Well! That was a very mean thing I did there, promising everyone all sorts of updates and mayhem, and then not writing a single blessed thing. That's some big Caroline Calloway energy, pre-order my blog post, get a free mason jar, etc. In reality, I hit the Publish button and then ran away in terror, worried that I’d get like, five whole comments, at least two of which would be bots telling me how much money their bot cousin’s bot sister makes selling pEn!s Enl@rgMent pi11s 0n FaCeboOk dOT Coom. I was both surprised and deeply touched by the actual response, and maybe teared up a little, and y’all know how much I hate that sort of thing, and then Typepad was down, because who the fuck still uses Typepad, and then work got super busy and Putin started WWIII and a million people died of COVID and the Supreme Court did that thing, and also I’ve also been really into houseplants lately and it’s a surprisingly time-consuming hobby? Who knew? Anyway, I’m sorry, here’s a picture of my cat: And here's a picture of my other cat: Here's a photo of a void, a void who is not doing... Read more →

Hello, my dear Internet void. I am feeling a rare burst of big run-on sentence energy this week, plus I finally got around to organizing a metric fuck-ton of photos and realized I would like to force other people to look at them. And since I've gone full Social Media Hermit and no longer use any of the FaceTokGramTubes, I might as well go full troglodyte and post them HERE, on my little prehistoric e-cave wall. But there are a lot! Where to even begin, at this point? So I figured I would ask you, the collective you, the entire maybe half-dozen of you who remember this site exists, what you would like to see and/or read about first: Spring break photos! Pet photos! That Time We All Got COVID! Christmas photos, because DAMN, how is this even still a blog, yo? Bathroom renovation photos, plus That Time the Kids Put a $1,000 Tub Fixture Out With the Recycling!!1! Is this perhaps just a shameless attempt to get some of those sweet, sweet serotonin hits of attention that I've been missing? Will I actually follow through on something I promise here, for once in my goddamned life? WHO KNOWS. TAKE... Read more →

I really want to delete my Facebook account. And Instagram, while I'm at it, to a lesser degree. I wiped my Twitter account ages ago, but that was hardly a sacrifice -- I was only ever on Twitter because oh my God, you have a blog and/or write for another blog, you have to be On Twitter! You can't not be On Twitter! But I never loved Twitter. It gave me a weird, low-level anxiety -- way too much of everything, all of the time -- and I never particularly excelled at being funny or engaging in a format that did not allow for paragraph-length run-on sentences. And I think a huge chunk of my followers were just blue eggs who signed up circa 2008/2009 to see what the fuss was about, took Twitter's suggestion that I was someone to follow because they checked "Parenting" or "Humor" or "Deodorant" as topics of interest, then never logged in again. (And yet I could never get my account verified for some reason??) Eventually I only used it to cross-post blog or Instagram links before finally deciding: This is dumb, and I'm not going to do it anymore. Facebook is not dumb, just... Read more →

Like many of us, in a valiant attempt to maintain my mental health, I've spent much of the past year past year-and-a-half-twenty-twenty-garbage in a place of quiet self-reflection and contemplation. When so many things you held to be true and constant are suddenly proven to be false or shifting -- the inerrant goodness of humanity, the forward curve of justice, the strength of the global toilet paper supply chain, etc. -- it's important to try to stay grounded and focused on what hasn't changed, on what you can depend on. For me, in particular, it's the enduring and absolute marketing battshittery of the deodorant label. I mean, look at this thing. This is no mere tube of armpit goo. This is Degree® MOTIONsense® ULTRACLEAR BLACK + WHITE PURE CLEAN INVISIBLE SOLID antiperspirant. Or more accurately: Degree® MOTIONsense® ULTRACLEAR BLACK + WHITE PURE CLEAN INVISIBLE SOLID antiperspirant This thing has not one, but TWO registered trademarks! It's got the balls to put the three most specifically descriptive words about the product at VERY BOTTOM, in VERY TEENY TINY TYPE! And it STILL needs to spill over to the lid space to assert that it is also ANTI YELLOW STAINS and ANTI... Read more →

