My sweet boy Ezra Star (6.5) jumped onto my lap today, throwing his little arms around my neck, and apparently milking the Oedipal Phase for all it’s worth, announced: “You know, Mama? We can’t really get married to each other. Even if we wanted. Because you are 41, and I am 6 1/2. And it’s just NOT appropriate.”

I burst into giggles and kissed him on both delicious cheeks: “No? That wouldn’t be appropriate?” He laughed too: “No! Even though […]

n these last weeks I’ve been pondering the tender intersection of choice, failure, and forgiveness.

Always poignant topics inside a human life vulnerably given to the forces of love and loss, what has driven these issues directly and painfully home to my personal heart of late is the rather angst-filled decision to let our sweet, amazing dog, Ekara Faith, return to the breeder from whom we received her in December.

And let me assure you, right from the start of this tender story, that while it is an intensely difficult choice, I completely trust this is the right choice, the wisest, most compassionate choice~ for this incredibly beautiful dog (who will now be devotedly trained to become a service dog for someone in need) as well as for my broken-hearted family, who truly wants the best life for Ekara, even more than we want to get to love her personally.

After many months mixed with incredible love and intense challenge, realizing we had made a commitment to loving an intensely intelligent dog who needs (and deserves!) […]

Last Sunday I had one of those days. It was like a Jesua version of Alexander’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

One thing after another went askew. I won’t even bore or depress you with the detailed account of everything that went wrong. It was like a comedy of errors, except at the time it really didn’t seem funny to me at all.

All day long I barely held it together; triggered by circumstance, humbled by hormones, and challenged by life’s sometimes mean and messy ways.

Finally, when I arrived home that evening, late of course, I walked in the door and Ekara, our 5 month old puppy immediately jumped up onto me and tore a hole in my longtime favorite, most beautiful hooded sweater.

The one I wear every day, through all the seasons~ to work, to be cozy […]

Yesterday I had to take my beloved boy Ezra (6) to get some follow-up blood work at the doctor office to investigate more thoroughly some of the numbers that had returned from the tests we had gotten the week prior. Nothing dramatically troubling at this point, just some slight abnormalities worthy of investigation.

Well, needless to say, getting blood drawn from his arm is not my boy’s favorite way to spend a free morning with his Mama. But Ezra is a pretty fearless soul by nature, and so he was buoyant and open-minded until the actual moment came, sitting on my lap in the lab, with the rubber tourniquet tight around his upper arm, while we removed the bandaids that had numbing cream under them, in support of inviting as painless a procedure as possible.

We watched as the nurse kindly and gently prepared the needle and vials in front of us, and then suddenly I felt Ezra tightening and tensing his body against mine, everything in his body instantly transforming into “No!”

The nurse opened the needle and I held his arm steady. And then he suddenly strongly twisted his arm out of the range, making the vein inaccessible, and began resisting, loudly, saying: […]

I loved having babies. I loved the relative simplicity of that chapter of parenting. Such a physically raw time, yes, wow; literally growing their bodies from my own flesh and blood, my milk, my chi, my sleeplessness given, helplessly, to the devoted care of these young mammals.

But I loved how my job then was to just feed them my heart, carry […]

This is such a loaded time of year, isn’t it? It can be a beautiful time, yes. Full of sparkly lights and brisk walks bundled in layers, sweetly, arm in arm. In this part of the Northern Hemisphere it is a time of turning inward, into the darker months, shorter days....

I've noticed the children haven't wanted to speak a lot with each other about Arayla's hospital journey. They've just wanted to recalibrate to one another, to play joyously as well as quarrel in familiar ways. Ezra( almost 6) and I definitely needed to process upon...

As I integrate the acute traumatic and healing passage through which we recently traversed with Arayla as she found her way back from the edge of physical crisis to health, something I've been contemplating is the interesting role that intuition has played throughout....

  One of the sweetest, most powerful moments during our hospital stay this past week, was right after we found out all of Arayla’s bloodwork showed enough improvement for us to get to go home. After the doctor left the room I climbed up into Arayla’s hospital bed with...