A kitten is great when it curls up between your chin and your chest, purring and cuddling, claws retracted.
A kitten is not so great when you are prying it from the window screens, pulling it down from the drapes, coaxing it out from behind the stove, extracting it from a tangle of power cords.
A kitten [...]
If I had a dime for every time someone said to me, “Hey, you should start a blog,” I’d have a bunch of dimes.
They say to me: “I saw on Oprah/The Today Show/The View this woman who left her job/was fired /suffered from post-partum depression/chewed off her right arm and started writing about it on [...]
Did you play with one of those plastic bug catchers when you were a child?
I did. It’s how I learned the difference between a grasshopper and a cricket and a praying mantis.
It’s how I learned that spiders are arachnids and not insects.
It’s how I learned that moms do not like it when you bring these [...]
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
— Frank McCourt
“Why are you so secretive [...]
We’ll never replace the one we lost in January, but we are happy to have a furniture- and curtain-shredding, leg climbing, food- and water-dish spilling, meowing little troublemaker in our midst again.
It went like this:
Yesterday I read online that a new band I like announced its tour dates.
Tickets went on sale at noon today.
My husband/keeper of the coin is out of town.
I took an oath never to make online purchases behind his back with community money for crazy things like concert tickets. (I have a history.)
I [...]
Today I cut some lilac blooms, filled a bud vase with water and tucked the fragrant blossoms inside. I placed the bouquet on the table set for a Mother’s Day lunch. The vase sits in silent tribute to the unknown, but very real guest at our table: my youngest daughter’s birth mother.
Although she is not [...]
Thanks to Twitter, I’m discovering new blogs and Web sites. Last week I found this blog and instantly fell in love with its funny, candid author.
She recently wrote about one of the most embarrassing moments of her adolescence. You’ll have to read it for yourself. (Painful.) This set in motion the squeaky wheels inside my head. It [...]
Mary, who runs the whole operation over at the Mama Mary Show tagged me on this one. It’s the brainchild of another blogger, Her Bad Mother,who is trying to fly this one around the globe. So, I’ll do my part and then pass it on.
Five things I love about motherhood:
The bond of love between mother [...]
I had a nightmare last night.
In my dream, Godzilla is chasing Buddhist monks through the streets of Tokyo. Behind the city skyline is a mountain chain of books. Between the Godzilla-stomped city and book mountain is a vast expanse of paperwork and red tape. The valley is bustling with a throng of young Asian women [...]
