Now that we know where most of our boxes are after our recent move, I decided to open a box of photographs and post about a random photo. My selection wasn’t entirely random. Summer is drawing to an end, and I told myself I would use the first snapshot I […]
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My Son’s First Birthday Party
Today my son turns thirty-seven. As I’ve been going through boxes, trying to declutter, I found some pictures of his first birthday party. Obviously, I would never throw these pictures out. In fact, I find it very hard to throw out any pictures. Finding these snapshots completely stopped my decluttering […]
Continue readingEaster Eggs: Hunting and Dyeing
I don’t remember ever going on an Easter egg hunt as a child. The Easter Bunny might have hidden some candy around our living room, but I’m not even certain of that. We had pets, plus my mother would have feared an egg getting lost behind the couch. The Easter […]
Continue readingMy Earliest Thanksgiving Memories
I’ve written before (see here and here) about how glad I am that my children spent so much time with their cousins growing up, because I didn’t have that experience as a kid. But I do remember one Thanksgiving my family spent with my cousins. It’s the earliest Thanksgiving I remember—1958, […]
Continue readingNo More Libby Jacksons
My kids and their cousins often visited their mutual grandparents (my in-laws) when they were children. When it was time to leave, my father-in-law would call them aside and hand them each a $20 bill. I told my children not to expect Grandpa’s generosity and to thank him when it […]
Continue readingYou Say Grandma, I Say Nanny . . . Doesn’t Have the Same Ring As Potayto, Potahto
I’ve mentioned before that I called my maternal grandmother Nanny Winnie. How I came to call her that started on my father’s side of the family when my older cousin began calling our common grandmother Nanny Kay. I was the second of Nanny Kay’s grandchildren (though a third was born […]
Continue readingThe Cousins and Rudolph
I wrote on Monday about my children and their cousins. The picture above is my favorite picture of the four of them, primarily because I know the story behind it. They were singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to the adults that were present. The youngest, my daughter, was nineteen months […]
Continue readingOn Cousins, Connections, and the “Social” in Social Media
I envied my children as they were growing up—they were close with two of their cousins. They were close in age, and for their first few years of life they lived within a reasonable driving distance of their mutual grandparents. The four kids played together regularly, stair steps spanning six […]
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