I don't think often about how the joining of people and lives is about love. Too often, for me, it's about anxiety and worrying and fretting and trying to Make Everyone Happy ( Read more... )

My husband's grandmother has died, peacefully, in Hospice, of old age at 99 1/2 years. She is survived by one sister (she is preceded in death by the middle sister), three children, eight grandchildren, eleven great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. Everyone seems to be doing all right.

( Marina Zidek 16 July 1911 to 5 March 2011, history, immigration story, and interview )

Yesterday and the day before were awesome weather...sunny but breezy and low humidity and COOL out. Gorgeous. I missed it the day before yesterday, but yesterday Elf and I rode bikes to the post office and then around the park and to the library and around another park and just AROUND. It was lovely. The streets we were on were quiet so we ( Read more... )

We made it safely to cheekygal's last night, where she fed us AMAZING homemade pizza ( Read more... )

I've been having thoughts this week as I read essays--Wuthering Heights essays in particular--as I thought about how the students didn't understand what they were talking about because they didn't understand pre-modern adoption (or the past or present position of gypsies in Europe ( Read more... )

I've wanted GOOD family photos for, oh, like, NINE YEARS NOW.

And so I finally caved and decided we were going a photographer. We did the simple thing and went just to The Picture People rather than something really elaborate. I am THRILLED. I have uploaded the many awesome-for-different-reasons photos here but my favorite is this one:


( Read more... )

A comment I read made me realize that my children have never seen The Addams Family. Not the movies, but the original sitcom. I checked, and a complete boxed set was available at Amazon and I GOT it. I had a suspicion that our kids, at ages 7 and 8, in a household rife with dark humor, a willingness to laugh at ourselves, sarcasm, and irony, ( Read more... )

Ben is lobbing some kind of vegetation at zombies ( Read more... )

I am proud of my kids beyond all words ( Read more... )

Last night, all four of us went out to the movies! We saw Race for Witch Mountain. My kids have seen (and Elf loves) Escape and Return (and I've read her the original book which is quite different to the movie--well, any of them ( Read more... )