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About Karrie

Karrie is proud to hail from the heart of the Midwest, where she and her family live in a small town that is so friendly it almost makes you sick. Here, where every grocery store aisle brings a new conversation and locals are on a first name basis with city officials, Karrie and her family have shared potato salad with just about everyone. This lack of anonymity has given her super special powers to yell at her kids through looks and small hand motions alone—and yet, all three of her children continue to prosper. “Eleanor” (b. 2001), “Tony” (b. 2003), and “Ally” (b. 2007) eat mostly noodles, constantly have dirty fingernails, and don’t practice the piano as much as their mother wants them to. Other than that, they bring great joy to Karrie, who drinks her own weight in coffee every day just to keep from falling over. Karrie once realized she had 4 seconds of free time and so she teaches preschool and toddler music classes, outdoor nature education, and writes a weekly column in the local paper (just to keep her honest). With the remaining .3 seconds, she blogs at www.karriemcallister.com.
Author Archive | Karrie

Resolving to Be a Kid. Because It’s Better.

For the most part, adults make the same generic resolutions each year. Eat better, weigh less, exercise more, live life more fully, love more openly, be a better person, blah blah blah. It all makes you sound like you’re talking less from your mouth and more from other orifices because we all know that by mid-January, you’re no longer counting wine calories because they’re considered “medicinal” in order to not strangle your kids, which you swore you weren’t going to (...Read More)

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Ten Things I Really Want for Christmas

I want to one-up the my-life-is-perfect Christmas card lady, the one who gets her cards out first, complete with staged photo of her hellion children and a one page, rhyming letter about how spectacular they all are. I want to make cookies that don’t look like powdered sugar and butter got together and threw up a bunch of sprinkles. I want to give my children the perfect gift so that they’ll be occupied for hours, all the while being educated. (...Read More)

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Cheez Whiz™ and Kool-Aid™ Mustaches Ain’t So Bad


I really do try to be a decent parent because when it comes to my children, I know that their general health and their behavior are the direct result of the upbringing my husband and I muddle through. I correct their grammar. I watch their language. I encourage good moral character and am constantly forcing upon them such things as exercise, education, and healthy eating habits. Generally speaking, it’s exhausting. Parenting would be a much easier job if I didn’t (...Read More)

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Smashing Pumpkin [Pasta Stirrers]

Tonight I smashed a pasta stirring utensil on the kitchen counter, breaking off the teeth so that they flew a dozen different directions and if one of them would have landed in the pumpkin pasta dish I was preparing especially for the harvest dinner celebration, that would have been the most teeth that actually sunk themselves into the creamy delight of a dish. Not my proudest parenting moment, but there I was, stinking like the leaf blower after a hefty (...Read More)

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H-A-Double L-O-W-Double E-N spells “Pain in the Neck”

Many many years ago, someone somewhere dreamed up this whole idea of Halloween and trick or treat and costumes.  And somewhere that person is laughing at the cruel joke they unknowingly played on parents since that very day, because Halloween has becoming an all-consuming holiday and all I usually get out of it are a couple of lousy handfuls of the reject candy. Traditionally costumes were as easy as throwing on a scary mask or cutting a couple of holes (...Read More)

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