Adventure Mom

Monster in the Closet/Where the Wild Things Aren’t A monster might emerge from the closet. The monster might eat me. I don’t want the monster to get me. Oh, look, the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine has an article about a TV presenter I don’t know. I’ll read this story so I won’t think about the monster in the closet.  It says here Simon Barnett and his lovely wife have four daughters. They’ve been married twenty years… Is the monster coming? Is the monster going to eat me? AND GNASHED THEIR TERRIBLE TEETH… Simon says (hey, that’s like the children’s game…) there’s no manual for the two most important things you can do in life – get married and have children. Oh, that’s true. He reads books about relationships. Really? A guy does that? I just finished reading the Five Love Languages and thought its ideas were logical and doable. We invest more hours researching houses or cars than we do before supercolliding our life with someone else’s. Or procreating… ...

Free Salmon and Hairy Legs I’m scared to write this blog post. Scared to write about cancer.  Scared I’ll say the wrong thing, say too much, or fail to paint the picture of my week with my sister-in-law, Stephanie. Mostly, our time in Olympia, Washington was ordinary. Feed-the-dog, load-the-dishwasher and cajole- the-nine-year-old-to-bed ordinary. Watch ‘Impractical Jokers’ on TV ordinary (though some of those jokes are seventh-grade genius – salami down the pants, then back to the customer? Ha!) Mostly, our minutes and hours consisted of gloriously ordinary family routines. Diagnosis  Here’s what’s not ordinary: Steph, who just turned 47, was diagnosed in late May with grade IV glioblastoma. Three malignant tumors have infiltrated the right side of her brain, compressing and pushing healthy tissue to the left side of her head. According to Wikipedia, glioblastoma "is the most common and most aggressive malignant primary brain tumor in humans...Median sur...