POWER RANKED IN ORDER OF WHICH BOOKS HAVE BEEN LITERALLY LOVED TO PIECES AND/OR EATEN (BECAUSE LOVE) (ALSO TEETHING) We have QUITE the library of children's books in our house. I'd call them children's literature but...I dunno. Some of our books are really dumb and make me kind of stabby. (Has anyone read The Little Engine That Could lately? Do you remember it being so long? Because it's soooo looooonnng. It's like 20 solid minutes of crying toys, mean trains, laments about the good little girls and boys in the valley not having any milk or fruit or toys [which are STILL CRYING], heavy-handed symbolism for Get The Fuck Over Yourself And Help The Goddamn Train Already, with a bonus clown who kind of looks like the great-grand-uncle of Pennywise.) (Our copy got mysteriously lost during the great move-that-didn't-happen house purge. AND I'M NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT SORRY.) The above photo is but a small representative sample of our book collection, but I believe runs an acceptable gamut of board books that your baby/toddler will love, to those he/she will tolerate, to those that no baby or toddler ever gave two shits about but no matter, you will somehow... Read more →

So. The beach. The beeeeeach! We got back on Saturday and it already feels like a hojillion years ago. Okay, maybe not that long. Just a lot longer than four piddly little days, though. But you know me. It's all zero to hyperbole, all the time. I didn't really plan to go the full week without posting; it just sort of happened. I realized I've blogged daily or at least semi-regularly through every single vacation or trip I've taken for the past 10 years and decided that I was tired of doing that. Though to be fair, I would not have taken quite a few of those trips if it hadn't been for this here double-u-double-u-dot-website-thing. I have not completely misplaced my gratitude, by any means, it's more like my posting fingers came down with a heady case of laziness and a slight laptop allergy. Besides, there was so much to DO besides sit on the couch — a rather uncomfortable wicker couch with craft-store-foam cushions covered in that same nautical striped fabric that every beach rental in the world has, along with the same seashell accessories and ocean-y sayings all over the place. Did you know that an ocean... Read more →

We're back, Jack. Apologies to everyone who is not named Jack. Which for some reason I suspect is...all of you. ANYWAY, I will be posting beach photos/stories/hilarity in a bit, but first. It's the first... ...day of second grade. So if you've been reading this blog since Noah was born (or possibly even before), join me. Taste it. Taste the pain. LET'S MARINATE IN OUR COLLECTIVE OLDNESS. I've already written a few times about how optimistic we are for this year of school, what surprised me most this morning was that Noah seems to share that optimism. He's excited but not nervous-excited. Ready to see old friends, meet news ones and roll with the changes in teacher/room/schedule/whatever. Second grade. Bring it. We had a loop-free sendoff, basically. He didn't even look back or wave from the bus window. I lingered behind to reassure this year's batch of weepy kindergarten parents that the school really does a good job of hardly losing anyone's children ever and that the first week of kindergarten tires the kids out so much that you can send them to bed at 7 p.m. and enjoy your sunrise/sunset wine in peace. *awkward arm punch* Here's hoping Noah... Read more →

Okay, going to type this up REAL QUICK. Am super busy. Have to get back to the important business of forgetting to pack someone's underwear. I can't believe I forgot to mention this earlier, but. Ezra. Mini Football Camp. You know, like regular Football Camp, only more wee. And a lot more sassy. This was his choice, OBVIOUSLY: We sat both boys down with the YMCA catalog and read off the options. Ezra chose swim camp, Superhero camp (?!), something called "Sports Festival" and finally...football. (Noah chose swim camp twice and Lego Robotics once, which was a DISASTER that I still don't even want to talk about. Still not a fan of the structured activities, that one, even if they are literally built out of goddamn Legos. Anyway, he quit one week in and transferred to gymnastics, hated that one too and we all basically spent a week dropping him off anyway and saying nonsenscial shit like, "I don't CARE if you don't have fun but you will at least TRY to have fun." Parenting win, all around.) Just like our experience at Build-a-Bear, Ezra got completely, over-the-moon ecstactic at the mere mention of football, EVEN THOUGH I STILL DON'T... Read more →

For some unfathomable, completely mysterious reason, we were...not...invited back for a visit with Jason's great-aunt and uncle at the beach this summer. I guess the Great Storch Family Tornado of Destruction Summer Tour 2012 was just too rockin' out. Too radical to the max. Some peeps just can't hang with our flow, our awesomeness, or our overall uncanny resemblance to a traveling mosh pit full of pointy toddlers. So we're going it alone this year. Our usual beach house partners in crime couldn't make it either, thanks to "work" and "no time off" or possibly "DEAR GOD YOU HAVE SO MANY CHILDREN TO KEEP TRACK OF." This means 1) there will probably be a lot less late-night kitchen experiments involving reheated Velveeta, and 2) I have to remember to pack everything myself, since I'll have no one to bum forgotten essentials from. That shouldn't be a big deal but let's all remember who we're talking about here. Last year I forgot washcloths and feminine products. The year before I forgot pillowcases and food. Obviously, there are things like "stores" and "stuff" at the beach, but I try to make it a point not to go to "stores" and "stuff" with... Read more →

