5 Can’t-Miss Ideas for Kid-Friendly Summer Fun
The big yellow bus just dropped the kids off for the last time until September, and you catch yourself thinking, Now what? After all, summer vacation means more than SPF 50, water bottles, and beach towels. Sooner or later, most parents start to wonder, What next? What will I do to keep these kids entertained and [...]
How To Find More Time For Yourself
You deserve more time for yourself. More me time. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of me time your life must be miserable indeed. The next minute or so of our time together should help with that. Here are seven strategies to find more time for yourself. Mix and match. Pick and pull. Gather what glimmers [...]
31 Simple Ways To Add Happy To Your Day
1. Go to bed an hour earlier. If you can sleep the extra rest will work wonders for your happiness the next day, and if you can’t sleep, then using the time to read a novel will feel absolutely luxurious. 2. Get flowers for your desk. Picking wildflowers is great if you can, but even [...]
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 [...]
10 Time Management Tips For Moms
As an at-home mother of little ones as well as a writer, composer and flute/voice teacher who volunteers as choir director and natural family planning teacher, I have to be really smart with my time in order to accomplish anything at all. Here’s my take on maximizing time and productivity, based on my experience as [...]
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.
How I write about my children
Meeting someone new is a fragmentary blessing. Within that sliver of time, you can reinvent yourself, a blank page, history unwritten. Your secrets are safe, unremarked. No one needs to know about crazy Aunt Molly, or the senior prom disaster. There’s no need to confess that you still eat peanut butter straight from the jar. [...]
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 [...]