A few hours ago I walked into an empty, silent house—quite a change from the morning I’d just spent volunteering in my son’s class for its 100th Day of School celebration. I sat on the bottom step of our staircase and took a few deep breaths to decompress from the chaos (but adorableness!) of my day so far. In. Out.
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The words slipped out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about what I was saying. My son and I had just walked in the door after an early pick-up from school due to him puking all over his shoes during center time. Since we both had vomit on our clothes in some capacity—him from doing the
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It felt so strange to hold him—to see this person who’d been inside of my body for almost 10 months wrapped up all burrito-like in the crook of my arm. “How is it possible for someone to look tiny and enormous at the same time?” I thought. “I love this person, but I don’t know anything about him.” As I’ve
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As I write this my husband and I are staring at the reality of spending a sixth day snowed in with our seven-year-old son. Yes, sixth. As in one, two, three, four, five, and six. Our part of the country got hammered by Winter Storm Jonas, and we’re probably looking at a few more house-bound days while our southern city’s
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In one of the final sessions of our childbirth class, the teacher walked us soon-to-be-mamas and our partners through putting together our birth plans. Most of us ended up in the class because we hoped to experience birth with minimal medical interventions. With that in mind, she encouraged us to come up with a few affirmations to comfort our fears
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Oh hello there, 2016. I didn’t expect to see you so soon. If you’re like me, you’re probably still trying to wrap your head around the fact that we just finished out another year. I keep thinking “2016? As in 16 years after all that Y2K hubbub that I still remember so clearly? How did I get here?” If I’m
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When my youngest cousin was little,* he called me Ballerina. My name is Valerie, and that initial V sound can be tricky for some really young kids. So, you know, Balerie…Ballerina–it was a logical jump for a toddler to make. I spent the summer after my junior year of college working as a nanny for a little boy** who was
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If motherhood has taught me anything it’s to not assume. Ever. That old adage of what happens when you assume became an old adage for a reason: it’s true. For whatever reason, when mothers (myself very much included) spot other mothers out “in the wild”, we tend to give each other a once over. Whether that assessing gaze comes from
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I’m currently working through what (I hope) are the final days of a nasty case of bronchitis. I spent five of the last seven days with a seal-like cough, a dull headache, and a fever hovering right around 102, Tylenol be damned. Save a case of the flu and a brief but memorable visit from the Norovirus last year, this
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As you probably gathered from my presence on this blog, I’m a writer. And although this is the year 2015, I’m one of those rare writers who still writes first drafts with pen and paper. For me, making letters with my fingers is the most efficient way to pull thoughts out of my brain. From there I can “smash them,
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