Bathtime, Berkeley, CA.

Each day, by the brevity of its life, our pet tells us, I shall soon be dead. In the deepest sense, these familiar creatures are part of the hurt of living. Because dogs inflict the suffering of loss upon us, the French sometimes call them “beasts of sorrow,” bêtes de chagrin.
–from Roger Grenier, The [...]

Q: Can I wipe the smoothie off your mouth, honey?
A: That’s okay, I can just clean it off with my tongue.

The Berkeley Parents Network is a mammoth online community of fellow travellers, kvetchers, generous direction-givers, cranky back seat drivers, kibitzers, kindly saviors, passionate idealists, well-informed pragmatists, and diggers out of the mud. Pretty much like this town, only the parental, wired slice of it.
Officially, they’re “a grass-roots, volunteer-run organization of more than 17,000 parents [...]

Special cousins double-team the lil’ monkey with hello kisses, Berkeley, CA.
What’s a special cousin, you might ask? Here, find out!

As seen on the tot lot playground.
The other day, at our neighborhood tot lot, a dad was pushing his toddlerish child in the swing next to me and the lil’ monkey, who, per usual, was heading into her second hour in the saddle, showing no signs of fatigue, though her lower extremities must surely have [...]

The world is so full of a number of things,

I’m sure we should all be

as happy as kings.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
O, I was going to write about how we’re in the weeds here, as they say in the restaurant business. And with a performing artist in the [...]