Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The New Year

Tonight, we celebrated German New Year’s Eve with the kids, which means, we drank sparkling cider at 6pm and the kids watched streaming video of the Brandenburg Gate while we scrambled to finish up dinner and keep the baby out of the dishwasher. Tony found old video of our actual German New Year, seventeen years […]

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One of those days

I have a beautiful day to look forward to tomorrow, including time with a friend who offered to bring lunch. I was expecting something simple, but considering that all of the mama meals this friend has brought us after the birth of our last three babies have become staples at this house, I should have […]

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The End of Preschool

I remember when he first started. He’d just turned three, and we had just moved into the city. He felt so little to me to be sending him away for part of his day. But then we visited, and the director of the school crouched down to his eye level and spoke to him gently, […]

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His Puppy

  From a year and a half ago, when my sweet boy was just a few months past his fourth birthday, instead of less than two months from his sixth: We went to the shelter today and there, in one of the cages, was a tiny pit bull puppy named Cyclone.  He had a big […]

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Purple

From a year ago: The Purple Lady was the kind of famous only crazy people get to be. I’d look for signs of her as we neared my grandparents’ town — electric poles painted purple as high as she could reach. I never saw her, and in those days I didn’t think she was crazy. […]

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Can you see it?

I remember as a child, riding on the train through the mountains near our town in Germany.  There, up high on a mountain above the train, stood a statue of a stag.  The statue wasn’t visible long, just for a moment, and I can still remember the wail of devastation when our friend’s little boy […]

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Sidelong Glances

I don’t know why I’ve been feeling the passage of time so acutely lately. Maybe because of this baby, probably my last, growing by such leaps and bounds. We watched some old episodes of Homicide this week, and I was stunned by how dated and old they felt, not like when I’d watched them with […]

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Deserving

We took a walk around the neighborhood the other night, something we always intend to do more often, as we intend to wander the forest paths that beckon right outside our front door.  We’re working on making these walks a priority.  Everyone loves them, we all feel better when we arrive home than we did […]

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More on Freiburg

I feel very honored to be included in MaryAnne’s World Culture for Kids series over on her blog Mama Smiles.  Here’s my post about Freiburg, but be sure to check out the other great posts in the World Culture for Kids series, as well as the rest of MaryAnne’s thoughtful and inspiring posts on joyful […]

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Copper Pennies

We arrived late, as we should have expected.  Google maps could factor in traffic delays, but we should have accounted for traveling with two small children and a baby.  The staff was gone for the day, but they had left our key in the wooden box nailed to the front of the red education building. […]

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