KJ

Wyatt was super excited. “Let’s carve penguins!” I was all, dude, that’s going to be so messy. But frankly the pumpkins were messy enough. As usual, my eyes were bigger than my carving stomach. We had a TON of pumpkins to carve. Fortunately Sam turned out to enjoy gutting them nearly as much as he did carving the faces. And like so many things, pumpkin carving is easier but still not precisely idyllic when your youngest kid is five. They […]

218 pages. 66,000 words, give or take a few. A book. About that year, that really bad year, when Rory was new and we both thought our lives had caroomed (no, really, spell-check, caroomed, I don’t know what you mean by caromed but it isn’t what I mean, not at all) to a very bad place, but only I get to write a book about it. Yet. I just finished the draft. It’s a first draft. With a lot of […]

Dinner Originally uploaded by kjda Let it never be said that Rory’s KFC meal did not include vegetables.

I really thought I’d be asleep by now. I got into bed at 10:15. And then there were just a FEW emails to answer. And then I thought, just half an hour’s book revision. Just half an hour, no more. But it was going kind of well. And then there were just a couple more emails. And Facebook. And a message. And now, this. And a new blog post by a favorite blogger to read (that would be Jess, on […]

I did some serious gunning for parent of the year tonight. Tonight was the school’s annual “wine and cheese” party. Babysitting was provided by the middle school students, and after a full day of work and two hours “coaching” Sam’s lego league team, I grabbed Rory and Wyatt from the actual babysitter and prepared to transfer them to the middle school team. (Lily came separately, with a friend’s mom.) I promised them a bouncy house. There was none. I delivered […]

I’m tired. I’ve been tired all day–sleepy tired, as in, shut-your-eyes-for-just-one-minute-huh? It’s that kind of day. Chilly, dreary, a little rainy. And I just got my mac id to work with iCloud. And I’m sitting here, looking at it. at the little thing that says “move your MobileMe to iCloud” and thinking, damn. It’s all working. Right now, email, iCal–all nicely sync’d up just the way I want them. ANd I JUST know if I move, there will be growing […]

So this past weekend, I was driving the car, listening to the Moth story hour on NHPR and feeling lucky. I love the Moth (true stories told live). Hell, I have a story I want to tell the Moth. (The Pringle Fairy.) But mostly, I love that what I expected to be a chore—a half-hour’s drive to a sleepover for Lily—was going to be a pleasure. Double amputee, athlete, actress and over-achiever Aimee Mullins was telling a fantastic story, about […]

This weekend, our family of six will load up, head to the medical center, and wait in line for our flu shots. It will be at least our sixth annual such journey, and a funny thing has happened along the way: the kids have embraced the whole thing. Not just because they don’t want to get the flu. I’m obviously a believer in the shot, even understanding its limitations. The vaccine’s effectiveness depends on the match between the influenza viruses […]

Gonna push the world away for a minute, pretend I don’t live in it… I was on the periphery of a tragedy today, one that wasn’t mine in any way, so I won’t go into details. I did what little I could for the people closer to it, and thought about how communities are when sudden grief strikes: first things fall apart, as people find their day-to-day routine interrupted, and there is a flurry of regrouping, and then they pull […]

Where’s the Phone? Originally uploaded by kjda I’ve figured out why we can never find a phone when it rings. (there’s even one hung up in the background.) I may have yours. KJ Dell’Antonia sent from my iPhone

I really don’t think we talk enough about snot. That’s by way of a warning that if you don’t actually WANT to talk about snot, I highly recommend you head over to Motherlode (http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/), where I am not writing about snot, and I would love to see you (I am particularly proud of today’s post: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/putting-down-the-ipad-so-my-kids-can-see-me-read/ ). But this is about snot. After a week and a half of no exercise, thanks to the kind of sinus infection that causes […]

Sam is grumpy, and I know why. He had the day off school, and he really didn’t do anything. Which is partly down to him: he didn’t try to do anything, didn’t look for a friend or set out to build a LavaMaster 5000 or anything like that, and partly down to me. He is ten, after all, much of the really fun stuff he gets to comes from me planning really fun stuff, and today, I didn’t. I was […]

For today, I offer you two topics: School lunches: Fix ’em from the top down, or the bottom up? And: Middle School locker bling: a harmless outshoot of too much igloo decorating on Club Penguin, or consumerism run amuck?

