Image credit: Photo by FJTU (a veces on-line) on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons My husband Mark recently taught our 5-year-old daughter, Janie, the basics of chess, and she has been fascinated by it. As I was playing with her this morning (and she was instructing me where to move so that she could capture [...]
Posts under ‘childhood’
Learning to Say No
I am getting better at saying no, when I mean no, but it's still an area where I have a lot of work to do. Saying "yes" to requests is like a reflex to me. Tap my knee and my foot bounces up, ask me for help and I say, "Yes." Oops. Wait. Let me [...]
Isolation
Image credit: Photo by H@Ru on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons I feel very comfortable in written words, in the virtual world, but relating to people face-to-face has always been more difficult for me. I'm an introvert (meaning that time around people drains me, even when I enjoy it) and although no longer noticeably shy, [...]
My Daughter is Not Me
Image credit: Photo by igorms on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons When my kids were infants, the hard work of parenting was mostly physical: dealing with extreme sleep deprivation, lugging babies and their gear around, changing diapers, keeping dangerous objects out of reach. But the older the kids get, the more the work shifts to [...]
Five Questions from the Maven
The Maven (and believe me, if you don't know the Maven, you should) was playing the interview game on her blog. I know I've done some variation of this like 5000 times in the past year, but it's always fun, and in this case, it got the Maven to e-mail me some words she handpicked [...]
Giving Birth to Change
Image credit: Photo bymindfulness on FlickrLicensed under Creative Commons When I was about eight or nine, I took my beloved uncle's cigarettes away and started flushing them down the toilet. I didn't want him to die prematurely (as he did anyway). Even as a child, I was sure that if I showed him how desperately [...]
I Smell a Mouse
When I was about ten, my best friend and I mutually decided that we wanted a pet mouse. We were going to share it and name it Jerry, after the clever little cartoon character. For reasons that were inexplicable to me at the time (come on, they're so cute and fuzzy!) both my parents and [...]
Getting Nowhere Slowly
This post is the ninth in a (slowly developing) series onhow I came to be where I am around the current election. Image credit: Photo byfeastoffools on FlickrLicensed under Creative Commons Recently, I've noticed a particular tense, worked up feeling I get about how wrong other people are. It's a kind of quivering moral outrage [...]
Parenting Is Not Child’s Play
Before I had kids, I loved playing. At age 30, I owned a wide array of board games as well as a vast nerdly display of toys -- an X-Files Scully Barbie and Mulder Ken, Star Wars action figures, a poseable Godzilla and several favorite stuffed animals. I played regularly with my friends, and I [...]
For the Birds
Image credit: Photo by Angelrays on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons I was out walking with my daughter today, and she wanted to feed the birds. She didn't want to feed the birds breadcrumbs or birdseed though; she wanted to feed them berries and acorns and pinecones we found along the way: things they could [...]
