Merry Day-After Christmas! Please enjoy this random assortment of child-like, hammy joy. (We take our PJ game very seriously around here, if you couldn't tell.) Our dining room is now Lego assembly central, while Ezra put his MasterChef Junior Breakfast Cooking Set to good use this morning and made French toast with a side of burning the house down, as he decided to get started without 1) waiting for me to wake up or 2) actually reading the enclosed recipe card. Be safe out there, kids. Read more →

We decided to keep things simple this year, so instead of visiting a tree farm, we picked one up pre-cut from the nearest lot. And for the first year ever, all three kids were actually genuinely helpful. The tree got evenly and uniformly decorated (as opposed to 17 ornaments stacked up on a single bottom branch) and -- perhaps even more monumentally, they didn't break a single ornament. The tree looked perfect. A few days later, however, the cats were like, HOLD OUR BEER. (BB-8 NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!) Thankfully, the majority of our ornaments are the of the cheap shatter-proof or kids arts-and-crafts varieties, but we still managed to lose a good number of the delicate, sentimental kind. (Trying not to look at the shards of the very last 70s vintage glass ball from my childhood Christmas tree in that last photo.) Jason and I propped the tree back up, frantically redecorated and scrubbed the crime scene of mass-needle-carnage evidence before the kids got home from school. Of course, it took Ike all of 30 seconds to notice that several of "his" ornaments were either missing or on different branches and we eventually had to come clean and admit that yeah, we're... Read more →

A look back through the years: * 2005 * 2006 * 2007 * 2008 * 2009 * 2010 * 2011 * 2012 * 2013 * 2014 * 2015 * 2016 * And the tradition continues, because why not just keep it going 'til college at this point? I believe this is our best one yet, by far. In conclusion... ...and many happy LOLs and much hamming to you and yours. Read more →

(Photo unrelated to post topic, for reasons that shall become clear. But look! Floors are done and lazy-cat-approved!) It's an...interesting time to be the mother of a 12-year-old boy. Puberty has hit our household like a ton of bricks launched from a Death Star. Stuff is changing. Girls are suddenly a thing. And we're having a lot of frank and honest conversations about hormones, boundaries, consent, and social cues. Also, butts. Meanwhile, every time I read the news I can't help but think that, hey, some of these grown-ass men clearly missed out of some of this SUPER BASIC INFORMATION back when they were 12 years old, because JESUS CHRIST. We might not know entirely what we're doing as we navigate this brave new phase in parenting, I can at least pledge this to my son's peers and fellow grown-ass women of the future: We're trying. We're really, really trying. So presented without further context (because none is needed, I think you get the gist, safe to say that if this list is intended to be useful for you, YOU GET IT, YOU KNOW, YOU FEEL ME DAWGS), here are my Current Top Best Book Recommendations: American Medical Association Boy's... Read more →

It's been five months and change since we adopted Poppy. And still the most frequently asked questions we get are: Q. What is she? A. A mix of Staffordshire Terrier and Labrador Retriever, we believe. She was brought to a shelter not long after she was born, along with her mom and litter mates. They were all classified simply as Pit Bulls. So we assume her mom was more of a classic-looking Pit Bull, since a lot of shelters/rescues will try to avoid the stigma (and a nearby county's complete ban on the breed) and call pittie mixes literally anything else if they can. Her dad was probably a Lab or maybe Pointer or some other hodge podge, given the shape of her snout. I keep meaning to order a doggy DNA test for her. Q. How is she with the kids? A. Terribly vicious. An absolute nightmare. The things this animal will do for belly rubs will shake you to your very core. (lolololol She's the gentlest sweetest thing and loves being around children, both ours and other people's. She's doing much better about jumping up since graduating from obedience school and will now greet you politely, although the... Read more →

We have (some) floors! (Wow. Photos of...a floor. A new high point for this blog.) They are very pretty and shiny, though. They shall surely be covered in muddy paw prints and stepped-on crayon nubs in no time, but for now I am very much enjoying this fleeting moment of sparkling newness. The banging overhead is at a fever pitch today, as the rooms directly above my office are getting installed. Then it's the stairs and thresholds tomorrow, and then we can officially move everything back and get our Christmas trees and lament our lack of area rugs. Also, the new floors are really revving up my already-existing desire to paint over all the beige walls, which, knowing me and my inability to choose paint colors, means you can expect those photos sometime around 2027. Last night was Ezra's first violin recital at school, which featured 94 third graders plucking at strings to produce something that seemed somewhat reminiscent of music, but only if you squinted really hard. Also a lot of kids swinging their violins around like swords. Not Ezra though, he took it all VERY seriously and spent the pre-recital lineup/setup time quietly practicing, and then bowed with... Read more →

