I’ve spent a fair amount of time in October away from home visiting relatives. The trips weren’t hard, but at the end of my travels, I was glad to be home. The first morning I returned, I started my journal entry “Home again . . . .” And a phrase […]
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Random Photos: Unaccompanied Minors and a Love of the West
As I look back on my childrearing years, one of the things I’m glad I did was to send my kids away from home. It gave my kids more independence and adventures than my husband and I could give them while we were busy with our jobs. Other than a […]
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A Pox on Chickenpox (Part 1)
My kids were born several years before the chickenpox vaccine was available. The measles/mumps/rubella vaccine existed, and I dutifully had them inoculated with the MMR shot at the appropriate age. But all we could do was wait to see if they got exposed to the chickenpox. I remembered the chickenpox […]
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The Father-To-Be: Not Expecting the Expected
Perhaps I should have saved this topic for mid-July—thirty-six years after it happened. But since it relates to fatherhood, and yesterday was Father’s Day, I’ll post it today. I’ve mentioned the “treasures” I found when cleaning some cupboards over the last several months. One treasure was an “all-porpoise” card from […]
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Summer Freedom from Generation to Generation
Now that we are well into June, most schools across the nation are out, and kids everywhere are enjoying their summer vacations. Or are they? It seems to me that children don’t have as much summer freedom as past generations had. They may have the world at their fingertips through […]
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Working Across Time and Across Generations
My husband and I recently were fortunate to have visits from our two adult children. Our son came for a few days at the end of April, and our daughter was here over Mother’s Day. I remember my mother telling me one time how nice it was to have her […]
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A Mother-Daughter Brunch and Fashion Show
My daughter went to an all-girls high school. One of my favorite events of the year was the mother-daughter brunch held each spring. After the meal at a hotel downtown, the senior class put on a fashion show, with the styles selected from several major retailers in our area. Each […]
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A Mother’s Speech to Her Son, With Compliments to Kipling
I mentioned in a post in March that I was looking for the speech I gave at my son’s Eagle Scout ceremony. I’d found pictures of him at that event, but I didn’t know where the speech was. In another monumental cleaning project a couple of weeks ago, I found […]
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A Story I’ve Rarely Told: The A Minus Incident
I’ve mentioned before that I was one of several valedictorians of my high-school class. The six of us all had 4.0 GPAs. A 4.0 was as high as one could get in our high school—all A grades (A+, A, A-) counted as 4 points. There were no deviations for pluses […]
Continue readingYo, 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 […]
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