Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home
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I moved into the house I have lived in for nearly half a century kicking and screaming. Not physically, of course. But in my head I was railing. I did not want to move from the small, two-bedroom ranch that was my husband’s and my first home. I loved everything about that house — the kitchen cabinets we painted yellow a few months before our wedding, the living room with its 1970s green, wall-to-wall carpet (which I loved to vacuum), the family room my Uncle Frank fashioned from our one-car garage when I was newly pregnant and making plans to turn our TV room into a nursery…
Read MoreWhen there’s no way around it, we’ve just got to go through it
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“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” is a children’s board book that my friend Anne gave me to read to my first grandchild, Lucy. I read it to her for years. It never captured me. I liked “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” much better. But Lucy liked the repetition of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” and when Adam came along, he liked it, too. “We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! We’re not scared. Uh-uh! Grass! Long wavy grass. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”
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