On a recent picture-perfect weekend day, I announced to my husband, "Let's go for a bike ride!" The weather was perfectly cool, blue skies overhead, and our bikes had been stowed away for the majority of summer, being way too hot to ride.

Since getting bikes a year ago, we had already enjoyed many a family ride - Jolie riding along in her bike seat attached to my husband's bike, providing a running commentary as we snaked along bike paths in… Read More

To me, nothing says Fall like apple-picking. Slightly nippy weather, maybe a hot apple cider, the air crisp with a tart bite, kind of like a Granny Smith. Last fall, we went with some friends for a family fun apple-picking adventure that I wrote about here. We came away with a nice stash of some different apple varieties than you usually find at the grocery store - a welcome change from the tired same old-same old. Plus, Jolie… Read More

I've decided to start on a new series on this blog dedicated to the health horrors I'm encountering during my pregnancy. For one, I wish you all wonderful pregnancies that leave no mental or physical scars, because pregnancy and new baby-dom is hard enough, and maybe some of this advice will spare you the development of massive hemorrhoids and the compulsion to chug quarts of Citrucel daily. I suppose my first post in this series was really my post on… Read More

One of my ex-boyfriends lived on meat and potatoes alone. Seafood?. Yuck. Salad? "Rabbit food". Vegetables? NOPE. Fruit? Bananas, okay, but that's were he drew the line!

Mind you, he was a nearly grown man and had a diet that a nutritionist would cry over. Seriously, I didn't know GI-tracts could function with such little fiber.

How did these eating patterns develop and why did they persist into adolescence? I wondered whether his parents just sat back and allowed this to happen over… Read More

Last Halloween, we stuck our then-1 ½ year old daughter into a hand-me-down bunny costume from Old Navy since a) we had the costume and it fit, and b) isn't this what you do on Halloween to kids too small to really get it and too small to enjoy the candy loot? Make them wear some kind of degrading animal or vegetable gear?

I convinced myself that she would appreciate it somewhere down the road, laughing at the super-cute… Read More

When I think back to all the Halloween costumes I had growing up, one word comes to mind: LAME.

I don't blame my parents. They were immigrants to this country and Halloween, you have to admit, is a bit of a strange concept. You dress up in costumes and attempt to threaten neighbors to give you candy or else suffer the consequences.

From childhood photographs, my first Halloween appeared to be when I was around 6 or 7. I had one… Read More