A friend sent me some hometown goodies, which adds a nice new regional element to Tucker’s playing card deck collection… and introduced Béla to a new Korean Marvel hero, Taegukgi. Béla’s so into that graphing calculator that the Easter Tucker got him. Béla’s interest in electronics, programming and circuit-building seems to tend toward the vintage……

An English friend on Facebook commented that this was quite a haul and I felt very American. But a lot of it is for the pets. Graphing calculators that do more than some gaming systems do were a huge hit with Béla in particular. A book on making cosplay costumes. New half-hoops for Claudia and…

She kept insisting she wanted to be the reader. I told her it was not easy. I really do try to do an oral run-thru of it before I read to them. This is why. And this is what the text looks like in the book: And here’s Béla and Marble having some recovery time.

Target Starbucks. New bath mat, Clothes and a frame for a poster of Béla’s. Ridiculous surge pricing. When they are thirty will they begin to see how incredibly treasured they are to each other? They see it some now… but when does it start to blow them away?

A friend called on the phone tonight and I actually took the call because in his whole eleventh month of life I had drilled him hard and asked “HOW OLD ARE YOU?” and got him to hold up one finger. He was my practice baby — for years. He never lets me forget how much…

“I love waking up at home on the weekends. It feels like being in a movie,” Claudia told me yesterday. She loves to look at the line of townhouses out her bedroom window, and hear folks outside. Claude had her first rehearsal with Settlement Music School’s Senior Choir on Friday evening. She’ll soldier through The…

Get on the good foot. Art is not expendable. Um, yeah. Had people actually forgotten that? Certainly when people climb all over one another to get their kids into a “prestigious” school, it’s always got a “great arts program”. Well, how about Claudia’s free teen program through Fleisher Art Memorial, where she’s currently taking a…

We’ve been here a year. In quarantine. Only the most limited, tenuous connections are returning here and there. The kids are very conservative about playing with their very lives — who’d have guessed? We know it’s not a straight path to full open doors. But Tuck and I each have our first vaccine in us,…

We were getting in one last study at The Tasty… before beginning a year-plus of lockdown. They sure have become more of who they are going to be. It’s been the most amazing year of their lives and development as people, and I feel closer to them than I ever have. The world never fails…

Thanks so much to Donna and PRIMA magazine. The article about Claudia is on 25. Check it out here.

Who could she be? This is Claudia’s pick for her FOURTEENTH gotcha photo (2021). Outtakes were too good not to share. Icon. Frankly I think she chose the photo on the basis of how the cats looked.