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Changing Hair, Changing Names: rights and responsibilities as a blogging mom
Robin’s hair color is changing. When she was born, she had a crown of reddish brown hair, just like her Dad. I love how father and daughter have the same haircolor and hairSTYLE here! That all fell out...
View ArticleIn which the ice cream truck waits for no man
Yesterday was terrible. And by terrible I mean, bladder infection, 2 trips to Target, a trip to express care, still trying desperately to finish my syllabi which requires intense focus on details even...
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Let’s Talk About Debt, Part 4: The Golden Handcuffs of Employment (aka...
Hello from post-academic-working-busy-life land! I’m so intensely sorry to have neglected the blog. I have excuses but they are boring. I think I’m finally settling in to my job and will have more time...
View ArticleHurts so good: Why I love new prep
Fall semester is in full effect here: stacks of syllabi cluttering my table, mountains of student emails to be answered: Can I drop your class? Can I add your class? Can I stay in your class if I can’t...
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Working Definitions of “Academic Advising”
I’ve been at my new job for a month as of today and I’ve hit a tipping point as a trainee: my ratio of time spent training versus time spent working with students is finally trending in the student...
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Advising Magic: What Advising Does Offer the Teaching Junkie
Jen’s post about teaching prep had me feeling all nostalgic for the classroom. And I’ve admitted that I do miss that start-of-semester energy. This is my first year out of the classroom since 2004, and...
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Feel Good.
My friend Greg lost his battle with cancer last night. I met him when I was a teenager in a program called Girls State; later I worked with him on staff there. He was a friend and a mentor in life,...
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Kindergarten
One week into kindergarten, this is what I have learned about what happens there: 1.) In music class, you stand on big shelfs. There are three shelfs, but really there are six shelfs, because there...
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The Worst, Hard Time (Part 1): The First Domino Falling
I love autumn in Iowa, and we start to feel hints of days to come in September. Often, our Labor Day holiday is sunny, breezy, and warm but not hot: the perfect harbinger for glorious fall days. For...
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The Worst, Hard Time (Part 2): How Ear Infections and Viral-Induced Asthma...
As I wrote in Part I, we never fully recovered from that awful, severe stomach virus that beset us in Labor Day 2010. As the weather cooled and the girls spent more time in daycare, we all started...
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Attachment Parenting Does Not Equal Helicopter Parenting: A Plea for More...
There’s this misconception floating around that Attachment Parenting is the same thing as helicopter parenting. I run into it frequently whenever feminist publications like Jezebel comment on...
View ArticleI am an attachment helicopter! Or maybe not! My take on parenting philosophies.
Like Lauren, I have followed the debates around feminism and attachment parenting and free range parenting and helicopter parenting with increasing frustration and disappointment. I think Lauren is...
View Article6 Things I Learned While Listening to Kids Music on Pandora This Morning
1.) I know all the lyrics to Call Me Maybe, Moves Like Jagger, and several songs from The Little Mermaid. 2.) The Chipmunks version of Party Rock is neither better nor worse than LMFAO’s version. 3.)...
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It’s Time for Big Tent Feminist Parenting. No more of this divisive shit.
On facebook, a friend of Jen and I recently shared Nicola Krause’s HuffPo article, “My Message To Dr. Sears: Why I Chose Detachment Parenting” because she thought it make good blog fodder. And she was...
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Lamentations of a Teacher: What Advising May NOT Offer
A couple weeks ago, I waxed rather rhapsodic about how some of the things I love about teaching can be fulfilled through an administrative position. It got some hits and even a link from one of the...
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“I hated you for that.”
I kid you not, within two days of posting about our winter of horrible illness, Robin got sick and had an asthma exacerbation. And then it happened again about 4 days later. And I have a cold, and now...
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But is it art? Water, and sky, and light.
“This is my ArtPrize,” D says. “I made it with paper and markers and it is about how rainbows are made of water and sky and light. Would you like to touch it? Here is a card if you want to vote for...
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My One Weird DIY Fixation: Halloween Costumes
As I’ve written before, I’m not terribly crafty. Yet I have this wild hair when it comes to Halloween costumes: I just refuse to buy them. I feel like Halloween costumes should be found in closets and...
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Fallout: The Psychological Debt of Grad School
When I named our blog Mama Nervosa, I thought it was sort of ha-ha funny. Oh, I’m so neurotic! It’s so amusing! But time has shown that it was a rather uncannily accurate descriptor, at least for me...
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Quittas and Post-Ac-ers: What should I tell the smart kids to do instead of...
Thanks for all the kind comments on my last post. Things are looking up. Sometimes drugs really do help. Work is busy, busy, busy and I’ve been thinking about how I could reframe my sad mindset about...
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