It's happening! Operation Let's Wreck Some Yellow House Shit Up is finally happening! I'd like to give a big shout-out to that moment when you move your couch for the first time in like, two years and are confronted with all your failings as an adult human being. Dismantling and moving our bed yielded a similar lint/cat toy/string-cheese-wrapper bounty, but also $20! We're rich! And also kind of vile. Let's run for Senator. Anyway, it's very bangy and screechy here today and the smoke alarms keep going off, much to Poppy's dismay. We are living in the basement for the rest of the week with a lot of furniture and closet contents. I was planning to go work from a Starbucks or something but forgot to retrieve any pants from upstairs (specifically, they are all piled up in the tub in the master bathroom) before the work crew arrived. So I suppose I am trapped down here for today until they leave. But hey! No pants! Not a bad deal. Read more →

A continuation. 1,498) IKE'S FRONT TOOTH I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Ike came home from school soooooo excited (and sooooooooo adorably gap-toothed) yesterday, because his top front tooth fell out on the bus. He'd been waiting to lose that tooth for what felt like ages. "I look like a REAL first-grader now!" he announced proudly. And then he accidentally dropped the tooth on the kitchen floor. And then Poppy ate it. What. The. Fuck. Dog. One gulp, and it was gone, like so many dropped Cheerios before it. Ike burst into tears. "BAD DOG, Poppy!" he wailed, as we all rushed to console him. "We'll write the Tooth Fairy a letter!" Ezra proposed, ever the problem solver. "I lost a tooth in the OCEAN once." Noah reminded him. "And the Tooth Fairy still came! I got like $20!" (Thankfully this infamous conversation did not repeat itself.) Indeed, the Tooth Fairy was quite sympathetic to Ike's letter and explanation of "MY DOG ATE MY TOOTH" and left him five whole dollars. He rubbed Poppy's belly this morning before school and told her he forgave her and was sorry for calling her bad (since you can literally see her spirit collapse and... Read more →

This post is sponsored by RetailMeNot. So this is happening. Starting next week, the carpet is getting ripped up and hardwoods are going down, and all our furniture is going...I don't even know where yet. Crammed into the garage and a hallway. Maybe the bathtubs. We'll be living in the basement with a lot of boxes and some very confused dogs. While it will be SO NICE to have the project done in time for the holidays, it's...um, not exactly convenient timing in the meantime. There will be no Christmas tree until the floors are done, and our holiday shopping budget is wafer thin. The kids aren't really asking for much, thank goodness, and as long as I agreed that the Charlie Brown Christmas tree and a few other decorations could come out of storage, they seem satisfied. (I set up a holiday-themed reading nook in place of the real tree, which has gone over really well. Ike has of course been wearing Christmas jammies since June.) (Stockings for Hobbes the Tiger and Tahu the Bioncle, naturally.) (Oh yay this guy again. I can't wait to forget to move him and bolt awake every night at 2 a.m., cursing the... Read more →

Thank you so much to everybody who commented/emailed/messaged/otherwise-reached-out after Friday's post. Y'all are still way too nice to me, especialy after way (way, WAY) too many years of oversharing and general idioting out here. Two things I've learned since then: 1) Ativan is like an almost-instant, big ol' OFF switch for my anxiety. Glorious. 2) Switching the anxiety off, however, basically cedes full control to the depression, which is unfortunately much worse than I realized. Turns out anxiety, while brain- and breath-rattlingly awful, has been the main thing powering the hamster wheel lately. Once it's gone, the relief of "I'm not going to have a panic attack!" is quickly replaced with "I'm going to melt into my bed like a pile of greyish-blah goo and just stare at the ceiling while my yoga pants slowly fuse to my skin!" Not so glorious. So looks like I have a bit more work to do in the medication/brain chemistry department. And I will do that work, and all the work, and am very very grateful and hashtag-blessed for all the support I have from family, friends, Internetters, and of course, the therapeutic assist from this pack of floofballs: Read more →