In yet another example of how time flies and how surreal it is to have grown children, we moved D into his first solo apartment over the weekend. He hasn’t lived at home full time for four years now (!!!!), spending the first three years in the dorm and this past year in a house with several of his friends. After graduation they all started to go their separate ways and he needed to find his own place. Jim and I drove up to Wisconsin to help him move, and we were secretly-not-so-secretly thrilled to find out that he had rented a truck the night before and had friends help…
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#BlogHer14: It Was About The People
On Sunday night I returned home from San Jose, California and the tenth annual BlogHer conference. This was the sixth BlogHer conference for me—the second as a team member—and while it was exhausting, it was also just SO GOOD. I’m still recovering, in fact. Reentry, the adjustment back into my everyday life, is the very worst part about attending this conference for lots of us; for me it begins when I say goodbye to my friends and continues as the exhaustion—which has been building for months and approached breaking point last week—sets into every pore and then doesn’t leave for days. FOR DAYS. I expect to regain the ability to…
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Ten Years Ago #Selfiebration
This year, BlogHer is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its annual conference and in honor of that milestone, there are lots of activities going on around the Selfiebration hashtag. Last week, BlogHer’s Executive Editor Julie Ross Godar asked, “Where were YOU ten years ago?” If that’s not a great blog post prompt, I don’t know what is. Ten years ago, it was 2004. (See? I can do math.) My life was completely different in so many ways from what it is at this moment. Let’s start by talking about me and the internet ten years ago. I used it only for email and…well, I think that’s about it. I had…
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Golden Year
We just had a whirlwind weekend in Tennessee, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of my parents’ wedding. To mark the occasion, they decided to renew their vows, and it was really so sweet. The Fab Five (Jim, D, J, my sister and me) made the trek from Chicago—we wouldn’t have missed it!—and we were thrilled to be a part of it all. There were twenty-six of us filling the living room in the home of my parents’ good friends from their temple. Jim, D, J, and my uncle held the poles for the chuppah and my parents’ rabbi performed the ceremony. My parents held hands the majority of the time, my…
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So Glad She Was Born.
It’s Momo’s birthday today!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOMO! (More on that later!) As I skimmed through the thousands of assorted pictures I have stored in my computer (aaaand backed up, thankyouverrrrymuch) to find a good one of the two of us, I reflected on our friendship of more than six years, which in internet time is, like, FOREVER, and I came to some realizations, too. Realization #1: When choosing from all the pictures ever taken of the two of us, I will almost always fall back on the one that was taken in the summer of 2009 at the bar across the street from the Sears Tower during the epic three-dollar…
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Absolute Proof That Time Flies.
I know it’s something we say all the time, but I can tell you without a doubt that time flies because I know it was only yesterday that this happened: Wasn’t it??? And then suddenly, this past Sunday, this happened: That’s right. It’s been four whole years since I was wondering how this house would feel when our older son left for college and it was just the three of us, and now we’re already a year into being empty nesters. D’s graduation from college over the weekend (Mom brag: graduation from college with honors!) was lovely. It was a proud day for our entire family, and I watched in…
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Separated At Birth, But This Day Is All Hers.
As I have grown older, I have gotten really good at counting my blessings. (If you don’t do this on a regular basis, I highly recommend it!) One such blessing—one of the biggest!—is my sistuh-from-anuthuh-muthuh, my chosen family, Liz. I know I mention her in about 42.67% of my posts these days, but that should give you a pretty good idea of how important she is to me. By the way, that percentage will continue to grow because I haven’t even written about last week’s visit to her house yet. Anyway. We met online, which doesn’t sound as weird today as it did a few years ago, and I thank…
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BlogHer Food: I Want To Go Back To There.
It hardly seems possible that BlogHer Food 2014 in Miami was nearly two weeks ago. Time flies when you’re having fun! Truth be told, I wish I could step into a time machine and go back to do it all over again. Don’t get me wrong: it was HARD WORK. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: the amount of work involved in putting on these conferences doesn’t seem possible when you consider the size of the team that’s doing it all. (I also submit that everyone who attends a major event like this should have to produce one, just once, so they can see what goes into…
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Tap Tap Tap…Is This Thing Still On?
Oh, hi! Nice to see you again. Did I mention how busy May would be for me? BUSIEST EVER. It’s a blogger’s dream, really, to have all kinds of super fun things going on because blog fodder is like gold around these here parts. It’s a blogger’s nightmare to have no time to write about it while it’s happening. OR IS IT? I guess “living life” really does need to take precedence over social media sometimes. I’ve learned a lot about that in the past couple of weeks and I can’t wait to tell you about it. My return to “normalcy” (or my own version of it), at least for…
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A Gift For Emily.
It’s the end of an era. Tonight I took my last Zumba class for the foreseeable future and possibly forever. My instructor friend, Emily, is moving to Australia in a couple of weeks and tonight was our last hurrah. I’ve been taking Emily’s classes for more than three and a half years now. When I started, she had only been teaching for about nine months and classes were held at a local dance studio three times each week, and I was there for most of those. After a few months, she moved to the YMCA and taught three or four classes each week, and I followed. A couple of years…