Word Up

So I saw this weird motivational speaker lady doing her “Up Time America” routine on YouTube. It’s this shlocky schtick where she gives a bunch of “everything I learned in kindergarten” sort of commands on how to go about your life. Her gimmick is that every sentence ends in the word UP.

While I agree with 75% of what she’s going for (When you drop a piece of trash, pick it up. If you make a mess, clean it up.), there is this creepy undercurrent of wild-eyed talk radio speak, starting with her towering Palin-esque B-52’s shagadelic hair-do. Perhaps I’ve outgrown wit and wisdom that fits onto an 8 x 11” poster, or perhaps my professor husband has trained me too well over the years to see such pop-psych as a mere marketing gimmick.

But later on we made fun of the whole thing. We joked about re-writing the “Up” manifesto from our own perspective, what we idealize, what annoys us, and what we work toward.

So I did. And here it is:

If you don’t have health insurance, save up.

Before you spout off on the news without the facts, read up.

If someone makes you eat a raw onion, throw up.

Breastfeed your babies. Milk it up.

If your mind is closed, open it up.

Follow the advice of Saint Marley and get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.

Quit wasting money on plastic garbage landfill character toys. Do it up yourself.

Compost! Stink it up.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Use it up.

To those less fortunate, offer a hand up.

For the marginalized, the voiceless, and the powerless, speak up.

In the face of injustice, bigotry, and hate, take to the streets and act up.

We all have a story to tell. Write it up.

Bring the noise. Turn it up.

Enjoy your food without guilt. Eat it up.

Life is short. Drink it up.

And in the immortal words of Cameo, Word Up.

(P.S. When I’m not writing stuff up like this I  like to dress up, live it up, and then come home and get worked up by the movie Up. Learn about my book, The Foggiest Idea by scrolling up.)

The Best of Both Worlds

I like living on a dead-end street. It reminds me of the cul-de-sac where I grew up in Midland, Texas.  It’s full of block parties, kids scootering in the road, and parents like me standing on the sidewalk and hollering down the street for my oldest to come in for dinner.

Oh yea. I live in San Francisco. Not exactly your stereotype city for cozy neighborhood street play. But our family has the luxury of living on a dead-end street in a quiet part of town, which means that we get the best of city and country life.

Living at the end of a street is not without its drawbacks. Like the dorks who drive in and can’t read the “Not a Through Street” sign and haul ass into the roadblock. Many a nap is interrupted by the screech of a geeked out Fast and Furious Honda slamming into reverse and doing the Tokyo Drift a few houses down. The giant city park at the end of our block is also a party haven where suburban-ish teens drink and get high. And it used to be a hub of the Asian gang scene.

But even with this ugly temptation, my little girls’ dad will someday be able to simply walk out the door and collar some thug who’s trying to slip a roofie to my kid at the end of the block. And our Irish ex-Marine neighbor has already shot his BB gun in the general direction of a few early perpetrators, getting in some practice for when his own toddler is of hooligan age.

We really live in the best of both worlds. In the suburbs inside the city.

Because here’s the good part. My kids play outside, biking in the street and running up and down the length of houses. Our house pushes right up to the sidewalk and all of us neighborhood moms hang out the kitchen windows and yell at each other. Dogs play fetch in the road.

We can walk to public transportation and restaurants. We can walk up a hill to the playground. We can walk to the beach. Our guests can always find parking because no one comes down to our dead end–except the above-mentioned teen partiers.

And did I mention that our living room window faces out into a 14-block urban nature oasis? Our back yard is a giant city park called Stern Grove, chock full of redwood and eucalyptus trees, duck ponds, berry picking, fort building, fairy houses, wild winged and furry creatures, and free summer concerts. I would have said that earlier, but I didn’t want to make you feel bad.

We feel lucky as heck. We get the best of both worlds.

Hell is Other Parents…Or is it?

I just finished tearing through Hell is Other Parents by Deborah Copaken Kogan, a hilarious memoir full of meanie moms and do-gooder dads who have the fiendish ability to make the lives of fellow breeders as torturous as Dante’s third circle. I wholeheartedly agreed with the thesis of the book at the time, thanks to my coincidental collision with a Hellish Other Parent who jabbed a mean-spirited pitchfork into my own familial circle.

