Bibliomama

You go to New Hampshire for a long week-end, and when you get back there are five messages, and they're all for your nine-year-old son.

I try really hard not to judge other parents. I know full well that parenting can be like a box of chocolates mixed with rabbit poop -- you REALLY never know what you're gonna get. So go ahead, feed your toddler chocolate in front of me, leave them wailing and beating their fists on the floor of the mall for as long as you like, use whatever bribery or blackmail seems required... whatever gets you through. My kids are fairly timid and clumsy, so they're not big climbers or clamberers or daredevils. A lot of kids are, and their parents let them climb things or jump off things that I don't have to debate letting my kids climb or jump off because it just doesn't come up. However, today we were at this great park we go to quite often. There are a bunch of different areas with different play structures, and a splash pad. My friends and our eight kids and one baby were pretty much the only ones there for a bit, and then a summer camp of twenty kids showed up. It got a littl

I'm happy. We're having a great week. For once I didn't overplan, and we had a nice quiet Monday and Tuesday, ran a couple errands and got school supplies and lazed around and the kids acted like they liked each other. Yesterday we went to the beach with friends and it was hot but cloudy enough to shield us from the blazing sun, and the kids frolicked in the water and played in the sand and my friend and I went in and out of the water and talked and then we went over to her house and the kids disappeared upstairs, and when I had to take Angus home for baseball practice Eve refused to leave, so I left her there until bedtime. Today we went over to another friend's house and the kids were great and I made lunch for everyone (to make up for the fact that I had basically invited myself and my kids over to her house). I'm happy. It's hard to blog when you're happy. Well, it's hard to blog and not feel like you're being really cheesy and boring. So I will

Yesterday was supposed to be my day off. Eve had slept over at my Mom and Dad's on Friday night and was happily ensconced in Grandma-and-Poppa-land ("I had pancakes for breakfast and macaroni and cheese for lunch, and then I told Poppa that I had all my favourites except nachos. So he went to the grocery store."). Matt and Angus were at a baseball tournament. The weather was perfect -- sunny and breezy, not too hot. photo credit creative commons license I slept in, had a shower, cleaned up the kitchen, did some laundry, read a bit. Then I tried to figure out what The Thing should be. The Thing that I did to make my day off count. So I wouldn't just fritter it away without due consideration. My husband accuses me of being terrible at Days Off; apparently I obsess and brood and overthink until nothing I do can possibly be good enough and I end up depressed and irritable instead of relaxed and refreshed. And to that I say -- well, nothing, he's totally right. S

I don't know how to do this other than as a sprawling, messy, off-in-all-directions thing. I can't do book reviews like Emily, who has her own little New York Times thingy going on at Edge of the Page . I remember this one professor I had for a few courses -- he was French, and big and bearish with spiky black hair and a beard, and it always seemed to me that he carried this towering body of knowledge around right on top of his head, and all he had to do was reach up and pluck out a few facts and an allusion or two, and there was another fucking brilliant off-the-cuff insight. In contrast, I always felt like I had a much smaller body of knowledge, and it was all tucked away in my pockets or left on my dresser at home, so I was always saying something like "well, it's like the goat in the desert and... wait!... something about Flaubert and feet, or everybody dreaming about Zeus and then walking funny..." I guess there's a good reason why I ended up writing abou

He's a good husband, really. He was just trying to get the partially-assembled basketball net off of the driveway for the night. He didn't realize I wouldn't be able to drag the hose around it. And last night he didn't realize that when he wound the hose up in the hose box it would be incredibly difficult for me to unwind it enough to reach all the flowers in the front yard without extremely taxing bodily contortions and said hose box being dragged about six feet down the paved path as I hoped I could just pull on the goddamned hose hard enough that it would unwind itself. It's not his fault that my feet are made wrong which makes my back hurt most of the time and I was hot and getting bug-bitten. I probably shouldn't have opened with "WHY do you hate my plants?".