Thankfully Yours
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…
Sorry, Not Sorry
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…
“I Made a New Friend!”
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…
Music Appreciation
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…
Slow Down Summer
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:…
On Their Own
They had a plan. My oldest daughter, Sam, who was just shy of twelve at the time, and a neighborhood buddy wanted to go on an adventure, a mile-long walk to the ice cream shop that had just opened down…
Oh, Babies!
Born to bear! is what my dad used to say about me, the youngest of his five daughters. And although it embarrassed me a little (I liked to think I had at least a few other things going for me),…
There Will Be Breasts
The fact that I’m still alive and that I have breasts. These are my risk factors for the cancer that nearly 41,000 women in Virginia were diagnosed with last year alone. When it comes to some of the other things…
Memory Game
We were a ping-pong family. My mother had her own paddle that she stored in a velour drawstring pouch. My dad had a top-spin on his serve that made it nearly impossible to return. These are very clear memories from…
Parenting Nugget
Last fall, my husband and I marked twenty years of wedded-ness and to celebrate we ate gator nuggets in Everglades City. No small feat, twenty years together, so we planned this trip to Florida for just the two of us…
