Shh, shh. Let's not talk about any further unpleasantness. Let's all just cross our fingers and hope that things continue in their current state, which is fine. And dead. As in, the scalp in question is fine, and all the unpleasantness that we are NOT TALKING ABOUT are dead. I think, should this blogging thing not work out, that I may have found my calling as an Obsessive Scalp Comber. I am ruthless and thorough. I am the Nit Whisperer. I am...talking about the thing I JUST SAID I didn't want to talk about anymore. Let's change the subject. Lookit! Pitchers! Last Christmas, the lovely and patient Isabel sent me a gift card for the lovely and patient Blue Lily Photography. I was pregnant, AS YOU MAY RECALL AS I THINK I MENTIONED IT ONCE OR TWICE OR A BAJILLION TIMES, and I went ahead and signed up for a shoot in October, knowing in my head that there would be five of us. That there would be a baby there. And that baby would be four months old. Basically, an eternity and a half away. And then suddenly. BOOM. October. BOOM. Five of us. One. Two. Three, omg. (FourFive.)... Read more →

And that's all I have to say about that. (Except OMFG.) (And maybe SEND WINE.) (And OLIVE OIL. And COMBS. And BLEACH. And perhaps an ATOMIC BOMB.) (Because SERIOUSLY, he crawled in BED with me this morning and we were all cuddling and snuggling and talking about stuff and...why are you scratching your head so much? Lemme just peek under your hair for a second and HOLY GOD GET OFF MY PILLOW UNCLEAN UNCLEEEEEEAN!) (Are you itching now too? Good. I pretty much came here just to make that happen.) Read more →

So. Yeah...turns out that was nicely anticlimactic, in the end. The best thing about about this whole...uh, thing (besides working itself out fairly quickly) was the fact that it rallied our mostly-dormant parent email distro list like nothing else in the world. What had previously only been used to send out links to special-needs talks and events and charity 5Ks suddenly came alive with the sound of HIGHLY ALARMED MOTHER BEARS. Everyone quickly passed along whatever bits of conflicting or corroborating information we'd received from the school, the teacher, the administration. We compared notes and conspiracy theories and even a horror story or two. (It was a dark and stormy Tuesday after the first day of school when one child spent 40 goddamn minutes wandering around the school completely lost because neither his homeroom teacher nor special education teacher realized he was missing, holy shit, the end.) By late last night, we were virtually toasting each other's wine glasses over email and firming up final details on a class playdate next week and a mom's night out the week after. It was beautiful. It was also interesting to see the different advocacy styles: Some go in with guns blazing. They... Read more →

The principal at Noah's school called us mid-day on Friday. She abruptly dropped an oh-HI-THERE-just-wanted-to-let-you-know-something-we're-changing bomb, in that sweet disarming way only cheerful elementary school ladies can. And after I hung up I stared at the phone for awhile, trying to figure out what just happened and why. The change in question felt like...not a good change, or at the very least felt like a change we should have been able to say "no thank you" to, or discussed a little further, instead of what it was: On Monday we're moving your child out of his morning homeroom, and sending him directly to the special education classroom. Try to give him a heads' up over the weekend, kthxbye. A flurry of emails among the other parents with children in the special education class confirmed that I was not alone in my unease. The "change" seemed to fly in the face of the program our children are in (small, self-contained classroom only when necessary, integrate at all other times), in the face of our IEPs, our right to be involved in these sorts of decisions ahead of time, and our right not to be fed a line of complete horseshit, just... Read more →

Yeah, yeah. Wookit the wittle face with the big eyes and the round cheeks and the blond hair and blah blah blah, this child BIT ME SO HARD this weekend that I kept checking the front of my shirt for blood afterwards. At first my shrieking startled him and I thought he was going to cry -- his eyes went all extra-Precious-Moments on me and his bottom lip began to tremble -- and then after a few seconds of studying my wincing-face-of-pain expression, he decided it was all terribly funny and laughed while I struggled to determine whether or not he'd broken skin on the underside of my boob. And did I mention this was all happening in the parking lot at Whole Foods? Greetings, hippies and fellow earth mothers! Say hello to MY BREASTS: THE OTHER OTHER WHITE MEAT. I am currently sporting two teeth marks and one large angry bruise on my left boob. (WORST TWILIGHT FANFIC EVER.) Read more →

