I told my friend who hosts our Nantucket trip that I liken these annual trips to therapy only it is not available on demand. I just returned late Monday night from what has become my annual gal’s trip to paradise and like all trips before this one, there is a tendency to want to tie up the themes in a nice little bow afterwards. Only this year’s themes were plentiful and ranged from cancer to…
A dear friend of mine who used to be my neighbor and was almost a second mother to Tin is transitioning. She was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer a little over a year ago. Three months of chemo and the cancer returned and she opted not to do chemo again. In the midst of all this, they decided to sell their house on the bayou and move across the lake. A move they as…
I inherited a love of gardening from my grandmother, who passed it down to her daughter, my Aunt Sue, and to me and so wherever I have lived, I’ve planted a garden. It is also a response to my mother who dreamed about planting a garden but often was overwhelmed by the task. The last two days have given us a fair amount of rain that was badly needed in New Orleans. It’s been unusually…
From Pre-K to Kindergarten. From Waldorf School to Morris Jeff. From toddler to little boy. The metamorphosis continues …
Today, my big boy graduated from Pre-K and spent his last day at Waldorf. Oh Lordy – I couldn’t even talk to Ms. Heidi, his teacher, who I thought he would be with for two more years of kindergarten. I just got in the truck and balled my eyes out. So many emotions – one that my precious child was entrusted with these people for three years of his life and now we’re leaving them.…
A friend of mine just changed her job status to seasonal at Whole Foods so that she can be home with her daughter during the summer. She said her coworkers kept offering her other options instead of just out and out not working, but she said, “They don’t understand, I’m a wife and a mother first.” I understand perfectly. See, I have a five-year-old child who is growing up fast, and who needs a mother.…
I am part of a group of girls who meet to watch episodes of An African City – a sort of Sex and the City set in Ghana. Our next event is coming soon and I’m already trying to figure out what to wear since everyone else came with such glorious outfits last time. I’ve been thinking a lot about Africa, about visiting with Tin, about Senegal where his ancestors might have come from since…
So while Tatjana is out of town, I’m using her car. I actually started using her car a couple of months ago to pick up Tin when I couldn’t afford the gas to go back and forth across town to his school. So I was happy to have the car and my gas bill reduced to a quarter of what I normally spend for this week. Only Thursday, I took Tin to a playdate in…
I started taking aikido classes a month ago. I’ve worked out a trade with the sensei there and I’m writing his newsletter and able to practice there. I took about four classes and found out there was a seminar coming up and a fellow classmate convinced me to sign up for it. So I did. The sensei who was doing the seminar is from Finland – a 57-year-old woman who has done Aikido for 40…
Last year, in February, after we had moved out of the LaLa, and moved into the three-room apartment that I thought would be home for a while, a few things happened to shake up life. The first was that it was the beginning of shared custody with Tin and he caught the flu and so he ended up staying with me since he had gotten sick there. As he slept noisily in his bed, and…