Back in early May, Ike scolded about not updating my website enough. I told him I didn't really have anything interesting to post about, so he ordered me to take a photo of him right there and then. "There. Now you have something interesting for your website." That was over a month ago, and yet I still didn't update my website as ordered. And then Ike's birthday (oh hi he's TEN now, all the Amalah babies are DOUBLE DIGITS now, don't you feel your bones disintegrating into ANCIENT DUST now) came and went and I still didn't update my website. I didn't want the site to officially devolve into something that only got updated on/around their birthdays, so...well. I guess I sure showed me! The site has officially devolved into a shining testament to both procrastination and my own very weird logic. Anyway, hello! It's a random Monday in June! LET'S BLOG THE HELL OUT OF IT. Tomorrow is everyone's last day of the Weirdest School Year Ever. Noah will spend it waving at people on his Chromebook screen. Ezra will attend in-person and distribute handmade letters and art projects to his favorite teachers, which are technically all of them,... Read more →

Hello. I am here. I am fine. We are all fine. We are all also totally, absolutely, five billion percent not fine. You know how it is these days. I never understood bloggers who just one day, out of blue, stopped updating, you know? At least announce that you’re closing up shop or pivoting full-time to TikTok? Post some kind of goodbye entry, farewell, The End? Now I get it. You don’t always plan to stop. In fact, it can be the exact opposite – I just needed a break, I told myself. I needed to find my sense of humor about…oh, ANYTHING, EVER, AGAIN. I couldn’t bring myself to document the days—the endlessly-bleeding-into-each-other days, full of a million tiny parenting microfailures and cliched complaints and inconveniences. I just needed to shut up about myself and let others drive the conversation for a little while. Plus, for three full weeks, the most recent photo on my phone was one I took at the grocery store, on the day when Clorox Wipes finally came back into stock. I told myself I would write something when I had something to write about, something I WANTED to write about. And sure enough, eventually... Read more →

The Last Four Years As Told By Amy's Laundry Pile* Remember when we thought this was enough? Remember when we thought Mueller would save us? Remember when we thought impeachment would stop the madness? Remember when we were all probably more excited about a candidate (or two! or three or four or five!) that we did not get? Remember what happened the last time that happened? Well. At least this one aged well. Like a fine, slightly wrinkled bottle of wine. *It's a tremendous laundry pile. The biggest, most beautiful pile. 68 stories tall, probably, people are saying. Many, many people are saying, and asking me about the pile. How did I get such a tremendous pile, such a vast amount unfolded laundry? And I tell them the truth: Because I am smart, because I can pick out sweatpants and a goddamn t-shirt just as easily off the floor as out of a drawer, and because the only thing that's even more tremendous than my laundry pile is my tremendously unbelievably massively big-league level of crippling election anxiety. Also I've been tremendously and entirely too busy doom-scrolling and screaming at my phone. Read more →

I'm technically a day late with Ezra's birthday post -- oh, mourn the plight of the poor middle child -- but in my defense I spent half the day working, half the day homeschooling, half the day cleaning the house, half the day playing tech support for Chromebooks/Google Meet/Canvas/Lexia/DreamBox/MackinVIA/Wixie/GAAAAAAH, and at least half the day baking his birthday cake and re-making a rainbow friendship bracelet for him to replace the first rainbow friendship bracelet I made that one of the cats ran off with. I know that's too many halves. Everything about life right now has too many halves. But you can never have too many rainbows. Or cheesecakes topped with carrot cakes. Or toddler flashback videos, provided you completely ignore the timestamp, which says this is from NINE YEARS AGO, which is a lie, I filmed this last week. It was a tough choice between this one and the cupcake gorge-fest one. Yesterday we had a bit of a repeat performance, only it was an entire bowl of mashed sweet potatoes and some salmon, because Ezra is a Refined Young Gentleman now. And yes, that is the same Taggies ball he had in the video above, and the same... Read more →