When we first moved to Dallas, we made some colorful friends who were actors at Scarborough Renaissance Festival- King Henry and a Contessa, to be exact. During October, the Scarborough Fair grounds become a spooky maze of haunted houses, Scary-oke, expensive food vendors, and a throng of tweens looking to snuggle up to their crush …
Tuesday, 7/11/2023, Nashville Airport 2:08 pm I wasn’t anxious about this until we popped open the back of my sister’s van. It’s not the actual flying that concerns me. The Baby is almost chronically un-anxious, as in, he is not anxious even when he probably should be, like when he tries to drown himself by …
January 23, 2023 Dear Mr. Sedaris, My son, {The Baby}, came screeching into the world via an emergency c-section at 26 weeks- a two-pound potato whose vital organs needed lots of assistance to keep him alive. I met him for the first time four months later, when his birthmother invited me to visit the Neonatal …
I remember talking about atheism and agnosticism in my world religions class in high school. In my little conservative corner of West Texas, we didn’t spend much time talking about the godless heathens, but I remember the description of Clockmaker god, who designed the world, perfectly calibrated all of it’s gears and dials, and then …
Let me preface the beginning of this series with a few things: I’m gonna take weekends off for my “writing every day” goal in November. I can do this because I’m a grown ass woman and I want to. I want to explicitly acknowledge that I have AMAZING parents who did the best with what …
Last August, my little family met my parents in Estes Park. We have done this trip every couple of years since I was a kid. We stay in cabins and hike and explore and breathe in the fresh mountain air. COVID made things a little different, but we were just happy to escape Dallas for …
Well, today the Wise family said hello to a new bed and goodbye to two of The Baby’s teeth. A few months ago, we started the laborious process of getting a SleepSafe bed approved through The Baby’s insurance because his crib had become unsafe. He was able to stand up in it and when he …
The Baby turned five this week. It’s crazy. All of those five years tend to blur together. After all, time flies when you’re drowning in medical chaos (just kidding…kind of). On the night of his birthday, our dinner conversation centered around remembering all of his firsts- the first time he sat up, the first solid …
(You can listen to an audio version of this post here.) I went to David’s Bridal today to purchase a bridesmaid’s dress for a friend’s wedding next summer. She had a dress already picked out in the system so they pulled her profile up and I followed the very nice saleslady to the racks laden …
(I realize this is very lengthy so I have strategically placed pictures of smiling animals throughout the piece so that you can mark your place if you need to take a break and come back to it. At my sister’s suggestion, I’ve also made an audio version of this blog. You can download/stream it by …
I grew up in West Texas- land of wide-open spaces, sky high teen pregnancy rates, and a colorblind racial ideology that masks racism instead of confronting it. In colorblind ideology, it is impolite to talk about someone’s race. I remember hearing a story about a friend who was trying to tell her son which store …
I just got back from San Francisco. I went to (hides face) a Christian conference. I found myself hesitant to tell people that it was a Christian conference because of the connotations of that. My sense is that many Christian conferences are lame attempts at pep rallies for God, the adult version of church camp, …
“What was I thinking?” I thought as I stared forlornly into the mirror. I should have known better than to impulsively stop at the hair salon directly adjacent to the Tom Thumb, still clutching my bag of avocados. I was hoping for a cute haircut before I left on my 10th anniversary weekend trip. Instead, …
I was a mere 21 years old when I got married. My uncle officiated our wedding. Before the wedding, my then-fiancee, now-husband, Alex, and I drove down to Corpus to do some premarital counseling sessions and stay with my aunt and uncle. After one of these sessions, Alex and I got ready to leave and …
I went to a vigil in Balch Springs for Jordan Edwards last week. It was everything you would want a vigil to be- beautiful and sad and moving and comforting. Like most, I was horrified by Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice’s deaths. I have been deeply affected before by deaths caused by police brutality, but …
I’m coming clean. I got my dog at a puppy mill. But I need you to give me a break because she was born in 2008, which is basically before the internet and I didn’t know about puppy mills. Alex and I were 6 months into marriage, moving our married life to a new city … Continue reading
Language is a funny thing. One of the things that I love best about teaching English is learning how to make connections through language. During our clothing unit, I had a student who consistently mispronounced the word suit as ‘sweet’. She did it 100 times and I finally threatened her with the tiny leather sandal … Continue reading
Life has felt oppressively the same lately. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone’s doing comparatively well. No one is seizing tens of times a day and losing critical developmental skills like sand in a sand timer or telling their sweet, first-year 5th-grade teacher to “Suck my mother fucking dick”. So…comparatively well. My friend Rachel said she … Continue reading
Much to the distaste of my family, I’ve been re-watching the show Hoarders lately. If you’ve never had the pleasure, let me explain to you the American institution that is Hoarders. It’s a TV show that follows one or two people that have hoarding disorder. Usually, these are older people who have been hoarding for … Continue reading
I am a recovering black thumb. It’s not that I don’t care about plants. I care about them desperately- maybe too much. I’m a textbook overwaterer. When my plants start looking wimpy, I think, “Oh, they just need some water” and then they quickly die of root rot. Last year, my friend Lori brought me … Continue reading
We took a last summer hoorah to Galveston beach a few weeks ago. The big boys and Alex took the car and went deep sea fishing. No worries. Our AirBnB had a community pool that was far, far away from my immortal enemy Beach Sand. I wrangled the Baby into his swimsuit, lugged him downstairs, … Continue reading
(BIG OLD ASTERISK RIGHT HERE AT THE BEGINNING: My proximity to disability is almost negligible. I parent a child with disabilities. I do not have any disabilities myself. I only know what I can observe and what happens to me within earshot of The Baby. My hope in sharing these stories is not that you … Continue reading
Alex and I took some time off in early May to go to Oregon. Neither of us had ever been there and we were excited to do some hiking and napping, sans children. What follows is a mish-mash of thoughts from the trip- the good bits. *** Day 1: It’s good to be small Airports … Continue reading
Does anyone else remember the Great Bagged Milk Fiasco of the early 90s? Surely, you do. If you were a part of it, you remember. Someone in the State Board of Education decided to thumb their nose at the waxed cardboard industry and copy our friendly neighbors to the North by providing bags of milk … Continue reading
The first time I ever had my eyebrows plucked was the night before my wedding. My bridesmaids basically sat on me while one of them used a pair of tweezers to individually yank hairs out of my face while my skin (and my mouth) screamed. I am #notafan of tweezing. After that, I did get … Continue reading
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