24/7

I've never been a big fan of the word "mommy" employed by anyone who is not referring to their own maternal unit. I don't use the word to describe myself in adult conversation. I skeeve when others do it. I think it's because, in my own eyes, that's not what I am. In my own voice, that's not me. I have a child, yes. I am her mother. I feed her and clean her and do the dishes while she wraps her arms around my knees and says "hug, hug!" It's in The Boss's big, blue eyes that I am "mommy." Today at lunchtime she was eating egg and bread. "Mommy!" she said, fried white hanging out of her mouth. "Mommy!" She looked to the window. She looked at the dog. Her eyes darted from side to side as if she was searching for someone. "Mommy?" "I'm right here!" I laughed. I pointed to myself with an emphatic finger to the chest. "I'm your mommy!" She started to giggle along with me as she...

The Partner and I have finally made the decision to relocate. After three years in our first place, we're ready to set up shop further downstate in a town built on the importance of education and community. As my Internet browser history begins to overflow with Realtor.com and Greatschools.net searches, I'm slowly getting a better picture of what that town will look like. Still, the image is fuzzy. One thing I know for sure is that the implications of any moving decision we make won't be clear until we get there. The mistake we made in buying our first home was basing the purchase totally on the house itself. We loved it then and we love it now. It has over 200 years of character seeping out of every crevice in its stone foundation. The rooms are spacious, if you don't count the kitchen. It's insulated with history. Open the doors, though, and there's highway as far as the eye can see. Our own street is a state road running parallel to the Interstate, and it...

I'm sitting here waiting for my dog to yak up slightly less than a pound of M&Ms after I administered 2 tbsps of hydrogen peroxide and 2 tablespoons of milk to bring on the barf. It seems that Roxie is no longer content with eating the garbage and has taken to climbing onto table- and countertops to find the most illicit of booty. I had been gone for three hours when I came home to find the M&M sack laying empty on the floor. I ran into the living room, fully expecting to find the family pet in the throes of a seizure on her dog bed. She looked up at me with one eye as I stepped through the threshold. There was nothing out of the sheepish ordinary in her gaze. I breathed a temporary sigh of of relief before I got on the phone with the vet. One sticky note filled with directions later, I was on my way to the store to buy hydrogen peroxide to induce vomiting. After Roxie lapped up her first dosage of the nasty stuff mixed with milk, she proceeded to run around the yard in h...

Today I arrived what I thought was twenty minutes late to the first class of a writing course I'm taking at an area art museum. Turns out I was actually one week, 6 days, 23 hours and 40 minutes early. I only wish I had taken the time to look a little more closely at the schedule before I lined up a babysitter and got in the car for the first leg of the hour-long round trip. Admittedly, I have never had a close relationship with the clock or the calendar. It is a mutual disrespect, to be sure. Time doesn't wait for me and I don't bother trying to catch up. It works out okay in day-to-day living (barring incidents like this), but in the grander scheme, we all know who will win the race. Time is a cosmic middle finger waggling in perpetuity just beyond my line of sight. It was subtle before I had my baby, but now I feel its presence almost as palpably as I do the literal digits being thrust in my direction every time I make an innocent merging mistake on the Interstate. Time ...

Straight from the same region of the state that helped tear apart the fabric of the US Constitution with the seam ripper of eminent domain , Eastern Connecticut can now boast another court case that is shocking in its implications for the average American. Julie Amero , a substitute teacher, was convicted on four counts of risk of injury to a minor for exposing middle school students to pornography on a school computer. The conviction came after she testified that the sexually explicit material on her computer popped up as a result of adware , not from any prurient searches of her own. She faces up to forty years in prison. The Internet is still a largely lawless frontier. The downside of its freedom is the prevalance of vigilante justice in the guise of the American court system. Lynch mobs are everywhere, kicking the bucket out from under noose-necked citizens and leaving them to strangle in the wind. Few people in a position to determine the fate of any given defendant truly under...

I was pulling out of the supermarket today when I paused in the parking lot to let two people traverse the cross walk. An elderly woman and the man I imagined to be her mentally disabled son plodded toward the store front, their pace naturally matched. He was large, she was small; they were both bent-shouldered over a shopping cart. One of the man's beefy hands joined his mother's on the cart while the other rested on her back. As I waited, I saw a lifetime of care make its slow way across the asphalt. Though it's hard to tell from a simple scene played out in front of Stop & Shop, I couldn't help but think that the woman's steps were buoyed by a constant source of comfort not available to parents whose children grow up and move out. Maybe she had spent all her years as a grown woman caring for this son with special needs. Maybe, with ninety years rendering her own needs more specialized, the tables were not so much turning as being pushed closer together. But t...

In the company of several bloggers I read every day and others whose opinions I look forward to discovering, I have climbed on board the new vehicle of Kristen and Julie known as the The Parent Bloggers Network . Based on the premise that bloggers are " savvy, intelligent consumers with the ability to influence the online community at large ," the PBN will pick up products and services being marketed by entrepreneurs and PR professionals and will drop them off with us bloggers, who will in turn do our best to provide informative reviews. These reviews will be posted on our own blogs and will be linked to in compilation on PBN. Hopefully it won't be too overt, this occasional infiltration of advertisement into the daily comings and goings of The Boss, The Partner and me. I often write about products and services as they relate to my family ( phones , the need for marital counseling , Cadillacs ) but the difference with these PBN reviews is that I will have acquired ...