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Claire’s New Email Address
Claire has known about email for a long time, but it was only recently that she discovered that some of her friends have their own email addresses. “Mom!” she said excitedly one day last week, “all of my friends have email addresses and I need one too!” I’d waited a long time for this. Actually, Shawn was the one who had looked forward to setting up Claire with an email account when she was old enough for one. In fact, when she was only a few months old, he told me he had secured an email address for her. I remembered the email address. But I couldn’t remember the password.…
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The Ensemble
Over the past month, my family life has been a bit consumed by the elementary school play, James and the Giant Peach. Claire tried out in the late fall and was cast as part of the ensemble. Since then, she’s had frequent practices after school. This has required a lot of coordination. The boys finish school at 3:15 and my dad gets them, but then I need to make sure I wrap up everything at work in order to get Claire whenever her rehearsal finishes. Or – more likely – I ask someone to get her. In the weeks leading to the performance, the play seemed to take over our…
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Valentines Day
Valentine’s day is a stupid, made-up holiday. It is! But I guess so are a lot of quasi-holidays and other silly things we celebrate. I’m pretty sure Facebook made up National Sibling Day but I love posting pictures of my sister on that day. So I was never against Valentine’s Day, exactly. I just didn’t make a big deal out of it. But Shawn knew better. He knew that if he forgot to recognize his love for me on this day, even though I thought the holiday was stupid, it might hurt my feelings. So every year, he made sure to get me something nice. The first year, when we…
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The Ring
I took it off for the first time as an experiment. Since the day I was married, I wore my wedding ring constantly. I know many people take their rings off every night but that wasn’t me. I knew if I took my ring off, I’d lose it. So no matter where I was – the pool, the gym, the sink, the bed – I kept my wedding ring on. As we gained financial stability, Shawn would ask me if I wanted a “nicer” ring someday. “No!” I always told him, emphatically. I loved that ring. “I don’t want a new ring,” I’d say to him. “This is the ring…
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The Spelling Bee
“The word is ‘universe,’” the judge said clearly. Claire took a deep breath. “Universe. U….n…i…” she paused for a second, and then started drawing the letters in the air. “V….e…r…s…e. Universe.” “That’s correct,” the judge said. Claire smiled, and walked quickly back to her seat. I waved at her as she sat down and she gave me a big smile. She’d made it through round 2 of her school’s spelling bee. I didn’t sign Claire up for the spelling bee. I think she told me about it a month ago, but I promptly forgot. I mean, like I need one more thing to worry about. But then the day before…
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Stories for My Daughter
One of my favorite parts of my day is after my boys fall asleep and I go into Claire’s room and sit on her bed. Sometimes we both read silently, and other times she tells me about the dramas of fourth grade or other things that are on her mind. One day last week, when we were quietly reading, she looked up from her book and said, “Mama, tell me about the day that Daddy asked you to marry him.” I smiled. I have told her the story many times, but she loves to hear it. “Well, baby, we were in Costa Rica, where we were living at the time,”…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
