http://heather.unit-e.com life and times of heather brandon Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:25:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en One of my kids is getting pretty good on his skateboard. Here he is making his way to the neighbors' house for a cookout last weekend. This video bit doesn't really show off his mad skillz, but you can get a sense of his confidence. When we toured a bike ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2008/04/22/skateboarding-double-dutch-and-an-addiction-to-turtlenecks/ Our family took a trip a couple of months ago far, far away to the west coast of the US so we could visit my brother and his family. He's a stay-at-home dad raising three children close in age to my own. His wife is a family practitioner at a ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2008/03/28/a-long-way-from-home/ At some point, while I was immersed in crash courses on parenting in the initial midst of having three babies born back-to-back, I remember sage advice from a class I once took at a parenting resource center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The class was always about parenting in general but ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2008/03/07/probably-puberty/ I love to host people at my house so it's been a really long, difficult transition of not doing that, and for no particularly good reason except some belief that houses have to be in perfect condition before it's alright to invite folks over. Since we've been renovating our kitchen ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2008/03/01/hosting-and-enjoying-it/ Several things have been going on around here that have, for one reason or another, prevented me from feeling as though I can write (which I sorely feel I need to be able to do) or even take a few steps back on occasion and simply ponder. Among those things ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2007/12/17/balancing-acts-and-the-people-who-love-them/ When I was about the age my kids are now, my family had been undergoing upheaval for a few years. We uprooted in early 1975 from our Phoenix home, where I'd been since birth, and transplanted to Pittsburgh, in relation to my father's work for the aluminum-fabrication company Alcoa. We ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2007/10/18/family-relations/ I'm so geekily happy now that I have discovered both the Flickr photo pool of quotation mark abuse, as well as the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. "Wet-Paint" on "Step's" Originally uploaded by gserafini. http://heather.unit-e.com/2007/10/12/wet-paint-on-steps/ WELCOME TO OUR NEWSLETTER =====SEEN: CELEBRITIES IN THE HOME===== Our favorite sensitive one, PAOLO BRANDON is currently having a temper tantrum on the couch. After coming home in a chipper mood and with a crisp to-do list after school, Paolo did his 30 minutes of reading and then dove into his math ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2007/10/11/news-of-and-from-the-home/ Seven years ago today, I gave birth to my third child alone in my bathroom. At the time, some people thought I was more than a little bit crazy to take this on in a somewhat planned manner. But for me, it was one of the best things I ever decided ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2007/09/25/on-this-day-i-did-something-one-might-consider-risky/ My husband's been working a lot this summer—working too much, I think, but it's the kind of deadline-driven work that becomes difficult to measure after a while. You just work and work and work and there's this bottomless pit of endless work facing you, and everything's behind schedule, and no ... http://heather.unit-e.com/2007/09/05/life-is-short/