Autumn is usually my favorite season. The heat fades away and students flood the city with excited anticipation. The evening sky turns deep purple and orange, and at night, the chilly wind sends dried clattering along the pavement. There are new shoes and sharpened pencils. Cozy sweaters. Trick-or-treat ( Read more... )

It's been almost two months since my baby died, and I spent this week in San Diego, the place where it all went wrong. Of course she never got to be a baby, only a fetus, but I'd been pregnant for months when we lost her, so she was very real to me. San Diego was really just a bit player in the whole drama, the backdrop to my own personal horror ( Read more... )

I have an adorable little girl. See?


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It's a really odd feeling to be writing fiction again after three years away.  The fun parts are even better than I'd remembered; the challenge of scene construction, the special zing of crackling dialog, the chance to hear someone else inside my head who isn't me.  The frustration is just exactly as I remember, when the words on a page don't look ( Read more... )

"Mommy, carry me ( Read more... )

I used to read every one of those “Mommy wars” links on the parenting sites. You know the ones. “Study finds that children who go to day care more likely to be aggressive.” Or, “Research shows children of stay-at-home-moms have smaller vocabularies.” I read the stories partly out of curiosity in the study design, and partly to assure myself that I ( Read more... )

I actually really enjoy Christmas shopping and spend a lot of time hunting for the right gifts. I don’t manage 100 percent success, but I like to think I have more hits than misses.   Here are some inspirations from the past -- around 100 gift suggestions for the young, the old, and the geeky.

To my friends and family: this year’s selections aren’t ( Read more... )

I recently read "Higher Education?How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- and What We Can Do About It" by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. Spoiler Alert: they never really give many concrete answers to "what we can do about it."  That part of the book is almost non-existent.

I wanted to like this book more than I did.  I wanted ( Read more... )

Over at the NY Times parenting blog, Motherlode, they were recently discussing the matter of banning noisy children from restaurants.  A typical blog post on Motherlode receives perhaps 40-80 comments.  The one on screaming children had 316 replies the last time I looked.  Oh, my, are people up in arms about this important issue ( Read more... )

I just finished reading Columbine by Dave Cullen, and the author makes an excellent case for the fact that the school massacre was never about bullying.  The one teen who masterminded the attack had more in common with a domestic terrorist than a typical loner teen who might fall victim to bullying.  It seems from the accounts that Harris (the ( Read more... )