Painted Cars, Monkey Bars

Yesterday. You know how your day can take an utter turn south, just like that? Like, the simplest thing becomes the not-so-simplest thing and suddenly you find yourself in a parked car tearing up in front of your bewildered kids, searching for a crinkled napkin in the glove compartment, mentally reminding yourself “You’re the grownup

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Dressing Your Kids

My mother is forever retelling a story of her endless sartorial regret one Sunday morning as my pastor lifted my 2-year-old self up for a hug to find that I was wearing approximately zero garments under my vacuous tulle skirt. (It would be a few years before she would buckle again under my insistence that

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Kiss Granny?

Last week, a girlfriend sent over a link to this illustration, and it hasn’t fully left my mind since. I’ve always been a firm believer in raising a child with character over compliance, someone who isn’t afraid to buck the system in a thoughtful, kind manner. So of course the idea of children’s agency hits

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Try This: A Resource Party

You know that thing you’ve been wanting to do? Climb Mt. Everest? Clean out your attic? Tailor those pants? Launch that project? Volunteer at the food shelter? I think you should do it this summer. (I know, I know. The kids are home. You’ve got that road trip planned. Work’s insane right now. The calendar’s

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Small Step No. 07

I love grocery shopping. It’s always been my favorite place to shop (perhaps because it’s the only place I shop?). Forget Target; just point me to the nearest grocery store and set me free for an hour or two. Heaven. And while I’m fairly rigid with ingredient lists, I’ve found I’m all-too-often thwarted by healthy

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Traveling with Kids

My daughter has garnered more passport stamps in three short years than I had in thirty plus. She learned to skip in Singapore. She learned to whistle in Ecuador. Just weeks ago, in London, she learned the fine art of balancing a profound wanderlust for this wide planet with the delicate yearnings for home: “Can

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A Poem

Something thoughtful for the week ahead. — Marie Howe, “Hurry” We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey, I say, hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down. Where

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Small Step No. 06

There’s an oft-referenced marketing rule that, to encourage impulse purchases in consumers, desirable products should be neatly organized at eye level, preferably as an end cap. Make it eye-catching, make it obvious. Make it impossible to ignore. And this is why I’ve stopped placing my phone on our kitchen counter. It was eye-catching. It was

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