By Cali Grimshaw You can never appreciate the true meaning of the word EXHAUSTION until you’ve experienced a cross country move.  Other words come to mind also…such as UTTER CHAOS and INSANITY. In our thirty six years of marriage we’ve lived in twelve different homes.   This adds up to eleven moves…and that’s not counting our two week stint at the Howard Johnson’s on Route 22 in New Jersey, awaiting occupan ...

By: Cali Grimshaw MOTHER OF ALL MOTHER’S DAYS (reprinted by Cali Grimshaw with writer’s permission) Last month I received the following e-mail entitled “MOTHER OF ALL MOTHER’S DAYS” and decided there was nothing I could write that would top it for a humor column. With the writer’s permission (she chooses to remain anonymous), it is reprinted here. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty: In t ...

By: Cali Grimshaw At one time or another nearly everyone must ask themselves the deep, imponderable questions of life: 1. Where did I come from? 2. Why am I here? 3. Where am I going? I ask myself these questions on a regular basis. It is usually while standing at the bottom of the stairs trying to remember why in the world I walked down them. “Oh yeah…I came from the kitchen …to get a can of soup…so I can ...

By: Cali Grimshaw Yes, you read the title right! All those years I had it wrong. If there was anything I passionately believed in as a mother it was encouraging creativity in my children. There was no need. They were born creative. To encourage them further was like throwing gasoline on a fire…which is exactly what I did. A rational parent would have devoted her time towards stifling—not encouraging—their l ...

By: Cali Grimshaw George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” When things went wrong my mom used to say, “Tragedy plus time equals humor.” Maybe they were both right. Several years ago my friend Lonnie, from New Hampshire, called me on her cell phone. The connection was terrible and her phone kept cutting out. We both had to strain ...

By: Cali Grimshaw They say life is what happens while you’re making other plans. I was planning to send out Christmas cards this year…then life happened. The cards are still sitting on my desk. I was also planning to write a funny column about quirky neighborhood Christmas gifts…then life happened. The column is half written and saved on my computer. Maybe I’m just a Christmas underachiever. A lot of things ...

By: Cali Grimshaw Any parent knows that the fastest way to get a job done—any job—is to do it yourself! That’s the easy way. But, if you want to teach your children to work you will, unfortunately, have to do it the slow and difficult way. Be prepared for hours of cajoling, instructing and standing firm on the fact that you will not back down and do it for them. That five minute job of making the bed and st ...

By: Cali Grimshaw Having spent most of my life in the suburbs of large cities, I was unprepared for the culture shock of small town living when we moved to Southern Utah six years ago. Life in the city has a certain urgency about it. You live in a hurry, driving from one event to the next. Being busy is the name of the game and there are plenty of places to go and things to do. Traffic, crowds and noise are ...

By: Cali Grimshaw It’s amazing the amount of money some people will pay for a luxury vacation or cruise just to get away from it all for a few days. What’s even more astounding is there are men out there who will invest as much or more to hike through the wilderness for a week to have a “near death experience” with the scouts! I should know…my husband was one of them. He served as scoutmaster, assistant sco ...

By: Cali Grimshaw If there could be only one holiday per year I’d take the 4th of July!  It’s the perfect combination of pride, patriotism, gratitude and good old fashioned family fun.  It’s also a day of reckoning.  By July you realize that the weeks are flying by fairly fast and if you haven’t had your quota of summer fun yet…well…you’d better get with it because summer won’t last forever. This year our f ...