The other day, my daughter asked me if “hate” is a bad word. The short answer is no, because I do not believe that emotions are good or bad. The long answer is a bit more complicated. When emotions such as hate, jealousy, and anger get classified as bad and wrong, then you might try […]
Last night, I tried to make some fresh pasta and the dough got gummed up in the pasta maker, probably because it was too moist. I got frustrated and started to toss all the dough into the compost, but my daughter insisted that she make dinner out of the dough. I was in a horrible […]
Conflict is messy. Not many of us are skilled at it. Sometimes, it is tempting to try bypass it altogether to “keep the peace.” I’m not talking about choosing a battle because a particular issue is not a big deal. I’m talking about when someone crosses a line and you feel violated but decide to […]
I have the Internet on my mind lately, and today I am thinking about how much of our lives we share with the public via social media and blogging. I often struggle with how much to share about my life and my children, and how much to keep private. Today I read a blog post […]
This morning on my Facebook feed, I saw a link judging a woman’s parenting out of context. It was a link to a blog post about a mom on her iPhone written as if it were a letter to her, explaining all that she was missing out on while ignoring her three kids at the […]
The other day, I ended a frustrating long term relationship with my raspberry patch. For about eight years, I tried many things to make the patch bear fruit. Every year, it would flower abundantly, bees would pollinate the flowers, and then the flowers would shrivel up and die. Every year, I would get my hopes […]
My daughter is learning how to pedal bike, which means she is also learning quite a bit about facing her fears. Recently, she learned to pedal small distances without me holding her bike. This increased rather than decreased her fear of falling. For a while, the better she got, the more scared she was. The […]
Yesterday, my daughter was in a terrible mood. She didn’t eat enough, and she skipped her nap. The littlest things would trigger the biggest tantrums. Whoever happened to step on the landmine of her bad mood was the person she thought was causing the bad mood. For a three-year-old, this makes perfect sense. Screaming from […]
My daughter recently turned three, and this is an age of great leaps in communication skills for her and her friends. When she started going to school in January, she experienced conflict with other classmates that sometimes turned physical, with her on the receiving end of pushes, head-bonks, bites, etc. The first time this happened, […]
There has been a ton of buzz around the latest cover of Time magazine, the one with the mother breastfeeding her toddler next to the title “Are You Mom Enough?” The goal of the picture is to shock people who aren’t accustomed to seeing this sort of thing, and the goal of the title is […]