Parenting

DIARY

The Kind Of Parent You’ve Got To Be Sometimes

July 12, 2018

I took the kids to Rockin' Jump after camp yesterday. Rockin' Jump, for those of you who aren't parents or don't live in the suburbs, is a massive trampoline park populated by oh god, so many small people, the vast majority of whom are physically launching themselves through the air at at any given moment. For safety's sake, there are also lots of uniformed attendants who will yell at them (and you) if they do anything wrong, and the list of "things you can do wrong in the trampoline park" includes "everything that children want to do a trampoline park."

I know. It sounds super fun.

Except my kids (obviously) love it, and so when they said they wanted to go, I was sort of surprised that camp hadn't tired them out...but I thought, what the hell. Because it's summer, and in the summer you can do things like take spur-of-the-moment trips to trampoline parks, and also because I have a little secret about Rockin' Jump:

DIARY

Five Things

July 6, 2018

Before we begin - on a lighter note - the leggings pictured here are Niyama Sol's "endless" leggings, and they're going to get their own post because if you are a yoga person or a leggings person or just a person, you need these.

Now.

A couple of weeks ago, after I published this post, I got a message from a reader telling me about her dad. Her dad, she wrote, had developed this interesting habit: He'd come up with five things that were virtually guaranteed to make him feel really, really good, and committed himself to doing at least one of those things each and every day of his life. (One of them is eating ice cream, so if it hits midnight and he hasn't done any of the other things that day, he will get himself out to a Thrifty and get a cone in his hand STAT, which makes him sort of a hero.)

DIARY

An Update, But Not Really

June 25, 2018

Before I launch back into writing about our (first) bathroom makeover (which is FINALLY finished, and oh my god that took forever) and the best ballet flats out there and, I don't know, chicken, or whatever...I figured I should probably address the elephant in the room.

I don't know if we're going to stay in this house. Or even in this city.

I don't know anything.

DIARY

The Ones Who Catch You

June 22, 2018

A few years ago - shortly before my daughter was born - a friend of mine told me that she had cancer.

When I say “a friend of mine,” I mean someone I cared about; someone I had special, beautiful memories with. Someone who I thought was smart, and interesting. Someone who’d just had a baby a couple of months earlier, making her diagnosis worse than the worst thing imaginable.

But by then, we weren’t especially tied into each others’ lives. In the old days we’d mostly been casual, going-out-type friends, and in the years since we’d grown up and out of bars and parties and late nights in the company of dartboards, and we’d emailed only occasionally. When the dust settled it turned out we didn't really have much in common at all, and we lost touch. I didn’t even know what she did for a living, or her partner’s name.

Parenting

Two Questions About My Kids, Because I Need Your Help

June 15, 2018

So happy! So sweet! UNTIL...

Not to put you in a Dear Abby situation or anything, but there are a few things my children are doing lately that have me stumped. And so today I'm going to use this site to access your collective genius, if that's okay with you, because I am fresh out of mom skills to deploy.

Problem #1: How Do You Know When to Let Your Kid Quit?

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