Travel Journal: Disneyland 2012

Last week, Sam and I took the kids to Disneyland.

I was invited to help with an employee reward trip; it was a rare and wonderful opportunity to combine business with pleasure and bring my family along.

This was our first foray into air travel as a family of four. The flights to California went as well as could be expected. Thank goodness for my iPad, the game "Where's My Perry?" and Felix's propensity to fall asleep easily while sitting upright in a moving vehicle (a genetic blessing which appears to be linked to the Y chromosome).

Oedipa's Story

Free kittens.

They were the most magical words I'd seen in the Humboldt Sun since my own byline.

It was 1999, and Sam and I had just moved to Winnemucca, Nevada. My college dreams of a career in journalism had brought us to this dusty mining town, half a continent away from our family and friends. It was lonely. We didn't fit in. We lived in a duplex that ached with disappointment, despite being painted an impossibly cheerful shade of teal.

The ad led us to a trailer park at the edge of town, where a group of children had gathered stray kittens to keep them safe from coyotes and other perils of the desert. You could say that we rescued Oedipa, a frail and tiny Siamese mix with bright blue eyes and white "socks" on her feet. The truth is, we needed her as much as she needed us.

A letter to Evie (almost) on her 5th birthday

Dear Evie,

Before you were born, I promised us both that I would use my blog to document the precious and fleeting days of your childhood. I'm not a scrapbooker or an artist, but I'm fairly confident in my ability to type words onto a screen - so these sporadic and heartfelt posts are my answer to the lovely baby books and handprint art that your classmates' moms are surely making as we speak.

I blinked, and 5 years passed. Already, I wish that I had written more.

10 Things I've Learned About Weight Loss

1. I am good at losing weight. I've had at least a dozen successful weight loss efforts in the last 20 years. The trouble is, I am equally successful - perhaps more so - at gaining weight and have done it exactly as many times. At least I'm starting with a solid foundation of knowledge and experience.

2. I thrive on competition and social reinforcement. I like attention. I like it when people notice my weight loss. I still carry the keychain I earned at Weight Watchers for losing 10% of my starting weight. I'll even share my "before" photos on Facebook. Perhaps this is why my weight loss efforts tend to sputter out and lose energy farther down the road. What happens when I reach my goal weight and the fun of losing is gone? This time, I think I'll enter some fitness competitions or maybe even take up a sport.

7 Things My Dad Taught Me

10 years ago this week, my dad, Peter Czernek, lost his life to cancer. He was 59 years old, and I was 23.

Circa 1971. My parents were awesome.

The advice that parents dispense to teenagers and young adults often seems like wasted breath. After all, young people already know everything. I certainly did. But somewhere on the way to real adulthood, something happens. We learn to empathize with our parents. We begin to understand their advice, and we wish we had listened. We realize they have been wiser all along than we ever gave them credit for being.

Family vacation 2011

We recently returned from our first road trip as a family of four.

Really, it was two trips in one. Part one was a weekend with friends in the Black Hills. 6 families, 24 people, 13 kids aged 4 and under, all in one house. It was happy, beautiful chaos.

We went to Mount Rushmore and the Flintstones village. Mostly, we enjoyed one another's company and let the kids be kids. There were impromptu ballet recitals and games of tag, hide and seek, and hopscotch. There were hours spent drawing with sidewalk chalk, pretending to be horses, and putting rocks into little piles (most popular with the under-2 set).

Super Goonie's Adventures in Chanhassen

This is Super Goonie.

He belongs to a group of my friends who call ourselves The Goonies. We met on the Internet, most of us through a birth board for mothers with due dates in March 2007. Back then, we were a diverse and hormonal group of expectant and new mothers united by our interest in discussing our babies with strangers. Today, we're parents of four-year-olds - and many more children as well.