Here’s the story. A week ago I gave up my entire Sunday, on a weekend when I would much rather have been at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival with my family, to stand on a corner in the Castro neighborhood and yell at partiers to put down their beers and penis-shaped lollypops and dump some money in a big bucket to benefit the Castro Street Fair. The cash gets divided up between various neighborhood non-profits, charities and schools, including my daughter’s cozy little schoolhouse.

I volunteer for things like this because I’m a goody-two-shoes. Because it’s the right thing to do. In a city where private school tuition is more than many hardworking Americans earn in a year, my child attends an excellent free public school. Free underfunded public school. The teachers and administrators work their arses off for a wee bit of pay and a whole lot of headache. Helping out with the fundraising stuff is the least I can do.

So I signed up to be the point person for the street fair. I had a great day in the sun, goofing off with other parent volunteers, and went home feeling good about doing my part. But I had a rude awakening in the schoolyard the following week. A woman who wasn’t even at the event “heard” that I was “unwelcoming” to some other families. She sent me a snarky email, and called the PTA and School Site Council presidents to tattle on me.

Before you could say what a load of crap, I was suddenly the center of a little bit of petty gossip from someone who didn’t even know me. I was hurt and angry. Okay, I was pissed. I gave up my Sunday for our kids’ school and this is what I got? And while I certainly have room for improvement in many areas of the whole personality thing, being “unwelcoming” is not one of my weak spots. The entire situation was almost too clichéd to be true. Poor hardworking volunteer mom gets slandered by catty woman with nothing better to do.

But a wonderful reminder came out of the stupid mess. I quietly touched base with a bunch of my other PTA parent friends, eager to cheer myself up, to boost my bruised ego, to make sure that I hadn’t really ruined the whole day at the fair for everyone. And I was touched by the empathetic responses of so many kind, warm families who reminded me not to let the haters get me down.

I decided to let it go, to not let one bad apple ruin the sweet little fruit tree of my child’s beautiful, warm, funky little school. I went to the PTA meeting later in the week and fought off the temptation to take the offending parent outside for a knuckle sandwich or at least burn a hole in the gossip mommy’s neatly pressed blouse with my laser-like stink eye.

Instead I focused on the 99% of the group who made funny wisecracks as we passed the budget, who unanimously agreed to help out families who needed financial assistance to afford their children’s musical instruments, who joked around and giggled and applauded each other’s success stories.

A bunch of us went out for drinks and laughs after the meeting. No matter how annoyed I was at the Real Housewives of New Jersey-style hi-jinx of a certain PTA drama mama, I couldn’t hold on to the anger. It was overridden by the love fest I continue to experience for our school and its sweet family of families. We are all just doing the best we can, and thank goodness we give each other lots of breaks.

So I amend my initial agreement that hell is other parents. Hell can be one other parent who does something silly. But Heaven is my sweet network of friends.

Book Review: The Daddy Shift by Jeremy Adam Smith

I know my review of The Daddy Shift arrives a little late in the game, what with author Jeremy Adam Smith already getting tons of pub in everything from the New York Times to US News and World Report. But I got my copy for free and I owe the author a big favor. Plus I totally enjoyed reading it.

A little background: When my daughter was an infant I worked two days a week in an office as a professional fundraiser. To save money on childcare costs and because we dearly wanted family members as primary care providers, my college professor husband juggled his schedule to either stay home with our baby those two days or else take her into work. She drooled around campus while Dada met with students, attended faculty meetings (with baby in the sling), and edited manuscripts. When it was time for my hubby to teach he a hired graduate student to push the baby around campus in her stroller and deliver her safely to the classroom at the end of the lecture.

For this, my husband received limitless praise and accolades from friends and colleagues. “What an amazing dad to make so many professional sacrifices.” “What a good man he is shoulder so much of the burden of childcare at the expense of his work time.”

I always imagine what the reaction would be if a woman did those exact same things. Would the same praise have been heaped upon my shoulders? Or would it be more like “Why can’t she get a nanny?” or “If her heart isn’t in it, why doesn’t she just quit her job and be a full-time mom?”

Our early family situation is just one of many reasons I was drawn to the book, The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Fathers, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family.

The second reason is (full disclosure) that our family knows Jeremy personally and we like and admire him. The third reason is (double full disclosure) my husband’s story gets mentioned in the book as both a stay-at-home-dad and an academic researcher on the significance and meaning of fatherhood.

