Last weekend my husband and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary with a child-free weekend away. Who would have ever thought when we got married in 2000 that we’d have three children by now?
I looked back at our premarital counseling booklet, and I had to laugh out loud. The booklet contained a list of questions that we answered separately and then discussed with the pastor who married us. “How many children do you want to have?” I circled “1.” My husband also circled...


I hear all kinds of entertaining tales from my four-year-old twins, and most of them are not even true.
You can forget all the toys we have in our house. My 23-month-old son would rather play with the vacuum cleaner. In fact, Siler is pretty much obessed with the vacuum cleaner. I’m not exactly sure what he finds so appealing about the vacuum. Maybe he likes the loud noise that it makes, which is interesting considering his big brother and sister were scared of the vacuum cleaner until they were three years old. They’d run out of the room and cover their ears whenever the vacuum came on.
Lately I’ve felt like I’m trapped inside the children’s book “Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.” Only in my version of the story, I have three monkeys, and my little monkeys are breaking their arms instead of bumping their heads.
This past weekend was a big deal for my husband. He competed in his first triathlon. For weeks, he had been training for this day, and the kids had listened to us talk about Daddy’s big race. Mark never asked us to come out to watch and support him, but I was adamant that we all be there. I wanted the kids to see that you can work hard at something you’ve never done before and succeed. That’s a quality that I hope they get from their dad. He’s not afraid to try new things, and he...
Today was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I think I’ll move to Australia….or at least into bubble until my luck turns around. Here’s how my day ran down. At around 9:30 a.m., I heard screams and crying. I ran out of the bathroom to find my 22-month-old son, Siler, balled up on the floor. I could quickly tell this wasn’t the crying because his siblings stole a toy from him. These were serious tears.
What happened to my sweet baby boy? Did someone sneak into my house and give him a personality transplant while I wasn’t looking? Suddenly, Siler’s as stubborn as a mule and will throw a temper tantrum worthy of an Oscar if he’s told he can’t do something that he has his mind set on doing.
You have to expect the unexpected. That’s my new motto for raising kids. I’ve learned in my four-year experience as a mom that when children are involved you never know what the day holds. For example, I had no idea when I woke up Thursday morning that I’d be taking my son, Eli, to the pediatrician’s office because he’d come in contact with poison ivy. He came downstairs with his usual big smile and I notice red, blotchiness under his chin. A few hours later, the rash had spread...
To cut or not to cut….that is the question that has been weighing heavily on my mind. I couldn’t decide if my 21-month-old son had beautiful golden locks or if he was sporting a curly mullet. The first hair cut for a boy is such a big stinking deal, and every person under the sun has an opinion on it. And when curly locks involved, as in the case of my baby boy, people are even more vocal.
I’m still standing. That’s nothing short of a miracle considering the stress I’ve been through in the last month. Moving is stressful enough. Tack on sickness and dealing with difficult people, and it was nearly enough to put this mother of three over the edge. That’s why I say the next time I move I hope I’m so old and senile that I have no recollection of it and someone else has to do it for me.