Kids

How to Use A Pollyanna Parenting Perspective - Part One Teenagers are designed to make parents lose their minds. It is a developmentally appropriate part of their growth towards adulting, and a required part of your parenting life. It can also lead you...
I’m so excited to announce that I've been published as a contributing writer to Grown and Flown! Yup. Like a real life writer. I'm a wee bit excited. I was recently making a joke about some remedial parenting I needed to catch up on before my kids are off to...
I was planning to write a blog about Man Flu - She’s Sick; He’s Sick(er), but something happened and I need to write it out. Katie has cooties. You may remember the blog I wrote about lice. She doesn’t have those cooties. But she has cooties of the foot variety,...
A new article states that only 25% of teens in the US worked in 2013.  Teens are missing out on earning their own money and building character traits from having jobs that make you question your own desire to live. More on horrible jobs in my life: Chuck E. Cheese...
(originally posted 2014.... in case you missed it)... It’s really just a guessing game and a matter of time until every parent loses their sanity.  I was privileged to watch it happen live in front of my own eyes to a mom this week, and then I started wondering when...
 So I was out walking the dog the other day and saw a teenager drive by in a BMW, their high school parking lot tags hanging from their rearview mirror.  My first thought was not “Wow, lucky kid”.  My first thought was “Wow, that kid is missing out on...
So if you don’t live in New Jersey, you may not have a clue what I’m talking about.  Then again, most folks living outside of NJ look at our Sopranos / NJ Turnpike / how do you live with that many people in such a small state and raise...
Ah, Tweendom. Hopefully you enjoyed last week’s part one installment, link here, and are ready for part two of things that make my head explode while parenting a tween. I really do think I'm a pretty cool mom, and of course thought that when my kids asked me questions about...
Life with a “Tween”: AKA, Tweendom is Making Me Crazy. So, my first-born and only son, Alex, turned ten this summer. TEN!  I’ve been a mom for a decade. That makes me extremely old.  It also makes the secret parenting handbook I’ve been waiting for extremely late. I was really...
My brother-in-law has this expression he uses, when we are all with the kids and really want to use curse words but don’t want to ruin our children at too early an age (there’s plenty of time for that), but he really has something that has surprised him, or...