As I stated in my last blog, the cabinets in the kitchen of our new house are original to our 1991 home, but that’s not the reason we wanted to remodel the kitchen. The problem is that it has a tight U-shaped layout with 48 square feet of standing space inside our U of cabinets and major appliances. Overall the room is larger thanks to a generous breakfast area and room for sitting at the counter on one side. But as homeschoolers, we are home A LOT and are eating and cooking CONSTANTLY. And we are in each other’s way. All. The. Time. The first floor of our home is 1,100 square fe ..read more

   As I mentioned in my last post, Josh and I knew we wanted to remodel the kitchen when we bought the new house, but I had agreed to wait two years so we could feel the space out and see what we really wanted. The house still had the original oak kitchen cabinets but one of the past two homeowners had recently upgraded the plastic countertops with a new surface coating. The cabinets have that late 80s/early 90s orangey-oak hue and I sometimes get splinters from the particle board shelves, but my biggest peeve is the lack of interior shelves in the lower cabinets and the deep blind c ..read more

      “On this day, 15 years ago,” a Facebook memory reminded me on Jan. 22, I had shared my status of “is excited to see her countertops go in today!” (Sorry, I used to post in third person for some reason.) I screenshotted the memory and texted it to Josh. “Would that make remodeling a kitchen a 15-year itch for you?” he replied. Ha! As if I would ever remodel the gorgeous kitchen we created out of a gigantic dining room/bedroom in the George Street house! (see photo at the end of this post) No, dear friends, in my blogging silence over the past three years, Josh and I so ..read more

  During Valentine's week, while signing his name on packets of heart-shaped gummies to give out to his classmates in preschool, Knox commented, “I don’t like girls.” To which I said, “But I’m a girl.” And thus he adjusted his statement to, “Unless the girls are mommies.” I loved this response. Perhaps I should have felt more special if he had said “except for you,” but it was made more enjoyable by him admitting that he likes mommies as a class of people. For example, my friend Erin, who dotes on him frequently and takes time to listen to his long drawn out stories when we’re leaving chu ..read more

   It is with much sadness that I write that we had to let Pepper go today. I was “her person” for almost 18 years. She has lived in three apartments and one full house with us, enjoyed 10 years of peace and leisure with us before we had children, and then pleasantly adjusted and accepted our offspring (and our offspring only) to become not like a sister to our kids, but more of a cranky old aunt that lived with us. She will be much missed.    Pepper’s twin sister, Pansy, had her health take a very sudden decline in December of 2019 and we had her put down at that time ..read more

    At the beginning of school year, I noticed that Rye’s math class is scheduled from 12 to 12:40.     Huh, I thought. I’m leaving home at 12:45 to pick Knox up from preschool each school day. If Rye’s math teacher ever needed a substitute, I could do that without being very inconvenienced. Also, I will already be following along with second grade math as Rye’s personal tutor on our homeschool days.     Math is one of just two classes that the full-time second grade teacher doesn’t teach, probably because that’s when she can get her lunch break, I ..read more

Have you adjusted to “the new normal” yet? I haven’t. I feel like a little piece of my spirit is dying with every day that this continues. OK, maybe not every day, but there’s a gradual downward slide in my outlook and well-being that just keeps sinking. It’s so hard to put into words just what’s so bad about all of this. After all, I’m an introvert. I like people in small doses. I love my house. I’m a stay-at-home mom who already, well, spent 95 percent of my time at home. But having my in-person interactions reduced to basically the three people I live with, and then the handful of commercia ..read more

I haven’t written about the epidemic or the quarantine because I haven’t been able to reconcile it. People keep saying this is our “new normal,” and I refuse to accept that. I suppose “this is the new normal” is what people had to tell themselves when they were suddenly under Nazi occupation, or their country was ravaged by civil war and they have to move into refugee camps. But our situation really isn’t like that. Because on the grand scheme of things, for the vast majority of us, things are still OK. Stay at home! Take your school’s “spring break” a couple of weeks early! Enjoy the family t ..read more

 You may know that I sometimes talk about going to “the gym,” but I’m guessing you’ve never thought of me as an athletic person. That is a correct assessment. “Exercising” has never been my thing. I’m one of those people who grew up dreading gym class, just trying to survive without something super-embarrassing happening, and trying not to get labeled as the weakest link on the team.  Daria, my athletic role modelBut just because I’m not athletic, I wouldn’t say I’m sedentary. I love a nice long walk at a fast pace. I enjoy hiking even more. I like riding a bike … on a flat, paved trail ..read more

I’m in a rut — a rut that has probably been forming for the past decade, and certainly has been dug-in deeper as I shifted to becoming a stay at home parent. My 2020 goal is to get out of this rut and flourish in new ways. Recognizing I am in a rut  Last year I read Michael Pollan’s Howto Change Your Mind, and I completely connected with what he was describing. The book is about psychedelic drugs, mainly LSD and psilocybin (as in magic mushrooms), and how many people use them once, have a life-changing experience that shifts the way they perceive love and the universe, and then live with a hi ..read more