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 [...]

Lights Out

When Rainbow Girl was two, she started picking up trash – sticky candy wrappers, crumpled bags, dented cans. She had an uncanny eye for litter, for anything that didn’t belong in her world of otherwise-green. It wasn’t long before we started calling her The Lorax, after Dr. Seuss’ “mossy-bossy” environmentalist. She hugged trees. She squished [...]