HOW MY DOGS SEE ME: Wonderful hooman! HI HELLO WOW UR PRESENCE IS AMAZE Beautiful face so haps so haps So good So kind Bet if I just knock glowing rectangle thing out of hand she'll be haps Look now ur hands are free for pets! Am hero! Oh no mad voice oh god oh no I so sry YAY PETS RUBS SNUGS Sometimes bed snuggles :) Sometimes no bed snuggles :( Confusing rules sometimes but ok Eats awful lot of cheese but shares sometimes so ok So much delicious wow how you do that Walk into room wow how you do that HOW MY CATS SEE ME Tyrannical withholder of food Cruel conjurer of inside rain water when we jus lookin for food up where you make food it's not a crime lady Dumb baby voice Food is right there won't give us food Just gave us food now won't give us more food Squishy belly is ok tho Nicer bed than our bed HEY IT'S THREE A.M. TIME FOR FOOD Maybe sort of deaf maybe just ask for food louder please to tidy our poop area peasant just poop outside the box it's okay that's how they learn... Read more →

DUMPLING UPDATE: Rey stole a dumpling! CAR UPDATE: The other driver has been found at fault for unsafe lane changing! Jason's car is toast, but they're giving us way more for it than we ever could've gotten in a trade in! We're even getting our deductible back! This is all very good news! Especially because he was putting off like $3,000 worth of repairs and had been ignoring the Check Engine light for months! Let this be a questionable lesson to us all! The bad news is that my husband now gets to shop for a new car and he is never more annoying to me than when he's shopping for a new car. It will take him months and he will test drive every car on earth. He will look at CarMax listing the way normal people look at Tinder. DUMPLING UPDATE II: Finn stole the dumpling! HAIRZ UPDATE: The only person in the world who is allowed to trim Ike's hair now is my hairstylist. Which sounds like it should be a pain, but she doesn't charge me much and swears Ike is always her best-behaved client of the day. Also, despite the holes in his pants knees... Read more →

My children, historically speaking (and spoken with all the love and genuine affection in the world), are giant chickens. They've bailed on Disney movies. They run from TV commercials with dramatic music. The mere presence of my Walking Dead comic compendiums on our bookshelf continues to upset them to this day, and they've never even peeked at the pages inside. Every movie or TV show this side of Nick Jr. is met with the same running commentary: Is it scary? Who's the bad guy? Does anyone die? Is there a monster? Who is that? Does something bad happen? You have to tell me before something bad happens, okay? Some of this is entirely our fault, of course, We've made a few bad calls along the way (most notably Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, That One Scene In Force Awakens You Know The One I'm Talking About, etc.) and they don't necessarily trust our assurances that no, really, this movie isn't scary, it's just exciting. But still. Guys. It's Coco! It's Pixar! The only people here who will be sobbing, emotionally traumatized messes by the end will be the adults AND WE ALL KNOW IT.... Read more →

It's hard to believe our spring break was cut drastically short this year after too many snow days, as every one of my children practically leapt out of bed this morning, thrilled at the prospect of school and getting fuck away from each other. It's been five days of a little too much togetherness, apparently. We didn't travel but instead filled the days with bowling, roller rinks, arcades and too many carbs. Oh! And Ezra got a new hairstyle and wanted me to share it with my "blob readers." Here's lookin' at you, blobs! He also finally, FINALLY lost that super-stubborn loose tooth, and had some demands for the Tooth Fairy. (He did not get 20 dollars, as we all know the Tooth Fairy is a punk-ass bitch around these parts.) Other exciting things that happened: We painted the master bedroom and bought a bedspread online that doesn't match anything like I thought it would, Poppy caught a squirrel and left its wheezing, flinching not-dead-yet carcass on the deck for me to find, and last night I had a dream about eating a fish that suddenly sprang to life mid-meal and flopped off the table and proceeded to bite my... Read more →

Hello! Is everyone continuing to enjoy this ass-bonkers March weather? Tomorrow it's pgoing to snow, on Sunday I walked to Starbucks in a hoodie, and on Friday all our outdoor furniture tried to make a break for it and blow off the deck. (#TIREWATCH2018 #ISEEYOU) I bundled up and battled the wind for awhile and got all the furniture and cushions back in place and securely covered, only to look outside like 20 minutes later at this: Yes, that's much better. The kids are LOVING all the canceled school days, although I predict much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in a few weeks when they realize they're losing most of spring break to make-up days. Pro-tip: If you have to go to Target in the middle of a N'oreaster, try a ponytail! We still do not have a completed patio, and therefore no hot tub either. It's been a lot of stop-and-go trying to get work done in-between all these wind/rain/snow storms. I'm hoping they'll manage to finish up today but who knows. The whole patio-building process is a lot more complicated and labor intensive than I realized (I thought it was more like, "Here are the bricks,... Read more →

