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My Favorite Kid’s Storage Finds for Every Room

If you visit my home for more than a minute, you’ll know kids live here. There are very often random items strewn about the entryway and living spaces — plastic balls, wooden spatulas, tangible exhibits of the toddler’s current, mysterious obsession with cookware. (I cannot tell you how often I have fished my favorite oven

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A Simple Trick to Kick Your Multi-Tasking Habit

Boone Pickens perhaps said it best: When you are hunting elephants, don’t get distracted chasing rabbits. This week’s rabbit: Stranger Things. I’m not a TV watcher by nature, but every now and then, a show will grip my immediate community so tightly that it becomes a focal point for conversation after conversation, theories and recaps

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Currently

Bang trims, watercolors, mango slices. Musical reenactments in the sunroom, her stage. She wants to know how to spell Gaston, needs to borrow a tote as a prop, asks me to put ‘Kill the Beast’ on repeat. For a bit, I say, sliding the door shut. She remembers candied pecans and puzzles from last winter,

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Letters to Mothers

The baby will wake, often, up and down, eyes popping wide and fading shut, and it will be a running joke in your family that you, the mother, will be physically unable to lull him to sleep. The baby will have figured you out, he will have found the loophole. When he cries out and

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When the World Feels Awful

“So there you have it: two things & I can’t bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?” ―Richard Flanagan There is something to be said for living life with open shutter

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Small Step No. 15: You Doing You

One of my most frequently asked questions in a podcast interview or Q&A session is always some measured form of this: OK, yes. I get it. I see the importance here. But how do I get my spouse/roommate/community to support and adapt to my decision to live more simply? How do I live as a

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Work & Whiplash

I fell into a bit of an impromptu travel season this month – three back-to-back trips with a weekend between. Just enough time to empty the suitcase into the laundry cycle, to re-roll and re-pack once it was refreshed. — I know two things: (1) I love this job. (2) I love this family. I

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