My household is a bit disrupted this month with a visit from my sister and her family. These get-togethers are rare since they live thousands of miles away in Europe, where my sister and her husband are both professional musicians. We treasure this time when the cousins can spend the days in one long, extended play date, while the grown-ups eat great meals and sample one bottle of wine after another, simply enjoying each other’s company.
Liz Stockwell
Liz Stockwell has a PhD in zoology from the University of Washington and lives in Burnaby, British Colombia. After experiencing the hectic pace of combined teaching, parenting, and academic life, she decided to be home with her two young children full-time. In her off-hours, she squeezes in writing projects (occasionally!) and enjoys exploring the forest and seashore with her family.
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Most Recent Articles
August 5, 2009
With summer vacation comes a flurry of activities to keep children occupied. We’re blessed in our community with all kinds of day camps, sports venues, and art classes through the city’s parks and recreation department. The problem: few of them are in walking distance. A few things appropriate for my son’s age are close by, but activities for my four-year-old daughter require a drive. And aside from our little patio wading pool and hose, there are no swimming pools or spray parks we can walk to when it gets hot.
July 22, 2009
I found the recent Wall Street Journal article about family-work balance blogs surprising. After all, in my own family my husband and I frequently check in with one another and analyze how we’re both feeling about the family-work juggle. We’re both guilty of being pretty intent on our navels much of the time. But we find that we haven’t just made static choices about how to divide our work and family lives.
July 7, 2009
We celebrated the last day of school and report card day at our house not too long ago. I know that one day I’ll get over this living vicariously through my son’s school experiences, but I still relive the trepidation I felt at opening up my end of year grades. There was one I always feared: my gym class grade. I was the quintessential anti-athlete and the slowest runner in my classes. Most of my grades would be S’s or S+’s (Satisfactory or Very Satisfactory)…and then the glaring S- (Less than Satisfactory) in gym.
June 24, 2009
For the past nearly two months I’ve been working towards some sort of new normal as I recover from and work with my doctors to figure out how to live with the illness I never dreamed would turn our family life so utterly on its head.
May 12, 2009
Provosts and chief financial officers may have different jobs, but they have to work together like a married couple, presenters at NACUBO say.
April 1, 2009
I remember the day it became painfully obvious to me that I was different from the other kids in school. I was 10 years old and in fifth grade. In a break from our academic activities, our teacher Mrs. Heaton suggested we play the “telephone” (or “pass it on”) game, where one person comes up with a word or phrase and whispers it to the next person, who whispers it to the next, and so on, until the last person has to repeat the word which has inevitably changed to something silly.
