Katherine Rue's Blog

I was going to title this post “Standards and the Forces of Evil”, but that seemed a little harsh on my one year old.

As you, gentle readers, may have noticed, I often write about abandoning my attempts to keep my house looking like June Cleaver lives here in order to stay sane. Actually, that’s a gross exaggeration. My house has never approachedwithin hailing distance of Mrs. Cleaver’s level of tidiness. So let me rephrase: I often abandon my attempts to impose some form of order and tidiness...

B has a cold (it’s not a man-cold, although at first I was suspicious). The toads (especially the smaller toad) have it too. The first thing that drops by the wayside when disaster strikes is my work. I called Mustang to vent about this because B does everything he can to be present and helpful so it’s not his fault this happens and therefore I can’t blame him. Then I realized I was interrupting my mom at work.

HA. WELL PLAYED UNIVERSE.

Side note: you know what cheers up a house full of cold su...

I’m in a self-congratulatory mood (which usually means something terrible is about to befall me, probably in the form of bodily fluids from one or both of my children), but until my pride causeth my fall, I will shareth: I am a genius.

I have a job in which is it considered research to:

1) Watch Gone With the Wind.

2) Read Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom Under the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, and any other books by Louisa May Alcott you care to mention.

3) Read and watch Jane Eyre...

Sorry the blog has been abandoned like a couch with bed bugs (i.e.: abandoned, ignored, pretend you don’t know it, just keep walking). It’s because I had been trying to balance too many things and nothing was getting done as it ought to be. So I sat back and thought (ha. who am I kidding? I thought while doing laundry, cleaning spit up, potty training, writing, revising, picking up from school, grocery shopping, menu planning, etc etc. But not sitting.). I figured out the things that had to s...

Dear Children o’ Mine:

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, (all the best stories start that way), there was a girl. Let’s call her K. K had a little brother. Let’s call him Junior. These two children were about as good as children generally are. They lived with their parents on the Last Frontier. Their mother (let’s call her Mustang), was working from home one day and had a big deadline. Mustang loved her children and was a great mother, an inspiration to many. But that day Mustang made...

I just received word from Goodreads that I am now counted as an official author. Which is thrilling. Run, don’t walk, over and mark Braving the Brontes, (Carly Keene: Literary Detective #1) as “to-read”! I’ll wait while you do that. Excellent work.

Carly Keene’s cover art

But setting up a Goodreads page, and a Facebook page (CarlyKeeneBook) for the series, and a twitter account, and a Gobblydigook account (okay, I made that one up), takes time. A useful social media presence requires the exact...

LLF likes to think up myriad excuses to get out of bed. He knows they have to be legit enough that we’ll do something about them rather than scoffing and sending him to the rightabout. Usually they involve inventive reasons behind a missing diaper, but after being sternly admonished on the topic he needed to find something new.

Never at a loss for long, not two minutes had passed before he reappeared. Sobbing.

LLF: Oh no! (Sob) eeyore-nays toooo long! (Sob)

Me: Eeyore? What? Why are you out of b...

I promised Editress that I would remind the interwebs how right she and B were about coffee and how entirely without sense I must have been not to drink it until this year. So here’s my piece of humble pie, Editress. Enjoy, it’s delicious (like coffee).

Me before my afternoon cup of coffee:

“Oh my God, why can’t my children both sleep AT THE SAME TIME for ONCE?!? I’m so tired I’m going to die. In fact, I might already be dead. Am I dead? No, I don’t think I’m dead, because dead people don’t hav...

Things LLF has learned while visiting the Last Frontier:

1) Taking the Labrador with you does not count as “having a grownup with you” when you go outside.

2) Arboretums and botanical gardens appreciate it if you use your super T-Rex sense of smell and the one-finger-touch rule, rather than picking the best flowers.

3) Glacier ice is not for licking.

4) If you smile winningly at adults and say “yummmmy!” they will pick and feed you your own weight in crab.

5) Saying “one beer please Mama” will not...

Everyone likes to feel independent (to a greater or lesser degree), but what independence looks like changes as you go along. When you are 6 months old, being independent means rolling over, and trying to crawl (please let that be “trying to crawl unsuccessfully” for just a little longer…), or getting to hold the spoon to feed yourself sweet potatoes; or even discovering all by yourself that you have a top of your head you can pat. What delight.

As a parent to small children, independence mean...