The Christmas Recovery Zone

Whew! What a Christmas! It’s taken me a whole week just to recover from our vacation. We went to The Motherland (Utah), where several relatives on both sides met us. We spent the entire time going from family to family with tiny interludes of seeing old friends. Relaxing, it was… Read More

My Brief Episode As A Soccer Mom

You might not believe this since I’m the mother of six, but it’s is my first year being a soccer mom. I’ve avoided the stigma of soccer mom-dom for many years, for the same reasons that many mothers refuse to drive minivans: you feel like you have lost every bit… Read More

My Lonely Halloween

This Halloween, more than all the others, has really driven home the fact that my kids are growing up. On one hand it’s really nice because teenagers are much more fun to talk to than babies. They also clean up the house (theoretically) and do chores.  But most of the… Read More

Behold Your Queen

I don’t suppose I need to tell you about all the drama that conspired when I was trying to fix up India’s Homecoming dress. When you are Mormon you can almost never find a formal dress that is modest enough. Since all high school girls are out to look as… Read More

Homecoming Mums!

Today is our school’s Homecoming. The football game is this evening and the dance is tomorrow. The game is, obviously, the big deal but there’s another big deal: the Homecoming Mum. That’s mum as in Chrysanthemum, not mum as in mother. It’s basically a Corsage of Insanity. They’re a tradition… Read More

The Children, They Are Gone.

Not gone gone. Just gone to school. And not a moment too soon. I’ve been stacking up errand to do once they went back and I’m just barely making a dent in my list. Today I need to go buy a new microwave and have a meeting with my Relief… Read More

Confederate Car Trip, pt. 2

Our car trip around the South continued on from western North Carolina to the eastern part of the state–to the farm of our friends, the Browns. Heather and Craig Brown (and especially their kids) were good friends of ours when we all lived in Utah. They have since moved to… Read More

Confederate Car Trip, Part 1

  Our Big Tour of the South started out on July 3. The dates we could be gone were strictly dictated by a fancy choir that India is in this summer. She was allowed to miss no more than three rehearsals or she would be sacked. So we had to… Read More

Back in Black

I’m back from our Grand Tour of the South. First things first: I managed to kill my laptop while I was travelling. So I am wearing black in mourning from destroying yet another computer. I’m beginning to thing I am made of magnets. How else to explain the destruction I… Read More