Category Archives: kid stuff

quick update before the xmas explosion

So you’re all on the edge of your seats wondering how the birthday thing went, right? I kept you waiting out of sheer wickedness. Wickedness, and the fact that I am both lazy and sick with a cold. What’s up with all these damned colds? They’ve been rotating through our house like some sort of [...]

preschool preparedness

Today I dropped off the paperwork for Ellison’s preschool. Paperwork, I’m telling you. It was somewhat unsurprising that I had to make an exhaustive list of the kid’s immunizations (which are thankfully up to date), but then there was this parental survey in which we were to wax lyrical about “things you appreciate about your [...]

premiserable syndrome

I keep finding myself trying to describe what it feels like to get depressed. Which is ridiculous, if you think about it, because it’s not like I sit around trying to find the words to explain not being depressed – and, let’s face it, if you look at the averages that’s how I spend most [...]

advice

If I could have given my new-parent self one piece of advice, it would be this:
Don’t worry about it.
Seriously. I started worrying pretty much the second I found out I was pregnant (am I gaining enough weight? What does that pain mean? Am I gaining too much weight? Is he going to be born with [...]

somewhat increasingly less cranky

Now that I have a potty-trained kid, the world is suddenly opening up to me in the way of an oyster or something similar. Oh, the things I can do: at the store, for example, I can stride blithely past the diaper displays without obsessively checking to see if they have his size. I no [...]

potty training: check

I’ve been dreading potty training the kid, but it turns out I had nothing to worry about: he did it on his own.
Yes. You read that right. He potty trained himself.
About two weeks ago, Ellison announced that he wanted to use the potty. Nothing new; he’d been doing that periodically for months, but last time [...]

scratch & sniff

My kid’s breath smells different when he’s sick. Not gross-different, but definitely different. My mom used to say that my breath smelled like rubbing alcohol when I was sick, and it’s kind of like that with Ellison too. It’s cool that the mom nose notices things like that, isn’t it? It’s like an early warning [...]