Whether it was Aaaaaugh! or Eeeeeek! or Ooooooh! no juxtaposition of letters would have done that shriek justice. Hot iron? Puncture wound? Home intruder? Those were the thoughts I remember spiraling through my head. And yes, this shriek actually lasted…
When my firstborn, Sam, was a month old, my parents came to Richmond to meet their new granddaughter. My baby girl gazed upon her grandma who had just driven eight hours to hold her and let out a scream, the…
Have you heard about the studies that connect the amount of money spent on a wedding to the length of the marriage? The research suggests that couples who splurge on a grand affair tend to end up in front of…
As far as my husband, Scott, is concerned, one of the most desirable qualities about his life partner is that she’s frugal. Romantic, I know. “You’re not cheap,” he’ll insist. “You do a wonderful job managing our family spending.” Talk…
Wait, what just happened? For a very long time, that’s what I asked the first week of January, when the holiday season was finally, thankfully over – or at least those lights at the end of the tunnel weren’t Christmas…
For about a year after we moved into the house we live in now, I had a peculiar habit that to this day, no one in my family knows about. (Minds out of the gutter, please. Nothing illicit going on…
Trust me, I do not spend my days on Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, but if there’s a #parenting tweet that sums me up, it’s this: I am not an expert. I like Twitter. It’s fun to talk about innocuous things…
Each year, as September’s school days slip by, few phrases are more pleasing to this parent’s ear than, “I made a new friend!” Even as my oldest, Sam, starts college (which I’m handling pretty well, by the way), I…
For lots of families, the youngest is in a constant scramble to get any scrap of attention she can. And so it was at the dinner table a handful of years ago, when Lindsey, tired of hearing the usual stream…
There’s a name for what a lot of us are doing. It’s hyper-parenting. Don’t give me that look, I didn’t come up with it. Hyper-parenting is a term coined by psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld in his book, The Over-Scheduled Child:…
