JMan sits on the sofa playing a video game. He is not supposed to be playing video games because he lost his temper and threw the controller. I put him on restriction when it was clear that he would not have to replace the controller.
Bookzilla has a friend over to play […]
We’re eating dinner and I tell the kids that I stopped at Costco during lunch. I tell them I bought a new bottle of olive oil to replace the one I broke. The bottle was sitting on the floor in the pantry and I bumped it. It fell over onto the tile […]
Bookzilla wanted a play date with several friends and then a sleepover with one of them. I gave the okay. It turned out that only Sacha and Glide could make it. I call one of them Sacha because she was born in Russia but emigrated to the US by way of Singapore. She has slept […]
The parenting of kids dilemma:
there is no right way to say things to kids;
you only get one chance to get it right.
Emily Bazelon tackles this toughie in Slate.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month on the travails of employers faced with twenty- and thirtysomethings who’ve been told how brilliant and wonderful and special they are […]
JMan as been walking around saying “Yo!”. He picked it up from a classmate at school. In the second grade it starts. Oy.
I bought a new Mac and it comes with a program called PhotoBooth. This program uses the computer’s built in camera to take pictures like the photo booths of […]
Clarkson, Georgia will never be the same.
Early last summer the mayor of this small town east of Atlanta issued a decree: no more soccer in the town park.
“There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told […]
How children absorb language is interesting. Both JMan and Bookzilla are at the oath emitting stage: they both want to use oaths at moments of exasperation, but they don’t know any and are casting about for some that are socially acceptable but still edgy enough to capture the frustration.
JMan says “Gosh!” when a car crashes […]
He stands on tip-toe, nose over the silvery bowl, plucking the popped kernels into his plastic box. The TV sounds in the room adjacent; Bookzilla and JMan are watching some TV show that I find boring. Some cartoons, like Spongebob, can be quite devious, but others are rather plain.
I lean over him, rest […]
She spins, dances, hair billowing, two years older than her age. She runs into me with the joyful thump of a golden retriever, if a golden retriever could head butt. I hug, amazed by the matryoshka-like nature of it: who she was, who she is, and who she will be. I can […]
When it comes to comma placement, I find mere appeasement a struggle. I am not a good writer. I try to improve, but I think that die has long been cast. I can explain NP complete problems, but when to use commas and when to use dashes in a sentence escape my cognition.
Mr. DeYoung was […]