kindergarten.  My five-year-old put on her boots.
My two-year-old looked from my boots to her big sister’s boots and asked, “Where my boots?”
“Um, you don’t have boots sweetheart.  You can put on your tennis shoes.”
“But I want boots.”
“Well, we [...]

Empty iTunes

Where did my iTunes library go?  When my iPod Nano froze (again!), I went to sync it back up with my iTunes software to reload the songs and playlists, and instead, everything was totally wiped out.  I just sat there staring in horror at a totally blank iTunes music file.
How did this happen?  I’ve spent hours trying to reload all [...]

Book Review: Amor and Summer Secrets by Diana Rodriguez Wallach

Amor and Summer Secrets is the debut novel by young adult author Diana Rodriguez Wallach.  The novel opens with a scene in which the main character, fifteen-year-old Mariana Ruiz, finds herself the level-headed mediator in a typical family argument between her enthusiastically rebellious older brother and her hard-working strict father.  A typical upper-middle class American teenager, Mariana would rather be hanging out [...]

International Book Club Theme

My book club does a rotating theme which changes every six months.  Our current theme is “international cultures.”  The purpose is to broaden our horizons and read a book that is based in a country or culture foreign to what our own experiences were growing up.  It’s a broad enough theme that can allow for fiction or [...]

Old MacDonald’s Wacky Farm

My kids like to cycle their bedtime songs.  They’ll obsessively request the same song over and over every night for weeks, and then suddenly decide to ask for something new.  For a long time, it was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Moon River.”  Lately, it’s been “Old MacDonald.”
I allow each girl to request two verses.  They [...]

Book Review: Daylight Runner by Oisin McGann

Oisin McGann’s young adult novel, Daylight Runner, is a story about a post-apocalyptic ice age that resulted in a vast underground survival project designed to hold a small portion of the world’s remaining population.  Originally released in Great Britain under the title Small-Minded Giants, this tale about a dystopian futuristic world where technological control is wielded by a handful of individuals [...]