Personal reasons aside, I still dig this book. It takes an unflinching look at both the day-to-day realities and the larger cultural framework that surrounds nontraditional families made up of fathers who at least do some of the primary care providing while spouses go out and earn the proverbial bacon.

Here are several reasons why I encourage you, as a thinking parent, to take my advice and read The Daddy Shift.

This book has a casual, natural, first person voice. Not erudite, academic or precious. Charming first-persona narratives richly illustrate a wealth of highly researched data, creating a tier upon tier of highly readable, yet highly credible material.

Which leads me to my second reason. This book is backed up by solid evidence. In both depth and breadth. Smith shares the fruits of many in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with his fellow daddy-care-providers, always backed by solid statistical data. The language, while often passionate on the subject matter is level-headed and non-judgmental of the choices made by the families in question.

I’ll admit that I initially assumed that most these non-traditional families only exist in blue-state coastal sorts of cultures that are chock-full of unusual family structures where anything goes. Not so. A large chunk of the care-providing daddies interviewed are solid Midwestern types with corresponding conservative values.

Stay-at-home-dads are an overlooked, undervalued group that deserves more than a pat on the back for their supposed heroic sacrifices. And Smith ends his book with a bold call for policy action that is quite feminist in theory and progressive in reach. A truly egalitarian society offers paid paternity leave as well as maternity leave. And true “family values” need to embrace all forms of family structures.

Whether you are a stay-at-home parent, a working parent, or someone (like most us) who straddles the great divide between the professional and domestic spheres, you will find something of value in The Daddy Shift. So what are you waiting for? Run out and read it!

Bitchin’ ’bout Stitchin’

So I took my oldest child to the emergency room last weekend. I wish I could say it was the first time I had to take a child to the ER. But at least it was the first time in Texas. And I can now check “stitches” off the childhood trauma box.

It was a classic childhood injury. A thwackety-thwack chin smack on the edge of the swimming pool. Yowtch!

The cut itself looked icky (I could see the fatty tissue underneath her still adorably chubby 6-year-old chin) but nothing for mama to panic over. However, the gaping quality of the wound led us to believe that the lesion required more than the simple Scooby Doo band-aid.

In truth, the initial panic lay far from the location or severity of the physical injury but in the resources (or lack thereof) found in the small town where my family vacations in central Texas lake country.

No fracking hospital.

“Where do people have babies around here?”  I muttered as my family hurtled about the small town, jamming our fingers across our iPhones in a frantic quest for a nearby emergent care center. Marble Falls, Texas doesn’t exactly seem like a bastion of homebirth midwife activism so I knew the mamas had to go somewhere nearby to push those little Texans out.

We quickly found out where the locals release their spawn when the jerkoff minor emergency clinic declined our HMO. The good folks of Marble Falls have babies, treat broken bones, and stitch up swimming pool- busted chins by hauling a few miles over to an actual hospital in Burnet.

They treated my little patient very well in Burnet. The nurses were kind, sweet, and patient. They told her she was a big girl and doing a good job and very brave. The physician’s assistant who did the actual sewing up of the cut was obviously not used to kids, especially precocious redhead kids with lots of questions. By the time a certain precocious redhead dared to ask him how long the whole thing would take, he looked genuinely baffled and lost, like no patient had ever dared to ask him such a preposterous inquiry. And this time the precocious redhead was me.

And I did fine with the whole thing. Until I saw the fear in my baby’s face. I could hear the dryness in her mouth, and her breath had the funk of that cotton-mouth terror where all saliva goes into reverse in some sort of fight or flight panic to reserve bodily fluids for maximum utility at a later date. Her voice quivered as she sucked back tears. Her hands shook each time she yanked a nervous tug of hair behind her pale little ear, and her normally porcelain face took on the shade of the Latoya Jackson statue at the wax museum. I worried she was going to pass out.

The sight of that small round face making a go at Big Girl Heroics very nearly pushed out my own tears, but I sucked it up too. Someone needs to be the grownup in these sorts of situations.

We ended the big day with a trip into south Austin for old friends, pizza, and snowcones.  I bribed the patient with a Homeslice Pizza t-shirt in atonement for the Texas-sized bummer that she would now have to spend 25% of our Tour of Texas Grandparents trip out of the lake and swimming pool while the stitches healed.

It was the least I could do for my brave girl.

