There Were Children in This House: Selected Stories from "Thinking Allowed" (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780692333754)

In 1983, a young reporter and eager astronaut-in-waiting thought aloud on the vastness of space and imagined what it would be like to gaze into his unborn child's eyes. Thus began "Thinking Allowed," a weekly column about a family - a mom and dad and two kids, a golden retriever, and a woolly mammoth of a station wagon. The stories were about the most ordinary things: a toddler picking through the kitchen trash, a sleepy two-year-old squeezing the last moments out of the day, a mom flinging together the secret ingredients for her Big Ol' Pot of Chili. From pediatrician appointments to dance recitals to high school graduations, there wasn't much that didn't show up in the pages of the local paper. And while the stories were intended to be light, they sometimes strayed into the unguarded air space of a sentimental dad who wanted his daughters to stay young just a little longer. Collected here for the first time, these stories are snapshots of an ordinary but most happy life.