“In case you are itching to foster….” read the text, beneath pictures of several puppies so tiny they collectively could be called a handful. “Do they need to be fostered together?” I texted back. “If not, I can take two.” Someone else on the group text emphasized my words with a HA HA HA. A couple of days later, without telling anyone, I drove to pick them up. I arrived home just after my youngest got home from school. IRead more
Posts filed in: Parenting
Toads and the Fourth and maybe a rat
There’s a toad living in a pair of sneakers I keep on the back patio. He switches from one shoe to the other, but he’s always in one of them during the day; at night, he emerges and hops around the yard. I guess he’s looking for bugs. Every day I peek to make sure he’s there. Do toads sleep? They must. Whenever I look, though, he’s just sitting there quietly, tucked into the dark cave of my shoe, hisRead more
Where I live and the terrible, no-good, very bad N-word.
Last month on Valentine’s Day, I was listening to a talk radio show about schools, guns, and the Parkland shooting. I don’t like guns. I don’t want guns in schools. But as I listened to the show, what occurred to me is this: there are invisible weapons just as dangerous as guns. I live in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Let me describe Ponte Vedra for you. It’s our ritzy little idyllic community. Our grass is literally greener than everyone else’s.Read more
The border policy of ruining children.
It took us over a year to get my youngest daughter home from Guatemala because our attorney** was trying really hard to prevent the government from enacting adoption reforms. She claimed she opposed any changes because it would harm children. Everyone in our little adoption circle believed her. Except us. We suspected she feared her money pipeline would dry up. We feared her animosity toward the government would prevent officials from approving our paperwork, and we were right. **by attorney,Read more
Just another day, or why I drink a little
Friday morning I woke up at 5 am like usual so I could make coffee before going to teach my 5:45 am boot camp class. I love coffee so much. I had not slept well because I’ve been having headaches. After class, I came home and got the kids off to school. I straightened the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher with the 14 glasses my family of five had used that morning. Then I drove to Orange Park to getRead more
A high school, Planned Parenthood, and anti-intellectualism: how students taught some grown-ups about censorship
A few years ago, some students at Ponte Vedra High School had an idea. Let’s host a beauty pageant for guys, they thought. Sort of a spoof, but just for fun. And we’ll charge people to come see it, and we’ll give the money to charity. The annual Mr. FINtastic contest was born (Go Sharks!), and it has been a smashing success. This year’s winner is PV High senior Matt Gibson, an affable guy with a mop of curly brown hair and anRead more
MLK Day, and keeping our eyes wide open
My teen girl, Scout, is reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah for school. At first, she moaned every time she had to read a new chapter. “I hate this book,” she said repeatedly. “It’s so, so bad.” So I held an intervention. A Long Way Gone is the memoir of a young boy in the Sierra Leone who was driven from his home and forcibly conscripted into a rebel army, where he witnessed –Read more
A Cast of Characters Update
It occurred to me yesterday that since I wrote a bestselling award-winning really good book about my family, I can stop using fake names when writing about them in my blog. It’s with some regret that I say this – I really do like their deserving monikers. But to be honest, I have never gotten proficient at writing the word “pterodactyl.” It’s time, anyway, to give you a brief update on everyone. The Diva: The Diva is my daughter Scout,Read more
The Diva flies off, and Wonder Woman
I owe you an Annual Vacation Odyssey post, and I will deliver on that tout suite. But in the meantime, I want to tell you about my darling Diva, whom I’ve shipped off to the Dominican Republic with a bunch of people she’s never met to run a summer camp for under-served children. This idea hatched in my brain earlier this year as I watched her struggle through her freshman year of high school. It was like she was trudgingRead more
The unfortunate chaos of busy-ness
The Russian spy ship Victor Leonov is not far off the coast of Florida right now, which means if I hop on a cruise this evening we could meet up by lunchtime tomorrow. I mean, not that I’d want to. I’m not a spy or anything OR AM I but apparently the Russians are our friends now, and with all their eavesdropping equipment I feel like somebody on board could help me get to the bottom of why Common Core math evenRead more