A good friend of mine recently loaned me The Book Thief, which I probably wouldn’t have picked up on my own and oh, how I would have missed out. This is a sad and lovely story set in WWII-era Nazi Germany. The tale is narrated by Death, who spins the heartbreaking, yet at times joyous […]

Okay, this is almost too lame to post, but I am going by the (weak) assumption that if I have made a certain type of laundry mistake more than once, maybe someone else has too. Here goes: if your laundry currently contains a large number of baby bibs, the kind with the surprisingly strong Velcro, […]

This Eric Carle book has quickly become one of my all-time favorites for reading with my toddler — the artwork is lovely, and each page contains a poem about the animal in question. The poetry ranges from Ogden Nash to Shakespeare to haikus, and the diversity makes every reading a pleasure rather than oh-god-not-this-book-again. I […]

I recently had a chance to try out the UNI cargo laptop bag from Ice Red Designs, and it’s awesome. The design is just right: not too fancy, not too utilitarian, with a ton of great storage both inside and out. My MacBook Pro slides easily into the internal compartment (it can hold any […]

One of the useful pieces of swag I took home from BlogHer last weekend was about a thousand individually wrapped “freshening teeth cleaners” from the fine people at Kimberly-Clark. The Dentaburst is a weird little cloth-feeling whatsit you slip onto your finger and use to rub your teeth, and it actually works really well. It’s […]