I was two when my dad shaved his beard, leaving only a mustache. I lost it, told him I didn't know him, told him to put it back, couldn't look at him without crying. Flash forward twenty-eight years: my fiance shaves his beard, leaving only a mustache. I lost it. For the rest of the day I couldn't look at him without…

Yeah, definitely. It was going on for a long time. And it doesn't matter how hard the kids tried to hide it - there's no way no one noticed.

The kids were removed prior to the start of this school year, but honestly, there is no way this was some sort of massive downside by the mother over the summer. Teachers had to have noticed last year, but as others have said, it's certainly possible child services didn't follow through on reports.

My immediate take on "concealing an out of wedlock fetal death" was that the district attorney's office is applying every charge they can so that she never, ever sees those kids again. Also "fetal death" makes it sound like the infant bodies were found to have been late-term miscarriages or stillbirths. It's possible…

As a person who a.) plans to have children and b.) takes antidepressants, this comment caught my eye and led me to do a bit of reading on the topic. So here's what I found.

Oh & early on I emailed one of my most down-to-earth married friends, who gave me this really excellent perspective:

The first (and best) thing we did was make a list of priorities — and then highlighted the ones that really, really, really mattered. (1. At the end of the day we're married; 2. Amelia wears flats.) Whenever I felt super stressed I came back to that list and remembered what we were really doing (getting married. In…

Congrats!

A friend let me know that a local bridal store was going out of business and selling every dress as-is for $400. I spent 45 minutes there, tried on a bunch of dresses, found one I liked, imagined a few alterations and presto. I hired a dear friend's incredible seamstress aunt to make the adjustments I'd pictured and…

Never not going to be jealous of this approach.

Thankfully only one person tried to do this — my husband's grandfather, who announced that he was bringing his new girlfriend! — but it wound up being a non-issue 'cause they broke up. I think it helped that everyone (we had <50 guests) knew that we were paying for it ourselves, and that they could just ask me (oh,…

I didn't even want a wedding (I acquiesced 'cause my husband did want one and it was important to everyone else) so there was no way I was going to be able to do the entire thing by myself without his input. It definitely made lots of decisions easier — What color do I want the napkins? I don't care. How many…

We live 3000 miles away from our wedding location (my husband's hometown) so thankfully everyone was willing to buy gifts online. They'd have to be shipped to us anyway, and the Amazon registry saved everyone postage!

Our photographer stopped returning my emails four months before the wedding and by the time I tracked her down I was so angry that I told her we were all set, that I was incredibly disappointed but I'd learned a lesson about vetting vendors, etc. As mad as I was at the time, in retrospect that was a mistake. (I…

Because my cycle has always been unpredictable and is even worse since I got Mirena (as in, I rarely actually bleed but I get ALL the other side effects) I didn't realize I was getting married in the middle of my worst hormonal week until my dress fitting exactly 4 weeks before, when my seamstress said "Wait, did your…

Oh, for awhile I thought it was "I guess it rains down in Africa."

I have a Toto brand toilet too, and I definitely find myself singing "Africa" in the mornings sometimes. SUBLIMINAL BLESSING OF THE RAINS.

Ugh god is there a better song out there? Is there a better lyric than "I know that I must do what's right / As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti"? The answer is NOPE.

I read the book a long while ago, and I remember really disliking it — I can't recall specific things I found off-putting, but there were quite a few. It wasn't super engaging, the "characters" were flat, and the tone was very detached. It read like an anthropological overview by someone who saw herself as above or…

Seriously, this is EXACTLY how I felt about our wedding. All we wanted was for our closest family and dearest friends to witness our little ceremony, give us hugs, eat a lot of brunch and pie, drink champagne and give us more hugs. We didn't expect gifts, at all - their presence and their support were enough, and I…