On Bribery
True confession: I once offered Rainbow Girl a dollar to stop talking for fifteen minutes. In my defense, we were in the Orlando Airport at the end of a disastrous vacation. At least one of my children had vomited every day for a week and a half. We were traveling home on my last and [...]
Spring cleaning? 5 tips for managing toys
Toys are not fun when they’re all over the house. If you’re stepping on green army men, threatening to sell wayward dolls on eBay and are using items like daddy’s lighter as a body doubles for game pieces, the toys have taken over.
Your children’s toys aren’t evil, they’re just a little misguided.
Here are five ways to manage toys in your home so that they feed your children’s imaginations and not your trash cans.
On Bullying a Bully
They say there’s no such thing as a bad child, only bad behavior. Recently I’ve had the misfortune of experiencing up close and extremely personally this so-called bad behavior. When I enrolled my two-year-old son in a program named (wishfully, ironically) Terrific Twos, I was excited. The aim of the class is just to give [...]
When a dad walks away
He left us. It was one of those terrible, awful situations you hear about happening to someone you grew up with and just cringe. No one saw it coming, not our friends, family, certainly not me. Suffice to say I came home from work on Thursday, he told me he was going, and by Sunday [...]
Tripped Up
At an Orlando hospital emergency room, I watch my three-year old daughter sleep, hard. A thin tube snakes up from her hand to a bag of fluids above her head. She lies on her side, curled into a ball, looking even smaller than she is. There are some moments, as a parent, that you never [...]
Putting the mass back in Christmas
“It’s snowing outside!” My two-year-old son announces as we trudge through the white stuff. “It’s snowing outside!” He says a few feet later. Then again just a few feet after that. Normally the repetition would grate on my nerves. But not today. The innocent marvel in his little voice is catching and I’m grinning ear to ear [...]
Facing Fears and Fluffy Bunnies
My husband and I struck a bargain when I was pregnant with our first child. He might argue that I extracted his promise like juice from an orange, but still, a deal was struck. He agreed to stop spitting in public. I could rest easy knowing that our kids would never walk down Main Street [...]
5 Things to Play on a Cold Wet Day
Whether your kids have a cold or it is cold, heart-pounding playtime — the good kind — isn’t always possible outdoors during inclement weather. In the winter months, moms like me can have a tough time keeping their busy kids from getting bored, especially when said kids are used to living it up covered in [...]