You can’t help but notice that it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Stores have been decked out in tinsel and holly berries since the day after Halloween, if not sooner. They’re hoping you get the hint: shop early this year. Everyone knows about the Black Friday sales dotting the landscape the day after Thanksgiving. Macy’s and Walmart are launching theirs at midnight, in fact, putting pressure on their competitors to do the same. OK, I’ll admit, I’m feeling the holiday season heat. So on the way home after picking the kids up from school, I glanced back at my son in the back seat …
In just a couple of weeks, students will be swarming out of their relieved parents’ homes in Powder Springs and Lithia Springs, and into awaiting schools, ready to start a new year and reconnect with old friends. My kids have mixed feelings about it—especially my high school sophomore, who, even as I type, is frantically tapping at his own keyboard, trying to crank out a much-delayed essay for gifted English. Other kids around town are doing last-minute reading that was optimistically suggested by their teachers as the children departed for what they thought would be an endless summer. Time’…
Many Americans were glued to the television last Sunday, waiting on confirmation that the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks was actually dead. There was much rejoicing when it was made official, including at our house. I remembered when my 15-year-old, who was 5 during the disaster, came home with a picture he’d drawn in kindergarten of a plane about to crash into a skyscraper. We stopped watching television for a week after that. My husband and I realizedhow saturated our children were becoming by re-watching the horrors from thatday. As I drove my 13-year-old to school on Monday, I talked…
It may seem like a fairly direct route from Powder Springs to the AmericasMart building in downtown Atlanta. Many locals with big dreams would certainly think so. However, the line wrapped around the building on Saturday was a clear signal to me that this was not going to be the easiest mother-daughter experience.But my 13-year-old was dead set on giving "America's Got Talent" a shot, so we joined the audition queue, grateful that this wasn't the weekend for an ice storm glazing Atlanta. My friend, Linda, and her daughter were with us; we've been friends since moving to the area nearly four …
The announcement Wednesday that schools would be closed—again—brought joy to my two children, as well as many kids around Georgia. But for those of us who are not avoiding homework and school projects, the proclamation provoked groans—or worse. OK, maybe I'm being a wet blanket. But I'm the one who nearly ran into our mailbox with our minivan, kids and guitars in tow, as I carted them over to their friends' house a couple of miles away. Their friends' parents incurred a similar trauma when they dropped off my kids—and theirs—for a sleepover at our house hours later. Apparently the carton of …