On a scale of one to 10, how corny would it be to kick off a blog entry with expressing gratitude to a supreme diety for the fact that it is currently Friday? Eleventy hundred? Ish? Fuck it. TGIF, man. Tee gee eye eff. I have no idea why this week felt particularly rough, but it did. There isn't any one thing to point to and say THAT. RIGHT THERE. That's where my week went off the rails and into the realm of I hate everything and am going back to bed and I would like to see anyone try and stop me because I will fuck your shit up. I had a cold, but got over it pretty quickly. Ezra kicked a kid at preschool, but his teacher was all, "Yeah, they're all kicking each other right now. Kids! Whattaya gonna do?" We missed the bus one morning and I yelled at Noah for refusing to put his shoes on the first seven times I asked and at Ezra for taking his shoes OFF right as we were trying to leave, but then we caught up with the bus at the next stop a block away and I felt... Read more →

Well. Hi! It's been awhile. ENTIRE DAYS, since I last rapped at ya. Probably an unprecedented number of days. (Unless you count all the writing I've done here and here and here and even some writing that will hopefully actually appear printed on an actual piece of for-real paper and no, I'm not just talking about when my mom prints out blog entries that she likes.) (No, not a book. I would very much like to write a book, but I seem to lack someone stepping in and saying "WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THIS SPECIFIC TOPIC AND HERE, HAVE SOME MONEY." That used to happen, didn't it? But not anymore, I don't think. Anyway, point is, time, publisher interest, attention span. I am zero for three.) I had perfectly good reasons for not updating, but sadly none of them were particularly interesting. At least not in a AND THEN MY OVEN CAUGHT ON FIRE sort of interesting. I was...busy. Ish. Ezra had his three-year check-up and he's oviously fine and great and fine. Only thing of note is that he moved out of the 10th percentile for weight into the 25th, and it took all damn morning to learn that... Read more →

(Three years old, tomorrow. But I'm posting this today because tomorrow I plan to be wonderfully busy.) Three years ago I gave birth to a ray of sunshine, a mimic, a chatterbox, a smartypants, a drama queen, a mischief-maker, a daredevil, a snuggle monster, a comedian, a ham, a goofball, a tenderheart, a storyteller, a child with a face so sweet and open it breaks your heart sometimes just to look at him. All that, plus the world's longest set of eyelashes. He thinks Grandma's name is "Honey," because that's what she calls him. He used to call Cheerios "chowder," but he doesn't do that anymore. He still rides a broomstick around the house while humming the Harry Potter music, and he still sets up elaborate picnics and birthday parties in the living room but he also knows how to play Angry Birds and read books on the iPad. He is always the one I lose at the store, the one I panic over and then find 30 seconds after giving his description to the manager, the one I can't ever seem to stay mad at for more than 15 seconds. He is newly impossible and tempestuous and stubborn, but... Read more →

Hey there, Baby Ike! What are you looking so self-satisfied about this morning? WHAT THE. BACK THE HELL UP. *** At Ike's four-month visit last week (13 pounds, 13 ounces; 25th percentile for weight, 90th for height, just like I always grow 'em), the doctor took a peek into his mouth and I mentioned we were starting to see some drool and chomping. She said yeah, the teeth are juuuust starting to move up into the gums at this age but wouldn't cut through for awhile, and I bit my tongue for the 75th time to refrain from reminding her that YES I HAVE THREE CHILDREN. This ain't mah first rodeo, lady. I know that four-month-olds don't get teeth. At the bus stop yesterday, one of my neighbors looked at Ike and gasped, "A tooth! I see a tooth!" And I was like, uh, no. Not yet. She insisted she saw something white in his mouth and I told her it was probably a speck of cheesed-up milk. Because four-month-olds don't get teeth. Noah and Ezra both cut their first teeth on the early-ish side -- around five months, probably closer to six. I figured Ike would teethe around the... Read more →

(I don't really think I'll ever be able to adequately top my last two entries, short of accidentally setting my hair on fire while being mauled by a squirrel. Yet I'm forging ahead with posting new stuff anyway, lest I fall into performance-anxiety-fueled writer's block, or wind up on the evening news with the headline AREA BLOGGER ARRESTED FOR THROWING LOAVES OF BREAD AT WILDLIFE, LATER TESTS POSITIVE FOR HIGH LEVELS OF FIRE EXTINGUISHER FUMES.) Noah's grandparents sent him a Stomp Rocket for his birthday. We'd offered a few gift suggestions, all of which were rejected because they wanted to get him an outside toy. (Go ahead and insert your own passive-aggressive subtext to THAT one.) So the Stomp Rocket arrived and Noah promptly assembled it and started stomp-rocketing all over...the ceilings, inside our house. That was pretty fun. Finally I managed to convince him that it really was a more appropriate toy for OUTSIDE the house. For those of you unfamiliar with the Stomp Rocket, here's how it goes: Step 1: Attach foam rocket to launching pad stick-thing Step 2: Stomp on repurposed inflatable mattress foot pump Step 3: Joy, wonder, awesomesauce Step 4: Have parent retrieve foam rocket... Read more →