This evening the lil’ monkey took umbrage at being interrupted to come to dinner.  She had been spelling her name out over and over, along with sundry other words and non-words.
Baba: Why in the Sam Hill did you just whack Mama?!
Lil’ Monkey: Because I wanted to find some harassing way to get her to let [...]

Isn’t it nice to know a lot?
…and a little bit… not.
 
[Above lyrics from "I Know Things Now," Little Red's soliloquy from Into the Woods, recently produced for her local youth music theater co. by the beloved, and still all a-swirl in the head of our music-mad girlie.  
You can imagine the thrill when a chum [...]

  
I don’t come to my sister’s cabin nearly as often as I could.  Not nearly as often as I should.  It’s beautiful; it’s above 5,000 feet elevation; it abuts a state park and is just a few miles from a beautiful national forest.  She has always extended me and mine an open invitation.  Conifers hundreds [...]

We’re cuddled under a make-shift tent on the couch, while her brother naps. I’ve draped a knit blanket overhead, and it filters the sunlight into tiny granules that dance whenever we move the blanket. We are listening to the original cast recording Sondheim’s Into the Woods, a masterful retelling of fairy tales, a story about [...]

Stop the presses our daughter’s a frickin’ genius! (Bet you never heard that out of a proud parent’s mouth.)
And we aren’t the only ones freaking out about it. I think she is, too. Just got a call from the preschool that she is on a hunger fast, and won’t leave the [...]

Lil’ monkey’s first Steam Train ride. Can you tell?
Our Baba’s day this year was nothing if not a sign of parental arrival. Half of the events of the day were exactly the stuff of my dreams, pre-parenthood: kids bringing me a breakfast tray in bed; my making pancakes for ‘em; us going for [...]

Okay, so my son is not a Hindu god. I mean, there are so many other multi-limbed deities to choose from. Where’s the elephant trunk, for one? Also, he’s kind of the Placer in My Path of Obstacles, rather than the Remover thereof (one of Ganesha’s attributes). Except I did read [...]

Sister looms large. Pace setter, lead dog. “This way!” “Like this!”
Not for ever, but surely for now.
Not such a bad gig, so long as it lasts. For either of them.
Or so it seems.