Picturepocket's Blog

Category: parenting

  • Home

    I had a reoccurring dream last night. One of the classics. It’s where I am running in slow motion. It’s not a nightmare, and I am not struggling get away from something, but trying to get back to something. The locations I am slo-mo traveling through are old neighborhoods of places I used to live…

  • Sweater Weather

    People talk about mental labor of running a household and I will give you a half-day example. In order to feed my children breakfast and make lunch and get them into the car for carpool, it helps to start with a clean kitchen that started the night before.  At eight last night, the kitchen was…

  • Who Not to Friend 

    These days my young daughters are navigating the turns and twists of friendships and I try to give them good advice and also demonstrate what it is to be a good friend.  There are pitfalls to finding good friends. My kids know to avoid bullies, but there are subtle indicators of false friends too. The…

  • The Dad Hole

    A few weeks ago, I was describing the feeling of losing my father, and I explained that it was like having a hole punched out of the middle of my chest. I know that sounds dramatic, and I also know that anyone who has been through similar situation feels exactly the same way.  Having a…

  • Work from Home Chicken Enchiladas 

    Ingredients:  2 lbs frozen boneless, skinless chicken thighs 1 package corn tortillas 1/2 bag of shedded cheese Can of enchilada sauce Taco seasoning Directions: 4:00 Arrive at home from school carpool pickup 4:15 Dust 2 lbs of frozen chicken thighs with taco seasoning and place in Instant Pot over two cups of water. Set for…

  • Happy Healthy Holidays

    How come it doesn’t seem like the holidays unless you’re in the Urgent Care waiting room for a family member? This last week, my youngest had a fever at the beginning of the week and so we brought her home until she seemed better then she went back to school. Then she got sick again,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Emotional Gifts

    This morning, I read a string on the internet of people talking about the emotional weight that women carry in families. One of the examples I read was wives sending Mother’s Day cards to their mothers-in-law for their husbands to help carry their relationship. Some were kind of sad, but I have a good story.…