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I noticed several things about what this year looks like versus other years. My posts on this blog have been cut in half as I started my other writings on race and parenting. And both have suffered from my indulgence on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Since the Times-Picayune quit publishing a daily, I’ve taken to getting my news off FB – I figure if something happened, I’ll hear it there unless I’m getting an…
It’s been quite the week starting with returning after midnight on Sunday night to Tuesday’s latke extravaganza (24 dozen gluten free and vegan latkes fried and eaten) and menorah lighting to Wednesday’s kindergarten presentation complete with latkes, candle making, and dancing the hora, to Saturday’s homecoming celebration honoring the four year anniversary of the first time I laid eyes on my son to his friend’s birthday at the Monkey Room to a playdate uptown. I…
I pulled out all the wigs, bought a few stocking caps from the second hand store (including one that looks like a chandelier) and got the boots out, and the sweaters hung all for the 85 degrees it has been here in New Orleans. Humid days with barely a Gulf South breeze blowing, and you’d think we would know what to do with ourselves but considering there was frost on the ground just short of…
I was trying to explain to Tin that his world is expanding as we flew to San Francisco to go to a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. Tin does not do well with greetings and new people and there could be an underlying reason for that as he was shuffled around as an infant and perhaps he “greets” people smiling at him and trying to introduce themselves with the trepidation it deserves. But as we were…
During Passover, the youngest child asks, why is this night different than other nights? But this holiday season all of us are asking why is Hanukkah falling on Thanksgiving creating Thanksgivukkah. The answer my friend is so complicated it makes my head burn but the short answer is: The quirk of Thanksgivukkah is that the Hebrew calendar, which follows the sun and the moon, and the Gregorian calendar, where Thanksgiving sits on the fourth Thursday…
The confluence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah along with the arrival of cold and damp weather as well as all of this happening at the same time as my friend’s son’s bar mitzvah is enough to make anyone discombobulated. As I approach the holidays or rather as the holidays encroach on me, I’m taking stock of how things are at this very moment. I have not had a glass of wine or any alcohol for three…
A 14-year-old and I were talking about boys and it was an interesting conversation. She was explaining to me that boys are weird. And of course, I gave that knowing nod in allegiance with our girl-ness. But then I offered her another explanation and that is think about the boy/girl dynamic from their point of view. I had thought about this earlier when Tin had been watching Toy Story for the first time and Woody…
I have a voice in my head or voices shall I say. They tell me things. For instance, no matter how ahead of the game I remain in my work, these voices tell me it is not enough. No matter how clean my house is, it could always use more. No matter what I’ve done to keep myself in shape, healthy, and fit, my voice tells me that it’s not good enough. These are the…
I’ve spent the last seven days in the trenches of a head cold almost-flu-like disease that Tin had caught at school and suffered one minute of a sniffly nose from and then passed to me in which it became the most infectious disease of the year. I told a friend of mine in California who is a life coach about my subsequent laryngitis and she said, “Laryngitis is when the words are blocked in your…
I went last night to a friend’s fundraiser for girls in Ghana who are unable to go to school. This is part of a long trajectory she has taken in the form of raising money to help women in Ghana. The fundraiser was billed as a Nina Simone evening as Simone worked in clubs to pay for her own classical piano lessons without telling her mother, so with the same fierce determination my friend is…