My daughter tells me her parent/baby group shows her nine variations of normal. What her baby—my granddaughter—does is one variation. But measuring one baby against another is a pointless exercise. She is right. The baby books from past generations in my family show more variations of normal. Comparing these variations […]
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Teaching My Kids to Drive
I wrote recently about my own experience learning to drive. I don’t remember that being a contentious time with my father, though starting to drive a manual transmission took a bit of doing. But teaching my kids to drive? That was harrowing. My son, poor kid, as the oldest, had […]
Continue readingI Don’t Know How They Do It
I posted several years ago how I hated my mother telling me “I don’t know how you do it” when I described my life as a working mom. And how I vowed I would never say to my children “I don’t know how you do it.” But I am now […]
Continue readingHappy Fortieth Birthday to My Son
My son, my first child, turns forty in a few days. It certainly does not feel like forty years ago that I gave birth to him in a bad snowstorm. I wrote about his birth in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat that here. I’ve written many posts about […]
Continue readingA Picture I Wish I Had: My Son’s Solo
Each year, my kids were in Christmas programs at their school. The programs were held in the church of the parish that operated their Catholic school, and religious Christmas carols made up the bulk of the program. The whole school was in the program. Each class, from kindergarten through eighth […]
Continue readingBaby Boy Hupp: What’s in a Name?
I wrote an earlier post about my son’s birth. I put his first baby picture in that post, but what I didn’t say in that post was that at the time of that first picture, the only name that baby had was “Baby Boy Hupp.” That’s how the hospital labeled […]
Continue readingFiring the Babysitter
One summer day about 38 years ago today, I thought my career would come to a crashing halt. We had to fire the babysitter. Our son—our first child—was five and a half months old. I’d gone back to work when he was three months old, and my husband and I […]
Continue readingHigh School Graduations Through Two Generations
Recently, a relative sent my husband a picture of his high school graduation day. I’d never seen this photo before. My husband is the tall young man in the red robe—the color of the Marshall High School Owls. He graduated in 1967—more than fifty years ago. My husband probably thought […]
Continue reading“Where’s That Baby?” and Other Memories
As readers of this blog know, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, my Nannie Winnie. I always believed she thought I was pretty special as well—after all, I was her oldest grandchild. I knew she loved all my siblings, and I didn’t think I was any higher in […]
Continue readingOn Hallmark, Haircuts, and the Persuasiveness of Grandmas
I thumbed through a photo album of my son’s baby pictures, trying to think of something to write as a birthday post for him. His birthday is later this week. In the album, I found two photographs taken by a photographer at Hallmark Cards when my son was almost a […]
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