My son attends a small Catholic college. I work at a large public university. In many ways the enterprise is very different. But in other ways, fundamentally the same. In the orientation materials, his school provided a Prayer for Parents: Almighty and all-loving God, you have given me this wonderful and treasured child who is […]
Family
Three Little Kittens (Despicable Me)
The bedtime routine for the harried parent, courtesy of Despicable Me. How is it that I identify both with Agnes (“pretty please?”) and with Gru (“Did you brush your teeth? Let me smell….You did NOT.”)? 1:40: “This is literature?!” 2:30: “Though while you sleep, we are apart, your mommy loves you with all her heart.” […]
Magic Coffee Table
This is really funny. It’s so funny that my sons even understood why it’s funny.
Happy Birthday, Cyber Lil!
Tomorrow would have been my grandmother’s 101st birthday. I recently heard our new dean tell her origin story as a first generation college student. I am not. In fact, the grandmother I celebrate today, Lillian Bunin, was a math major at Hunter College, which makes me a third generation STEM nerd. In addition to sharing […]
Leaving Your Kid at College
I was asked to give some remarks to the incoming freshmen and their parents this week. Here’s what I said. (I changed the name of my son’s friend to protect her well-meaning mother). Good morning and welcome. On behalf of the faculty, I welcome all of you to our Leeds family. One of the reasons […]
Scenes from the Swimming Pool Bleachers
My sons were summer league swimmers, and my younger son also swam on his high school team. For fifteen years, I mostly shirked my swim-mom duties and let swim-dad own those responsibilities. You spend three to eight hours in the bleachers to see your child swim for a few minutes. That calculation might sound unmotherly […]
Playing Lemur
A rogue lemur has been in the local news. It’s rare to see lemurs in the news in Colorado. Not so in North Carolina, where we lived when our boys were little. Durham, North Carolina is home to the Duke Lemur Center. The world’s most famous lemur lived there. That rockstar lemur was Zoboomafoo, the […]
Van College
We have a 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan. It has a cassette player. Like some of us around here, it is showing its age. It did get a new battery this year, and we figured that would be the van’s last battery. Still, one day this week, the van wouldn’t start. The van feels like a […]
Silly Happy
This is a picture of me and my sister. I’m on the left. I am VERY happy. Maybe you can tell from the picture, or maybe it just looks like a garden-variety happy kid picture. Not garden-variety at all. Finger puppets, people. I’m not so sure about my sister. She doesn’t seem unhappy to me, […]
