I spent most of last week with one child and then another sleeping on me, breathing hot sick-kid breath into the skin of my neck. I stroked fevered heads, and kissed flushed cheeks. I hummed disjointed melodies as they slept and I rocked – hour after hour cradling my congested sleepers and listening to them breathe. My back and arms screamed in protest, and I gently rearranged us, careful that they were not disturbed. When I was young and pregnant... Read more
In case the title wasn’t warning enough, I’m going to use the word dumba** in this post because that’s the way I talk in real life. If you’re offended by words like dumba**, this probably isn’t the day for you. I’ll see you tomorrow. I wish that I could blame this morning on lack of sleep, or sick children, or a wild weekend in Cabo…I can’t. This just is what it was. ********************************************** Thank goodness I checked the calendar on... Read more
Have you heard? Amazing blogger, and cute baby maker extraordinaire, Simcha Fisher is having another baby! I’m thrilled, because people who have cute babies should have more cute babies. (We need more sassy girls like Irene and Benny, they just make the world a better place!) While little Fish #10 doesn’t yet have a name, her mom is already training her in the ways of the family business! If we lived anywhere near the Fisher clan, I’d be throwing them... Read more
Earlier this evening, I mentioned to my 96-year-old grandmother that I haven’t been sleeping very well. “The problem,” she told me, “is that you don’t know how to relax. You should just have a nip of whiskey before bed and you’ll sleep just fine.” “How much whiskey?” I asked her. “Well…it’s different for every person…so what you should do is get out one of your drinking glasses and just start pouring the whiskey into it. When you say to yourself,... Read more
Ever since Ella joined the basketball team in the fall, we’ve had an ongoing discussion about her teammates’ disabilities and abortion. It’s a topic she keeps returning to as she struggles to make sense of an ugly reality. The day that she saw the abortion rate for Down Syndrome was around 90%, she asked “What’s the abortion rate for spina bifida?” We looked it up. The reports vary between 64 and nearly 100%. “What does that mean?” She asked with... Read more
Our youngest has been having a tough time of it lately. With everyone else constantly on the go for the past two weeks, she’s been feeling a little left out as the only person who always stayed at home. This morning as Ella and I set off for basketball practice, she melted down sobbing “I just want to go….” Her daddy scooped her up, and took her to the local coffee shop for hot chocolate and some one-on-one time. Half... Read more
In many ways, 2014 was an incredibly blessed year. In other way it was the year medical practices and bureaucracies made me want to beat my head through a wall. The 31st was a beat-my-head-through-the-wall kind of day. The second-hand wheelchair that Ella’s currently using is functional, but it doesn’t fit her quite right. Chairs are supposed to fit like prosthetics, and that’s difficult to do second-hand. So for the past two months, we’ve been working on the paperwork to... Read more
This year started for us with an unintended pregnancy (about which I told the truth) followed by a miscarriage, followed by a mystery illness and the horrors of the American medical system. I’ve been tempted many times in this past week to label the year as simply heinous and move on from there, but that wouldn’t even begin to tell the true story of this year. It would be wrong of me to focus only on the negative and pretend... Read more
In the midst of the Christmas festivities in Rome yesterday, a topless protester from the lunatic fringe radical feminist group FEMEN squeezed through the crowd and stole the baby Jesus from the Nativity Scene, before making a run for it. She didn’t get very far. It looks less like a political protest than it does a fraternity prank gone wrong. I have this mental image of them sitting around, slightly sloshed, going “I triple-dog dare you to go snatch the... Read more
Merry Christmas from our demon-eyed family to yours. Read more
Shoved to Them
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In