It would have been an “oh sh**” moment, except I was surrounded by Big Guy’s basketball team, and I’m careful to restrain myself in such situations.
“Where was Big Guy?” his coach asked shortly after we …

I knew Big Guy had to be getting better because his belt kept changing colors but I’ll be honest: I hadn’t really noticed.
Despite sitting through almost three  years of the guys’ karate lessons, I still  …

He’s a list-maker who’s used to same slip of steno pad for months to keep on track.
He’s a planner whose Valentines were ready Feb. 8.
He’s an organizer who gets that if you put away your …

There was a time when I wrote two, sometimes three times a day every day of the week. A time when life seemed a little muddled once in a while but mostly clear.
That time is …

Big Guy brought the project home from school Monday. It started with a typed note attached to a brown bag – bring three things to school that represent something important in your life. You’ll talk …

Boots’ school operates on a color system – kids start the day at green and either move up to yellow, orange and then red or down to blue, purple and gray.
The problems with that are …

Boots  loves critters – anything with fur, feathers and fins. He’s always loved winged creatures the best, so I suppose it was inevitable that once the infomercials hit we would be buying a butterfly kit …

Due to a dog who eats everything and kids who leave drinkware scattered through out the neighborhood, I dragged my collection of stadium cups out of the cabinet yesterday. Accumulated over decades, the stack had …

It took a while longer to get to the little one.
By the time Big Guy was 4, I knew he was destined to be a baseball fan. That was the summer when he opted to …

I’ll say this about our first adventure in standardized testing land: Big Guy’s results from the spring exam dovetailed perfectly with his performance in the classroom. I’m just not sure that either indicator is accurate.
In …

Big Guy had just gotten his little butt beaten badly, but he’d come up grinning so it was safe to broach the subject.
“So what did you learn today?” I asked. It’s my standard question when …

I figured we were headed this way a year ago, when all Big Guy wanted for his birthday was “cool clothes.” Clothes? Didn’t that used to be the ultimate gifting insult?
Suspicion grew stronger at Christmas, …

I started out with good intentions, declaring as school let out that the guys would read for a half hour each day.
That soon devolved to bribing – they’d earn one “Mom Buck” for each 30 …

When Daphine was a girl, red shoes were forbidden – only “loose women” wore them, she was told.
As a result, as soon as she got her first job she took part of her first paycheck …

A funny thing happened on the way down the mountain.
Maybe the cross at the top triggered a religious experience, or maybe my brain lapsed into giddy euphoria due to oxygen deprivation. Whatever the reason, exercise …

It started out as a joke between a 7-year-old and his mom. A few weeks after his dad deployed, the boy sat down on the couch, grabbed the  remote and began flipping channels. “I’m doing …

The guys are not squeamish about the news – there’s really no way a kid can be growing up in a military community, where events continents away can flare and invade your life. So …

If there’s an app on my phone Big Guy is going to play with it – especially since I’ve taken the games off my geriatric-by-today’s standards Blackberry so I could install Major League Baseball At …

The guys go to a school that ends at second grade, though the weight of the entire student body has been thrown behind this week’s state testing.
The kindergarteners made posters supporting the second graders – …

I’ve never paid much attention to birthdays – not since I turned 18, at least, and was old enough to drink. Yes, I am that old. Being old doesn’t especially bother me most of the …

I wish I could track down everyone who, two years ago, was ready to label Boots a mental midget just because Big Guy was doing well in kindergarten.
“Gosh, I hope Boots isn’t dumb,” was the …

It came to 17 hours out of my life this week, and I’m a slacker. Some folks put in 40 or more. My paltry total still was the equivalent of half a work week at …

The running joke about Big Guy is that he was born in a hurry. He arrived a week early, with all the subtlety of a thunderstorm, and tried to pop his head up and look …

Rita is not having a good time of it.
We’re on a road trip that came up at the last minute, too late to make arrangements to board here. She handled the trip part spectacularly. We’d …

For want of a sock, the soccer game was lost.
Technically, I don’t know that the game was lost. I do know, though, that Boots was lost to the game after he decided to sit on …

Big Guy survived his BFF’s move last spring, and the relationship continues to thrive thanks to unlimited long distance and Skype. He teetered last week, though, when another friend – the first he’d made here …

After all the warnings that any paper left lying around faced extreme peril, I was the one who screwed up.
I was sorting through Big Guy’s envelope of graded school work when I moved his Valentine’s …

Competition is good: Before his last indoor soccer game last winter, Big Guy knew his team hadn’t lost all season. He saw that slipping away and begged his coach to put him in on defense …