Wheatzie

I love mushy food. I’m going to make a great old person someday because I won’t need teeth to chew; the stuff I like to eat slides right down. Most people complain about soggy, wilting McDonald’s fries.   I don’t.   That’s actually the way I order them: “Do you happen to have, like, an undercooked batch?   Or could you scoop a few of them out of the frier a couple minutes early for me, maybe?” I love when the fry is so soft and greasy with oil that it just sort of flops onto your finger when you take it out of the bag. YUMMY. At restaurants, I ask for my steak “as rare as you’re legally allowed to serve it, please.” The servers’ reactions to this request are always fun—especially if the server is a 20-something male who is ready to watch how this challenge will go down. His eyebrows will shoot up and he’ll nod his head, giving me a knowing smile. I sometimes like to imagine the server and the chef in the kitchen, roaring with laughter about the still-bleeding ...

The other night I was texting with my older sister when I sent this one around 9:35 PM: Alright, I’m going to bed.   I’m not feeling well. She latched onto that pretty quickly. First off, I’m a night owl so going to bed at 9:35 PM, even though I wake up every morning at 5, is unheard of for me.   Second, I hardly ever get sick.   I attribute that at least in part to my immune system being so strong because I’m like a goat—I’ll eat anything * —and my body has had to learn to overcome the challenges I’ve thrown at it.   (For more tips on how to maintain a healthy, balanced existence, subscribe to my life coaching page, linked at the bottom of this post.) What do you mean, not feeling well?   What are your symptoms? My sister fancies herself a nurse, so as I began to explain how I’d been feeling lately—light-headedness, shortness of breath, body really heavy, heart pounding hard like it’s working overtime, not being able to finish a workout—she told me, wit...

“Hey, Mom,” my 16-year-old son said to me as we sat in our sunroom together one Saturday morning recently, “how are you going to spend two entire nights at Uncle DJ’s house and not fight with him?” I paused, coffee cup halfway to my mouth, suddenly deep in thought.   “I hadn’t thought about that,” I murmured.   “Maybe we should cancel the trip.” My husband and two teenagers and I were planning to stay at my younger brother’s house in Las Vegas for two nights before hitting the MGM Grand for a night, then driving our rental car four hours to Los Angeles to spend the last two days and nights of our spring break trip hitting every single tourist trap L.A. had to offer (update: it was amazing) before hopping on a plane to fly us all the way back across the country to Missouri. My younger brother DJ has been in the military for the last 26 years and he’s always living in really exotic, faraway locations, so we don’t see each other very often.  Maybe once every couple of ...

My junior high schoolers performed a beautiful Christmas concert last Friday.  Yesterday, as I was at the front of the classroom teaching my “5-Paragraph Essay in 15 Minutes” lesson to the 7 th graders, one of them raised her hand. “Mrs. L…were you crying last week during our Christmas concert?” I wanted to say something like, Yeah , you guys were so bad it brought tears to my eyes because that’s the type of relationship we have. Instead I said, “I was.   I guess you could tell?” “ A little bit ,” she replied, smiling and holding her forefinger and thumb about half an inch apart. “A little bit” is putting it mildly. I’d been bawling all over myself.  My husband had been teasing me about it and had asked if I wanted a tissue, but he’d never brought me one—probably because he would have had to do that crouch-walk all the way across the gym as he attempted to snake his way to the bathroom around 300 parents catching video of their children.  You kno...