This always happens. I go to the doctor, knowing, as I did today, that I have a sinus infection. This one is a whopper, a horrible, painful, miserable, ear-popper. Moving my head is agony. Blowing my nose, worse, and of course I only have to blow my nose oh, every forty-seven seconds. Plus, you really don’t want to have a sinus infection if you’re going to change altitude by 600 feet or so a couple times a day, and here, […]

I Want Teee! Originally uploaded by kjda It’s very important to be able to ask for what you want. It’s also very important to listen. When we got to the pizza place, Rory had to go potty. She was jumping up and down, and I told her to run, but– "What do you want to drink?" "I wan’ tee." "Really? Tea?" "I wan’ TEEEE!" "Ok! Fine! Go!" I ordered–pizza all ’round, three fountain drinks, and one bottled drink–tea, but I […]

Tonight was “open school night” or “back to school” night or something like that at Sam and Lily’s school. No kids, just parents in the classroom. Don’t tell Lily, but because we’ve been second grade parents before, we defaulted more towards Sam’s class, although Rob went to her teacher’s main presentation, and I rolled in for the tail end and to ask a key question. In Sam’s class, though, I focused. I listened to the lovely, lovely teacher. I copied […]

I love Harry Potter. I love Harry Potter so much that I am awaiting entrance to Pottermore for both Sam and me. I love it so much that I pre-ordered Book Two from Amazon UK, back when Scholastic didn’t realize you could do that. I was Harry Potter for Halloween before more than a handful of kids knew who that was. But I am VERY FRUSTRATED with Harry Potter just now. (And no, not because we don’t have our “Welcome” […]

Sam the fantastic. Sam the wonderful. Sam the kid so easy, relatively speaking, that I do not HAVE to blog about him. Sam, the child who was the topic of this blog long, long ago. so long that all of the posts have been horribly corrupted my spam and need to be somehow rescued. Sam, who would really appreciate the above if he only knew what I’d written about him. What are you DOING, KJ? I’m trying to game Wordle. […]

Look! It’s my plastic wrap! I love my plastic wrap. My mother gave it to me for my birthday. In, um, 2010. I finally get to use it, because we finally used up our old plastic wrap. We don’t use much plastic wrap, especially if it doesn’t really stick, and I have, as I invariably do, punched it open wrong and it doesn’t want to cut. So it took us more than a year to go through the box and […]

I didn’t actually buy new slippers for anyone. Rory and Wyatt need slippers for school, and I must have bought the ones we found in a closet today on sale at the end of the year last year. Then there was a larger pair for Lily that I vaguely remember buying in the distant past, on the theory that she would grow into them eventually, which she has. The problem, of course, is that Rory’s new slippers look like this: […]

Tonight Rory wanted to write me a note. To surprise me. I heard her, at the table, drafting carefully away. “I … Love … You…” “How you write ‘because I’m your Mommy?” I interpreted that she wanted me to write “because YOU’RE my Mommy,” and so I did, on a scrap of the holiday pad she was using, for her to copy. A few minutes she appeared at my elbow. “I have something for you! Surprise!” And she handed me […]

Who doesn’t like to be pursued and desirable? No one! Pay attention to me! Chase me! Want me! I just wish my children wouldn’t take it so literally. Wyatt has a friend over–actually, it would be more accurate to say that both Wyatt and Rory have a friend over. A very good friend. Always a success. Rory wants him to chase her. When he does chase her, she will run and shriek NO! NO! She will dodge. She may even […]

