#7 I’m listening to the Pogues right now. I’ve been on a Pogues kick lately, and I finally made my own Pogues playlist on YouTube after several frustrating attempts to listen to other people’s disorganized ones. Mine is perfect. It’s very short, only ten songs, but they’re my favorite ten, and they flow seamlessly from high-spirited to slightly melancholy to downright depressing. As it should be. I seriously wonder about these people who can actually listen to “Whiskey You’re the... Read more

I woke up this morning with a swollen, painful foot and some lingering calf-cramps that I was prepared to ignore until my facebook friends intervened and ordered convinced me to go see the doctor, just in case there was a nasty clot lingering in my veins, waiting for its chance to make a break for my lungs. Unbelievably, I found a babysitter in about ten minutes flat and took off to the doctor sans minions for the first time since... Read more

I haven’t blogged in forever! And I have a totally legitimate excuse. One of my friends came to stay with me for ten whole glorious days, in an attempt to ease my distress at losing my husband to Sin City till mid-August, and we had a fantastic time. We watched Firefly, went to the beach, ate at Five Guys (yum, yum, yummy), took the kids to the Imaginarium, sat around and read summer lit, and had countless conversations about the... Read more

If you’re a parent, you know what I’m talking about. That moment when you think you catch a whiff of something but you aren’t really sure, and you’re faced with one of two options: either unbutton layers of baby clothing in order to peer gingerly into the recesses of the diaper, hoping against hope that you don’t accidentally stick your finger in poop in the process, or pick the kid up and bury your nose in Junior’s bum for a... Read more

It’s kind of become a habit with me to write these wildly optimistic posts about how things are going so well in spite of my typically dismal expectations, only to have things crash and burn the next day. It’s like my super-positive posts are harbingers of doom, like saying, “nothing can go wrong”. As soon as you say it (or in my case, publish it), everything goes wrong. Liam had a fever yesterday morning, so we had to cancel our... Read more

I was expecting this week to be awful. I was gearing up for a week of depression, apathy, and chocolate. I was prepared with multiple seasons of Doctor Who, the crappiest pop-lit I could find at Costco, extra butter and sugar for baking emergencies, and a whole drawer of clean yoga pants and t-shirts. I mentally gave myself permission to become a useless blob of post-vacation husband-missing unshowered blah on the couch for a whole week. But then a funny... Read more

This is why I haven’t blogged in a week:   Also, in between my numerous modeling engagements, my parents rented a house on Marco Island and treated us to a beach vacation before the Ogre took off to teach his summer course in Vegas. The vacation was divine, we’re all properly sunburned and exhausted, the Ogre is safely ensconced in Sin City and my parents are going back to Texas today. Be back later for real bloggery!     Read more

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. -Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address Read more

*I know I said I hate blog posts with videos in them, and then turned around and gave you a post full of them this morning, but this video is really worth watching. And not just because I happen to know and love this woman to pieces. She’s got a great story to tell! “I didn’t know anything about the Catholic Church, I didn’t know anything about the Vatican, I just understood that where I was was good.” This video... Read more

My parents are coming tomorrow, and I have tons of cleaning to do, that damned dress to finish, and our whole family to get to the doctor since we’ve all been in various stages of coughing/hacking/dying/whining/eschewing melodrama all weekend. But instead I’m going to join Betty Beguiles‘ love song link-up. I figured there would be an excess of Ella Fitzgerald over there, so I decided to bring the awesome. I’m nothing if not a world-class procrastinator. (Oh, and if you... Read more