Irish Daisy

It all started with a rejected dinner, and it was a darn good dinner too – one of the kid’s favorites which is why the rejection of said dinner was so strange. Half-way through, Quokka dropped half her sandwich and said, “it’s good mom, I just can’t tonight.” Tomato-basil soup and a tuna melt, mmmm Coming from Quokka, this is a major thing. The girl has never met a dinner she didn’t eat – even when it was my disastrous attempt to make brussels sprouts – she will do her womanly best to choke it down. She took her uneasy stomach to bed and was an immobile lump in the blankets within minutes. Then, Badger, who is still small enough to make middle of the night visits horror-movie-levels of creepy, woke me up at 2:00 am to tell me she didn’t feel well. After I peeled myself off the ceiling, I told her to try a sip of water and see if that would settle her tummy. Water running  Slurping noises Pad, pad, padding little feet across the hall and the creak of her bed frame A few...

It’s pumpkin season, so I was going to write about pumpkin bread…but, you know what, screw it. I’ll write about pumpkins later because there’s something else going on right now that’s a little more important. What’s going on has a lot of feelings clamoring inside me, it’s brought up a lot of things that I don’t look at very often, things I don’t take out and examine. But it’s all here right in front of us now and the fear, anger, worry and long-festering rage can’t be ignored – so, I’m writing about this instead. Not Okay In response to a now infamous tape of two men casually discussing, and one boasting about, sexual assault, author Kelly Oxford started a conversation on Twitter under #notokay . She tweeted about her first sexual assault at age 12 and invited other women to share their experiences. She said she intended to erase the tweet if no one responded. Hundreds of women replied within hours, thousands in a few days. It’s in the news, it’s all over social media, bu...

No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Really, it’s not. This is not the lament of a parent with a hormonal teenager, or a dirge about girls and emerging PMS, or a cautionary tale about how my once sweet daughter became an actual fire-breathing dragon because…HORMONES! No, it's not about any of that at all...it's actually a whole lot worse. Puberty Sucks Large I went through puberty, and it sucked, but wrapped up in my own hormonal shitstorm I wasn’t able to put my finger on exactly why it was so terrible and soul-sucking. 26 years later, I have a ring-side seat to Quokka’s voyage and, yes Martha, it still sucks. There has been tons of research about what happens to girls in our culture during puberty – in a nutshell, their self esteem and confidence plummet. Feisty, kick-ass little girls, shrink down into pretty paper-dolls, a two-dimensional copy of their younger self. Theories about why this happens focus on the cultural pressures that assault a girl and undermine her en...

The tooth fairy visited our house last night on a critical mission to claim a poor, broken little baby tooth – oh, and thanks to Rise of the Guardians for giving us a visual on that, as well as plausible reasons for why the tooth fairy is sometimes tardy. The whole kids-losing-teeth thing is a fairly standard part of childhood for most people, but there are certain Puff family members, not naming names, who lean toward the drama side of things. Athena is NOT amused For example, no one is allowed to show Mr. Puff a wiggling tooth, or a recently removed, still bloody bicuspid. And, while Quokka rips her loose teeth out with gleeful abandon, Athena has always been on the more restrained side. We've had instances of teeth hanging by a thread, with jagged roots cutting her gums to bits, and Athena begging us to yank it out, but if any of us made a move toward touching the tooth there would be shrieking. I was honestly afraid someone was going to call the cops on us – it sounde...