My daughter balances me out. Oh don’t tell her I said so, and on my blog no less, but she does. Many times I forget this myself. I am too busy in mother mode, which, as any parent will contest, requires a tight leash at times. She can be a handful because she is so damn smart (and now you nod and you say, ‘here goes another mother about to bore me to death with her daughter’s attributes, if she could she’d pull out the video, no wait, she’s going to attach a YouTube link of The Daughter performing “You Light Up My Life” on the piano. Just wait. I know it is coming.) I mean, yes, she whips out a mean version of her own music on our dusty keyboard (inventing music is always more intriguing than …Read on

It was a self-imposed exile that kept us away from our technologically-appropriate glitzy LCD screen and comfortable couches in the living room.
We had shuffled ourselves into this tiny, forgotten playroom (created out of a sliver of the garage only to end up serving as a cemetery of misfit Barbie heads and long-forgotten Super Heroes) in order to allow our cleaning ladies, who where there for their allotted weekly clean, to go about the business of organizing our disastrous home.
Still, Barack Obama was minutes away from being inaugurated as the first African American president and we weren’t going to miss that moment over an issue of hygene.
We sat in that room side by side, transfixed by the teensy 17″ cube dinasour of a television won by our daughter at a local raffle years ago, and as the day’s events unfolded before …Read on