making space for creativity
I know that 12 months is the big mile stone for most parents, but for me 15 months is the one I keep thinking about. I started full time nannying my little godson at 15 months, and I’ve been counting the weeks until my own son is that old. Five years ago, I left…
Dear Friends and Family, It’s a very snowy week before Christmas here in Milwaukee. With snow falling, snow on snow, Milwaukee looks like a snow globe, everything fresh and clean and quiet and quaint. It’s hard to believe that during the last Christmas snows we had a nine-pound month old baby who was just…
My earliest years were spent in southern California, which means that I have a deep love for those tiny yellow cone flowers, which I just learned are called pineapple weed or wild chamomile. My family has always eaten fish tacos with cabbage and lime. And I tended, as a child, to call…
One of the byproducts of becoming parents is watching your own parents become grandparents and your own grandparents become great-grandparents. I don’t have any memories of my great-grandparents. Supposedly, I met one of my great-grandfathers, but the details of that story are vague and the photograph we have of the event seems like it…
This past weekend for Pentecost Sunday, Jackson and I got to renew our baptismal vows while spending the weekend down in Illinois with my goddaughter Teresa and her family (Evan was in DC with his students). That is one of many wonderful things about the sacrament of baptism — several times a year as…
Spring in Wisconsin comes quietly and gradually. Grass stretches and greens up slowly, buds extend off naked branches subtly, and then one day you look around and daffodils and snowdrops and woodland violets are suddenly dotting the ground like little yellow and white and purple fireworks. So it has been with motherhood,…
Right in between Christmas day and my birthday, there quietly passed the one month mark of having little baby Jackson here with us. We spent the day sleeping and eating, crying and gazing, getting clean and messy again. Which is basically exactly what’s been going on all month. In fact, the month sort…
Our long awaited baby arrived in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning! Tuesday evening, two days past my due date, I felt the familiar tight contractions that had been coming and going, and getting gradually stronger throughout the dark November evenings. It was the night before my husband Evan’s Thanksgiving break, and we watched The…
Somehow, miraculously, I have arrived halfway through this pregnancy. It has been both slow, especially those first exhausted weeks, and at the same time so fast, particularly the second trimester with its summer trips back to DC and up north to the shore of Lake Superior. Overall, I would highly recommend the…
The Joy. After seven months of trying, the end of the month was drawing once again to a close. I was that guarded hopeful that I had come to know, counting the days until it would be “reasonable” to take a pregnancy test. That month (March) it was Evan’s birthday, five days after…
When I was tiny, vacation felt like leaving for the airport before dawn. It was exciting to feel the bumps of an empty highway as we rushed with our bags full of swimsuits and books to make an early flight. And once we were there, Florida or California, vacation was full. It was full…
Dear Friends & Family, What a great, wonderful, difficult, beautiful year! We moved from Maryland to Wisconsin, became an aunt and uncle to the beautiful Anika Eve, and started a new job at Hope Christian High School teaching US History. Well, technically, only Evan has that new job, but I have been doing so…
I have nine first cousins, all on my mom’s side. I’m the fourth oldest, which puts me smack in the middle of admiration (boarding on adoration) for my cool three older cousins and complete acceptance and enthusiastic adventuring with my five younger cousins. As a child, I loved seeing my cousins. Comedian…
On Saturday morning we got up and crept quietly out of the house, hoping that we could let my niece and brother and sister-in-law sleep past 7:30. I think the dogs foiled this plan, but I hope we slipped out without causing too much of a ruckus. We finally, after almost five months of…
I can hardly believe it is really mid-July. I think that perhaps this has to do with how the weather this early morning was in the 50s. The 50s, in July. Yesterday, there was a heat index of 100 in DC. But here we are with windows open 2 1/2 weeks before Evan starts…