The Year of the Snake

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Year of the Snake

 

Or, How The Child almost did not come to exist.

First, let me just say that, yes, I know that 2015 isn’t really the Year of the Snake. It’s the Year of the Sheep. Which doesn’t sound nearly as sassy. As a matter of fact, Chinese families everywhere have been working the calendar so that their babies’ births do not fall during the Year of the Sheep. (If you care, you can read why here, especially if you think I might be making this up.)

Well, anyway. It’s the 7th of January, and I know I really should have written this post last Wednesday, but it was New Year’s Eve and I was afraid everyone (but me and the Dude) would be out celebrating, so I posted that piece about ‘When Harry Met Sally’ instead. So sue me.

But back to me and snakes. Continue reading

Sex is like Santa

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‘Birds and Bees? Ho Ho Ho.’

Did someone spike the eggnog? Last week it was Incest. (See ‘The Incest Mug’ for details, but not just yet.) This week it’s Sex Ed. Fingers crossed everyone’s out of the house bolstering the economy, especially The Child. Because this post is about how You-Know-Who learned about You-Know-What.

The story begins innocently enough, with me walking said Child home from school. Third Grade, I believe. Which would make her about eight at the time.

So this adorable innocent girl holding my hand looks up at me through impossibly-long eyelashes and says: Continue reading

Happy Ho-Made Halloween

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‘A Simple Costume can do the trick. And get the treat.’

I blame it on The Headless Horseman. This was a Halloween costume I thought up, oh, when I was nearing the end of my trick-or-treating career. Like, when I was about 11. Appearing ‘headless’ involved poking the ends of my Mom’s yardstick through the sleeves of her ‘borrowed’ raincoat and balancing said yardstick on top of my covered-with-a-scarf head. The dangling ends of the sleeves were safety-pinned to a pair of Dad’s utility gloves, one of which was attached (somehow, the details are a bit fuzzy now) to a carved Jack-o-Lantern, so it looked like the Headless Horseman was carrying his head. I mean, if you were very young and impressionable or old and almost blind it looked like the Headless Horseman was carrying his head. But that was good enough for me.

You see, we Henrys were a family of Costume Makers. As opposed to Costume Buyers. I don’t think my parents were the type to buy, much less encase me, in a teensy infant Devil Onesie. But maybe they did, and I was just too little to know about it. If they did, Continue reading

Gone Baby Gone

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Mom Vase

‘The Nest. Is it half-empty? Or half-full?’

I think I can trace my rather non-involved mommy style back to a certain babysitting gig where I had to keep track of the kids’ poops on a chart. There were two of them (kids, that is), and a correspondingly healthy number of poops.

That, and a few other instances of dealing with what we now call ‘helicopter parenting’ put me off hovering. But I have to admit in all honesty that I was never destined to be one of those let’s-bake-a-zillion-cookies-and-then-whip-up-some-papier-mache-heads kind of moms.

The Dude (thank you!) was happy to handle Playground Duty. When the Child would say ‘Run, Mommy, run!’, I was apt to reply ‘Mommies don’t run; babysitters run’. And when well-meaning adults would exclaim Continue reading

What’s up with all the apps?

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‘Silly, Stupid, Sophomoric, and Even Dumb’

Today I sent a NY Times article to the Child (I do this kind of thing with annoying frequency.) Her reply? ‘Write a blog post about it.’ (She’s been urging me to get off my FB-trolling butt and do this Blog Thing for ages.) So, if you made it this far, you are reading the blog post. And if you’d like to go further, here is the article, subtitled ‘Surprising, Scandalous, Serious, Even Inspiring’:

‘Apps for Sharing Secrets and Gossip’

But wait! Before you leave my first ‘real’ post, let me summarize. And editorialize. The article is about some cool new apps that do all kinds of tasks that you didn’t know needed to be done. One of them, Secret, according to the Times, ‘encourages airing information or feelings that might not otherwise be shared’.

Another, Whisper, lets you let the world know Continue reading