Author: Illustration by Jane Sanders

I was sad to miss Carnival season this year, sadder than I originally expected. I normally wouldn’t call myself the world’s biggest fan of the whole thing; I tend to feel like the stress of traffic and parking and muscling…

It’s been almost a year now.  A year since I thought a quarantine sounded like a fun break.  A year since I was mad that my March 17 conference in New York City was canceled.  “It’s just like the flu,…

Picture it: A bleak and freezing mid-February Tuesday in Columbia, Missouri, the sky gray, the trees bare and brown, black piles of plowed snow lining the busy street. I pull on gloves and a hat and boots and double socks…

I am a notorious pessimist. Sometimes I think this comes from a childhood of watching Saints games where they seemed certain to win only to blow it at the last second, but honestly, it’s probably just deeply ingrained in my…

I’ve worked in the magazine world for quite a while now, and I know you’ve got to plan several months out. I always found it slightly jarring to be working on a Christmas issue while everyone in the real world…

Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve,  which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com The experiment didn’t go so well. Every so often, I get frustrated with some aspect of my life and make stupid, unrealistic pronouncements. “We’re all becoming…

Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve,  which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com I had the week off, but it wasn’t the same. When I was in high school, “spring break” was something I watched on MTV but never…

Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve,  which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com 1. Cleaning my house. Last week, I spent an hour cleaning my daughters’ room. I also tidied up the living room and cleaned my car. Now…

My almost-teen daughter, Ruby, stepped in front of the TV while I was simultaneously pedaling frantically to nowhere on my exercise bike and trying to watch Ina Garten make something obscenely rich and fattening for the holidays. (“My mom exercises…

Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve,  which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com “I can’t wait till I have my own room,” Ruby said wistfully the other day. Her stepbrother, Elliot, is a senior this year and will be…

Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve,  which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com With Ruby recently starting seventh grade, I have been going back in time to my own middle school experience. I remember the excitement of getting a…

Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve, which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com. Before I had kids, I would talk about my dog when my co-workers complained about their kids. “Jordan slept like crap last night,” my officemate Cathy…

Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve,  which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com It goes so fast. Everyone says it, typically folded in with some “cherish every moment” drivel that I never feel like listening to because “every moment”…

It is a constant source of amusement to me how very different Ruby, my somehow-now-12-year-old daughter, is than I was. In school, I loved English and struggled with math; she is the exact opposite, making high marks in math and…

I recently headed out to Pensacola, anticipating a pleasant mini-vacation with the girls – we’d have a cozy night in the hotel before dropping Ruby at her roller derby clinic, and then Georgia and I would explore until she was…

There are many life problems and concerns on which you don’t necessarily want advice. People feel compelled to give you advice, particularly, it seems, on issues relating to pregnancy and child-rearing, but often you don’t actually need or want it. Struggling with infertility? People…

I sometimes joke that Ruby is the person in infomercials. You know, the person who is completely flustered by the idea of spreading a blanket over their lap or buttoning a blouse. The person who encounters catastrophe by opening a…

I’ve always defined myself as a dog person. For most of my life, I’ve had a dog. When a friend asked me, more than 15 years ago, what I’d do if I found myself at age 40 unmarried and childless,…

It’s May in New Orleans, otherwise known as “Have all the good summer camps filled up already?” season for parents. Well, I’m here to tell you … probably not yet? There are still openings at all the camps I just…

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Remember the glory days? When you didn’t wear out the keypad connecting to a real person? After a four-year stint as a restaurant review columnist and a customer-support/quality-control manager with IBM, I consider myself the Queen Bee in recognizing quality…