So we're down to the last 2 1/2 weeks of summer.  I can't believe it's almost time for school to start again.  Where did my summer go?  It feels like July was just a blink.  This year, neither T nor I are ready for school to start.  I mean, yeah, we've got all his school shopping done and stuff, but we've had such a great summer--health issues ( Read more... )

So the other day when I was walking on the nature trail with my friend, her son asked me if I wanted to see the cool thing he found in the woods.  Of course I said sure.  He led us off the trail and into the trees.  Call me silly, but it had never occurred to me before that I could veer off the path and trek through the forest.  A little ways in, ( Read more... )

Yesterday, while walking with my walking buddy on the nature trail, we passed a couple talking to two women.  We overheard the couple saying how they met and as we walked away, I said, "Well, that just got stored in my mental scrap file to be pulled out later."

She asked me if I do that a lot.  I laughed and said, "I'm a writer.  Anything you say or ( Read more... )

Yesterday was my eighth anniversary.  I can't believe I've been married for eight years already.  Seriously, where has the time gone?  Does anyone else ever stop, look at your life, and blink in stupefied amazement that you're where you're at?  And not in a bad way?  But in that, holy crap, how am I old enough to be married eight years and have a ( Read more... )

Some of our traditions have carried over from my childhood, some from Chriss’, and some we’ve made on our own.  They’re always things I love and look forward to and bring us closer as a family.  And really, when I think about Christmas memories and traditions, it’s always family that comes to mind first. 

This time I thought I’d talk about the Christmas traditions I had while growing up.

Christmas started in our house the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  That’s when we brought out the tree and the decorations and made the house all festive and cozy and cheery.  We’d spend the whole month of December watching all the different Christmas movies in our ( Read more... )

No specific year this time and this one will actually be pretty short.  I was just thinking of one really fun tradition we had during the years that my brother and I believed in Santa.  Every Christmas Eve, we had elf hunts.  They always started with my dad pointing out a picture frame knocked askew or a hat that’d fallen off the coat rack.  ( Read more... )

Three years before, my best friend, Kim, moved to TX.  We’d been through so much together, surviving the horrible job our husbands had, being pregnant together, having no other friends or family in the area, and we were determined to stay close no matter how far away she was moving.  We succeeded, especially since once we confessed to each other ( Read more... )

We flew out to WA to spend it with my family.
What a crazy holiday season this was. We’d spent the previous 3 months packing and dealing with all the craziness that comes with closing on a house. We finalized the sale and moved in on Dec. 5. Two weeks later, our house full of unpacked boxes, we were packing up yet again, this time to fly to ( Read more... )

This was a Christmas that was both exciting and bittersweet. It was exciting because four days after Christmas, Chriss and I got married, bittersweet because I was moving to NY a week and a half later and had no idea when I’d see my parents again and also because it was our first Christmas after Grandpa had died, four months earlier.

A few days ( Read more... )