On Sunday, Laura graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Pittsburgh. We were all there, perched way up in the nosebleed seats at "The Pete." I didn't even attend my own undergraduate graduation, just because of this; parents gazing down on a sea of black robes, wondering which dot is theirs. But now we have Jumbotrons and text messaging. ( Read more... )

I am somewhat of a history buff when it comes to my adopted home town. (I grew up in Chicago, but I've lived here a lot longer than I did there.) This is a small city, easy to navigate and small enough to really get to know, and I've enjoyed finding out about neighborhoods and their histories. When calsabon was little and had a doctor's appointment, I'd ( Read more... )

My little baby calsabon is en route with her father to Toronto. There she will board a plane for Montreal, where she will change planes and wing her way off to La Belle France for six weeks. She spent this morning in a lather of "I don't wanna go" anxiety (which affects me, too, before a big trip), but I know she's going to have a great time. She's ( Read more... )

Twenty years ago today, my life changed yet again. I became a mother, for the last time. I had savored this pregnancy, not wanting to rush through it and meet my new child, but to enjoy the anticipation and the changes as she grew. In the hospital, I had wondered if I had enough love for this new little one; I thought that I loved her sister so ( Read more... )

Twenty-three years ago today, my life changed in a massively fundamental way, taking me forceably into my future as nothing else could. I became a mother. I became someone's mother. I created, nurtured and gave birth to a human being, a tiny complete person with slate blue eyes (that later became rich brown), a head of fuzzy dark hair and her ( Read more... )

I feel as though I am a perfectly round sphere, as though I could just roll gently around the house, brushing the edges of doorways as I go from room to room. I am absolutely asog with water, and I don't know why ( Read more... )

I am in Pittsburgh, ensconced in a hotel close to the Pitt campus. I arrived yesterday after an uneventful but oddly interminable drive during which the Prius only got 40 MPG. Yeah, I know; they do better in stop-and-go driving than highway, and it's uphill all the way from the shores of prodigious Lake Ontario to the banks of the mighty ( Read more... )

I was wiping and packing CDs today, and riffled through the audiotape collection as well. Tapes pretty well went by the wayside 10 years ago; before that they were mostly good for use in the car. I've got a lot of Little Mermaid and Baby Beluga crap stuff from when the girls were little. But I also have two tapes that I would desperately like to ( Read more... )

Laura and I took a few things over to the new house today, to get them out of the way here. We met the neighbors who very pleasantly introduced themselves and started talking about gardens. During the course of the discussion they made it quite plain (in a pleasant way) that they expected that I'd keep the garden up to their standards ( Read more... )

Today, we bought a house. It was suprisingly anticlimactic. We went to our lawyer's office, signed here, initialed there, repeated 7,659,431 times (by actual count*), turned over a check for a heart-stopping amount of money, agreed to pay back an equally heart-stopping amount of money, and then left. We own a beautiful old house in the ( Read more... )