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Meet Lilia

Dubsie spends most of her days in the company of a Ukrainian woman whose name is Lilia. Lilia grew up in Dnepropetrovsk, in central Ukraine, about 300 miles from Kiev. She is our au pair. Let me explain what that means, exactly.

Au pair is a French word that literally means “on equal terms” but […]

Come Again

Everything was going so well up until the moment of the eruption. We’d had a happy, playtime kind of day with our friends Russ & Sunny and their two kids, and now we’re assembled in the living room to see them off, so great to see you, let’s do it again soon. Dubsie sits innocently […]

All By Myself

My ladies boarded a jet plane last week and disappeared to Texas, on a visit to family, leaving me alone in an empty house, and I took no time in regressing to a primitive, almost bachelorlike state.

‘Superbly awesome’ is really the only phrase to describe it. I wake up in the morning in this […]

Brush brush brush!

They tell you that parenting is about patience, and about poop and vomit and curtailed sleeping hours, of course, but they don’t tell you that it also requires salesmanship, especially in the realm of tooth-brushing.

Brushing Dubsie’s teeth has been difficult as long as there have been teeth. (Or ever since our pediatrician, Dr. Busse, […]

Inspector Gadget

Of all our devices, the one Dubsie finds most relaxing is the pager. When she gets her mitts on it she’ll kick back on the bedroom rug like she’s reading a trashy novel in goddamn Ft. Lauderdale.

The other gadgets aren’t for relaxing but for the pushing of buttons. (Tactile buttons and her parents’ buttons.) […]

Raising a Child on Bad Spanish

I recall the exact moment when I decided to raise Dubsie in Spanish. She and I were walking on 5th Street, or rather “walking,” since stepping out with an 18-month old is an exercise in going nowhere. I sing-songed for her to come along, and she tripped a few steps before being transfixed by the […]

California Piercing (on Such a Winter’s Day)

A little girl in polka-dot pants and her Mummy stand at the door of a lavender house. Yes, a lavender house, a single-floor conventional California ranch-style house, yet a whimsical and not-normal house, with a fat chimney where the beige has been painted over with more lavender, and also with an elaborate mosaic of tiny […]

Pulling Together in Columbia Heights

I carry Dubsie past the intersection of 11th and Kenyon to her Saturday morning music class. This is Columbia Heights, where the kids (mostly black) go to Tubman Elementary School and the professionals (mostly white) go to little hipster joints and pay $14 for a pork roll bialy sandwich.

Outside of BloomBars is a cluster […]

Whatever Works

Any catalog that arrives in our mailbox is hurled directly to the recycling bin, unless I pause to call the company, recite its serial numbers with the cold precision of an executioner, and send it to oblivion with a please-allow-six-to-eight-weeks-to-be-removed-from-our-mailing-list. To my way of thinking, a catalog — and especially a novelty catalog — is […]

Stuck at Home

A temperature of 100.8 ℉ with a chance of vomit, not worthy of a trip to Urgent Care but bad enough to force a change in my plans. Dubsie and I are on our own this weekend, with Mummy away on a business trip, and Friday night I wanted to sneak baby over to see […]

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