We have a long history in our house of food labeling. I’m not talking about anything having to do with nutrition facts: I mean literally labeling food. As in, “J’s cereal”. The two people mostly likely to label their food are Jim and J, because they like many of the same things, meaning whenever I buy said items they don’t last long and one always blames the other for finishing it off. (You can read a great story–with pictures–about it in this old VINTAGE Suburban Scrawl post!) It’s been a while since the last kerfuffle over food, and I put it out of the front of my brain for the…
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Moving On.
Lest you think that the only transition we’re dealing with around here is J’s high school graduation and impending departure for college this fall, turning Jim and me into Empty Nesters, I figured I’d tell you about how D just moved into an off-campus house with three roommates–he isn’t coming home this summer because he has an internship–and will graduate this December, one semester early. I can say today that everything on both fronts is going very well, but we’ve had some rocky patches over the past couple of months which prompted me to send an email to D: “I just wanted to email you and apologize for being a…
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The Other Side
I had just turned eighteen the month before Jim and I were married. When I moved to Norfolk, Virginia–where he was stationed for sea duty–we rented a townhouse off of the Naval base in a military family-only subdivision. That neighborhood proved to be something wonderful for me, a much-younger-than-average new bride whose husband would be going out to sea for weeks and months at a time. In the first four years we were married, he was gone for more than two-and-a-half years. It was okay, though. Even though it was difficult to be apart at the time (this was before cell phones and internet!), my being left at home alone…
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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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Weirdest Halloween Ever.
Halloween came and went (as it tends to do), and for the first time in twenty years we didn’t have a kid in costume. Not only that, but Halloween was almost–dare I say it?–exactly like any other day. It was bizarre to say the least. In fact, when J left for school, he said goodbye to me like he always does and walked out before I even remembered that it was Halloween at all. My decorations, as I’ve written about before, were pitiful. I didn’t even have time to take pictures of Roxie in her 2012 costume because I took a TDM class in the morning and then worked on…