Before moving to the great state of Colorado, I was living in the panhandle of Oklahoma, where a tornado warning was the local staple, where the majority of my customers were pig farmers; co-workers were Limbaugh fanatics; and neighbors, such thoughtful souls, liked decorating our cars with egg when we suggested that they turn their [...]

Rocky Raccoon runs ‘round the race track as the crowd ROARRRRS and CHEERRRRRS and reads recipes at recess.
No, I have not cashed in all my sanity chips. Not completely. The above phrase is just one of many things I have repeated over and over since the new year began because my seven-year-old son has resolved [...]

“You look crazy.” People used to say that a lot in my family. I think they feared appearing crazy almost as much as they feared appearing poor. When I was a kid, I had this habit of saying the alphabet over and over and over and over… via sign language. In retrospect, it was obviously [...]

For me, Christmas has everything to do with Mexican food, and nothing to do with Walkmans.
For the first time in their lives, Emma and Kyra (three and two, respectively) played major roles in the tree-decorating tradition. In a moment of sheer delirium (or genius as it were) I decided to provide them with construction paper, [...]

Kyra, my two-year-old, recently attended a day care where you were considered an over-the-hill parent at 25, where everyone (disabled or not) parked in the disabled parking spaces, left their Hummers humming, and allowed rappers named after pocket change to cascade freely through their open windows. Sure, it wasn’t ideal, but we probably could have [...]

Generally speaking, I’m all about honesty. Why has Mommy locked herself in the bathroom? It’s called food poisoning. And the door is locked because it’s possible your eyes would never fully recover upon witnessing what is happening on the other side. Why are we having hot cocoa and cereal for dinner? Because those are two [...]

It was like the perfect storm. There was my mom, my sisters, my dad, and my dear friend Juanita out in eastern Oklahoma ALL asking the exact same questions: How are the kids? What’s new with you? Whose TV are you going to park in front of for Thanksgiving?
It’s not that I have anything [...]

There is a long-running tradition of believing in superstition in my family. For example, my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all lived in mortal fear of El Cucuy at some point in their lives, believing he’d whisk them away in the middle of the night if they didn’t behave. For years now I’ve tried to put [...]

Antonia, my oldest, was a born nervous wreck. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said that she’d been sharing womb space with Marilyn Manson for nine months. Traumatized is the only word I can use to describe her little facial expressions and her glass-shattering vocal pitch for the first year of her life. I [...]

My daughter has recently graduated from the local summer soccer league to this new, year-round, traveling-across-the-state, you’re-in-the-big-leagues-now soccer team. She loves everything about being on this team, from the standard issue sweatshirt with her name embroidered on it, to the more strenuous training that involves a coach telling her she needs to “carb load” before [...]