Today I had a wonderful discussion with a new friend about whether or not we’re ruining our kids. We lamented the tension between being a nurturing, involved mom and being an overprotective nutcase. Do young kids need to navigate a bigger, scarier world solo to gain true self-confidence? During our conversation, I said, “One thing we...Continue Reading
There is a good reason why our family is at the beach. It’s the same reason Nate is naked. (And, yes the reason he is playing some sort of celebratory air guitar.). We are celebrating fall on the Gulf Coast. October is (secretly) the best time to go to the beach. The tourists from Italy,...Continue Reading
When I was growing up in Galveston during the ’70s and ’80s, we had one shopping mall. Galvez Mall was the perfect size for our small-ish city. There were the usual ’80s staples (Limited, Corn Dog Factory, arcade, movie theater), but also a couple fancy, locally-owned department stores and more than one t-shirt shack. Really,...Continue Reading
Life has been fierce around here this week. If you’re my Facebook friend, you saw the ferocious picture I posted of the kids on Sunday morning in Galveston. We headed down to the beach for the night, but we had to leave early Sunday morning to make it back to Houston for M to catch...Continue Reading
The best relationships, the ones that stand the test of time, are those that flexible enough to change. Like I’m sure you’re aware, relationships based on one thing (our kids are in play group together; we live next door to each other), die when that season passes. Bear with me here as I (clumsily) extend...Continue Reading
BEFORE: The rusty, dated bathroom lighting and wallpaper My strange relationship with exercise (by this I mean how I went to the gym for two years to work on my computer instead of working out) nicely illustrates how I’m afraid to suffer. I went to the gym’s café every day and watched hundreds of people...Continue Reading
Here’s what we learned, house redos are an expensive, time-consuming PROCESS. If we had remembered what a rigamarole renovating a house is, we would have never signed up to do it. Because of HGTV, we SHOULD HAVE KNOWN what a pounding, expensive headache we were signing up for. But we refused to hear the HGTV...Continue Reading
When we bought Best of Times Beach House, it needed a lot of love. It had “good bones” (realtor-speak for “good luck finding the bones under all its scars and cellulite.”). But the ugly scars of bad paint and the cellulite of dated wiring and rusty fixtures didn’t daunt us as much as they probably...Continue Reading
Happy Birthday, M…. Turning thirty-nine is dangerous territory. The temptation is to become obsessed with your next birthday, to make this year all about what you can squeeze in before forty. To treat thirty-nine as an evaluation point, a “have I accomplished enough to be successful?” observation deck for your life. Anyone who believes in...Continue Reading
