Sixty years ago today was my first birthday. I was too young to remember it, but there is a fuzzy photograph of me in a high chair with a cake bearing one candle in front of me. I was the oldest grandchild on my mother’s side of the family, so […]
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Yo, Mom: An Introduction to the Teenage Years
I’ve written before about our family’s trips to the Absaroka Ranch in Wyoming, where we spent a summer week riding horses, except for occasional breaks to hike or go river-rafting. On our last trip in 1994, my son was twelve. It was his third time to the ranch (or the […]
Continue readingLittle Brother as Mother’s Escort
My husband and I will celebrate our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary soon. We were married just days after my youngest brother turned ten. His role during our wedding was to escort my mother into the church. He wore a tuxedo and looked so cute, as little boys usually do when they […]
Continue readingLearning Flexibility at My Daughter’s Birthday Parties
I wrote an earlier post listing many of the things I included in my daughter’s baby book. One thing I didn’t mention in that post was that I wrote descriptions of how we celebrated each of her first eight birthdays. I reread those entries recently, looking for a hook for […]
Continue readingMilestones: On Turning Sixty
We have a tendency to mark milestone birthdays more than others. In my last post I described my twenty-first birthday. I don’t remember my thirtieth birthday—I was too busy with work and child-rearing for the day to make much of an impression. In fact, I remember being bothered more when […]
Continue readingFirst Birthdays With My Husband
My husband-to-be and I started dating about a month before my twenty-first birthday. We were first-year law students at the time. When my big day rolled around, he gave me flowers and took me out for a really nice dinner in downtown Palo Alto, California. (We were law students. Any […]
Continue readingMy Mother’s Last Doll
I’ve written before about my first doll. I’ve written about my mother’s Storybook Bride doll that I could never play with. And I’ve written about the sewing doll that my grandmother and I made clothes for. This post is about my mother’s last doll. It wasn’t really a doll. It […]
Continue readingThe Boy Wonder
When my son was about three, he went through a Batman phase that lasted several months to a year. He had Batman pajamas and underwear. He had a toy Batmobile, which is still in our basement. He ran around the house singing, “Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Batman!” (Did I do that […]
Continue readingHalf a Generation, But Not So Far Apart
My youngest sibling is eleven-and-a-half years younger than me, and he was not yet six when I left for college. I was his primary babysitter from the time he was just a few months old until I left home. In those early years, he sometimes felt as much like my […]
Continue readingTrue Confessions: My Sister Peeled Her Peas
My sister is now eligible for AARP membership and is an accomplished professional, but I often remember her as a child. She was born when I was eight-and-a-half, and I left home when she turned nine, so our common experiences were limited to those few years. We were both picky […]
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