Two nights ago I attended a mandatory 2 hour Parent’s Driver’s Education class so Ling can someday get her license.  She was out with a friend, Scott was out at work, which meant that the younger 2 had to fend for themselves for dinner. When I came home and found them and their dinnerware in front of the TV (seems like these days of April vacation at home that’s the default), I noticed that there was something green in their... Read more

I’m joining the Patheos posts on the Mommy wars, including Rebecca Cusey’s Beyond the Mommy-Wars Bumper Sticker, “Can you cut your trip short and come home?” came the woeful voice over the phone on the first day of my 3rd business trip this spring. “No, I can’t,” I said, “I’m sorry.” “But I NEED you,” said the child. “You’ve got to come home and discipline (sibling’s name)!” Enter a gazillion opportunities to feel guilty with even more judgments. Tina Fey writes in Bossy... Read more

“Wow, here we go, walking our daughter to Driver’s Ed,” I said to Scott as we walked with Ling down the street. “Just like kindergarten,” he said. “Another rite of passage. . . sniff,” “Um, except I’m big enough to walk away from you guys and have nothing to do with you,” said our 5’9 1/2″ daughter who did NOT think this was a moment for sentimentality. And I guess it wasn’t.  Scott was in his running clothes about to... Read more

What does it mean that at the most scary point of The Hunger Games, my son left my side to go sit next to his father? I’m sure you, like most of America, have already seen the movie (It’s made almost $303 million at this point).   We finally went last Saturday on Holy Easter because there was not one movie-sized slot over in the 3 weeks before then.  There was much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth when I said:... Read more

I knew Scott was going to wash my feet when he proposed because his good friend had done the same.  So I brought along 3 bars of LL Bean soap, the first presents Scott ever gave me (for Christmas when we weren’t even dating—I had that horrible “I didn’t get you a present because I didn’t want to presume our relationship is actually going to happen” reaction).  We washed each other’s feet with LL Bean lily-of-the-valley scented soap as a... Read more

As I wrote on “pretty good” being the new standard for me and my kids, I couldn’t help thinking “This is contextualized for my uptight, Northeast, performance addicted, grim and driven culture.”  Add the Chinese-American layer, and pretty good looks. . . pretty good. Yet for other cultures, and other peoples, pretty good might not be good enough. For example, I talked to an African American friend at church, commiserating about our middle-school boys who need both motivation and executive... Read more

A senior leader in our ministry says that he strives to be a “pretty good leader.”  Not a great one, not an excellent one, just a pretty good one. I’ve been thinking about this, because, at least in my Northeastern grim and driven town, becoming “pretty good” might be a pretty good goal.  Up here, we demand excellence in everything in everything and it’s just too much to handle.  I can feel like a failure if I’m not an excellent... Read more

“What did YOU give up for Lent?” school friends would ask in the month before Easter.  As their resident Jesus freak, I surely would have given up something big—like all food and water. “Nothing.”  I would say,   “My church doesn’t do that.” In fact, growing up in my PC-USA church, I somehow missed out on Lent.  Instead, we had “One Great Hour of Sharing” where I took home a plastic bread shaped bank in which I was supposed to put small change... Read more

On Monday, in an attempt to make lemonade out of my pre-diabetes lemons, I bought MacGourmet, a recipe/nutrition computer program.  Because of my new low carb pre-diabetic diet, I decided I needed something to help me calculate the carbs in the foods I cook.  This is what MacGourmet looks like on the screen I’ve been obsessed ever since… Day One:  Ren and I spend 3 hours making vegetarian White Vegetable Lasagne (compiling the best of 4 separate recipes) because the... Read more

In December I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic.  My doctor tends to be hyper-conservative, chasing every possible abnormality, so I chalked it up to her being over-reactive–after all I wasn’t fasting before the appointment. But then I talked to my physician brother-in-law, and he told me that these days the test measures your blood sugar over the past 3 months and doesn’t need to be a fasting measure, so it’s much more accurate.  My numbers mean I’m definitely pre-diabetic. Bummer. I’ve... Read more