The following post is part of a guest blog for my dear friend Sarah at allmannerofinspiration.com. She is kicking off a fantastic series for Creative-types to help inspire, challenge, and inform the creative process no matter what your creative outlet may be. And for you actor/singer types, you know there’s one part of the process…   read more

When I was a kid, Chuck E. Cheese had a full arsenal of animatronic terrors — five or six at least, their globe-eyes blinking with their paintbrush lashes. Chuck E. Cheese also had the groundhog game, the one where you whacked the iron heads of fury until your arms unscrewed. There was also the ball…   read more

Halloween is not Drew’s favorite holiday. I dropped him off at school yesterday and he would barely sit on the steps with his costume-wearing classmates, much less wear a costume on his own. For weeks people have been asking who he is going as for Halloween, and for weeks he has been saying “Yightning” —…   read more

Thing Two really started power walking/runway strutting on Sunday. If you can get past my motherly blatherations in this video and concentrate on Thing Two, you’ll be richly rewarded. Oh, and wait for the end. It’s the best 47 seconds you’ll spend all day:

I like to play a game called “Would You Rather” with my sillier friends. It’s kind of like Truth or Dare except without the dare and where the truth is entirely hypothetical — just the kind of game risk-adverse control freak first-born romantics love to play. Each person takes turns answering questions like, “Would you…   read more

Right before I gave birth to Thing One, a friend asked me to judge a beauty pageant. My friend is a former beauty queen herself, first runner-up Miss Texas to be exact. (She should have WON.) In college I was her piano accompanist when she would go around making appearances and singing. Most of the…   read more

A couple of weeks ago, my hairdresser broke up with me. I had been trying to find a way to end it myself, but she made it easy. It was the conclusion of a seven-year relationship, a relationship that was full of tenderness, sympathy, understanding – everything but monogrammed bath towels. We didn’t have the…   read more

I mentioned in a post last week that Madeline has Lauren Hutton teeth. I think this picture from her birthday party proves my point: What can I say? She’s a supermodel in the making. And if she keeps her pudgy figure and her patchy hair and never grows another tooth, she’ll still be the most…   read more

Last week was our first-ever bona fide family vacation. We went to Destin, FL with my in-laws, my sister-in-law and her hubby, and their 6-month-old baby girl. Gordon and I had been excited for months, but of course Things One and Two didn’t know what to expect, or what hit them when we finally arrived….   read more

(In honor of my vacation week, here’s a little blast from the past: -Ology magazine’s May 2010 article. Enjoy.) How wonderful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterwards. This little saying is needle-pointed on a framed wall hanging at my grandparents’ house. I didn’t have appreciation for it until 2.75 years ago…   read more