outsidevoice

We had the neighborhood, the activities, the dates. We were thisclose to having the apartment (hey, there, Park Slope). I was thisclose to setting up meetings, roadtrips. But the Universe had other ideas. Not just one idea, MANY ideas in many areas, and soon it became apparent I had to be a grown up and [...]

I haven’t written much about Leah in some time. She’s almost twelve now, and old enough to know about this site and old enough to where many of her stories are not necessarily mine to tell any longer. I try to respect that, but in this instance, I’m TALKING. We put Leah in a private [...]

In all the chaos of selling this house and managing the closing date, it became clear there is not enough time to look for the next house, pack, deal with financing, etc. This real estate market is ridiculous and I cannot deal with houses that have twenty offers (not kidding) on them in the middle [...]

You know the day is coming. I mean, it doesn’t take much to look around and see what is going on in the world, in the country, to know you’re going to get that call.  If your kid is at a Jewish day school, the likelihood of that call is exponentially greater. And then one [...]

  We are moving soon. Well, we hope we are.  Our house has been on the market since the end of November, we had an offer in mid-March, but never made it out of the Option period because the potential buyers backed out.  I was so tired of the endless showings (now up to 76 [...]

Dear Benjamin: It’s been a good while since one of these notes has been written to you. You are six-and-a-half now and in Kindergarten. You’ll figure out soon enough you are older than everyone in your class because we “bridged” you, but you may not know why. You see, your mid-July birthday brought gifted you [...]

  For YEARS I had been asking Husband to teach me to shoot. Years. The rationale was pretty simple: We have his late father’s shotguns which are both beautiful and meaningful. If we were going to keep guns in the house, I wanted to know how to use them, gun safety, etc. Same goes for [...]

Today was Benjamin’s last speech session. As of 9:15am today there are no more Waiting Room Wednesdays. This feels weird. And sad. I may or may not have gotten teary-eyed hugging our speech therapist that has worked with Benjamin off and on for two-and-a-half years. I haven’t written much about it, but Waiting Room Wednesdays [...]

Two years ago I wrote about how I wanted to show the kids how other people lived differently. TWO YEARS. See, here’s the thing about plans and dreams and a Life List. They don’t just HAPPEN. You sort of have to DO SOMETHING. Because if you don’t you blink and two years goes by and [...]

Image by Renault Futterer Last weekend Leah went to her first Tae Kwon Do tournament. She had been looking forward to it for weeks and spent hours in class getting ready for it. Not knowing what to expect, she was a little nervous, but was comfortable in her skills and abilities – for months she [...]