Callie Feyen

My main objective on road trips is to get to wherever we are going without having to use a public bathroom with Hadley and Harper. I’ve been a parent for nine years now, and so far this objective has not been reached. I’m a mildly well-mannered person, but when I hear one of my offspring tell me from the backseat,… View Post

If I were to write a poem about these two pictures, it would go something like this: Driving to school, I see a change in the leaves and the girls see a Halloween decorated house. The three of us gasp at the same time. “LOOK!” we all say, but they get the words out faster. “LOOK AT THAT HOUSE, MOMMY! LOOK… View Post

“Mommy, did you know Taylor Swift recorded ‘Fearless’ two days after I was born?” This is Harper, reading facts to me from the book, Taylor Swift: When I Grow Up. “She wrote ‘Mean’ because a music critic was being mean to her,” Harper explains. “He was giving her, like, bad grades or something.” Harper picked this book out at the Scholastic… View Post

Anyone who spent more than five minutes with me from age 9 to about 14 knows that my three greatest fears were dogs, bees, and Freddy Krueger. In fact, the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street” left such a dent in me that I cannot think of any memory of my Longfellow days after fourth grade without thinking of him. Back… View Post

My favorite part in To Kill a Mockingbird happens in Chapter 17, when Scout gives readers a picture of the Ewell residence: “the plot of ground around the cabin look[ed] like the playhouse of an insane child,” she tells us. It’s a dreary paragraph with a grocery list of descriptions that support Scout’s observation. I’m not of the haunted house type,… View Post