b.rox

A bit discombobulated and disconnected for this recent holiday. Perhaps that’s because I was traveling just before — the POD Network traditionally has their conference at the end of October, and this one was combined with the annual conference of the HBCU Faculty Development Network, and we mustered our biggest contingent (four) ever. Wouldn’t have [...]

Dear Persephone, You are forty-three months old today. You’ve just completed your first full month of school. Every day you are coming home full of songs and dances, art and ideas. You learned a new favorite phrase there too: “Everyone makes mistakes; that’s how they learn.” I had to point out that your mother learns [...]

A quick guide to help you out. If it’s gender-neutral that would be a plus. It it’s made of plastic that would be a minus. Mass-manufactured is a minus, but hand-crafted is a plus. Batteries? Minus. Noisy? Minus. Educational? Plus. Reflecting values antithetical to our own? Minus, minus, minus. When in doubt, remember: The best [...]

Today was Persephone’s first day of school ever. She’s going to a small Catholic school on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish. I never thought I’d be sending my daughter there, but it’s the same school where Xy teaches, so the convenience is unbeatable. There are precious few publicly-funded pre-K3 programs in town. We don’t [...]

Twenty-five years ago — I came home from Sweden with blue hair, much to my parents’ shock and my sister’s delight. At least I think she was delighted. Kind of hard to tell in this photo. Certainly I was glad to be back home. It was a great experience, my year abroad, but it was [...]

Here’s Persephone’s directorial debut. Cast: Xy — Snow White Persephone — Nice Fairy Michael — Grumpy Therese — Dopey Nicole — Flower David — Prince Cinematography by yours truly. Obviously this was mostly improvised, but Persephone engineered the basic situation. She assigned roles and costumes. She didn’t want a Wicked Queen in her movie, for [...]

Lammas is rapidly approaching. It was last year at Lammas that I began making an effort to observe each holiday in the Wheel of the Year with my family. Now that we’ve seen one full revolution of the wheel, I’m taking stock and reflecting on what it means. It’s my understanding that the Wheel of [...]

Posting has been a little thin here lately, for good reason: I’ve been on vacation. My plan now is to back up in time and recreate these ten days in excruciating detail. So here we go. My in-laws rolled into town on Wednesday, June 15, but my vacation officially began the next day, when I [...]

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there — including my mom, my mother-in-law, my baby-mama, and of course the Great Mother: Mama Earth. I love you all. Forgive us, mothers, for we know not what we do.

This morning Persephone smacked me on the chest as I was carrying her into her bedroom to get dressed. I don’t remember why. She is so tiny I don’t think she could hurt me even if she hit me with all her strength. So in some ways it was no big deal, but I decided [...]

Or would that be Mardi Mince? I never completely recovered from the cold I caught in late January. I only missed one day of work, and I felt well enough that my general routine was not disrupted, but I could not quite kick that last stage. I kept coughing up little bits of phlegm, but [...]

I took Persephone to the doctor yesterday for her three-year checkup. I was going to ask the doctor about getting a lead test, even though it was my understanding that standard protocol doesn’t call for it. A brief recapitulation of her numbers might be in order. These are all expressed in µg/dL (micrograms per deciliter [...]

Inspired by my old compatriot Joe Nickell, who is now an arts writer out in Montana, I commissioned local artist Jane Brewster to paint a family portrait. It’s based on a snapshot (above) taken by a random passing neighbor. The painting (below) captures the magic of the original moment and inscribes it to a deeper [...]

Property tax bills are coming out in New Orleans right now. But this is not about that. I finally beat my father-in-law at Scrabble. The key play for me: MILLAGES, a triple triple bingo for 158 points. This is a word I only learned upon living in New Orleans; it’s another word for property tax. [...]

In addition to Xy’s birthday, we’re also celebrating Persephone’s 25,000th hour of life today; but how to explain this number to a toddler?

Here’s two sets of a dozen pictures each. For maximum enjoyment, view each slideshow in fullscreen mode. (A button will appear in the lower right corner after you click play.) The first batch is over 40 years old, the second batch was collected (from our refrigerator) over the last three months, but both were scanned [...]

I was searching high and low for turkey drumsticks. They’re normally available in most local stores, but suddenly, the weekend before the holiday, we couldn’t find them anywhere. We visited seven groceries. Plenty of whole turkeys, turkey breasts, turkey thighs, ground turkey — but no drumsticks. Finally we found them at Rouse’s on the second [...]

As a number of people pointed out to me, the trouble with celebrating the first thousand days of life is that the number 1,000 is generally beyond the grasp of most two-year-olds. A couple friends had funny ideas about how to communicate the idea. “Let her play in a pile of 1,000 $1 bills so [...]