You know the question. We’ve all heard it. We’ve all asked it. Whether we’re chatting with our neighbor sitting next to us in the window seat, standing serpentine in a line at the grocery store, or sipping cocktails at the hippest place in town, me? yeah right! ninety-nine point nine percent of the time someone asks, “So, what do you do?”
When I was a Stay-At-Home-Mom the guilt over not having an ‘outside’ job in addition to my familial responsibilities left me sputtering like a dying carburetor. Out loud, I’d hem and haw about how my adventures with the frantic four left little time for anything else, but inside I was asking myself how the focacchia did my mom-peers find the time to be welders, bio-chemists, lawyers, and artists between changing diapers and cleaning up barf? And why was I feeling like I should be keeping up with them?
I get it though. Heck, before I had children, I too used to wonder what a mother did at home all day without going insane. How many times could she blow on a boo-boo, clean a toilet, or fill the washing machine?
For years, I felt like a slacker. I could see that same thought reflecting back at me in people’s eyes, too. Or at least I thought I did. Thankfully, that did change when a now, dear friend innocently asked that loaded question, only this time ending it with “all day.” Armed with an answer that had been stockpiling for years, I shot back, “Well, typically, once the children have been taken to school, I change into turn of the 20th century lounge wear, grab a good book -preferably one with little or no plot- drape myself across a plush divan, Continue reading
…and the faery known as Thrill-Seeker, the only one of her sort to attend this type of celebration since the Sleeping Beauty debacle, first soared to the rafters of the modest nursery, stopped short, reached into her pouch of post-natal best wishes and sprinkled the babe in a soft shower of aromatic flower petals. “This,” she whispered, “is the inoculation against even the most minimal bouts of 
“Umimmar?”
It’s the question no one asked when they heard I’d be camping in the arctic in the summer of 2009.
One homemade heart
Alice Wetherby Pimms knew it was in the library. The beautifully scripted note written in 
You’re probably thinking how conspicuous that might seem, rather like a toad wearing a hot pink béret on a sunny day, 
Words fail
The ageing comedian, known the world over for his slapstick parodies, brushed past me in the pre-dawn chill to take his place in the crowd queuing up to board the British Airways flight from Edinburgh to London. I have packing my warm jacket in my checked luggage to thank for our chance encounter. Had I not hung back to keep warm in the stairwell, I’d have totally overlooked him.
Donna Gwinnell Lambo-Weidner 