By Beck “This year has been awful!” I said to my husband last night – mid-asthma attack – and he laughed in a sad sort of way. We’ve had money problems. One of our kids is worrisomely stressed out all the time. We’ve lost friends. Another one of our kids is a crabby pre-teen. Elderly…
Author Archives: Beck
Things I’d Never Even Heard Of
By Beck So yesterday we took the kids to get their flu shots. There wasn’t a lot of debate about it – two of our three kids are in a high-risk group for flu complications AND they get everything. After school, I calmly packed the three of them into my mom’s car and we headed…
Footsteps
By Beck I’ve been writing about Halloween every day recently – or more accurately, I’ve been attempting to write tongue-in-check horror posts about children’s books. And so of course as soon as I decided to do that, I started being told tons of interesting stories that just cry out to be written. Like this one…
Trick Or Treat
By Beck “I want to be a jellyfish for Halloween,” The Baby announced, which only gave me a moment’s pause. Okay! I said. Be a jellyfish. That would be awesome. A few minutes later, I was flipping through the family magazine she’d been reading and found the jellyfish costume that had inspired her, and was…
Thankful
By Beck Canadian Thanksgiving is this upcoming weekend. I like the mid-October date for Canadian festivities, but feel rather wistfully that Americans have a fairly good idea in putting the holiday in late November instead – November is short on cheerful holidays AND it makes a nice kick-off to the holiday season as a whole. …
The First Day of October
By Beck Autumn was at its peak last weekend, and we drove down a country road surrounded by 100 year old farmsteads and red orange yellow leaves on trees and Mennonite boys in straw hats chasing sheep down hills turning gold with the cold fall sweeping in and taking all of the leaves away. The forests…
Reading
By Beck My oldest child loves to read, which is pretty pleasing to me. I’ve always been bookish and one of the things that I wanted for my kids was for them to love reading, too. It’s funny, these things we base our identities on, these things that we want our children to carry. And…
Changes
By Beck All of my life, I’d been aware of women who I thought were good mothers, and kept mental notes of how they did things – I liked the way one mother celebrated all of the small holidays, liked the way another always did baking and crafts with her kids, liked the way my…
Rated R For Repeat AND For Really Horrible
By Beck This is a re-print of an old post. I’m scattered this week, but I hope to be back to my normal chatty self next week. And did I ever get over the trauma that I wrote about in this post? Oh, apparently. The note of hysteria in this post has always amused me….
Cruel Summer
By Beck “In headaches and in worry, vaguely life leaks away,” wrote W.H. Auden. And that is how life is feeling these days for me – leaking away while I fret over things, the seasons flitting dully past. This has been a rainy, muted summer, not full of our usual beach trips and happy farm…