Blog Posts
Under the Weather
My eyelids opened to a semi-dark room which made me think it was earlier than my usual wake-up time. It wasn’t, though. Slate gray clouds were pouring out rain; I could hear the drainpipes working overtime. Going through my calendar in my head, I remembered that my husband had a lunch meeting. What a day for a long drive! My [...]
Pick a PEC
Of pickled peppers? Nope. There’s no connection here to the pepper-picking piper. The PEC I am pondering focuses on picture cards. These picture cards posed as the primary form of communication for Zach for a solid decade of his young life. From about age 2 to age 12 (when iPad came along) Zach relied on the PEC system to communicate. [...]
Beautiful~Butterfly~Boy
I can’t recall exactly when Zach began noticing butterflies. It’s a love affair that’s been going on for quite a while now. It may have started after the bees. During the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, which kept him home from school for 14 months, we made a daily trek around our neighborhood. During those strolls he started watching and [...]
When One Door Opens
It was a blistering hot day soon after we moved from the Bay Area to the Central Valley. The Mediterranean climate of the Bay is something I was grateful for during the 20+ years we lived in the outskirts of San Francisco. The farther away from the ocean, the less Mediterranean it becomes; no on-shore breezes from the Pacific, no [...]
sun * son * Son
One foggy morning a few years ago, after I dropped Zach off at his beloved school, I decided to do the coffee shop + laptop thing. I have to admit, I was not in the practice of bringing a laptop to a coffee shop and sipping latte while surfing the internet. “Back in the day,” when I did not know [...]
The Preston Pére Noël
What little child doesn’t scream, cry, or freeze up when introduced to Santa for the first time? Maybe there are some littles who reach exuberantly for the man with the white beard and round belly (“that shook, when he laugh’d, like a bowlful of jelly” – sorry, couldn’t resist). I’ve seen toddlers sprint toward the velvety, high-backed chair surrounded by [...]
Sense & Sensibilitea
Ordinarily, tea bags are pretty…well, ordinary. Neatly arranged in colorful, perky, perfect-sized boxes or stacked like Pringles® in pretty metal tins, tea bags generally stay perched on a shelf till needed. Whatever their packaging, dressed-up cardboard or embellished metal seems to make up for their ordinary-ness. Tucked away in my pantry are ordinary tea bags of all sorts. Calming [...]
Dancing at the DMV
Much to my surprise, I was asked for my ID while purchasing wine recently. I was carded?? Maybe the cashier forgot her glasses that day. And I probably should have donned mine when I pulled Zach’s ID card from my wallet instead of my own. I giggled and then gasped. “You don’t have your ID, miss?” the cashier asked. “No, [...]
Wish. Wash. Awaken.
I want to get baptized too. Six words. Six powerful words. And six words that were communicated purposefully, accurately, and simply. They were not to be ignored. […]
Lemme’ See You Smile
During the winter months, we like to watch Wheel of Fortune while eating dinner. Somehow, the combination of comfort food and Pat Sajak’s corny jokes just caps off a wintry evening. And the routine of TV game show, dinner, conversation, and clean-up just seems to flow nicely and set a calm pace for the remainder of the night. […]
Advertisement