Adventures In Motherhood

Be careful or the negative will consume you, I thought to myself summoning the energy to raise much-needed positive endorphins on a morning run. The 24-hour news cycle, global temps rising, and Customer Care Representatives who suck me bone dry will require a longer run this morning to combat the negative slime oozing in our country and polluting my mind. Keep America Great! The irony when 'customer care' reps deny, deny, deny or someone from India answers. Aetna health insurance is the bane of my existence after seven phone calls, each a minimum hour-long blood boiling conversation having diminishing returns on my mental health (which is also likely not covered). And what happened to common courtesy? Last night a lady refused to zipper merge me onto I-5 south, throwing up her hands in anger, as if it made her a better driver! I gave her thumbs up instead. Then there's the mid-century modern sofa we purchased supporting a boutique local business thinking it would be grand...

Summer escapades are not for the faint of heart in our family of six; further evidence we never do anything small! A family of avid outdoor enthusiasts, we participated in Sunday Parkways last weekend in North Portland, an 8.8 mile loop bringing out cyclists of all persuasions from Storm Troopers and Unicyclists playing the violin, to dogs on bikes (my own included). Sunday Parkways in Portland is family friendly and the Forced Family Fun (#FFF) our family has grown accustomed to! As parents of two teenagers, ages 15 and 13, not to mention an 11 and 8 year old, sometimes we have to force the family fun, with less than eager participants. It becomes 'Extreme' when we load on the miles or level of difficulty, for us as parents that is. North Portland is quite a distance from our SE Portland hood, and the exact length of the 24-mile trek was not something we initially divulged to our children as they ventured out along the Springwater Corridor, wind at their backs and smiles o...

It's easy for our children to be involuntarily subjected to a world full of hate nowadays.  Impatient drivers flip 'the bird' and yell obscenities at me as they dangerously zoom past my carload of children.  A gridlocked lady sarcastically claps from the safety of her vehicle as my friend kindheartedly moves a garbage can blocking traffic, in plain view of her puzzled daughter.  Protests and counter-protests in anger block our streets as my family bikes downtown.  The 24-hour sensational news is not easily consumable by children.  Sometimes I cannot help but visualize pink slime boiling in our sewers fueled by hatred and anger akin to New York City in Ghostbusters II! As a mother with clandestine experience, I recently reached my internal boiling point and decided to make it our charge to spread love throughout the day, albeit in disguise.  Boys, I smiled, "I mustache you to spread some love today!"  My son and his buddy enthusiastically accepted t...