Cece Meng's Blog, page 4

Our New House

I'm pretend moving. I'm undergoing some Significant Life Stress and I can't focus. So I've decided it would be in my best interest to move from my tiny 1,300 square foot cluttered, lived-in home to an adorable sparse little cottage filled with nothing but charm... and happy kids... and warm comfy beds. You get the picture.
And I'm tired of stuff. Stuff, meaning, papers on my dining table, shoes scattered across my living room, cabinets filled with Useful Items we don't use, and hidden piles of th

Tween the pages of books...

I've been diligent with my summer reading and I've prioritized acquiring new books over acquiring new anything else. I'm wearing last year's T-shirt collection but I'm still having a pretty darn good summer. My bookshelves are overflowing. My brain is evolving. My children are left to fight things out without my bothersome interference. I'm busy reading.
It's not until I lend a book out, that I realize I have not been entirely kind to my books.  To lend it, one must first find it. And as I dig it

Magic Potions and Keyboard Trolls

I have one hundred wandering hogs that want to go to school, two devious young kids staging a worldwide bedtime revolt, and an autistic kid named Joshua - all with the same problem. They can't make the leap from my manuscript pages to a book. I love to write. I love creating new stories. I love being an author. But so many of my little darlings, my daring story attempts, are unfinished, in need of repair, less than perfect. Rejected.
It's like Harry Potter in potions class. If you don't have exac

Smart Kids, Dumb Crimes

Both my kids were early writers and readers. I'd like to be proud of the fact, but sadly their quick minds and eager hands soon led them to the less-than-desirable criminal activities of graffiti and vandalism. Crimes they committed within the walls of their own home. So far, I have not pressed charges. Yet.
One of the first acts of graffiti both my kids involved themselves with was marking their territory with their names. They'd execute neatly printed and properly spelled first names, and somet

Lulu Needs a Boyfriend

Lulu is my loyal and opinionated writing companion. It says so on the jacket of my books, so it must be true. Though lately, her enthusiastic - and not very melodic - early morning singing has banished her to my front porch. The deciding factor was her appalling table manners which recently evolved to the unrestrained flinging of food. I think she learned it from my kids. Lulu will be the first to remind you, though, she is a full grown mature cockatiel girl.
Hanging out with the wildlife on my p

Confessions of an anti-shopper

Not only do I hate to shop, but I'm cheap. I'm not mother-in-law cheap. Lonna reuses her plastic bags by rinsing them in water and hanging them in her garage on a clothes line next to her ancient undergarments. Now that's impressively cheap. Plastic bags, when purchased on sale, are just not expensive enough to warrant that level of effort and organization. Plus, my garage is busy doing other thing right now. Like housing a family of skunks.
Now that times are a bit tough, I'm hearing of how peop

Tomato Wars

My grown-up version of the War of Tomatoes is a long cry from the version that played out when I was a kid. My sisters and I used to collect boxes of rotten fruit from the compost pile and meet our neighborhood rivals in a nearby field. While hiding behind shields of stolen garbage can lids, we'd chuck moldy tomatoes and every other kind of nastiness we could get our hands on over to the pack of mean neighborhood boys. It wasn't long before word spread and the Meng girls were both feared and res

Ya Baby, She's Got The Sick Grandma Blues

The challenges of family life are often reflected in the writing of children. My own kids do this quite often, and I always learn something new about them when I read through their school writing assignments. I argued with my daughter at the beginning of the school year, when as part of a class assignment she wanted to pick as her family slogan, "My family is like a roller coaster. We have our ups and downs." We hadn't met the teacher yet and I didn't want my daughter to give her the wrong (or r

At Least Her Hair Looked Great

Unlike other big moments in life, the good thing about hair mistakes is that you will always have a do-over. You may have to wait a while for a Very Bad Hair Mistake to grow out. But it should eventually grow out. Many of us learn quite quickly that cutting ones own hair usually results in a Very Bad Hair Mistake. And then there are those of us who are prone to forgetting the Don't Cut rule and must never keep scissors in the bathroom lest the temptation overrides good judgement. I'm a little fo

You So Stingy?

My mother-in-law, Lonna,  is not doing so well. She is dying. Though, as my husband likes to remind me, we're all dying. Her heart is just not functioning very well and it can stop at any moment. Lonna still has a bit if fight left in her and this situation can go on indefinitely.
We're all trying to help her, but we can't always figure out what she wants. She is a hard person to understand for a number of reasons. She has aphasia from a stroke nine years ago, and so she can't remember the correc