My goal is to post every day this month.

We dropped  off our daughter at her new middle school at 7:30 this morning.  It’s not the first day of school.  It’s 6th grade orientation.  They’re going to take a bus upstate for the day to play some games and get to know each other before school starts next week.  It’s like an off-site retreat. [...]

This evening we attended the incoming 6th grader orientation at My Kid’s new school. She’s starting a new school. She’s going to middle school. It was just a regular day, until we left the house and started walking toward the entrance to the subway to go to the school. I realized my heart was racing [...]

We were standing in line to buy gyros from the fair booth sponsored by the Greek Orthodox Church and the young people behind me were talking. The blonde girl said to the soldiers in fatigues: “I’d already signed the papers even before they came to talk to my parents.” She talked about her job at [...]

Tonight we went to see our friend Cynthia Whalen in the play Just Cause at the Flea Theatre in Tribeca.  Proud parents of cast members seated behind told their friends “This is a very important theater.” The energy and intensity of the young actors reminded me so much of Annex Theatre in Seattle where The Husband [...]

After school on the subway train today, I overheard the mother advising her son, who looked about six years old, to keep his shirt tucked in. “You want to keep your shirt tucked in or else you’ll get in trouble.” “But, I got hot.” “Well then, sprinkle a little water down your shirt to cool [...]

This morning my daughter woke up on time and ate breakfast sitting in a chair at the table (for the first time in weeks) before sharpening six pencils to take to school because this is the first morning of many days of standardized tests.  At this point there isn’t much an individual student or teacher [...]

This morning while we were still waking up in our bed, in the same room where we were when we woke up to the news that the sound we’d heard as thunder was actually a plane that had just flown into one of the World Trade Towers, we heard on NPR that Osama Bin Laden [...]

READ THE FOLLOWING TWO TEXTS THEN WRITE AN ESSAY: BUTTERFLY HOUSE by Eve Bunting When I was just a little girl I saw a small black creature like a tiny worm, and saved it from a greedy jay who wanted it for lunch. I carried it inside, safe on it’s wide green leaf.  My grandpa [...]

Bits of media filter through about the royal wedding.  So many reported the importance of the wedding dress. The dress is the woman.  The woman is the dress. One British reporter said that the wedding dress “is meant to say everything about who you are”. On the day of my marriage, my own wedding dress [...]