A couple of weeks ago, I sprained my neck while washing my hair.

Of all the injuries I could think of that would prevent me from completing my lengthy, daily to-do list, “accidentally wrenching my neck out of whack while completing an extremely mundane task” was not really on my radar. If I had to be laid up, I think I would have preferred to be stricken by a more romantic or heroic malady. …

1. Name, claim, and pre-game this time when your baby is supposed to be napping, but isn’t. Never fear. You are a 2021 Parent and you have got to Get It Done, nap or no nap.
2. Open your laptop, which is inexplicably covered in cat hair. Frantically dust off the cat hair so the baby won’t inhale it, despite the fact that the baby’s preferred wellness routine involves fervently embracing your unwilling pet at inopportune times, burying a snotty nose in its fur, and sucking in a good healthy lung full of fuzzy dandruff.
3. Scoop up baby and cuddle him gently…

Here there be a lot of links, and also maybe monsters. Well, probably not monsters. But it’s best to be prepared.

In April, I embarked on a 30-day writing challenge with the goal of 30 published pieces by the end of the month. I laid out my plans to “spend time writing every single day, and intend to publish something every single day, [but] I will not be writing a brand-new article, start to finish, thought-up-that-morning-while-brushing-my-teeth, every single day. Because that, in my mind, is a recipe for mindless listicles.”

I’m happy to say that I didn’t write any mindless…

Earlier this week, I sprained my neck, and had to take a couple of days away from my normal responsibilities — and my thirty-day writing challenge — to give my upper body a chance to heal.

I won’t bore you with the particulars, but as far as the urgent care team could assess, I pulled and stretched some ligaments with the repetitive stress movements of picking up my baby, putting him down, carrying him around, and lunging to grab him when he attempted to launch himself off his changing table. It’s not an uncommon injury for a parent of a…

When my husband and I got married in 2018, we had a lot of decisions to make together. One choice, though, was mine alone: the dress I was going to wear for our wedding day. We had a very traditional ceremony and reception, so he didn’t see what I was going to wear until I was actually walking down the aisle.

I have been sewing haphazardly since I was in first grade, and sewing seriously with an eye to making real clothing — though still, sometimes, haphazardly — for the past eight years. Making my own wedding dress was a…

Fiber-wearing humans have been pressing creases out of their clothing for hundreds of years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, flat pieces of iron forged with a handle — originally known as “sadirons,” and then, quite creatively, as “flatirons” — would be heated in a fire and then used to flatten wrinkles in freshly washed and dried clothes.

A flat surface was required for this work, and women who needed to iron clothes would do so either on an existing table — risking scorch marks or dirt on clean clothes — or on a flat board placed between two chairs…

Throughout most of my adolescence, my family volunteered at a nursing home. Every week, we’d run into an elderly gentleman who drove forty miles to visit his bedridden wife. She had Alzheimer’s, and he was completely deaf. Their ability to communicate was minimal at best. Yet every week he’d appear with a snack and a smile to push her reclining wheelchair into the courtyard on sunny days or to sit quietly in her double-occupancy bedroom when it rained.

He was full of stories of his past career and present grandchildren; his brief stint in the army before his commanding officer…

Though I am not nearly so skilled at dancing through life as Fiyero in Wicked, I must confess that there are many times when I am “deeply shallow.” Every single time I get a Medium notification, for instance. That little rush of dopamine after discovering a new comment or a series of claps is wonderfully mood-boosting. (I could do without the news that someone else highlighted the same line I did, though. That’s nice. Go away.)

I used to feel a thrill right down to the tips of my toes, a la Anne Shirley, every time I was informed that…