So I wrote about four sentences' worth of an entry yesterday, an entry I didn't really WANT to write but simply didn't know what ELSE to write: My mom was in the hospital. She'd been in the hospital since Friday. They didn't really know what was wrong and the tests were starting to creep up into the realm of OH SHIT. (At least according to ME. My mom was like, "whatever, I'm FINE.") And so I finally caved and figured that writing a blog entry telling the Internet about it was a slightly better use of my time than all the WebMD Googling I was doing, Dramablogging may be ill-advised at times, but my Internet browsing history was becoming a full-on experiment in terror, so I figured I better let it out. I only wrote four sentences because — as you may have surmised by all the past tense I'm using — that was when my mom called to report that the tests all came back normal and she was free to go home in just a few hours. Okay then! And so we can add this incident to my upcoming bestselling self-help book, tentatively titled "The Power of Bloggable... Read more →

For our anniversary, we did our typical thing of better parenting through abandonment (patent pending) and once again left the boys with the grandparents while we got a hotel room in D.C. and did all sorts of scandalous things like SLEEP IN and READ BOOKS and BUY ALLERGY MEDICINE AT CVS. Back when we were first married, we would sometimes talk about how we would celebrate the big milestone-type anniversaries. We were VERY ambitious: I think we decided that at 10 years we'd throw a big party and renew our vows at a vineyard (on top of a mounnntain), and at 15 years we'd go to Italy. Then the actual milestones come up and we're like, what? We barely tolerated our original wedding, why did we think we'd ever feel some buring desire to do that again? And while a trip to Italy still sounds pretty awesome...well, The Book of Mormon was in town this weekend, no airport or passport or the ability to ask for Zyrtec in Italian required. (And thanks to my husband's awesome photo-taking skills, I may or may not have gotten all dressed up...or shown up in my pajamas. THE WORLD WILL NEVER KNOW.) Unlike some... Read more →

Today is my 15th wedding anniversary. Fiiiifteeeenth. Just think: only one more year until my marriage is old enough to drive. I still wouldn't let it babysit your kids or liquor cabinet or anything. The maturity level just isn't quite there yet. I was planning to write some longwinded sentimental thing today, and talk about him and me and us and how awesome it all is to be married to your best friend and also the best person you've ever met, period, and how it doesn't feel like 15 years. Maybe more like five, even though our oldest child is almost eight and we were already married seven years before he came along so that math doesn't make a lick of sense. Plus I wouldn't even want to go back to only being married for five years because 15 is more fun, more honest, more comfortable and yet also more adventurous, and definitely more "okay yeah, everything that is good is even better because YOU" rock solid. Also: Archer and Game of Thrones weren't even on way back then, which would suck. But I guess the point of writing about all of that would have boiled down to this: We're... Read more →

When I was a kid, my family had one car, a Ford station wagon. My family also had seven children. So I remember riding in between my parents on the front bench seat (whatever, it wasn't like there was an airbag or anything, just the comforting safety of the AM/FM radio knobs), while three of my older siblings sat in the back, and three of my even older siblings rode in the trunk, careening around like loose tennis balls and making faces through the glass at the cars behind us. I do remember eventually sitting in a little pleather-covered plastic booster seat with a lap belt; enough of my siblings had survived childhood by that point that a space opened up in the back seat. I of course wanted NOTHING MORE IN LIFE than to ride in the way back, in the trunk, and I think my parents did indulge me a couple times, at least until they traded the station wagon in for a Ford Escort in the late 80s and had watched enough news segments about how your child is probably dying of a car crash RIGHT NOW, AS YOU WATCH THIS, and thus became big sticklers for... Read more →

Ike woke up at 1:30 a.m. this morning and stayed more or less awake until 5:30 a.m. "More or less" consisted of: 1) crying 2) whimpering 3) flailing around on our bed 4) saying "ow ow ow" 5) completely freaking us the fuck out 6) because what's ow? WHAT'S OW? 7) settling down for a short doze while draped across my body 8) while clutching fistfuls of my hair, the new hotness in security blankets 9) waking up again to crawl on top of my face 10) and starting all over with the crying/whimpering/flailing/owwwww business. I really figured the night would conclude with him barfing on my face or something, but that never happened. Nothing really happened. He fussed and howled and tossed and turned and did forehead-stands on my chest for awhile and just when Jason and I both gave up on sleep and productivity and not looking like saggy-eyed monsters all day...his complaints suddenly ceased and he dropped off to sleep like a perfect-haired angel child. And that's all I've got. That's the whole story. It's been 26 months, 100-odd weeks, 780-odd nights later and it's still "probably just gas." P.S. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Read more →