Life as a parent

Why I let my kids eat all the Halloween candy they want

31 October 2011 Kids
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Am I crazy? Or crazy like a fox? Here’s why I let my kids eat all the Halloween candy they want: Kids get way too much Halloween candy, and this is my way of getting rid of it early. If I doled out one or two pieces at a time, they’d still be hoarding a [...]

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Apologies to Connecticut

5 October 2011 Getting older
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I owe Conecticut an apology. For six long months in my mid-20s I reverse-commuted from New York City to the suburbs of Connecticut for a job, and every day I wondered at the strangeness of such a nearby but utterly alien land. At lunchtime I struggled to feign interest in foreign conversation topics. “I installed [...]

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Pioneer day

8 June 2011 Columbus, OH
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From my elementary school days in California, I remember panning for gold-painted pebbles and taking a field trip to a local Spanish mission, where we learned about making adobe bricks from clay and marveled at how small the Spanish padres must have been to fit into such tiny beds. But for my school kids in [...]

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Sentimental value

9 May 2011 Family
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Pangs of guilt go into my paper recycling bin. I look fondly at the doodles on school worksheets, the evolving handwriting and kid-logical spellings, but after four children I know I can’t save it all. Knowing that even the most special items I hold onto get faded and tired as the years pass, I’ve learned [...]

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Celebrating springtime: Easter tree and gifts

15 April 2011 Gift ideas
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It’s finally spring in Ohio. Grass is green, leaves are budding, and the sunlight is blessedly warm. Winter’s brittle ice tree is now a jauntily swaying festivity of rainbow eggs. My clever friend Jenny conjured up this surprise for the kids. It’s like a Christmas tree but better – easy, fun, inexpensive – and best [...]

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Standing up

5 November 2010 Kids
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Just read something I had to pass along – a mom in Missouri wrote a post about her preschool son dressing up as Daphne from Scooby Doo for Halloween. It’s a brilliant story about standing up for your kids, but it’s also about saving childhood for free imagination. Grade school is already a stinging awakening [...]

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Mondays

1 November 2010 Family
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You’d think that now that I’m out of the paid workforce, I should be free of the Monday blahs. Every day has the same cooking, cleaning, laundry, driving and piles of paperwork, and since I have two in school, you’d think Mondays might even be a relief from the all-the-kids-all-the-time clamor on the weekends. But [...]

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Boo

30 October 2010 Kids
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I take photographs so I don’t forget moments like these. My first Halloween as a mom, and this dear, silly, doggie moment – like much of that sleepless year – would have disappeared from my memory if I hadn’t captured it with my first little Canon Elph digital camera. The person-ghost is my banana bread/scone [...]

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Anna Quindlen on motherhood

1 October 2010 Brain food
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Today’s brain food is about the sisterhood of moms – the sisterhood that knows the wondrous joy and dark lows, the fog-headed sleeplessness, the constant company of little people in the bathroom, the desperate need for Five Minutes of Silence, Please. For those of us who have made it through the trial by fire of [...]

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On loss: Maria Shriver and Susan Saint James

29 August 2010 Brain food
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It is a sign of a good life to have much to lose. I’ve been lucky – I have my parents, my husband, my children, a large extended family and many longtime friends. But as I approach midlife, I feel acutely the inevitability of losing people that I love. An abundance of love is a [...]

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