For three weeks now I’ve been experiencing one of the hazards of being a stay-at-home mom: terrible neighbors. One would think in a country like PNG there would be no chance of having neighbors with a garage band that has zero self-awareness. One would think. Sadly, our neighbors do have a garage band made up […]

We’ve traded white and yellow cockatoos for leathery fruit bats, air conditioning for the occasional sea breeze, indoor church for outdoor church, restaurants for home cooking, and suitcases for closets. There are certain aspects of Cairns we sorely miss, and I briefly adorn my “going south hat” when I see the morning and evening flights […]

I learned recently during an ill-advised Google search that when women say they’ve been in labor for 48 hours it doesn’t actually mean they’ve been red-faced, sweating, cursing their husbands, and in unbearable pain for a straight 48 hours. That’s what I always assumed and it sounded horrific. But those hours encompass all of it; […]

When I was in high school we lived in a house that sat between a lake and a golf course. I grew up skiing, tubing, knee-boarding, and generally getting in the water as much as possible. My parents were never golfers, but the proximity of the course lent itself to some fun family runs at […]

When I was in high school my parents were very free with us. They gave clear boundaries for our Friday and Saturday nights, and then they trusted us. Both my sister and I stayed well within those boundaries, and in doing so never gave them reason to question that trust. We didn’t have a set […]