Last week, my best friend from high school came for a visit and brought her family along. We hadn’t seen each other in oh, four years? And another four before that? But time melted away the months and in mere minutes flat, her kids and my own are stacking pillows at the foot of the
The way I see it, a baby grows in your belly, or perhaps your heart, and stretches each to the max. A nudge here, a push there. Stretching, expanding, breathlessly requesting more room from you – inside, outside – until you think you cannot possibly give another inch, another minute, another day. (You do, of
Bee is both collector and crafter, wildly imaginative and unsurprisingly resourceful (sounds not at all familiar). Her desk lives in Ken’s office, and often, the pair can be found whiling away the afternoon in tandem, fully immersed in their own respective projects. In Bee’s world, Q-tips become fishing rods. Pom-poms become hedgehogs. To say nothing
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
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
One of my oft-asked questions about Scout’s adoption is this: How did you prepare Bee? The answer is layered, of course. Buckle up, if you’re of the curious type. — I will first offer the ubiquitous disclaimer that having children does not make me, by any stretch, a parenting expert. I know very little about
Well, I’m certainly no expert on winter survival with small children in tow (my yellometer often creeps up in these dark, cold months), but I’m determined to learn. Below, my tried-and-true playtime hacks – a few spins on everyday activities that have been keeping our home (relatively) peaceful, fun and busy: Read a book backwards.
You want inspiration. Insight. Advice, wisdom, a lifetime’s worth of perspective, and you want it served in one tidy spot to lap up in five minutes or less, no? You could try meditation. Prayer. Call a mentor, perhaps book an elusive five minutes with your therapist. Or you can sneak into your kid’s bedroom and