Check out my poems in this week's issue of LiteraryMama. The poems that come immediately after mine are also by a Spalding alum, Matthew Vetter. His poems are awesome! You can find him and Jill Koren sharing poetic wisdom here. (Spalding doesn't have any particular affiliation with LiteraryMama, we just happened to both end up in this issue.)

Well, we saw Up yesterday with the kid at a 9 am showing. Had the theater practically to ourselves and 3D glasses on so no one noticed my crying like an idiot. This wasn't my favorite Pixar movie, but it did beat Finding Nemo for most tear-inducing opening sequence and pretty much any movie ever for most heart-rending emotional climax ( Read more... )

I'm teaching a humanities class called Literature & Fine Arts. It's only met once and the kids are pretty unapologetic about the fact that they're only in this class for the required humanities credits, but I am crazy excited about it. My only problem is keeping myself from getting nervous and distracted in class and figuring out how to fit 500 ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Anybody else think this whole Miss California nonsense is just a way for the Miss America pageant to trick people into caring about their ridiculous, antiquated dog show? Shame on the news networks for reporting on this idiotic charade as if it were, you know, news. Don't sweat it, CNN, the bloggers can handle this one. Maybe you could go back to ( Read more... )

April is National Poetry Month; don't know if anyone's mentioned that to you over the last couple of weeks. Poets.org has a ton of poetry activities, poems of the day, etc throughout the month. You can also find a lot of people trying to blog a poem a day or even some poetry events in your area ( Read more... )

Here's the newest addition to the family:


( Read more... )

The Bouncing Souls rock ( Read more... )

My friend Julene posted this little questionnaire with answers from 4-year-old son. Since Alice is always wanting to take quizzes online (I don't know, she's growing up in the computer age), I thought she would find it fun to answer these questions together. It was a lot of fun for both of us. We laughed our heads off.

1. What is something Alice/Mom ( Read more... )

Another example of how Alice's sense of humor is developing: just now we were snuggling on the couch, and she flipped the end of a lock of her hair in her mouth. This has become a habit lately, ever since I let her cut her hair into a chin length bob. It's a bad habit, grosses me out, and is exactly the kind of thing mom's have been yelling at ( Read more... )