Postscript by the patient:  “I know it seems like the stitches were the worstest part. It actually was the medicine. Because they stuck it inside of my cut. But when we were done with it I still couldn’t open my mouth too wide. Before I had the stitches and just a cut I didn’t open my mouth wide because it made me feel hurtful.”

Random Lines Overheard From the Movie Tinkerbell That Could Possibly Be Mistaken for Adult Content As I Am Forced to Work While on Vacation and Thus Plug My Kids Into Our Free Childcare Service (TV)

The last light of day!

Now is the fun part!

I’m just getting started.

And I had such high hopes for you.

I don’t want to be just a stupid tinker.

Keep flapping! Keep flapping!

I’m starting to run out of options here.

Wrong answer.

I don’t know, I just found it.

You’re tinkering!

It’s working! It’s working!

Mom Camp

“Which camp will your daughter go to this summer?” my friend asked me about a week ago. “In this economy?” I replied.

“We’re doing Mom Camp this summer!”

In defiance of strict San Francisco parent law my family eschewed children’s day camps this summer season in favor of something radical and exhausting. Entertaining the kids my own damn self.

I’m fortunate enough to not need the camps for childcare. I work from home, half-time. I set my own schedule and bill the hours when I’m done. I’m lucky in that, in these tight fiscal times, I can make the choice to take care of my kids during the day and hit the grindstone during naptime, TV time, and after bedtime. This frees up my money to pay for things like food and electricity instead of one of the many excellent Bay Area specialty camps, such as (and I’m not kidding here) Shark Fishing Camp.

So far we’re having a fabulous time. Such a good time, in fact, that I’d love to spread the word on my Mom Camp highlights.  If you live in the Bay Area feel free to copy these ideas directly. And if you live far away, I am sure you are sharp and clever enough to modify this stuff to create your very own Mom or Dad Camp that works with your city or town.

I’ve found it best to have themes. Starting with some San Francisco basics.

Tourist for a Day. Register ahead of time with the Pier 39 local special to get stuff like free parking or food for kids. Arrive early to hook up with the crowds on east coast time and check out the sea lions, the carousel, and (for toddlers who are still not too jaded to freak out over all things transport-related) the many varieties of boat going bye-bye. Trek over to Musee Mechanique and entertain the kids (while creeping out adults) with the likes of Laughing Sal and other Victorian-era nickelodeon machines. Be sure to avoid the Opium Den puppet show or you’ll have some serious explaining to do.

Scavenger Hunt Day. Make a list and check it twice. Then head out to a unique neighborhood like Chinatown or Japantown to forage for items of interest (waving kitty, fortune cookie factory, etc.). Pop some  pics of the stuff with your phone, making sure to have a kid pose in front of each one for proof of scavenger hunt success.

Explore A New  Neighborhood Day. We applied this one to West Portal but it works anywhere as long as you plunge yourself into a certain part of town with total commitment. We started our neighborhood quest at the playground above the awesome tunnel where MUNI trains exit the subway to go above ground (see above note about toddlers and things that go bye-bye). Then we hit the library for your typical screeching and ripping things off of the shelves. After a lovely stroll down the sunny main street we took a break for gelato at a hip new shop that mainly sells the trendy sour yogurt everyone’s getting all tarted up about. A great Mom Camp day except for the fact that the yogurt/gelato shop’s sullen teenage employees played eff-word laden gangsta rap the whole time (who’s got two thumbs and is gettin’ old? This gal!) And they didn’t have recycling. Seriously? No recycling bins in a restaurant in San Francisco. Please! They practically come into your kitchen and rinse the damn cans for you.

Field trip day. Last week we trekked across the Bay Bridge to Children’s Fairyland in Oakland. Next up is a voyage down the coast to a goat farm in Half Moon Bay. I don’t need to tell you experienced moms and dads out there to plan well for rain contingencies, bring loads of snacks, and offer plenty of time for rest and unstructured play breaks on such outings.

But I will let you in on the best Mom Camp secret I have yet to discover.

Taco Tuesdays at Park Chalet. Shhh! This is between us, but the best way to end a day of Mom Camp is to find a kid-friendly happy hour. I’ve found that the outdoor Taco Tuesdays at this charming little beachside restaurant offer the kids a final chance to run off some steam while the parents get to mingle over a cold one with our fellow camp counselors.

