Category Archives: Introductions

Introductions of people – including myself – who you read about in this blog.

Water Bugs

Posted on by May 29, 2011

Sorry there wasn’t a blog entry yesterday. I’ve been swimming with Sam.  I know I blogged a couple of days ago that he was almost swimming.  Since then, I swear I’ve spent at least twelve of the last twenty four hours in the water with that kid. OK, not true. But it was at least six. He is totally swimming. Not just “almost there”, but really there, totally there, and completely comfortable with himself in the pool.

He orders me to stand further and further back as he leaps from the edge, bobbing easily to the surface with his face still submerged.… Read the rest

Swimming Lessons

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Sam is learning to swim, and he’s almost there. Well, I say almost, when really, the kid’s there. He’s there. The teacher can let go of him for several strokes and he’ll stay afloat. He doesn’t shy away in terror any longer from her classes, like he did just a few weeks ago, and he even gets excited about jumping in the water and chasing down the toys she throws for him.  His skills have increased dramatically since he started, and his attitude has become correspondingly positive.  He differs from me there. Both my kids do. My attitude is hard to modify, and I struggle to give something I dislike a “second chance”, even if I continue doing it.… Read the rest

World War III

Posted on by February 25, 2020

This morning, Scott went out to put the lid on the sandbox and came back in with three signs from the tree house.

These stem from a combination of Caroline’s current Calvin and Hobbes addiction and a recent playdate at our house. Caroline’s been reading the series where Calvin makes a boys only club to keep out Susie. But that’s not  Caroline’s handwriting on the signs. So we know she had help with the implementation here. Our friend Heather has two daughters and a son, and they came over the other evening. This brought a sufficient number of boys and girls together to launch an all out gender war.… Read the rest

Treasure Island

Posted on by May 21, 2011

   Well I made it. While I did not reach page fifty, I got through the end of chapter eight and thereby completed the material I had assigned myself for the week. Naturally, I got behind in my grading, and I came across potential blog topics just begging to be written daily. But I got my characters out of their conversation without bogging the plot down too much more, and ended with a chapter from the killer’s perspective. Whee! I can resume my blogging now, as The Bitch has been appeased. (Should I be at all concerned that her urgency turned out to stem almost entirely from desire to get to that “killer’s perspective” chapter?… Read the rest

Pain yes, gain no

Posted on by February 25, 2020

So I’ve been doing this workout thing, going to the gym six days a week and doing some other form of exercise on the seventh, even if it’s just walking. I hate walking. At the gym, I hit the cardio and weight machines like I know what I’m doing, and I take a class pretty much every weekday. I’ve joined a women’s wellness group where we encourage each other in our goals, and where we don’t have to set our sights on a specific level of weight loss. Personally, I’m measuring my progress in clothing sizes, and I refuse to step on a scale, but I seem to be making progress.… Read the rest

Treasure Chest

Posted on by May 16, 2011

“I eawned my tweasuwe chest!”

This is how Sam wakes us up nearly every morning. It’s a huge improvement over “I SEE THE SUN. IT IS MOWNING TIME!” Although he was eighteen months old before he got there, once Sam started sleeping through the night, he was pretty good about it. For a year. Then, he discovered that his big boy bed was not the same kind of prison as his crib, that he could, in fact, bounce up and come find me at will. All. Night. Long. We tried several methods of stopping this, from the gentle “stand-at-the-door-and-wordlessly-return-him-to-bed” (he once jumped back up a hundred times, thought the whole thing was a game, and completely wore us down) to the slightly less polite lock-the-door-from-our-side (he just screamed –once for an hour), to the completely draconian unplugging-his-nightlight-routine (that one worked, but had to repeat it every single night, and we hated it.)… Read the rest

Dawn

Posted on by May 11, 2011

Good day ladies and gentlemen. I’m on my soapbox this morning, and I’d appreciate your vocal support. I have a friend named Dawn – she’s my step-sister-in-law, in fact – who is getting flak for being an outspoken straight ally for same-sex marriage. She deserves support from every corner of the globe, and I’m asking my friends here to chime in on Facebook and my blog comments on her behalf.

OK, let me back up, because this gets complicated. First, let me explain who this person even is. My husband’s parents divorced some years back, and his Dad has since remarried.… Read the rest

Da Mac

Posted on by May 10, 2011

I’ve had some hellaciously bad office jobs. The kind that make The Office and Dilbert alike pale by comparison.  I’m not talking about my present employment situation, for the record, but about past workplaces. Employers I had to pick myself up and drive to see five days a week, just about every week. Currently, I teach college English online. It’s a work from home job, and that “work from home” factor outweighs a lot of potential negatives. Thus, not only am I not talking about my present job, I won’t be talking about it until or unless I move on to something else.… Read the rest

Flight of the Preschooler

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Sam is the kind of child for whom clichés like “look before you leap” mean exactly nothing. He is very much a leap-then-look kind of boy. I’ve got some ideas about where this tendency came from. Scott and I were both pretty cautious kids. But my Dad has these reel-to-reel tapes, extremely early home videos, that show him wearing a sheet for a cape while he leaps off of a picnic table. There’s no sound on this  footage, but I’m pretty sure the boy in those pictures is yelling “Superman!”.  Which is just one of the things Sam likes to shout before he pitches himself forward into the unknown.… Read the rest

The Programmable Child

Posted on by February 25, 2020

We call Caroline our programmable child. It’s one of the more amusing aspects of her Asperger’s Syndrome, for her as well as everyone else.  Given the right mindset or circumstances, she can be made to repeat a message almost verbatim. It’s fun to set this in motion and watch the reactions. Mostly, I program her with information for her teachers and appropriate responses to social situations. But sometimes, I’ll stick a phrase in her head and wait to see when I hear it back again. And, on rare occasions, and always by accident, others will program her with messages for us, not knowing the power they have unleashed.… Read the rest