I stayed up really late on Friday night making her cake. It wouldn’t have been as late had I remembered to grease the cake pans, had the cakes come out cleanly, had I only had to make four cakes one time.

She doesn’t have a wheat allergy or sensitivity to eggs: this is Day 3 of her sugar-free consequence.

Which brings me to the question I weigh myself down with every day as a mom. Am I enough?

While I cooked, Bug shouted from the other room, “Something smells.” Clearly a bad omen, but I shrugged it off.

I want my son to know the joy that comes from creating something – and I want to instill in him a lifelong hunger for that.

“Is he spoiled?” she asked, not once but three times, as I couldn’t hear her over the hysterical crying of my son, Amos, strapped in the baby seat of the cart, slightly damp from the late afternoon rain.

It made me wonder why it is that children get food envy?

It's fun and unifying to share the good times. We know, though, that motherhood is more than this. It is harder than this.

Sometimes, quiet is the best way to make it right.

he was seeing it all, the sweet and wild tonic of words, in ways that I've forgotten, no longer so young, so open, so rapid, so endless, a basin of sounds and swirling images, a white page.