‘O Spring, You Are a Merciless Tease

After weeks and weeks of misery (at least for those of us who hate the snow), spring shoved the winter aside for a couple of glorious days.  The 55-degree weather has started to melt the mountains of white stuff, which makes for an interesting study in contrasts.

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Risky Business

Not the movie. The game. Risk. Usually Chloe plays alone with her dad. But with Sophie at her friend’s house for a sleepover, I crashed the war for the first time. Chloe loves Risk. My husband likes playing the game because he always wins. After a few minutes of listening to the two of them interrupt one another to explain the rules to me, we dove into battle.

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Happy Birthday to Moi, Super Truffle!

Hello, my friends. Tomorrow is a momentous day for me. I will be six months old. My human family tells me it’s not a real birthday. Whatever. They’re such Debbie Downers. I beg to disagree with them (and believe me, I’m good at begging). My human sister Chloe officially celebrated joining the Teenageddon army the other day, and now I am a terrible teen, too.

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What Chloe Has to Say About Turning 13

Having started the tradition of interviewing Chloe for her birthday last year, here are her thoughts on finally entering the era of Teenageddon.

The moral of the story is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Chloe did not look at last year’s entry before finishing this one and was surprised at how similar her answers were.

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Stop the Presses! They’re Getting Along

I’ve written about this phenomenon before.  Once every year or two, Chloe and Sophie actually get along during their waking hours. It’s a rare occurrence.  A bit like witnessing a total solar eclipse.

At the risk of jinxing this most recent episode of sisterly love, I find it necessary to document it on this blog now, lest the girls forget that there were times during their tender years when they didn’t fight.

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A Boyfriend Conversation With My Kid

Fade in to a restaurant dinner scene. It’s family pizza night at Grimaldi’s. A Mom, Papa and their two daughters, Chloe and Sophie, are patiently awaiting their food.  The camera pans in on the midst of their animated conversation about Chloe’s 12-year old male French cousin who has a girlfriend.

“What would you say if I told you I had a boyfriend?” asks Chloe.

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Protecting Sophie’s Shrouds of Turin

Desperate times call for desperate measures.  Sophie’s two precious towels, which have comforted her since infancy and which I last wrote about in September 2012, are continuing their slow but inevitable decline into dust.  Random pieces of fabric fall off on a regular basis.  They are filled with holes. You’d never know from looking at them that they were once square-shaped.  We haven’t washed them in at least a couple of years because they would never survive the ordeal.

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Sometimes All It Takes Is a Desk (and a Solar System)

It’s the little things that often remind me of how quickly the girls are growing up.  The most recent examples of this phenomenon occurred with Sophie over the holiday break, and involve a new desk and a solar system.   Who’d have guessed that these two random things – a surface on which to write and a bunch of painted spheres – would make me feel incredibly happy to be Sophie’s mom, yet bittersweet about the little girl in her ceding space to the big girl increasingly asserting her individuality?

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A Mom's Ramblings About the Marvels & Mishaps of Parenting, the Joys of Family Travel & the Writing Life