Picturepocket's Blog

Category: family

  • Fixer Uppers

    If necessity is the mother of invention, then poverty and misplaced confidence are the parents of DIY.  When we bought our home eight years ago, it was plenty large enough for Tim, me and a preschooler. Now we are a family of four and space is feeling tight. We have reconfigured the kids bedroom in…

  • Simple Pasta Recipe

    The first time I made pasta from scratch was when I was probably around twenty one. I was home at my parent’s house from college. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but my mom was out for the evening.  The sky was starting to turn dark and my Dad wandered in to the kitchen with…

  • Things that Keep me up At Night

    Most nights I crawl into bed, totally physically and mentally exhausted from the day. The living room and kitchen tidied and swept just enough to let them rest until the breaking of our next fast. The children have been bathed, brushed, bundled and rebundled in their beds. The dog has been walked around the block. If…

  • Back to the Past

    Netflix has the movie Back to the Future playing for the last few days of September, and I watched it last night. It originally came out in the Eighties when I was in third grade.  It was a big deal, everyone was talking about it.  Back then, it was a straight forward adventure story of…

  • A New Bedtime Prayer

    Growing up, I learned the bedtime prayer that starts “Now I lay me down to sleep. ” When it came time to teach my children something to say at night, I reconsidered. It has a nice rhythm and rhyme structure, but the words get a little dark talking about “if I should die before I…

  • Life in the Margins

    One of the things that I am trying to do better with the kids is to build in margins. If we all have to be somewhere at a set time, then I schedule the drive time and parking. Then I add the time that it will take to find the children’s shoes and also go…

  • The Hard Rest

    With school starting next week, I finally did a reset in the kids’ room.  On Monday and Tuesday, we went through all of the clothes and got rid of the fall and winter clothing they outgrew since last year. We also pulled anything lighter that won’t make it next to summer, size-wise. We were rewarded…

  • Don’t Mind the Cursive

    I keep seeing posts from folks bemoaning the loss of cursive and  complaining about what books the kids these days are or aren’t reading. I guess that Facebook has become a place to vent frustrations about the educations Gen Z and Alpha. So here’s mine: please stop. Seriously, as a parent of two school children,…

  • The Other Other

    If I told you, “There is somebody at the front door,” Could you tell me what they looked like if my description did not include anything other than what I said already? Probably. You could go by my lack of description and rattle off all the “normal” things. First, we assume that it’s a man,…

  • Stay’n Alive

    I took my kid to the pediatric cardiologist today. It was in the medical building complex up the hills of Portland where they have Dorenbacher’s, Shriners and Oregon Health Sciences University Hospitals—all the best medicine we have available to modern humans. The reason we went was to keep my youngest healthy. While she didn’t have…