More Than Four Sides

Category: Family & Friends

  • Pepco’s self-service app

    Pepco, our utility company, has an app to track outages. Today, our status shows 2 customers are without service! Really? Just us and one other house? Actually, it’s impossible to tell from the app, because it shows multiple triangles, each listing up to 5 outages on our street. So, we just wait…

  • Power outage

    We’re at the 84 hours mark without power since Friday night’s violent thunderstorm, now given the elegant term derecho by the weather people. Life contracts – we spent hours over the weekend in the clear water of our non-circulating swimming pool, using the power of our arms and legs to circulate the water and prevent…

  • Why Are American Kids So Spoiled? : The New Yorker

    Why Are American Kids So Spoiled? : The New Yorker. this book review hits so close to home!! Madeline Levine, a psychologist who lives outside San Francisco, specializes in treating young adults. In “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success” (HarperCollins), she argues that we do too much for our kids because we overestimate…

  • Random connections and memories of a 3-yr-old

    We got pizza tonight up in Olney after picking up S from our kind friend who brought him home from the bus. On the way home from a satisfying, but slightly loud dinner, I stopped for gas, and J piped up “We went to the moon doctor when I was sick!” I thought “Huh?”, and…

  • Fun start of camp

    S started camp today – check out this smile!! I think he’s going to have a fun summer.

  • I’m itchy now!

    I was really hoping that after two exhausting weekends out of town, and a busy week in between last week, that today we could finally settle back into the normal routines. That hope was shattered when I looked down at J’s scalp on returning home, and discovered that he had a nice infestation of head…

  • Family camp

    The words “family camp” have strong reverberations for me. I spent most summers of my childhood at some church-affiliated family camp; the United Methodists have a strong tradition of camping, and that was my affiliation through most of my growing up. We signed up for this “forever families” camp with high expectations. We hoped that…

  • Ready for boarding!

    We’re at National Airport, remarkably an hour before our flight, and the boys are very excited about being here. They’re gazing out the window at the planes on the runway.

  • Can’t wait to jump in the pool

    This spring I’ve been behind with everything. It’s very frustrating, but especially with two areas of life/activity that are dependent on the weather – gardening and our swimming pool. It suddenly got hot! 90 degrees today, and nothing would feel better at the end of a day like this than to jump in the cool…

  • Oops!

    Passover got in the way of a lot of life this year. I wasn’t ready for it (not that I ever am, but this year I was particularly unready). My discomfiture was compounded by a lot of things going on at work, and resulted in just my bring completely overwhelmed. No time for reflection, despite…