• Las Chicas

    Time for a girl update. A big event has not gotten its proper blog treatment: M.’s “graduation” from kindergarten. I use the quotation marks because A) kindergarten graduations are kind of silly to begin with and B) she’s not really done with kindergarten. Let’s get the event out of the way first. Her class put on a fine performance for…

  • Banned

    The school year is almost over, but it’s never too late for the teachers to ban items from the classroom. M.’s class has been overrun by the scourge of our times: Silly Bandz. For the non-parents, or parents of younger kids, Silly Bandz are basically colored rubber bands that have been molded to the shape of kid friendly objects: pets,…

  • Baby Steps

    I’m pleased to report that M. has improved her soccer game over the past few weeks. She’s still no Mia Hamm, but at least she’s doing some positive things during games. Tuesday night she even had an important milestone. Last weekend she mastered the concept of getting back on defense. Unlike her earlier attempts, she was racing back towards her…

  • M’s First Soccer Game

    M.’s first soccer game was Saturday. As with her first practice, it went about as well as we could have hoped. She wasn’t the fastest player on the team, nor the best, but that fit our expectations. After trailing the action for awhile, she finally got in the mix and even managed to gain possession a few times. It was…

  • Another Milestone And More Great Moments In Parenting

    M. had her first soccer practice Wednesday night. It went about as we expected. She was a little tentative, but active. Her team of eight is split evenly between boys and girls. A few of the boys and one of the girls have some skills. M. will get comfortable and get more into it in time. But at least she…

  • Awkward Parenting Moments

    There was a situation I ran into a few times before I became a parent that I never really knew how to handle. It always involved a child who had an older sibling who was either learning to read, or had just mastered reading. I would say to the younger child, “Let’s read a book,” and that child would soberly…

  • Dear Diary

    Periodically we buy the girls spiral notebooks to use however they see fit. Most of the time they turn into sources for paper when they want to draw and color. But, as M. learns to read and write, hers has taken on a new use: her first diary. While she was insistent at first that we were not to read…

  • Las Chicas

    Sometimes I forget that I’ve posted things about the kids to Facebook and not shared here as well. Thus, your obligatory, periodic update on the girls. M. is secretly Canadian.* Or at least she talks like a Canuck. We have no idea why, but she says the words house, mouse, out, mouth, etc. as if she’s from Ontario. We don’t…

  • Slump Buster

    I’ll admit it: I’ve hit one of my periodic blogging funks. I’ve found it difficult to write over the past week. I think most of that can be attributed to my sleep cycles getting all jacked up.* I’ll only say that I’ve been spoiling our youngest child at nap and bedtimes, and as a result I’m getting plenty of sleep,…

  • The End

    Well, the girls and I survived three days without their mother. S. arrived home from her trip to visit her new nephew this afternoon and found a house that was remarkably clean,* three daughters that were still alive and happy to see her, and a slightly tired husband. (In my opinion.) And suddenly it’s the final day of the year. And…