I met my friend Crystal nearly 16 years ago on the message board of a website for women trying to conceive. After trying for a year, then a devastating miscarriage, I needed to know there were women in the world who were out there feeling like me...
We just returned 4 days ago from our annual trip to the KOA. Having missed last year due to Covid, this familiar trip felt like a welcome back to pre-pandemic life. Just sun, and swimming, and togetherness! It was going to be great! Years worth of...
We finally met the neighbors tonight that had moved into my childhood home, right next door to where we now live. I’ve seen them several times, but have always just missed being able to speak to them, and I’ve peered through their windows often...
Dear teenage girl, Come sit with me. Perch here on the bed. Come tell me why your eyes look down and won’t meet mine, instead. I see you grinning beautifully, in your selfie pose, But you forget I know more of you than most anyone else knows. You...
Yesterday my mom, who is here visiting, helped me and the girls drag out, and deep hand-clean my very large living room area rug; A task I’d been planning and had watched YouTube tutorials on. Right away I could see that handing her the garden hose...
I remember the first day, and how she turned around on the bench to smile back at me before she began. A little bit nervous, a lot excited; Her expression a regular of hers: Like she was about to make history. My middle daughter, Tessa, then just 8...
My youngest daughter has been getting into skateboarding lately. She’s gotten pretty good. She begs me daily to go to the skatepark here in town, and many nights we’ve stayed so long we watch the stadium lights come on. Most others go home, with the...
I thought someone was being murdered, and was screaming for anyone who could to come help. Without shoes on, I rushed outside to listen and realized that it was not, in fact, someone near death, but was our neighbor’s new goat screaming once again...
It had been days of looking for bikes for the girls with no luck anywhere we searched. I never thought about how a pandemic could affect bike buying, but apparently, it really does. After multiple fruitless missions, and sad daughter faces, we...
Luck would have it that, now that I am at my heaviest, it is the time to order many things online. A cosmic joke, me searching and hoping things come in my size. But, I decided to bite the bullet, having already gone big AND gone home, so two weeks...