Two weeks ago I stood twenty yards away from my flat-on-his back toddler having a massive meltdown. Hollering out in agony, legs kicking, and tears sliding down his face, my son was done with skiing at 8:59am. I wasn't right next to him because I was hovering over our other toddler who was trying desperately to get her three-sizes-too-big ski boot back on her foot so her sock stayed off the wet snow. 

Two pandemic years was all it took to forget about the horrors of first time skiing. I grew up skiing, so I'm used to the pain required to get to the pleasure of skis slicing through snow on a gorgeous sunny day and the wind gently whipping at your tail. This foray into beginner territory with our toddlers reminded me of an important lesson: sometimes things start off hard, but they really do get easier. If I was trying to convince someone that ending diets gets easier over time (which is the opposite of every new diet that inevitably gets harder...

Standing on tip toes to make sure Alexa could hear him, my son shouted, "Alexa! Please play "Stretchy Pants"! 

The girls, my mom and I laughed as we tossed together the final ingredients for our pumpkin bake. We all laughed and sang along with Carrie Underwood. 

Listen here, but you'll get the idea with this verse:

One of my friends likes hosting parties at her house because she can simply leave when she's tired. Everyone's had a few drinks and nobody even knows she's gone. She's become a pro at the French exit (leaving without saying goodbye). 

Lately, the toys at our house have been guilty of this French behavior. 

Let me explain. We moved to a new house a few weeks ago which meant that I got (painfully) reacquainted with all the, errrr stuff, that we own. Don't get me wrong, I love getting rid of things, thanks to my friend, Shira Gill***, and even did a massive pre-move sweep. Despite my best decluttering efforts, I still ended up with five trunk loads to our recycling center. 

It was that fifth load that was the toughest. I was struggling with getting rid of a few bigger toys that our kids use periodically, but had sentimental value. Our playroom at the new house is smaller than our old house and things were just feeling cluttered. After an exhausting few...

The cicada's evening chorus filled the dark night air as I opened the wash machine door for what seemed like the fiftieth time today. At least I had insect company as I stared down the two dozen plus freshly washed masks. 

If you’re anything like me, you almost forgot about wearing masks for the past two months of summer. Luckily, we were largely outdoors and with fully vaccinated friends or family so everyday didn’t feel like a maskmergency. It was my own joyful mask amnesia or masknesia as I like to say. My partial, not total, memory loss of daily mask wearing felt blissful. 

But, here we are, Delta variant on the rise or peaking in many areas of the country, school looming around the corner, breakthrough infections and cooler fall and winter temperatures on the horizon. 

My heart sank a little as I assessed my mask mother load. Don’t get me wrong, I love masks. If there was a community badge offered for civilians willing to remind people to put on...

“Isn’t Eucerin another word for penis?” One of my kids asked after I mentioned that we had some Eucerin they could use if the Vaseline was running low. 

“Ummmm, no, no it’s not another word for penis.” I said with my best poker face. 

My other child chimed in right away with the question, “isn’t that thing boys pee in called a ‘urinator’? 

“Ummmm, no, no it’s not a urinator, it’s a uriNAL.”

This conversation means that we’ve officially hit our summer slide and forgot everything we know about sex ed and very likely every other school subject. In the past, now was about the time I would panic and order those summer “fun” books to prevent the dreaded “summer slide”. Those books were never fun for anyone, especially me, whose main job became summer unfun mom reminding threatening kids to do their work. 

Screw it. This summer we’re going full slip n...

I sat in the sterile office staring out the window covered in blinds that had at least a quarter inch thick of dust obstructing my lackluster view of the highway. Once I started talking and tears were flowing, I asked for a kleenex. I had forgotten that I already had the box behind me. 

The last 14 months seem to have brought up more grief than I can remember in my life. It’s been a lot to process grieving the loss of celebrating milestones with friends and family, the loss of jobs, the loss of school community and school events, the loss of holiday gatherings, the loss of loved ones old and young, the loss of social connections and the loss of travel. 

Since I can’t time travel to my pre-Covid, less grief filled life, I’ve been doing some of my own grief processing. I was reminded about the five stages of grief model introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. The five stages are denial, anger, bargaining,...