This post is sponsored by The Bouqs Company. I waited a long time to take the Christmas decorations down. The house looked so bright and cozy with them around, and they made me happy. I mean: Eventually, the number of pine needles all over the floor became less bright/cozy/happy-making and I finally dragged up the boxes and put everything away. Luckily, I had the perfect replacements already sitting on my doorstep. VALENTINE’S DAY HERE I COME. (Seasonal Affective Disorder say whaaaat? It's totally spring up in this place!) Bouqs.com is officially my go-to site for ordering fresh flowers now -- for myself or friends and family, since the flowers 1) aren't cut until you order them, so they last an impressively long time, 2) are absolutely bonkers gorgeous, duh, 3) are grown at sustainable, eco-friendly farms because I really do love this crazy planet of ours, and 4) giving/getting flowers that were grown on an ACTUAL VOLCANO is just kinda badass. (Third-party certified by both The Rainforest Alliance and my cat.) (Just making sure I trimmed the stems properly, of course.) Yep. Those'll do. (I kept the BB-8 ornament out. BB-8 just feels like a year-round decoration.) BAM (Officially sense... Read more →

I did! I really did. But not a book for you. It's you know, for kids. (But I guess since kids don't have all that much money of their own, and the target audience is probably in the pre-Tooth-Fairy dollahdollahbills age range, maybe I did write it for you. To buy. With your money. YOU ARE SO WELCOME!!) After I wrote about the incredibly helpful pre-moving book I made for Ike through TwigTale.com, they reached out to say thanks, and then a couple emails later they asked if I could write a new book for them in time for Halloween. This book is essentially a much more beautiful looking version of a social story I created for Noah when he was a preschooler, back when EVERYTHING about Halloween terrified him. The costumes, the decorations...anything vaguely Halloween-like stressed him out to the point that just leaving the house became difficult. The costume shop at the mall! The billboard advertising the haunted hayride! The CANDY AISLE IN THE GROCERY STORE. As with All Things Noah, we eventually learned that letting him acknowledge and actually feel his fear worked much, much better than having him fight it, or trying to logic him out... Read more →

This post is sponsored by TheBouqs.com. A couple weeks ago, I bought some flowers. For myself. In the grand tradition of Treat Yo Self, I ordered not one, but TWO giant bouquets of gloriously happy-colored flowers. I ordered two because I received two promo codes as part of the compensation for this post, although I THINK MAYBE TECHNICALLY they gave me two codes so I could send a bouquet to someone else. Yeah. Screw that. (oooohhhh) (ahhhhh) However, I was kind and generous enough to write myself a note to accompany my flowers: Dear Self of Next Week, Congratulations of finding a new house! If you did not find a new house, please quietly weep into these beautiful flowers. Love, Self of Last Week P.S. Get your roots done. (I found a house! AND got my roots done. Clearly I earned both of these bouquets as a reward for such unparalleled productivity.) And now my Self of the Week After That is STILL enjoying both the relief of finding a house and my happy orange-y blue white flowers, which Jason and I have affectionately taken to calling Amy's Volcano Flowers. Because yes. These are literally grown and shipped directly from... Read more →

So a few Christmases ago, Jason thought it would be "funny" to buy me a DVD copy of "Hill of Fire," the infamous Reading Rainbow episode that inadvertently triggered my lifelong phobia of volcanoes. He figured I — as a mostly reasonable, somewhat mature adult — would be able to watch it, laugh about it, maybe get a good blog post out of the experience, like the time I watched a terrible reenactment of Pompeii. Maybe it would even help!, he reasoned. I never managed to write that good blog post because I never made it through the entire show. He put it on and I kept having to leave the room. It was just like I remembered, and for some reason the realization that my childhood memories weren't NEARLY as warped as I assumed made the whole thing worse. It wasn't funny. It was HORRIBLE, and Jason learned a valuable lesson about maaaaaaybe taking people's most irrational fears a bit more seriously, and that no, I really wasn't making things up or exaggerating the depth of my volcanic terror: That show fucked my shit up proper, dude. Well, he learned that lesson for awhile, and then apparently forgot, because... Read more →

In the continuing saga that is That Weird Ear Lump, I had an MRI of mah head today. Dee, when your ear lump acts up, take out your nose ring! I spent about a half hour crammed in a bionic tube, listening to an unnerving cacophony of clangs, bangs and techno beats. It was like trying to take a nap at a gay steel mill on dubstep night. Still less annoying than the sound of multiple children whiiiiiinnnninggg, though. Anyway, look! It's the inside of my head! Specifically, the inside of my ear. Which looks more than vaguely Ackbar-ish. Tell the truth: how badly do you want to cut-and-paste some googly eyes and type IT'S A TRAP on this right now? Pretty bad, I bet. I am pretty sure this is the best, most flattering photo of me EVER. I should make this my Twitter avatar. Anyway, here's The Lump, after a shot of contrast dye. And while that looks cool and all, I was bummed to see this picture, as the technician explicitly told me that if the lump was in fact just a harmless fatty deposit or cyst, the contrast dye would do nothing to it and it... Read more →

