Looking back now on my year of traveling light, alone and broadly, I often ask myself how I did it ... and why.

Don't get me wrong. I'm very happy about the path my life wandering has taken, and there's certainly no way I could have found this content and happy place I'm in now if I hadn't gone around the world, but having just unpacked after only a week of holiday in Mauritius, I'm thinking I don't want to see the inside of... more

When I was forty-one years old, I bought myself a backpack and an around-the-world air ticket and took off for points east. From the northern hemisphere to the southern, and back again, always toward the rising sun, I traveled for months.

Every few weeks, I'd hop on and off another plane, arrive in another city in another country and be presented with the same initial conundrum, as chore number one was always to try to sort out how to get from the airport to a room where I could divest myself of the thirty... more

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a week away, but thought I'd leave you all with some photos and tales from a wedding we went to yesterday.

For a little run-down that conveys a sense of my part of the world quite well, I'll give a short description of the players ...

Groom: from South Africa, works with my husband at the world's largest tuna processing plant.

Bride: from Philippines, was working there too, until recently. ... more

When you were a child playing house, what sort of mommy or daddy did you look like in your head?

Were you June and Ward, all pearls and suits and "Wash up, boys!", while your little scamps got in to all sorts of hilarious and innocent high jinks that would unravel before their eyes, but come together within the alloted 22 minutes, usually about the time Father returned home?

Or the Nelson version of the same, where Harriet held down the tidy, calm, ultimately reasonable fort during the days as Ozzie vanished into a fog of... more

A friend from the UK stopped by the other day on his way to one of the other islands to study some of the rare birds he specializes in, and since it's been more than a year since he's been around he noticed some big changes in my kids.

He has two of his own in England ... a girl Sam's age -- the first Ella to prompt the play on names that suggests his child and mine shouldn't date, a joke I've since worn thin (Sorry Lisa of Guatemalan blog... more

Still writing about my birthday for a moment or two longer, and wanted to add that thanks to Sam and Cj I am now able to jettison fifty-some years of unwrapping caution that was drilled into me by my mother. Ever the frugal and practical woman, in her world wrapping paper is not some disposable frippery meant for magical moments of mad mayhem in frenzied ripping. No way! It's a durable, reusable product meant to last for years, so to be handled not with kid hands, but with kid gloves.

Granted, shrinkage... more

So, I'm now fifty-six-years old, and although it is still my birthday in California where I was born, it's all over but the wrinkling here in Seychelles.

I had a pleasant enough day, although it was little like the imagined happenings that came with the numerous ... and very welcome -- thanks to all who conveyed lovely greetings! ... birthday wishes that came my way. Those all assumed that the kids and I would be passing the day beach-side, basking in the sun, lolling in the sea, and generally doing all the stuff... more

Feeling like the pressures of parenthood are mounting?

Tired of struggling to stay awake with a new infant night after night?

Need a break?

Well, if you are in Australia ... or ready to pack up for a trip down under ... you, too, can join other mothers at the new $8 million, five-star "mother's retreat" in the Lavender Bay area of Sydney.

For a mere $1300 (US... more

Now that I've settled in to all the information I gathered on Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase deficiency, the condition that put my former foster son in hospital last week and scared the beejeezus out of all of us, it's time for an update on him.

The short version ... he's great. His color in normal again, his pee is... more

It seems of a funny trick of the mind that momentous moments in life can so easily seem like they happened yesterday, yet at the same time feel as if everything that happened before must have been years and years ago ... almost irretrievably lost in ancient memory banks.

That's my brain tease for the week ... I can remember the moment now two years ago when I first held my youngest daughter, the darling, sweet and adorable Chamroeun Jada as if it happened yesterday, but at exactly the same time it seems that she's always been... more