When I worked as a college counselor, my students would often get frustrated because they felt as if they weren’t in control of their college admissions process.  “I don’t have any choices,” they would say.  “The colleges are making the decision for me.”  more

One of the things that sucks about moving to a new city as an adult is that you never run into anyone you knew as a kid.  My husband Michael has lived in Los Angeles his whole life, and everywhere we go we bump into people he knew from camp, from elementary school, from his middle school baseball team, and my special favorite, girls he made out with in the sixth grade.  more

What a week to be pre-menstrual. I’ll give you a brief overview: Tuesday night there was a picnic for all of the families at Harper’s new school. I read the invitation wrong and showed up half an hour late. Upon realizing this, I began to cry. more

Harper starts kindergarten in less than a week, and my anxiety level is at Defcon five. Back in June, when it was still three months away and my emotions ran the gamut from sad to hysterically sad, I dubbed it Kinderbreakmyhearten. But now that its mere days away and I’m having panic attacks about all of the changes that are about occur, I’ve switched over to Kinderpleasedon’tstarten.

  more

Every August our family, along with the family of my good friend Jodi,makes a pilgrimage to San Diego where we sit by a pool for four days and then, on the fifth, get up off our lazy asses and spend some QT at one of the local parks. Last year was Sea World, and the year before was the San Diego Zoo. On the agenda for 2007: Legoland. more

About a year ago, a friend of mine told me that her four year-old was obsessed with High School Musical.  I remember that I scoffed to myself, thinking how totally inappropriate it was.  Because even though I’d never seen the movie, I knew that it was called High School Musical, not Pre-School Musical, and I knew that I did not want my four year-old going near anything high school related with a fifty foot pole.  But when all of the kids in Harper’s pre-school class were running around singing Bop to the Top, and when

more

Back in June, I took a trip to Toys ‘R’ Us to buy some pool toys for my kids, and I found this amazing sunscreen there. It’s a spray-on lotion, the metallic purple can has a picture of Tinkerbell on it, and it smells like berries. more

After five long years of holding on – my grip growing more tenuous with each day of working motherhood – I’ve finally decided to let go of my hobbies, at least for now. They were old, old friends, my hobbies. I met the New York Times crossword puzzle in college, old editions of which ran in the school newspaper each day. The puzzle accompanied me to boring geology lectures and nursed me through hangovers on Sunday mornings, as I sat with it over bagels and cream cheese, smiling at its cleverness. more

A friend of mine was telling me today about her son’s tennis instructor: tall, gorgeous, Latin, twenty-nine years old, with a Stanford MBA, to boot.  She joked to her husband that she would leave him in a second if the tennis pro ever came on to her, and she confided to me that she always dresses up, just a little, on tennis lesson days.  I knew, of course, exactly what she was talking about, as I’ve had quite a few crushes of my own in the last few years.

more

FINALLY, Rosa is back and my life has returned to normal....It’s funny, I thought that I would be counting down the minutes until she returned, but I was actually a little sad when she walked in on Wednesday morning. Of course, it didn’t help that the second Davis saw her he went running over to her, gave her a huge hug, and then informed me that he wanted to stay with Rosa the entire day and that, I quote, “Rosa is the best.” I was definitely a little insulted. I mean, I just spent three weeks straight with the little guy, and you’d think it meant nothing to him.

more