Memorial Day and a Tantrum To Remember
I described my son’s tantrum in my last post, so it’s only fair that in this post I describe one of his sister’s—her first tantrum, in fact. It occurred on Memorial Day, when she was just two weeks old. My husband and I took our family to see his parents over the holiday weekend. With […]
Icing on My Cake for Mother’s Day
My daughter was born the day before Mother’s Day. Some years her birthday has been on Mother’s Day—including her first birthday. Obviously, a small child’s birthday takes precedence over Mother’s Day. Even a grown daughter’s birthday takes precedence in our family. But I’ve never minded sharing “my” day with my daughter. After all, her birth […]
Mother’s Day Memento
On one of the spring vacations my family took, we were in a gift shop full of tchotchkes. Neither my husband nor I am fond of tchotchkes, and I was ready to move on. Nothing in the store looked interesting to me. But our children wanted to browse, to find some small mementoes to take […]
Hopping Down the Bunny Trail
As I’ve written before, we didn’t spend many holidays at home when my kids were growing up. We typically went to grandparents’ homes to celebrate. And that was true of Easter as well as Thanksgiving and Christmas. Plus, my children’s spring break was usually the week before or after Easter. So many years, we traveled […]
What a Difference a Year Makes!
A year ago I was suffering from the worst stomach flu I’d had in a decade. And within days, my daughter would break her leg skiing, requiring me to leave my sick bed and fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, to care for her. Plus, my mother had just moved out of her home and into […]
Memories of Cold
We are ahead of pace on snowfall for the season, and the average low temperature this month has been about 18 degrees below average. It is cold. Monday morning this week, the temperature in Kansas City was -11 degrees. As luck would have it, I was scheduled to be in court on Monday to serve […]
To Grandmother’s House We Go
In all the years we’ve been married, my husband and I have never spent Christmas at home. We’ve been responsible for a few Thanksgivings, but never a Christmas. This is primarily my daughter’s fault. She does not believe that I am capable of “doing” Christmas. Oh, my husband and I can put up a tree […]
Giving Up Divinity
My paternal grandmother’s chocolate fudge and divinity were part of many of my childhood Christmases, along with her fruitcake. I didn’t care for the fruitcake, but I did love the candy. She made two colors of divinity, pink and green. One of the batches she would make without nuts, because I didn’t like nuts in […]
Rocking Through the Ages
I mentioned my pint-sized rocking chair in a recent post. I received the rocker for Christmas when I was a toddler. During my preschool years, the chair sat in the living room of our home. In those years, my father and grandfather often posed me in it for pictures. The photo below of me in […]
My Daughter and the Bobbie Vehwahwee
Who waits for Black Friday (now called “Thanksgiving evening”) or Cyber Monday? When I was working I did as much of my Christmas shopping on the Monday through Wednesday before Thanksgiving as I could. Maybe the prices weren’t as good, but the stores were less crowded. And that’s what mattered most to me—getting in and […]