Today, Suburban Scrawl is six years old. Six years!!! While I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for six years, I also can’t remember what it was like to live life without social media. Though I have several friends who have blogged for a decade or more (wow!), I still feel like an OG blogger: six years is almost like a whole lifetime in internet years. I belong to a fantastic generation of bloggers–I refer to us as the Jan Bradys of blogging; don’t ask unless you are in the same room or on the phone with me and have about ten minutes–and I see no end in sight, thank goodness.…
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This Is The Part Of The Roller Coaster Where I Go, “Wheeee!”
I have a habit of comparing all different measures of time to a roller coaster. “Oh my gosh, those two hours were like a roller coaster!” “I had a roller-coaster kind of day.” “Last week was really up and down, like a roller coaster.” The fact is, life is like a roller coaster. I’m glad about that, too: if there were no ups and downs, things would be pretty boring. (Naturally I prefer the ups, but you can’t have them without downs!) The stress of sending J to college six weeks ago was quite enormous, and as much as I knew that things were going according to plan it was…
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College Drop Off: We Went, We Moved Him In, I Got The T-Shirt.
Two, actually. I bought two t-shirts, because I couldn’t decide between the short-sleeved hot pink shirt and the long-sleeved orange and blue shirt–school colors–so I went home with both. So, the deed is done. We dropped our younger son off at college and I didn’t die. I can tell you what leaving felt like, though. It felt like having a full-body bandage pulled off, with that last little sticky part that always stings the most being positioned right over my heart. But again, I didn’t die. Jim didn’t either. We were sort of thrown for the rest of the day, but we’re going to be absolutely just fine. Also, there…
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The Necklace
I’m not really a “jewelry person”. Don’t get me wrong; I wish I were. I am in awe of my friends who wear different jewelry accessories with every outfit, who make use of lovely necklaces and beautiful bracelets and all kinds of earrings, seemingly endless choices. Unfortunately the awe is where it stops for me. I’m apparently more of an appreciative observer than a joiner in this situation. I’m lazy. I’ve tried to be like them. I have a small collection of pieces I could interchange (and my loving husband has given me a few gorgeous pieces through the years), but the reality for me is that I just…don’t. Ninety-five…
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(21 and) Counting.
We just returned from a family vacation—a five-day cruise with stops in Jamaica and Grand Cayman—to celebrate J’s graduation from high school*. We’ve been planning the trip for almost a year now. It was phenomenal, but I’ll have more on that in a separate post as soon as I achieve some sense of re-entry into reality. Anyway… I posted a picture on Facebook as we were setting sail, and one of my friends** commented something along the lines of how I deserved to go because I work so hard. Though I fully appreciate the sentiment behind her words and I am happy to have a reputation for being a hard…
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Almost Wordless Wednesday: Golden Birthday
A very, very, VERY special birthday is coming up around here later this week. Any guesses?
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My NBC Nightly News Debut…Sort Of
So we weren’t actually ON Friday evening’s NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams as scheduled because our segment got bumped due to breaking news. (“Sigh…but that happens in the news biz, you know”, I type knowingly, because I have LOTS more personal experience with the “news biz” than I did a week ago.) Tracey and I were in the Valparaiso, Indiana Buffalo Wild Wings during the broadcast*, and we had just talked our server into changing the channel on the huge tv that hung on the wall above our table (from NBC Sports to NBC local) when Ann Imig (National Director/Founder of LTYM) sent me a text letting me know…
- Amazing People, Best Thing Ever, Blessings, Fun in Chicago, I've Got Mad Skillz, My Friends Have Mad Skillz
LTYM Chicago 2013: The Non-Recap Recap
I have been at a loss as to how I should formulate a decent summary post for Sunday’s LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER CHICAGO show. I have so many words swirling around in my head but at the same time, none of them want to come out in any way that makes sense. I could tell you how amazing the show was, but that would be very similar to what I said last year. In a way, that’s not a bad thing. I’m finding out that, just as Tracey and I have been preparing our 2012 cast for “younger siblings” in an alumni group on Facebook, each year our show is…
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All By Myself
So here I am, at this awesome hotel in Turrialba, Costa Rica. Actually, it almost doesn’t even seem like a hotel. It wasn’t, always. It used to be someone’s house. Now it’s a “hotel” with twelve rooms and four suites, one of which Jim and I were given (yay!). I am in heaven, honestly. This is a working trip for Jim, and I tagged along willingly, knowing that I would be left to my own devices. I find that most people either don’t mind spending time alone, or they absolutely hate it. I rather enjoy it, to be honest. It’s not that I don’t like (or prefer) being with others–I…
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We’re All Adults Here.
Major milestone in our house today. This guy? Turns eighteen today. EIGHTEEN. His coming of age means all kinds of things for him, of course. Among other things, he is eligible to vote, and as he pointed out at the dinner table a while back, he can now sign himself out of school “should he need to leave early for any reason.” Ahem. This birthday also impacts Jim and me, of course. It’s a little stunning to realize that on this, our younger son’s eighteenth birthday, we are no longer legally responsible for anyone except for ourselves. Bizarre, even. I casually mentioned to J two weeks ago that he only…