ArcaMax

Nothing makes you feel more like a parent than wearing wrinkled sweats, listlessly flipping through your phone and sipping on drive-thru Starbucks while sitting in your parked but idling seven-seat SUV waiting for the Target to open. That's where I was this morning.

The other parents, sitting in their own idling cars, would occasionally look ...Read more

When I was living in Australia, I heard about a girl who stepped on an old land mine while traveling through Indonesia. The blast threw her back, and to get better medical help, she was flown to Australia. Once she was patched up, she decided to continue her adventure by exploring northern Australia. Be sure to follow the road signs, she was ...Read more

The other night, I attended a branding session for my school district. Yes, branding. A letter went out, addressed to school district "customers" -- apparently not wanting to offend us by using outdated, totally unhip traditional names, e.g., parents and guardians, community members or moms and dads. Yikes. In this customer-directed letter, ...Read more

Children learn about love and the birds and the bees from a variety of places -- parents, guidance counselors, siblings. But I got my first lesson on love and sex from my pet rabbit, Surprise.

I had Surprise for about a year before I brought home a stuffed blue lion I'd just won at the fair. And it was love at first bunny sight. Surprise took ...Read more

When we had to put down our beloved rabbit at the end of last year, we wondered what to tell the children. Should we say he ran away to a bunny farm in the mountains where they learn to bunny yodel and knot sweaters from their own fur? Should we say he is eating carrots in the sky? Or should we say he went on a boozy bunny binge bender after ...Read more

"Someone got into something naughty last night," the front desk worker said.

"Not naughty," I replied. "Windy."

"Funny how no one else's unmentionables wound up in a tree," she said with a wink as she turned on her walkie-talkie and asked a fellow worker to come to my aid.

My husband and I just returned from a trip to the Caribbean. We went...Read more

Bicycles and I are not friends. We have a mutual understanding: If I don't get on one, one won't kill me. So when I moved across the country, I was shocked to find a bicycle in the moving truck along with my old dresser and beanbag chair. I demanded an explanation from my mom, who simply said, "One sunny day, you may wish you had one." How could...Read more

"Just ignore that," the woman at the car rental place said.

I looked at the light-up orange icon. The words "Oil Change Required" were blinking on the dashboard. Surely, I thought to myself, she knows her rentals well enough to make that call -- the way I know that my car can go another 23 miles before running out of gas after the "empty" ...Read more

Henri is back from the dead. I didn't believe it at first. Surely, I was being catfished. But after an extensive Google search, it was clear. Henri wasn't in the grave; he was in Bogota, Colombia.

It started with a simple Facebook message to one of our old roommates. He wished her a belated happy new year. She responded with elation and ...Read more

In less than an hour, I will be at the dentist. It will be the first time I have seen a dentist in three years. I know, gross.

It's not entirely my fault. The lapse in frequent visits began when I got pregnant with my daughter. It used to be common knowledge that you are not supposed to go to the dentist while incubating infants-to-be. The ...Read more

On Friday, a bunch of bearded white men in top hats and an overgrown squirrel sentenced me to six more weeks of winter. Personally, I think this winter has gone on long enough already. I'm ready for a change of scenery and temperature, and frankly, I'm ready to replace the marmot who has an affinity for seeing its shadow with a marsupial. Let'...Read more

Sometimes I think we live in the most insane country in the world. But when I read about the Nutella riots in France, I felt as if we're just the right amount of (hazel)nuts.

According to many sources, full-on hair-pulling, fist-pumping, leg-tripping, nose-bleeding riots broke out in supermarkets around the country after Intermarche offered a...Read more