Happy 4th of July Weekend! I hope most of you are out enjoying some sunshine and BBQ, so I’ll keep this one short. As I type this, we’re en route to Vermont, but I’ll be back next week for the all of the NSale craziness.
Since I have nothing helpful or interesting to say -- truth be told, it’s been a...
We dropped Raines off last weekend for an Outward Bound 8-day expedition that includes hiking, rock climbing and camping every night in the wilds. And by "the wilds" I obviously mean bugs, bears, snakes, falling off cliffs, potential loss of limb, serial killers...
Yeah, those first few nights were really rough. For me. Not yet sure how Raines fared, but...
Happy Juneteenth Day!
Truth be told, I literally just Googled “is it OK to say happy Juneteenth” and found that “Happy Juneteenth Day” is -- according to many sources -- the appropriate phrase (although others disagree). As I’ve been falling out of love with July 4th these last few years -- a day dedicated to celebrating the founding of a...
We're officially on summer vacation. The last day of school was Friday, and it felt a bit...anticlimactic. Both boys have been on a hybrid schedule, so only half of their class was even there on the last day.
Everybody is just done.
Raines is going into 8th grade next year, which means high school is just around the corner. That...
I’ve been avoiding tricky topics. Not for lack of caring but -- quite frankly -- I’m overwhelmed. Every morning as I scroll through the news, reading about the latest legislative clap-backs from red states…I find myself more and more depressed. From the bizarre loosening of gun laws (no background checks? Um…why?) despite decades of evidence showing how well sensible gun...
Philly has been rainy and cold, so we've spent the majority of our long weekend curled up inside. Normally I like to take full advantage of long weekends (a getaway? a party? the shore?) and even Mike has fully expected me to be going bonkers by now but...
I'm exhausted. Philly's vaccination rates are up and case positivity is down,...
Do your kids have Greenlight cards? They basically function like debit cards for kids, but the parents can choose how much money the kids can access. So if you have a kid who's prone to losing his card (Raines), or a kid who doesn’t pay attention to how much he spends (Raines) you can keep that balance fairly low.
However, it’s...
Raines got his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Thursday. The FDA had just cleared use of the vaccine for kids age 12 and up, and my friends and I were all scrambling to make appointments. Which, quite frankly, we didn't need. Philly's vaccine response has been stellar, so we were able to easily walk up and get...
Scotti called yesterday, from Target. It was the first time her littlest, Ozzie James, had ever been to Target. I mean OK: the kid likely went as a baby. But once Ozzie was old enough to be aware of his surroundings, the pandemic hit and BOOM.
No Target.
Scotti and her husband have been very cautious thus far. They were in a pod with...
We’re trying something new. On Mondays and Tuesdays, Mike is on kid duty. Which basically means that I'm the one who gets to close myself in the bedroom upstairs and he’s the one working downstairs with the kids on Zoom school. This setup is…mostly working. My kids’ laser targeting systems are set firmly to ‘mom’, but now on Monday and...