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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Adulthood Looms
It’s thick in the air around here. I can feel it looming. As busy as I have been lately, I have noticed. What’s fleeting around here? Childhood. I have been doing my best to pay extra attention to my boys, to close the laptop when they are talking to me, to listen fully, to answer them thoughtfully. When they want to play a game with me, I drop everything I’m doing if at all possible and I play. When J wants to show me his latest DJ video, I watch. Same with D and those random YouTube videos that college students seem to spend hours sharing and laughing about. (He…
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Displaying Artwork For Geniuses
When the boys were little, the amount of papers and artwork they used to bring home from school (not to mention what they produced at home) was ridiculous. I bought a plastic storage container for each of them and put select items in them to save for posterity. Every now and then, I’d come across something that I didn’t want to put in a time capsule. Of course, I didn’t want it laying around the house, either. I needed a place where I could look at it whenever I wanted to, but it was out of the way at all other times. Enter my kitchen cabinets. The insides of the…
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Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bebe” Stirs The Pot On Parenting
There’s been another dust-up in the news this week, and this time the big story is how great the French are at parenting. I mentioned it briefly in yesterday’s vlog, and I really need to expand on it because parenting and its various styles is a topic for which I have endless passion. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here to read the Wall Street Journal essay/excerpt by Pamela Druckerman, author of “Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting”.) First, let me give you the disclaimer: I am not ragging on the author OR the book, which I have not read.…
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Texten Sie Deutsch?
I started learning the German language in Middle School, eighth grade to be exact. I loved German class even more than I thought I would. After all of this time, I still remember some of the conversation examples used in the book, like “Wo ist Monika?” (Where is Monika?) “Im Boot.” (In the boat.) “Wo ist der Hut?” (Where is the hat?) “In der Stube.” (In the living room.) (Truly not literary masterpieces, but they helped us learn.) The following year I was a High School freshman in German II class and I was able to compete at the state level. (Yes, a state-level German competition.) Categories in the competition…