Everyone in my family has a super power—not like Superman, who can fly around and throw cars—more like Batman, who has less traditional powers, like popularizing eccentric outfits with vestigial capes. My super power is that I can type really fast. Sometimes I do it in front of students, and they inevitably tell me I’m […]
Write Away: To keep or not to keep
We have an issue with throwing things away in our family. Mostly, that we don’t want to. Andy believes everything is useful. From empty butter tubs to pencils that are too short, he has uses for everything. He’s not a hoarder. He really does have a purpose for all of these items that the world […]
Write Away: Common Core Kindergarten
Last year, my son Colin started kindergarten. For the first couple of weeks, I was dying to hear what he’d learned. Was he writing novels? Translating a bit of French? Maybe splitting a couple of atoms—while wearing safety goggles—the teacher would make sure he wore his safety goggles, wouldn’t she? I am lucky that Colin […]
Write Away: Adventures in landscaping
Our house is a fixer upper that I used to think would one day be fixed up. Silly, naïve me. When we first bought it 10 years ago, my father tried to inspire me by speaking nostalgically about the backbreaking labor he and Mom had put into houses they’d owned. He recalled with pride the […]
Write Away: Say yes to the dress…and yes and yes and yes
My 3-year-old daughter is currently in love with Rapunzel. She has a Rapunzel dress that she wears every day. Seriously—every day. Bonus: it’s full of glitter, so yay! Our house is always sparkly! The dress too fragile to be washed, and I thought it would bother me that she wears the same unwashed outfit every […]
Write Away: Rats! And other four-letter words
Two years ago, my family and I visited my parents in Reno for Christmas, and when we returned, our kitchen was flooded. Apparently rats had snuck into the house in our absence and chewed through the water line to the fridge– the water line I’d been wanting installed for seven years and that was finally […]
Write Away: Obsessions of a 3-year-old
My 3-year-old daughter is obsessed with “Paw Patrol.” It’s a Canadian show about a boy named Ryder who directs about 10 pups. Whenever there is a problem in town, the citizens call Ryder and his dogs to save them. They do this in lieu of funding a fire or police department. “Paw Patrol” was invented […]
Write Away: To grandmother’s house we go
MY PARENTS LIVE IN RENO, so several times a year we pile in the car, two adults, two kids and a dog, to go over the hills and past the neon lights to grandmother’s house. Sometimes we have uneventful drives filled with “I spy” and kiddie naps. Those are the best kind. Sometimes my daughter, […]
Write Away: Andy’s philosophies on stalking and ex-boyfriends
THE OTHER DAY, I was looking for a Father’s Day present for Andy, and I was browsing through websites that sell nerdy shirts. We both like nerdy shirts, a fact that I think speaks volumes about him but that says nothing at all about me. I ran across one with a statistics joke on it […]
Write Away: Un-Linked and un-Liked
I WAS CHECKING OUT MY HUSBAND’S LINKEDIN PAGE, and I noticed he’d been endorsed for both English and finite element analysis. This was clearly a mistake because he teaches math and computers, and I’m the resident English expert in the family. I’m also not sure what finite element analysis is, but I’ve never heard him […]