Before I had children, I never spent much time with them. I have no siblings; none of my friends had kids; I never even babysat very much. And so when I brought Indy home from the hospital, I had to figure out - very quickly - what this whole "mothering" thing was about. I cobbled together a parent-persona that I'm pretty sure was based largely on Kirstie Alley's character in Look Who's Talking, and when I heard someone say "Mom" I often found myself looking around, wondering who they were talking to. I watched other moms for clues, wondering how they seemed so confident in their decisions: my child will eat only organic food, my child will breastfeed for a year, my child will never hear his parents raise their voices.

I made my own baby food for exactly one week. I declared I would breastfeed until my children were at least six months old, and then stopped at 13 weeks for the first, 11 for the second. Kendrick and I fight - sometimes loudly - and although I wish this weren't the case, our kids have certainly seen it.

I think part of why Erin and I became such close friends is that we recognized this uncertainty in each other; this struggle to find a label that might help us navigate this strange new Mom World we found ourselves living in. But above it all, I think what we shared was a profound desire to have someone tell us that the kind of mom we should be was the one we already were.

When I left home, these sneakers were snow-white. 

Hey there! I'm in St. Louis. Again. (And once more again later on this summer.) This go-round is three days long (plus two travel days), and each of those three days has involved 12-13 hour shoots in 100-degree weather (with occasional thunderstorms), plus a LOT of dust. And mud. And things like construction equipment.

I am disgusting. 

Here are the things that happened on Saturday: Francesca, Brie and I (plus kids) got in the car with the intention of driving to Marin County to meet Francesca's brother Mookie for a lovely, semi-glamorous lunch before "hiking" (strolling) through the Ewok Forest. Then, an hour into the drive, traffic and carsickness happened, and we thought it best to just take the nearest exit, which happened to be Berkeley. And so the lovely semi-glamorous lunch was replaced by grilled cheese sandwiches and a pitcher of Bud, which was obviously fine by us. We wandered around in vintage shops (I picked up a gold lame maxi dress that is wildly inappropriate for my present lifestyle of Safeway runs and baby-corralling, but whatever it's amazing) and made a string necklace for Kendrick to match the ones that Indy and Goldie wear, and then drove up to a scenic overpass and took photographs of the fact that we have all simultaneously decided that we are excited about miniature bags like the ones we last wore in 1996.

Those bags were what I was originally planning to write about today. But then we drove home to make dinner, and my plans changed. Because around 7PM, Francesca asked where Lucy was, and in the same instant all five of us realized that we hadn't seen her in hours.

Lucy is getting old; very old for a purebred dog. She sometimes spends hours sitting in the bathroom underneath the toilet, staring at the wall that she can no longer see thanks to the cataract that has developed over her single eye. She sleeps most of the day. She gets stuck on the couch or on a chair or on the edge of the bathtub (how she gets up there, I have no idea), and barks and barks until someone comes to help her down.

Whale-watching | Monterey Bay

It's a beautiful summer day. The sky is blue; the birds are chirping; all seems right with the world. So let's talk about death, shall we?

Here is why I want to talk about this (or, more specifically, feel like I need to): because until very, very recently, death was not a topic I could even begin to unbox in my mind without sparking an emotion that was some singularly crushing combination of despair and utter panic. The feeling that I got when I allowed my mind to wander to the death of anyone from my dogs to my husband to my parents to myself was so intense it felt like a living thing that I had to keep under lock and key, because if it got out it would consume everything it touched. I felt it - still feel it - physically, like a fireball in my chest. If I let it take even the smallest breath, it instantly expands beyond the borders of my body.