I’ve never been a runner. I played a lot of sports growing up, mostly with an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm, and the one through-line is that I hated running of all kinds. I can remember the side aches, meandering my way through the one mile “run” in middle school gym class, dreading running as a punishment during every sports practice. Once I was in college I eventually decided to try to get in good enough shape to run a 5K, and I did, and that was enough for me. I’m someone who goes to the gym and does cardio but long stretches of running have never factored in heavily. Continue reading
Snapshots from a ski trip
Last Friday Jonah had the day off from school while no one else did. A friend of ours told me recently that she’d taken her daughter, also in kindergarten, skiing for the first time. “She loved it!” she said of her daughter. “You have to take him!”
I grew up skiing and have so many happy memories of those times. My dad took me for the first time when I was seven or so, just he and I. While I don’t remember learning, I vaguely remember coming home and falling asleep on our brown velvet couch after a long day out in the snow. In the years that followed we went up north and to Colorado on ski trips as a family or with our next door neighbors who had girls the same age as my sister and I. I can picture moments like snapshots of the places we stayed, some nice and some less so, the various colors of chairlifts, runs that twisted through the woods and the places we would veer just off of the run to weave through the trees. In middle school my happiest memories are from ski club, winter weeknights when my mom would pack up and drop off all of my ski gear, always packing a Hershey’s Cookies and Mint candy bar in my bag. We’d stay after school until the bus took us way out to the ski hills where they would let us loose with the responsibility to return by 9:00 p.m. before the bus left to bring us back. It left me with a thrilling sense of maturity and trust. Continue reading
The twins turn four
As I typed the title to this post I paused for a moment and wondered when (assuming it’s inevitable) Jude and Vivienne will object to being referred to as a collective noun. They have such an incredible bond; both would quickly name the other as best friend. I hope that they’re always that way. Continue reading
Easy DIY photo strip valentines
Valentine’s Day has never made my list of favorite holidays, but since having kids it feels like an excellent excuse for thematic crafting. For the past couple of years I’ve picked up some pre-cut hearts and loads of stickers and sequins and markers and let the kids go to town and drop whatever chaos they ended up creating into their classmates’ paper-bag mailboxes. This year the holiday coincided with an irrepressible urge to take on a creative project, so I decided to co-opt their valentines entirely. Continue reading
Late January winter chaos
The last two weeks have brought some of the most extreme winter weather Kalamazoo has seen in a very long time. Of the last ten school days, eight have been snow/cold/ice days. It was thrilling at first: wondering the night before if school would be called off (it’s worth noting that this is easier for us because when they call school Kristin is at home to watch the kids), waking throughout the night to peek outside and revise your guess for the morning. We had so little snow in December and early January that I was really hoping we’d get enough for some serious sledding, but this was more than I’d anticipated. Continue reading
Multicultural Children’s Book Day
You may not have heard, but today is Multicultural Children’s Book Day. I first heard about it via The Conscious Kid, which is an Instagram handle worth following if you’re interested in raising anti-racist and race-conscious children. Continue reading
This is 40
I turned 40 last week, and I feel really good about it. I still vividly remember when my mom threw my dad an epic 40th birthday party, and someone brought my sister and I to the club she’d rented out for the surprise party so that we could be there to surprise him too. It feels odd to have that vivid memory and to have arrived here personally, because I still feel young in so many ways, but by now I’ve learned that you never feel nearly as much like an adult as younger people might perceive you to be. Continue reading
How do you raise kids to find joy in the ordinary?
This morning when I dropped Jonah off, he told me that he doesn’t like school. It was the first time this year that I can recall him having said so, and it made me sad. He’s had a surprisingly positive experience in kindergarten so far (and I say “surprisingly” only because I had my doubts about the worksheet- and testing-centric culture of today’s public schools). I asked him what he didn’t like and he told me that it’s too hard (which is also surprising, since he’s whizzing through everything they’re teaching). I assured him that he’s doing great in school and that he can do hard things, which is when he took a turn for the existential and told me that most of the time he can’t find anything fun to do. I inquired as to whether we were still talking about school, but no, now he was talking about life in general. Continue reading
A Christmas of unmet expectations
Very little about Christmas was what we’d hoped or expected. It was a lesson in my sister Kira’s new mantra: embrace more, control less, but I have to say that for days I’ve been waiting for the universe to drop a wisdom bomb on me that brings come clarity but said wisdom has yet to materialize. Continue reading
Jonah turns six
Jonah was born the Saturday after Thanksgiving, exactly a week past his due date. So this year, the year that he turns six, was the first year since that his birthday has fallen on a Saturday. For some reason that felt meaningful to me this year, though I can’t say why exactly. Every year I feel completely unprepared for our children to suddenly become a year older than they were. I know; it isn’t sudden, it’s a one-day-at-a-time sort of thing. But it always feels abrupt. Continue reading
