Blowing & Drifting

I’ve been a parent for almost eight years now, but tonight was the first time I’ve ever carried a sleeping kid in from the car. Genevieve fell asleep on a five-minute drive home from a friend’s house, and stayed asleep through the closing of the garage door, through the unbuckling of the safety-seat straps, through [...]

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Wednesday night, Shannon read from her new book to a bookstore full of friends. As Shannon wrote on her own blog, the reading went very, very well: she read several funny and poignant excerpts, the audience liked those excerpts, the Q&A period included lots of interesting exchanges, and – yes – the bookstore shifted some [...]

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I’d be remiss in being the husband of a famous author if I didn’t point out that Shannon is going to be reading from her new book (The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual: How to Have a Wondrous Life Amidst Kids and Chaos) at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 15, at Monkey See Monkey Read in [...]

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Some five year olds are composing operas or dribbling basketballs ambidextrously or mastering a third language or playing Django Reinhardt on the guitar. My five year old, on the other hand, is playing with authorial convention and narrative structure (and giving the old heave ho to the bourgeois constraints of punctuation).

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Vivi bounced out of bed this morning (6:01!) and recounted this dream: I saw two little girls carve a circle in the snow. Then the circle howled like a whale and said, “Errrrrrrrrica!” Then a little thing popped out from behind a snowbank and yelled, “Now the monuments!” She added, “I have no idea what [...]

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I’m not much for great clothes (except maybe shoes) or fine food and drink (except maybe pizza and beer), but I do like bags – backpacks, shoulder bags, fanny waist packs, and so forth. Over the last few years, my collection had grown steadily, so in January I resolved to cut back. I gave away [...]

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Today I read an incredible essay by Meghan Daum in The Believer – “Haterade.” Equal parts autobiography and social commentary, the article analyzes hater culture on the internet – horrible comment boards on news websites or blogs, vitriolic email criticisms to authors, and so forth. Maybe I’m naive, but I was shocked by some of [...]

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All right, friends. This blog has been awfully quiet for a while now, but I’m going to break the silence with another post on Shannon’s book. As you know if you’ve recently read this blog or her own blog, you know that her book – The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual – was published last month. [...]

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I am ridiculously lucky to be able to take a lot of time off this holiday season, including all of the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Before Christmas, Shannon and I decided to make the most of this time by doing fun stuff with the girls each day. Early this afternoon, we headed over [...]

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Over our lives together, Shannon and I have enjoyed some everyday accomplishments – buying houses, having kids – and some less-ordinary ones – earning doctorates. Yesterday was a day for a very un-ordinary accomplishment: the publication of Shannon’s first book. This is the culmination of a lifelong dream and a lot of hard work. It’s [...]

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True to tradition, Julia is making Christmas presents for the rest of us. She started making me a book – How to Be a Good Daddy! – but then abandoned it. This is a shame, given that the first page is GENIUS and because I would love to read the other chapters, especially number 6, [...]

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As the girls get bigger, sledding becomes easier and more fun. Already this winter, we’ve twice made the short drive to a relatively big and steep hill near Julia’s school – a hill they found too scary even last winter. They’ve loved it both times this winter, which I find exciting. And I’ve also been [...]

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Here is a partial list of make-believe “games” that my daughters play, and what explanation of each that I can offer: Kitchen (cooking and serving food in the play kitchen) House (being a family) Old Fashioned (being the Ingalls family, or another pioneer family) Rich (being a rich family) Poor (being a poor family) Mrs. [...]

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Vivi woves lerdplay. She and I are the only people in the house who don’t think toying with words is pun-ishment. Her specialty, though, is coining and using nonsense words, the latest and perhaps greatest of which is “baba,” as in Baba? Beebee baba. This muffin is so baba! Daddy! I’m baba to see you! [...]

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Genevieve: “Know what my favorite population is?” Me: “Population? Uh, no.” G: “Seventeen thousand.” Julia: “Daddy, did you know that if you’re a human, you have thousands of ancestors who were cavemen?” Me: “Sure. You do, too.” J: “What? That’s crazy! I wonder if they looked like me…”

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