• Best Thing Ever,  Childhood Memories,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz,  Something That Could Change Your Life

    It’s A Very Brady Birthday

    November 6, 2014

    It’s my birthday today, and over the past couple of days I’ve put some thought into what I might want to write about this year…and came up completely empty. This is my eighth birthday blog post, and I feel like I’ve covered all of the angles already. I mean, how much can a person really write about her own birthday? Then a friend, Erica, who I will now call “the Amazingly Wonderful and Hugely Tremendous Erica” whenever her name crosses my lips to infinity and beyond, did something really nice last night and unknowingly gave me the perfect gift. Make that two gifts; she gave me a gift AND the…

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  • My Friends Have Mad Skillz,  Something That Could Change Your Life,  Spreading the Bloggie Love

    NaBloPoMo: Here We Are Again.

    November 1, 2014

    Hello November first. This is the day on which there are two kinds of bloggers: 1. I’m doin’ it!! and 2. No. Way. You are all insane. It seems like there’s no gray area when it comes to National Blog Posting Month, and I’m fine with that. Really, no matter where you stand on the issue of blogging every single day during the month of November, you can’t deny that the event is a great unifier. I THINK I have done November’s NaBloPoMo every year (all the way through) since I started blogging in 2007, but I’m not sure and I don’t want to go back and look. It doesn’t…

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  • My Friends Have Mad Skillz,  Reflections on Parenting

    It’s Okay To Be Okay.

    August 22, 2014

    The other day I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time when we crossed paths in the parking lot of our local big box store. I remembered that she had just dropped her second child (her daughter) off at college for her freshman year, officially joining the Empty Nester Club. In asking her how everything went, I wasn’t surprised to hear that on the long drive home she had both happy moments and tearful moments. That’s pretty typical. Overall though, she’s fine. I was glad to hear it. She told me that her daughter mentioned that her friends were asking if she (my friend) was “going…

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  • Amazing People,  Blessings,  Friends,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz

    So Glad She Was Born.

    June 4, 2014

    It’s Momo’s birthday today!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOMO! (More on that later!) As I skimmed through the thousands of assorted pictures I have stored in my computer (aaaand backed up, thankyouverrrrymuch) to find a good one of the two of us, I reflected on our friendship of more than six years, which in internet time is, like, FOREVER, and I came to some realizations, too. Realization #1: When choosing from all the pictures ever taken of the two of us, I will almost always fall back on the one that was taken in the summer of 2009 at the bar across the street from the Sears Tower during the epic three-dollar…

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  • Blessings,  Friends,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz,  Pretty Pictures,  Travels

    BlogHer Food: I Want To Go Back To There.

    May 27, 2014

    It hardly seems possible that BlogHer Food 2014 in Miami was nearly two weeks ago. Time flies when you’re having fun! Truth be told, I wish I could step into a time machine and go back to do it all over again. Don’t get me wrong: it was HARD WORK. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: the amount of work involved in putting on these conferences doesn’t seem possible when you consider the size of the team that’s doing it all. (I also submit that everyone who attends a major event like this should have to produce one, just once, so they can see what goes into…

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  • Amazing People,  Best Thing Ever,  Blessings,  Friends,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz

    A Gift For Emily.

    May 14, 2014

    It’s the end of an era. Tonight I took my last Zumba class for the foreseeable future and possibly forever. My instructor friend, Emily, is moving to Australia in a couple of weeks and tonight was our last hurrah. I’ve been taking Emily’s classes for more than three and a half years now. When I started, she had only been teaching for about nine months and classes were held at a local dance studio three times each week, and I was there for most of those. After a few months, she moved to the YMCA and taught three or four classes each week, and I followed. A couple of years…

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  • Amazing People,  Best Thing Ever,  Favorite Things,  Fun in Chicago,  I've Got Mad Skillz,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz,  Pretty Pictures

    Listen To Your Mother Chicago 2014: Wow, That Was Quick!

    May 12, 2014

    It’s been a full week (eight days, actually!) since the show, and I can’t even believe THAT, let alone the fact that the 2014 season, our THIRD season in Chicago, flew by faster than a…what is one of those cute southern sayings? These last two weeks, in fact, have flown by faster than a…never mind. I can’t think of anything. QUICKLY. They went by QUICKLY. In the last two weeks Tracey and I drove to Milwaukee to see that show, we put on our own show, we drove to Valparaiso to see the NWIndiana show, and yesterday I drove up to Madison, where it all began five years ago, to…

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  • Blessings,  Friends,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz

    It Takes A Village To Lift All Those Boats

    January 31, 2014

    Yesterday I drove to the north side of the city for a lunch meeting with my “City Half”, Margaret. I am always energized after I meet Margaret for lunch, and I don’t think that’s the Gino’s East deep dish pizza that has become our lunch of choice doing the talking. In fact, the effect that so much fat and carbs in one meal would have on the average person technically means that I should be feeling extremely sluggish and lazy after indulging, so the fact that I feel ready to set the world on fire really speaks to the power of our not-often-enough ninety-minute meet-ups. Anyway. I call our lunches…

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  • Friends,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz

    Grand Theft Auto

    December 3, 2013

    See this guy? That’s my friend Fred, otherwise known all over the internet as Mocha Dad. (Totally famous, you guys.) Mocha Dad and I go way back. Well, in internet years, anyway. Even though he lives in Texas, I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with him on multiple occasions: at a couple of conferences, over breakfast when he was in Chicago for business a while back, and most recently, last month in Detroit at an immersion event with OnStar and a bunch of other awesome bloggers. While in Detroit, Mocha Dad and I did the following things: 1. Spent more time than the average driver/passenger combo in one of…

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  • Best Thing Ever,  Friends,  My Friends Have Mad Skillz,  Pretty Pictures,  Spreading the Bloggie Love

    Monkey See, Monkey Draw

    November 18, 2013

    Every now and then, magic happens on Twitter. It’s more rare these days because just about everyone (myself included) is tweeting out lots of links and not always engaging as much as they (I) used to, but still, magic can happen. I have found that the best Twitter interactions for me are the ones that either stem from or lead to something that happens IRL (in real life). With that in mind, some examples of my favorite Twitter moments, in no particular order, are as follows: 1. The roadtrip known as Momo’s Meat Wagon played out in 2009 over Twitter with so many of our friends chiming in and having…

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