If you don’t live near such a miraculous venue, I advise you to invite your friends over around 4:30pm, bust out some cheap, kid-friendly hors d’oeuvres and grow your own Taco Tuesday. It makes being Mom Camp Director worth it.

I also realized it was quite worth it when my six-year-old daughter blurted out in the car last night, “Aren’t we having the best summer ever, Mom?”

We sure are, Little Camper, we sure are.

Book Review: The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen

I got my husband The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City for his birthday.  We recently bought our first house and I thought the book looked like an excellent resource in assisting our family in realizing the organic-yuppie dream of creating our own garden. Based on my cursory skim of the jacket blurb I thought the book would be about planting tomatoes in my backyard and harvesting homegrown lemons off the patio. Typical grow-your-own advice for the intrepid new homeowner.

Turns out this book is more than your standard Better Homes and Gardens resource. More like a DIY (that’s Do-It-Yourself to the non-do-it-yourselfer) guide taken to a hardcore level. It’s written by folks who seem to be prepared to withstand any major calamity of human or natural origins while they ride out the storm in their off-the-grid Los Angeles bungalow.

As I perused the advice on guerrilla gardening in public spaces and keeping wild quail for eggs, I got the feeling that the book almost amps up the reader for some sort of progressive response to the apocalypse, without coming right out and saying so.  It’s a sort of leftist manifesto to sustainability, eco-friendly living, and urban community for those who have long-since mastered growing a lemon tree on the patio. A sort of hipster thinking-person’s alternative to the back-to-nature hippie advice of our parents’ generation.

My first clue was the guide to urban foraging. Things like grinding flour from recovered acorns, the legal wiggle room allowed when plucking fruit from your neighbors’ overhanging trees, and how to safely dumpster dive.  Seriously cool advice, if not somewhat surprising.

Diving deeper than the dumpsters, I learned about peeing in your own compost, building a wormery, and raising hens in the yard. I was all for it and ready to take the kids out to buy some chicks until I got to the part about cleaning their nasty poultry bottoms. I do enough of that with the small human members of our household. And then I turned to the page on building your own luggable loo/self-composting toilet. It’s basically a bucket in the bedroom. Wow.

Along the way are all sorts of handy projects that take DIY to the extreme. The authors eschew buying expensive compost kits and chicken coops in favor of metal trashcans and busted old vans. They advocate growing your own living curtains out of climbing vines and ripping up the lawn to let wild edible weeds take over. Folks who have apartments are advised to plant secret gardens along highway medians and grassy parking lot green patches. Reduce, reuse, recycle and save money and stick it to the man while you’re at it!

The authors strike me as the sort of educated Ready-Made readers who live in Berkeley or Brooklyn and fetishize mid-century furniture. The extremist, back-to-land living that The Urban Homestead makes the case for is not for militant black-helicopter types. More like citified, yet eco-minded, farmers market shoppers who want to take it to the next level without giving up the creature comforts of urban living or really cool design.

Extremism aside, this is an excellent book for those who are ready to dip their toes into gardening and farming, or taking sustainable living to the next level.  The Urban Homestead’s main weakness lies in its breadth not depth. It almost covers too much ground with its detailed instructions on making your own sourdough starter before moving on to harvesting water off the roof.

As an added bonus, this book is quite a handy guide for folks living in San Francisco earthquake country, or any other city that is at high risk for potentially losing services in the face of disaster (i.e. any city). We were reminded after the Katrina nightmare that we are totally on our own in the event of calamity—that local, state, and national government will pretty much be useless. I’m keeping many of the self-providing lessons of The Urban Homestead in the back of my mind in case of such an event. And I think I’ll throw a copy into the earthquake kit for reference in case the shit goes down and we have to ground flour from foraged acorns or recycle our graywater. Or even just grow our own tomatoes.

Getting Ready for Summer in San Francisco (And, yes, we all know that Mark Twain quote)

I recently read a blog with a hilarious (and true) list of 5 signs it’s spring in San Francisco:

I read this particular article (and I’m writing my own blog entry) while sitting in my iceberg-ish office, wrapped in a cardigan and scarf on a San Francisco Memorial Day weekend. The temp hovers in the mid-50s, the skies are gray, and the wind is tearing off the Pacific Ocean like an arctic fart.

Yes, indeed, it must be springtime in San Francisco!