In other non-home improvement news, Poppy ripped open almost-new bag of cat food yesterday and promptly horfed the entire thing down in under five minutes. Or however long it took me to go from, "hmmm I don't like the sound of that" to finding this in the living room: (AND OF COURSE: It was a bag of expensive specialty cat food. Rey's on an elimination diet as we're trying to pinpoint what our vet thinks is a protein allergy. She is one high maintenance dumbass, but she's like, my high maintenance dumbass, you know?) (TANGENT: I had a doctor's appointment yesterday in Baltimore and not long after I got there Jason texted me asking about Rey's whereabouts, as someone on Nextdoor reported seeing a stray black cat on the road right by our house. She'd been on our bed when I left and for the life of me I couldn't think of a single rational explanation for how she could possibly have gotten outside but you KNOW I came up with several irrational ones* and was low-key terrified until I got home and could confirm that yes, she was still right there on the bed.) (Then I got in the... Read more →

I'm not a very big Pinterest user. I have fits where I go and pin three dozen near-identical home project ideas that I will never look at again, and then I go so long without logging in that both my browser and my brain have completely forgotten my password. Twitter gives me anxiety, Facebook makes me depressed, Pinterest is why I have a dozen dead succulents in my kitchen. Jason, on the other hand, freaking loves Pinterest and regularly falls down the wormhole, texting me link after link of things he is TOTALLY gonna build/cook/make/whatever. And a couple times he maybe actually did! (Still waiting on a patio table, console table, bathroom shelves, shiplap bedroom wall, and backyard treehouse.) Anyway, once upon a time and several hundred bottles of wine ago, he came across a tutorial for making a bathmat out of wine corks. Wow, that looks really cool! And seems pretty easy, especially because step one is literally to just drink a ton of wine to collect the corks. WELL I FOR ONE AM SOLD. And so we began saving wine corks. From nice bottles, special bottles, crappy bottles. We'd order wine at a restaurant and I'd snatch the... Read more →

In an attempt to keep costs down on our kitchen remodel, we opted not to replace any of the appliances. They were all pretty old and not particularly stylish (shiny, black, basic), but they worked. They probably wouldn't work much longer, we guessed, but we could live with them for now. We'd replace them as needed, once they officially gave out and died. It turns out Appliance Death is not exactly a cut-and-dry sort of thing. Much of our lives since have been spent locked in existential debate about the fate and mortality of our stupid appliances. The dishwasher "died" on a semi-regular basis from the day we moved in, but we found it could usually be revived with a couple vigorous slams of the door. If that didn't work, we just needed to pop open the control panel and replace a particular fuse that kept blowing. Also the top rack was prone to popping off its track and falling off completely if you pulled it out a touch too far. That cost us a couple dishes every now and then, but hey, it's all just Ikea and Goodwill crap. Other than all of those things, the dishwasher works! It's... Read more →

In exactly one month from today, I will be turning 40 years old. I suppose I should Feel Something About That, but...not really? I'm more stunned by the realization that I'm only 10 years away from being 50 years old, at which point I can FINALLY fulfill my life-long dream of living full-time as Molly Shannon's SNL character. Better get working on those high kicks! (Although I have no intention of shying away from my age, I do admit I am intrigued by a fellow-39-going-on-40 friend's plan to say he's "39 Part II" and then "39 Part III," then end the trilogy by turning 42, at which point he can literally be the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. That's a solid plan and I applaud it.) I really enjoyed my 30s though, and all the growing/evolving as a person mixed with a solid appreciation for no longer giving a fuck. I'm hoping that trend continues and I can put off being too Set In My Ways for awhile longer. (Unless, of course, My Ways involve lots of insane hats, occasional day drinking. fighting the patriarchy from a tricked-out motorized scooter, and always tipping the waitstaff well.) THAT SAID,... Read more →

Me, all year: Oh yeah. we host a big Friendsgiving thing the Saturday before Thanksgiving. It's really fun. You should come next time! Me, the week of Friendsgiving: GAH GAH GAAAAAAH WHY DO WE DO THIS GAH GAH AHHAGS GAHAHAGA JPFNZCMZXC,M.CZXLDFJD We're up to three turkeys this year. One roasted, one deep-fried and now, one smoked. Jason is making the stuffing, I'm doing boozy cranberry sauce and gougeres. Ezra is handling the sweet potatoes and the other two are whining about all the Doritos and Capri Suns that I've told them they aren't allowed to have yet. I need to figure out the logistics of two pies and a cheesecake sitting in our freezer and of course, clean all the things and declutter all the surfaces. Last week my therapist (BOOM) (THAT HAPPENED) asked me if there was anything in particular stressing me out about the party and I said, "the stupid fucking bookcase in the living room." So, back up. We impulse-bought an Ikea bookcase instead of a proper TV stand/entertainment unit right after we moved in and almost immediately regretted it. It was too big and didn't really go with anything else in the room. But we never... Read more →