This weekend, Lulu and I went on retreat with our mother-daughter group, to the hostel in Point Reyes. It was a glorious weekend. The eight pairs of mothers and daughters formed from our homeschooling support group, back when the girls were eleven and twelve. A few of the girls have left the larger group to [...]

On New Year’s morning, I woke to find a message in my inbox telling me that Scott Russell Sanders had left a comment on my blog. Sanders was my essayist for October, and reading his message was such a thrill, and a closing more satisfying than I ever could have imagined for my year-long project.  [...]

I decided against posting my thoughts on my essayist project just yet. I thought that maybe two essayist posts in a row might be about as thrilling as back-to-back episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. I’ve been thinking about how homeschooling ebbs and flows. There are days and weeks when the kids come up with projects [...]

It’s time for the last installment in My Year of Excellent Essayists. random notes: If you’ve been reading here for a year now (and how lucky I am if you have), you’ll remember that it was my thoughts on Adam Gopnik that inspired this project. I started 2009 bemoaning the fact that after years of [...]

I hesitated about posting this photo. But I checked with its author, Mr. T, and he okayed it. This was a slip for our Advent box. A box in which, during Advent, we place slips of paper sharing how we’ve brought light, somehow, to someone else. Mr. T wrote this one. He didn’t fold it [...]

The bees had a festive time. And so did we. Requisite annual monkey pull-apart bread photo.   Chris and I got, finally, our own stockings. Handmade by Lulu. Daddy got guitar picks. Mama got yarn.   Some of the best gifts were old ones. For a long time, Lulu has wanted an old typewriter. Chris [...]