• Family Fun,  Reflections on Parenting

    Hakuna Matata Means “No Worries As Long As You Get Those Old VHS Tapes Transferred To Digital Files”.

    Jim and I have hours and hours (and hours) (and hours) of VHS tape recordings of the boys from the time D was born until J was about four. That’s about when our old video camera, which was about the size of the ones they use for reporters in the field these days, conked out. We never replaced it. The first two or three tapes are full of coverage that consists only of newborn D just laying there while I talk to him: really exciting stuff. The last time we had a VCR and I was able to watch, about five years ago, I found it extremely obnoxious and annoying…

  • Amazing People,  Confessions,  I've Got Mad Skillz,  My Kid Has Mad Skillz,  Reflections on Parenting

    Something Wonderful

    Something wonderful is happening around here. (Indulge me while I brag for a moment. Thank you.) Although it seems like yesterday that we were in the midst of his college search, D is finishing his coursework a semester early. He’ll be done with classes in less than a month! It’s a pretty spectacular accomplishment: he achieved it via a combination of some AP testing for college credit, testing into (and then passing) an advanced German course which earned him the credit for that class plus the year he skipped, and mostly due to his staying the course with his major and getting awesome grades (Dean’s List all the way!). Did…

  • Reflections on Parenting,  We Are An Awesome Couple

    Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, Life Goes On…

    We’re just about ten days into our new Empty Nester status and I can report that things are going very well. Life goes on, you know? Just as I thought, the transition itself and the actual act of dropping J off at college were the toughest parts. The adjusting to his daily absence in the house has been easier. I mean, I have done only four loads of laundry in ten days, and I probably could’ve gotten away with doing only three loads if Jim and I weren’t exercisers, needing our workout clothes laundered so we could throw them back in the rotation. Also, a couple of days ago I…

  • Confessions,  Reflections on Parenting

    Actively Waiting For College…

    The raw emotions I was experiencing last week seem to have gone away (for now?) as we creep closer to Wednesday, which is “Take J to College Day”. We’ve moved into a different phase of college move-in prep, too: the “actively waiting” phase. Just like his older brother (who also chose a college in Wisconsin, where school doesn’t begin until after Labor Day) did, he watched all of his friends head off to school ahead of him. Now we are just shuffling around, trying to keep ourselves busy until it’s his turn. We all know that this is happening, that it is supposed to happen, and we wouldn’t want it…

  • Amazing People,  Confessions,  My Kid Has Mad Skillz,  Reflections on Parenting

    Son Set

    I really didn’t want to write about this–the emotion surrounding sending my kid off to college–since I wrote about it at length three years ago when I did it the first time, but I can’t help it. The fact is, I’m doing it again and I have returned to that state of mind. Under the circumstances, I feel an intense need for a cathartic release–again–especially because this time involves the added element of becoming an empty nester. Though I still carry a smile on my face and am truly, extremely happy, I have this inner shrieking and squirming that ebbs and flows underneath it all. The act of putting these…

  • Confessions,  My Kid Has Mad Skillz,  Reflections on Parenting

    Foiled again.

    We have a long history in our house of food labeling. I’m not talking about anything having to do with nutrition facts: I mean literally labeling food. As in, “J’s cereal”. The two people mostly likely to label their food are Jim and J, because they like many of the same things, meaning whenever I buy said items they don’t last long and one always blames the other for finishing it off. (You can read a great story–with pictures–about it in this old VINTAGE Suburban Scrawl post!) It’s been a while since the last kerfuffle over food, and I put it out of the front of my brain for the…

  • Amazing People,  My Kid Has Mad Skillz,  Reflections on Parenting

    Moving On.

    Lest you think that the only transition we’re dealing with around here is J’s high school graduation and impending departure for college this fall, turning Jim and me into Empty Nesters, I figured I’d tell you about how D just moved into an off-campus house with three roommates–he isn’t coming home this summer because he has an internship–and will graduate this December, one semester early. I can say today that everything on both fronts is going very well, but we’ve had some rocky patches over the past couple of months which prompted me to send an email to D: “I just wanted to email you and apologize for being a…

  • I'm Apparently Old.,  Random Thoughts,  Reflections on Parenting

    The Other Side

    I had just turned eighteen the month before Jim and I were married. When I moved to Norfolk, Virginia–where he was stationed for sea duty–we rented a townhouse off of the Naval base in a military family-only subdivision. That neighborhood proved to be something wonderful for me, a much-younger-than-average new bride whose husband would be going out to sea for weeks and months at a time. In the first four years we were married, he was gone for more than two-and-a-half years. It was okay, though. Even though it was difficult to be apart at the time (this was before cell phones and internet!), my being left at home alone…

  • Amazing People,  I've Got Mad Skillz,  My Kids Have Mad Skillz,  Reflections on Parenting

    Adulthood Looms

    It’s thick in the air around here. I can feel it looming. As busy as I have been lately, I have noticed. What’s fleeting around here? Childhood. I have been doing my best to pay extra attention to my boys, to close the laptop when they are talking to me, to listen fully, to answer them thoughtfully. When they want to play a game with me, I drop everything I’m doing if at all possible and I play. When J wants to show me his latest DJ video, I watch. Same with D and those random YouTube videos that college students seem to spend hours sharing and laughing about. (He…

  • Family Fun,  I'm Apparently Old.,  My Kid Has Mad Skillz,  Reflections on Parenting

    Weirdest Halloween Ever.

    Halloween came and went (as it tends to do), and for the first time in twenty years we didn’t have a kid in costume. Not only that, but Halloween was almost–dare I say it?–exactly like any other day. It was bizarre to say the least. In fact, when J left for school, he said goodbye to me like he always does and walked out before I even remembered that it was Halloween at all. My decorations, as I’ve written about before, were pitiful. I didn’t even have time to take pictures of Roxie in her 2012 costume because I took a TDM class in the morning and then worked on…