Back to School

It’s so fun to be able to go into the kids’ school. Today, a beautiful Friday, I was able to walk up the hill to the younger kids’ school to volunteer in art class. It was fun to see the children drawing the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Tidal Basin, etc. They all were in good…

More Fun

Porter, Harlan, and I went to the tree lighting ceremony on campus. They had cookies and hot cocoa afterwards, but their favorite part was rolling down the big, steep hill on campus! I took the younger boys to Scottish Walk. Definitely festive to see the bagpipers and the kennel clubs with the different dogs–corgis, Westies,…

Spring brings Changes

What a long year. This spring has felt good because it seems to be that every day I hear about someone else getting vaccinated and that’s one more person protected and potentially seen soon. It does start to give me some envious feelings, because I’m not eligible yet, even though I’m still working in person,…

Vertigo

Holy moly. I’m just putting this here for the record of if it ever happens to me again, I can pinpoint when and how and for how long it happened before. Feel free to skip this post. Saturday was absolutely gorgeous! Seamus had a soccer game, the weather was high 60s and around noon we…

Updates in the Time of Big Changes

We have been doing a lot of talking and listening with the kids. It’s been good to see them noticing more, asking more questions, etc. So, at the risk of sounding blasé, which I am not, I will give a few updates. The kids had their last day of school of this really bizarre year.…

Senior Seminar–English

I took my senior seminar students downtown to the National Portrait Gallery to see the short-term exhibit on Sylvia Plath. Our theme for the course was Questioning Author-ity, and we did some theory reading, including Barthes “Death of the Author,” Foucault “What is an Author?”, Derrida “On Roland Barthes,” Walker “Feminist Criticism and the Author,”…

Turtle Talk

My colleague very generously offered to come talk to the elementary school about turtles. He has a wonderful turtle lab on campus, which we’ve been to a couple of times. This time, he packed up the small box and slider turtles, some turtle eggs, a snake, and a couple of large snapping turtles! The kids…

Squeezing in one last January Post

Just quickly, I hope to provide you a moment of brevity (levity! Oops. I’m up with the baby a lot) before you go back to reading the horrifying reality show that is the news. My birthday came and went. I had a great time with fun celebrations with friends and family. The boys all wrote…

An Itch to Travel, Part 2

I like travel. I also like to travel with my children, as they learn so much when we go places. Sometimes the things we learn are that we need to slow down and not try to do so much, but often we learn interesting things about traffic, animals, waves, sun, local food, and more. Patrick…

Summer Teaching

I think there is a message out there about summer teaching. I’m loving the class (see from the sidebar that I’m teaching Ana Castillo and have read pretty much everything by her at this point), but man, teaching three nights a week is tough. Only a week and a half to go. In the last…