Little boys with long hair
“Mom! That man called me a girl.”
Oh, I’d heard. I’d just hoped he hadn’t.
Balancing the pizza box across his arms, he slipped through the door after I opened it, tinkling the little bells overhead.
He didn’t ask why the nice older man had thought he was a girl. He knew why. He’s nine and a half now and he hasn’t cut his hair since just before his eighth birthday.
He tells me this isn’t the first time it’s happened — being called a girl. A substitute teacher accidentally called him a girl a few weeks earlier but he’d never mentioned it to us at home.
“What did you say?” I asked curiously as he buckled his seatbelt and took back the pizza box, ready to hold it while I drove us home.
“I said ‘Excuse me, Mister [REDACTED]. I’m a boy!’”
I was impressed. The teacher apologized and everybody got on with their day. It wasn’t a big deal.
When I was a kid, I was called a boy on multiple occasions and it was absolutely a big deal. It crushed me.
Read MoreMom’s mental load
I did a bad, bad thing.
Something I swore I wouldn’t do again.
I re-downloaded The Sims.
It doesn’t sound that terrible until I fill you in on the fact that I have a long and tortured on-again/off-again relationship with this computer game.
I started playing the original Sims back in university and fell deeply in love with the way I could design people and houses, right down to the size of each room, the style of the wallpaper and each piece of furniture.
I bought the expansion packs so I could have new outfits and furnishings, and somewhere along the way I upgraded to Sims 2 and started all over again.
I was young and child-free with plenty of free time, so the only issue was that I developed painful hand cramps if I played for too long.
Then I had babies — two under two — and there was barely time to shower, let alone time to meticulously drag and drop tiny digital shrubs into a tiny digital backyard.
Read MoreDIY fur wreath (that won’t scratch your painted door)
When we first moved into our home back in 2011, there was a wreath of faux berries on the front door.
It wasn’t my style so I took it down, and that’s when I realized the terrible truth about front door wreaths: they can wreck your paint job.
We live on top of a very windy hill, so any outdoor decorations need to be extremely secure, otherwise they’ll get blown around and potentially sent crashing through a window.
Our enormous wooden planter for next to the front door? It crashed over dozens of times — sending a thundering echo through the whole house — no matter how much weight we stuck inside the bottom.
Hey! I’m Heather.
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