Beck

The Best Of A Bad Year
By Beck
It is THE LAST DAY! I am so excited!
And that excitement has made me feel unexpectedly generous towards the old year. (…)

Busy
By Beck
It is very, very early in the morning. I am up and writing because I have so much planned for today that this - this time of day I normally use for sleeping - is the only time I have to write. (…)

Worried Birds
By Beck
It was a snow day yesterday, which meant that my oldest child was home from school and that I declared a house-wide break from all schoolwork and THIS meant that I spent all day listening to my kids fight and by the end of the day I was making mental lists of other careers I might possibly consider. (…)

All is calm, all is well
By Beck
It's suddenly snowy and my house is covered in a crazy, Clark Griswald amount of Christmas lights and we play Christmas music all day long, of course, and there is one Christmas song that makes me have to retreat and cry EVERY time I hear it. (…)

Merry And Bright
The first Sunday of Advent is THIS WEEKEND! Well, that was fast.
I love everything about the Christmas season - I love singing carols and wrapping presents and drinking eggnog (sometimes. (…)

Science
By Beck
"This year has been awful!" I said to my husband last night - mid-asthma attack - and he laughed in a sad sort of way.
We've had money problems. (…)

Things I'd Never Even Heard Of
By Beck
So yesterday we took the kids to get their flu shots. There wasn't a lot of debate about it - two of our three kids are in a high-risk group for flu complications AND they get everything. (…)

Footsteps
By Beck

I've been writing about Halloween every day recently - or more accurately, I've been attempting to write tongue-in-check horror posts about children's books. (…)

Trick Or Treat
By Beck
"I want to be a jellyfish for Halloween," The Baby announced, which only gave me a moment's pause.
Okay! I said. Be a jellyfish. That would be awesome. (…)

The First Day of October
By Beck
Autumn was at its peak last weekend, and we drove down a country road surrounded by 100 year old farmsteads and red orange yellow leaves on trees and Mennonite boys in straw hats chasing sheep down hills turning gold with the cold fall sweeping in and taking all of the leaves away. (…)

Reading
By Beck
My oldest child loves to read, which is pretty pleasing to me. I've always been bookish and one of the things that I wanted for my kids was for them to love reading, too. (…)

Changes
By Beck
All of my life, I'd been aware of women who I thought were good mothers, and kept mental notes of how they did things - I liked the way one mother celebrated all of the small holidays, liked the way another always did baking and crafts with her kids, liked the way my own mom would talk to us with puppets when we were surly teenagers (Imagine: you are a sullen, black turtleneck-clad 15 year old, and all of a sudden a PUPPET sticks its head around the door of your bedroom and asks, in a Grover-voice, "Why so glooooomy, Becky?"). (…)

Rated R For Repeat AND For Really Horrible
By Beck
This is a re-print of an old post. I'm scattered this week, but I hope to be back to my normal chatty self next week. And did I ever get over the trauma that I wrote about in this post? (…)

The Luckiest
By Beck
I wrote a guest post for 5 Minutes for Special Needs which is posted today, talking about my feelings about The Baby's Celiac Disease. (…)

Childhood Kitchens
By Beck
My grandma - the one who is now, my kids will tell you, in Heaven - was a magically good cook. (…)

Getting Ready For Winter
By Beck
My youngest child was given a chipmunk stuffed animal for Christmas this year, one of Santa's more inspired stocking stuffers. (…)

Teddy Bear
By Beck
When I wrote last week's melancholy post, I had NO IDEA that the very next day would be Babyfest 09: Emergency Time! (…)

Pictures
By Beck
The Boy got rushed to the hospital from his doctor's office yesterday afternoon, which was pretty exciting. (…)

What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor
By Beck
It is - despite the chilly mid-April temperatures and the monsoon rains - summer and the local young people are enjoying their freedom. (…)