Greetings from the Tunbridge World’s Fair Originally uploaded by kjda The Tunbridge World’s Fair is old school. There were pigs, cows, horses, oxen…And rides, of the kind that come by truck and move on on Monday with the carnival. And BBQ, run by a bunch of guys in leather who look like the Sons of Anarchy gone straight. We are sticky with maple cotton candy, maple ice cream, maple candy and a maple donut with maple icing. It’s been a […]

This morning Lily looked straight at Rob, and lied. Not about anything big. Rob said, “Did you do breakfast hokey?” (One of her jobs this week, running the hokey over the rug tiles under the bar where they eat breakfast.) And she said, “yes.” And she hadn’t. I knew she hadn’t. I knew it by the half smile, and by the fact that I’d been in the kitchen all morning. Rob said, “really?” And Lily said “yes,” again. “She’s lying,” […]

It really bothers my children to see me sit on the sofa. This may be because for many years, I did not have any opportunity to sit down. I kept us so busy that we were rarely home, in part because I was a little afraid to be alone with all of these kids, who might want me to play Candyland. I hate Candyland. And then when we were home, it was all very active. We were baking! We were […]

On this rainy Labor Day, books were read, games were played, video games were played, Lego models were built and various and sundry this and thats and whatnots occurred, and suddenly it was 5:30 and no plan had been made for dinner (which, of course, really means that I hadn’t thought about dinner.) There were boxes of fondue in the fridge, and already sliced fondue bread in the freezer (from a party that took place last November, but it’s the […]

Corn maze! 85 degrees in the corn maze, but: corn maze! Rory is alone in the picture because the last time we went to this farm, I apologized to one of the people who works here after overhearing him tell her not to touch something, and he came over to me, and I said I’m really very sorry, again, and added that if he had one thing on the whole farm that she shouldn’t touch and he hid it under […]

Lily loves a project. I suppose there are a couple ways in which being so much like me won’t work totally to her disadvantage (although I still think she inherited all of my very worst characteristics), and maybe this is one of them. She had an idea about marshmallow popsicles. Her vision was, I think, that we would melt marshmallow and reshape it into, well, different shapes. I’m not sure how she planned to hold the shapes together, but somehow […]

Rory has a playdate tomorrow. And Sam and Lily have school. That means I get Wyatt all to myself for a couple of hours. I’m planning on some legos, some coffee, and some snuggling. I’ve been realizing lately just how little solid attention I lavish on Rory or Wyatt. They’re such a pair! They play together nearly all the time, and even when it’s not entirely amicable play (I really wish Sam had not shown them how to shoot a […]

Two weeks ago or so, I posted about how we (I) cleaned an organized our hall/entry/mudroom to get ready for school starting. This past Sunday, with all of us trapped at home staying out of hurricane range, I called Rob into the playroom/family room. How, I asked, do you think the sofa would look turned sideways? Well, he said, let’s try it. Yes! Sam shouted. I demurred. If we moved the sofa we had to move the train table. Move […]

One last summer picnic Originally uploaded by kjda Sigh. KJ Dell’Antonia sent from my iPhone —

If you don’t try, you don’t get it wrong. If you don’t try to answer the phone, you will never accidentally hang up on your daddy. I felt like I got things wrong today, too. Tactless in a couple of instances, inattentive in others. Not present. Bothered by the echoes of flooding and loss that are all over, here (we’re right on the Connecticut river and unscathed but surrounded). And bothered, as I think I always am, by a beautiful, […]

My babysitter’s daughter has been going online occasionally with the three younger kids to play Moshi Monsters. I’ve staunchly refused to let them do this at home, largely because I do not want to play Moshi Monsters, and I suspected that was what it would be. Plus, I’ve had my doubts about this entire genre, which seems to promote shopping and decorating as the only fun activities available to our virtual and real selves. But I’ve always secretly thought–who wouldn’t […]

Admitted Originally uploaded by kjda I love Lily’s new shoes so much, I checked to see if they come in my size. KJ Dell’Antonia sent from my iPhone —

Captive Originally uploaded by kjda Food, water and shelter. At least Lily, Rory and their two friends are complying with the Geneva Convention. KJ Dell’Antonia sent from my iPhone —