The funny blog list led me to come up with a few more signs we know it’s spring in the City by the Bay, and I can’t help it if my list offers a parent’s perspective. Here are a few ways we know that San Francisco families are gearing up for summer:

1. A rush on off-season fleece sales. San Francisco parents have been known to swarm the sale racks at Old Navy and Nordstrom in a shark-like frenzy each spring as they search for the perfect bargain on winter clothes. Since San Francisco summers usually top off at an average temperature that is ten degrees less than January in Arizona (see #4) moms and dads of quick-growing kids like to load up on cheapie NorCal “summer” wear.  I have yet to witness a savvy retailer catch on to this phenomenon.  They still mostly stock tank tops and sundresses. I assume this is for the shopping tourist or the SF folks who need to buy true summer wear to take with them on their vacation to somewhere warm.

2. Public school fundraisers. I work for a non-profit website (Plug! Plug!) with a mission to serve as a resource guide for SF families, and every year around this time we get bombarded with requests to help publicize Spring Flings, Kiddie Carnivals, Big Bashes, Movie Nights, and of course my personal favorite, DogFest. My colleagues and I are more than happy to post tons of info on these ubiquitous school events, but along with spring fever comes a bit of a spring bummer that the District provides so little funding that parents have to hold a friggin’ dog show to pay for things like art.

3. Summer camp fisticuffs. And I’m just talking about the parents trying to get their kids in. If you have kids in SF, you may have heard the buzz in the school yard, on the playground, or at Acrosports lessons. Perhaps the messages are flying back and forth on the neighborhood list serve. Second only to preschool panic and public school application mayhem is the summer camp melee. San Francisco parents who work both inside and outside the home tend to bum rush the (thankfully many) summer camps starting early spring, hoping to land a coveted spot at one of the Rec and Parks programs. Some of them are incidentally harder to get into than Harvard University or Rooftop Elementary.

4. Transplants going home. In anticipation of a summer full of cold and fog, many parents who are non-natives of San Francisco (especially those who couldn’t land a decent day camp) pack the hell up and hightail it out to Delaware or Texas or London or Arizona to have a “real” summer with swimming pools and popsicles and sunburns. A real summer does not involve wearing fleece. Even in London, I’m told.

5. Festivals, fairs and parades. For those who choose to stick around and brave the cold, there is no shortage of free or cheap family entertainment. San Francisco families have the good fortune to take part in everything from county fairs to the Stern Grove Music Festival to San Francisco’s crowning glory, (second only to Halloween) the Pride Parade.

6. An odd burst of summer. For an occasional 48 hours parents get to rejoice in 90 degree temperatures. Everyone hurls their kids in the car or onto the N-Judah line to rush to the beach, the white mommies blinding each other with radioactively luminescent legs. The farmers markets overflow with mommies and daddies stocking up on fresh blueberries in their shorts and flipflops. Windows are cast open (as no one has AC here) and all manner of odd bugs make new homes in children’s beds and fruit bowls across the City. Parents scramble to find the window screens that were hidden away in the garage or attic or back closet after last heat wave in February. And then, as quickly as it arrives, the warm weather beats a hasty retreat, smothered by a white pillow of fog.  And out come the fleece jackets again. Purchased on sale at Old Navy.

Why My Mom is Mom-tacular!

I love my mom because:

She teaches her dog to sit, Texas-style, with two syllables: “Seee-it!”

We still bond over classic lady-dates: lunch, shopping, manicures.

She taught me how to dress in a manner that is most flattering for a short woman.

On a related note, she totally understands why I think being called “cute” is a lame compliment.

She taught me to be well groomed and have pride in my appearance. Mom never looks like a slob, even if she is just running out to the grocery store.

Manners, manners, manners. I whined about it as a kid, but I have thanked God for her etiquette lessons every time I’ve ever been on a job interview or at a decent restaurant.

I heard the following mantra a million times growing up: “You can do anything you set your mind to. Don’t ever settle.”

Certain conversations of an intimate nature with her young daughters made her a wee bit uncomfortable, but she sucked it up and had them anyway.

She won’t admit it, but she’s a closet feminist.

I’ve learned how to be a loyal, long-term friend by watching her sustain relationships with an amazing circle of women for the past thirty years.

She embraced my husband from day one, welcoming him into the family like he was one of her own.

She spoils my kids rotten.

She spoils me rotten too.