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Plan Your Costumes Now, Kiddos!

Number Two with Carol Channing wig

It’s probably already too late to get the supplies for your Halloween costume.  Someone else with superior planning skills and costume-planning moxie already snatched up the good stuff.  Just take a look at the wigs we found at Goodwill this

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T-t-t-t-TRAIN COMING!!!

Kids in locomotive

Hang out with some little kids for a while and you’ll realize how amazing EVERYTHING is.  Maybe you have trains or trolleys or streetcars or railcars or funiculars or electric buses or rickshaws in your hometown.  But have you ever

Posted in Parenting, San Diego Tagged with: , , , ,

Parental Love

Number Two playing cars at window

There are good days and bad days, and moments in a day like blades of sunlight cutting through stormclouds.  Life isn’t a train of events, each linked to the next by the relentless curling wave of time.  No, life is

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Turtle Baby

N2 and Turtle Baby

There is no accounting for love.  It strikes unexpectedly and doesn’t follow rules or conventions.  During an IKEA outing several weeks ago, Number Two was getting fussy, what with the endless turns into rooms full of lamps, reasonably-priced kitchenware, and

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Dinnertime Craziness

CH and Number Two dinnertime craziness

It all collides at dinner:  low blood-sugar, stimulus overload from a day of school, punchy tiredness, and the impossibility of getting four people at the table at the same time.  Forget the genial family dinner set under the olive trees

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Child Labor

Small fingers weaving

There’s a reason kids are used for tasks like this.  Just look at those nimble little fingers!   I was having trouble helping Child Harbat weave using a crochet hook and she found it easier to just use her fingers.

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Birth, Life, Death, and a Curtsey

CH with dead finch box

Sometimes you get to see an entire life cycle, to feel as old as a mountain as forests rise and fall at your toes.  At our house this meant watching a pair of red house finches build a nest under

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Getting More Food on Your Face

N2 with juice on chin

Of all the things I have to deal with in parenting–the temper tantrums, dirty diapers, unflushed toilets, runny noses–the thing that irritates me is messy faces.  Child Harbat never had too much of an issue with this and learned to

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Lemonade for Sale

CH lemonade stand

Entrepreneurship:  it’s the spirit of America and a word you need to sound out as you write it to be sure it’s spelled right.  And even then it doesn’t sound right.  What does it mean in our household?  It means

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Life’s Little Defeats

N2 eating sad

It’s not the catastrophic failures that wear you down–those you mark as unique and unrepeatable.  No, it’s the breaking of a bridge by the stamping of ten thousand small feet.  At the end of the day when you’ve rejected your

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