Oh, did I say something about posting more tomorrow? As in, yesterday, the day I did not post anything because...well, I don't know. Was busy. OBVIOUSLY. Planning on being similarly busy today as well, although we're leaving tonight because Noah has his kindergarten orientation (WHUT HELL NO) and Ezra needs school shoes (NOT MAH BABY) and Ike...well, Ike just kinda needs a bath. I'm sure I could find an acceptably-sized sink to bathe him in around here, but...eh. I never claimed to not be completely ridiculous. OBVIOUSLY. PS. Yes, we totally felt the earthquake. I mean, poor Tracey did, since she was alone in the house and everything shook and wobbled like crazy and she ran out right when Ezra and I were returning from the beach for a potty break and was all, "Holy shit, earthquake!" and I was all, "Oh, I thought that was like, a truck," and Ezra was all, "I HAVE TO PEE AND SHE TRIED TO GET ME TO PEE IN THE OCEAN AND I HAVE BEEN POTTY TRAINED FOR WHOLE ENTIRE WEEKS NOW AND THEREFORE REFUSE TO PEE IN THE OCEAN BECAUSE I NOW SUDDENLY HAVE STANDARDS." PPS. Yeah. It's pretty metal around here.... Read more →

So. 2011. Another year, another realization that I missed my own blog's anniversary about a month or so ago...Thanksgiving-ish? December if we're waiting until I actually started posting anything other than entries that said stuff like TESTING TESTING IS THIS THING ON HA HA IT'S A BLOG BUT I'M TREATING IT LIKE A MICROPHONE OMG I AM LIKE THE MOST ORIGINAL PERSON TO EVER FIGURE OUT HOW TO ACCESS THE INTERNET? Anyway. Here I am, about to embark on my EIGTH YEAR of blogging, and I feel like the first entry of 2011 should be a good one. An important one. I should at least attempt to spell things mostly correctly. And I should have a really, really good topic. THINGS THAT ARE NOT GOOD TOPICS, PROBABLY 1) Bitching about the person who is selling a set of bunk beds on Craigslist for $150 yet has not responded to my email about wanting to buy said bunk beds. Which means they either enjoy keeping me in suspense OR they have already sold the bunk beds to someone else, someone else who does not DESERVE THEM like I do, who will not LOVE THEM like I will, so FINE, bunk-bed seller... Read more →

THINGS THAT WOKE ME UP LAST NIGHT: 1) My husband snoring at 12:17 am. 2) A mislabeled calendar reminder making my phone vibrate on the nightstand at 3:00 am instead of pm, which then kept me up another hour because I had to think about OMG THAT THING I HAVE TO DO AT 3:00 PM over and over again. 3) My dog puking at 6:12 am. THINGS THAT DID NOT WAKE ME UP LAST NIGHT: 1) The 3.4 magnitude earthquake at 5:04 am. Was it fun? Read more →

Guess what! You guys! You wanna know what I'm doing this weekend? Something I've wanted to do for ages and ages and like, forever and now I'm totally gonna do it? I'm getting my EARS PIERCED. Okay, so I'm kind of messing with you there, because my ears are already pierced. Several times, actually. I think my total was...squints at ghosts of piercings past on earlobe...five. Five holes. I got my ears pierced the first time in fourth grade, even though my agreement with my parents was and had always been that I could get them pierced at 12 years old. By fourth grade, though, I was one of only two girls without pierced ears and UTTERLY DESPERATELY MISERABLE. I wore those little sparkly sticker things? Every day? I even kept extras in my desk because they NEVER lasted the whole day and otherwise people would know that I was just wearing STICKERS and not REAL EARRINGS because I was totally and completely FOOLING EVERYBODY, SHUT UP I WAS. Then at home, I waged a relentless campaign of begging, pleading and probably a lot of door-slamming of the YOU'RE RUINING MY LIFE variety. I think we eventually negotiated a deal... Read more →

Allow me to present definitive proof that the public schools are turning the hearts and minds of our children against us. EXHIBIT A, which came home in Noah's backpack late last week: EXHIBIT B, which came home yesterday, thus cementing the fact that this is officially a pattern: If, for some reason, you are not super-experienced when it comes to deciphering preschool crayon scribblings, I present an enhanced and annotated version: WHAT ARE THEY TEACHING THIS CHILD AT THAT SCHOOL? I swear to God, if I find out that next week's field trip to the farm is actually a volcano discovery mission, I am homeschooling from now the fuck on. Read more →