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Variations on the Theme of Kindness
We had the big Halloween event at my kids’ school last week. My husband and I were both on pretty major committees and wow that is not my favorite thing. It was stressful, and I’m glad it’s over. But my oldest got to make his big debut as a scare actor in the haunted house,…
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Strong
We began fall clean-up at the cabin this past weekend. I raked and piled leaves into a wheelbarrow and then pushed it up the hill and to the back of the property where we dump yard waste. I did this about three billion times. I mowed every blade of grass, and ran the mower out…
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Stout
My husband took a picture of me this weekend with the kids. This was significant for two reasons: Guys, I am no longer just adorable and fat, I now qualify as stout. Jeez. (And I am trying to use “fat” and “stout” as neutral terms here. I did not say I was a bad or…
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Mrs. France & Childhood Memories
A memory bubbled up from the depths last week, I can’t figure out why. Kindergarten. 1990. I had a necklace of rainbow plastic beads with a pink plastic heart in the middle. It seems out of character for me now, but I loved that necklace and wore it to school frequently. The necklace broke one…
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Drained
I spent several hours this morning cleaning out the sink drain in our upstairs bathroom. I just unclogged the bathtub drain last week, and I thought that was a disgusting job but the sink was much worse. There was gunk in there that was at least a decade old. I almost died from the smell.…
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An Outside Child
As I mentioned in my previous post, my youngest has strep throat right now. In an effort to avoid germs, my oldest has been avoiding the youngest as much as possible. In a surprising gesture of kindness last night, the youngest volunteered to eat dinner alone on the patio and spare his brother the germ…
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Bob
My youngest has strep throat for the fourth time this year. Due to various poor decisions on my part, he only just got his first dose of antibiotics an hour ago even though he was diagnosed with strep yesterday. He’s been miserable off and on, but mostly he’s been curled up in the basement diligently…
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Warm Milk
One thing you should know about me is that I don’t use warm milk to make anything. Instant oatmeal? Hot water. Hot cocoa? Hot water. It’s water, it’s always water, it will never be milk. Who has time to warm milk when water is so damn cheap and easy? I bought this color-changing hot cocoa…
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Casey’s Daycare for Exceptional Bunnies
We had pet rabbits when I was a kid. They lived in a backyard hutch, and they really weren’t good pets, but I, at seven years old, knew exactly what would improve our situation: baby bunnies. So I did what any intelligent child raised in a religious household would do and I started praying for…
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Casey Reads Wikipedia, vol. 1
I was on Wikipedia the other night–as I often am–and ended up at this article about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, an astrophysicist who was active in the first half of the twentieth century. Did you know that Cambridge University did not award degrees to women until 1948? In fact, Cecilia went to Cambridge on scholarship, completed her…