"That's Not Food!"

I've lost the desire to blog.  I'm compelled to keep writing so that Emily has as many stories about herself to one day read as the boys do, but whenever I sit down to write, I just don't have it in me.  It's not that I've run out of material, per se, because children- all children- are endless fountains of humor and amusement.  It's just that it's started to feel repetitive.  This mommy blog thing is so played out.  The couple of mom bloggers I follow online generally follow the same sort of formula.  Kids are annoying, and we also drink wine.  I'm in the trenches with an army of beautiful morons.  Or it's a humble brag of winning at motherhood. That kind of thing. So what do people think when they read *my* blog?  I've become hyper aware of that question over the past year, which is partially why I haven't written.  What do they think about ME?  That question becomes more nuanced when you whittle down your audience.  To ...

Would you believe Alex broke his arm again?  It's six weeks later, and he just traded in his awkwardly angled cast for a spiffy new brace, the kind that bowlers wear.  I will not be taking Alex bowling any time soon, of course, for fear of resnapping his arm bones.  "That's the biggest complication we see with these type of breaks," Alex's doctor has said many times.  "It takes a year for the bones to fully strengthen and straighten.  Rebreaking is a major concern."  His doctor relayed the same story twice, giving me the uneasy impression that he's only had one other patient besides Alex.  Another young boy broke both his radius and ulna at the playground, same as Alex.  Six weeks after the cast coming off, he got smacked in the arm with a flying soccer ball.  Bam!  Forearm broken again!  Sucks to be that guy. What fun!  An ambulance ride. Everybody knows how Alex broke his arm.  Every stranger and semi-stranger who ...

"I'm going to win!  I'm going to win!"  Emily raced alongside me in the rain, giggling and threatening to beat me to the entrance of the library.  I was holding her backpack, my purse, the bag of library books, and her pink puppy.  We were neck and neck in our fake race, and then her feet tangled up in their unstrapped shoes.  Down she went, hitting her face on the concrete steps.  The howl was immediate and terrible, and I knew what I would see before even dropping to my knees and looking.  A mouthful of brilliant red blood.  Shattered, jagged front teeth.  A shaking little girl, in pain and scared. Oh my God.  Oh my God.  I juggled all of the things, including Emily, wiping blood from her face to the front of her jacket while digging through the backpack- no wait, my purse- looking for my phone, which would not turn on or work right, which did not contain the programmed number of the dentist, which did not have sufficient Wi-Fi ...