Family

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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My favorite houseguests

21 January 2011 Family
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The fact that my husband and I were unambiguously depressed to see my mom and dad go back to California after a three-week visit says a lot about them as parents and people. Tiger moms (not to mention Tiger mothers-in-law) are all about applying pressure; my parents are all about relieving it. They come to [...]

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Chinese mothers

14 January 2011 Family
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Many friends have sent me the article by Amy Chua in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” asking what I think of it. For those of you who have not read the article, Yale law professor Chua writes about her experience raising her two daughters in the stereotypical Chinese fashion: command-and-control, [...]

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Gift ideas for school-aged kids

3 December 2010 Gift ideas
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It gets harder to make general gift recommendations as kids grow older and their tastes more defined. I’ll share some fun finds from my research for my own two school-aged kids, boy and girl, and for their their many cousins and friends. As with the preschool kids, I have categories Pretend, Create, Learn and Move [...]

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Gift ideas for preschoolers

2 December 2010 Gift ideas
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Preschoolers are at the golden age for gifts – old enough to appreciate them and young enough to like just about anything. But choices out there are endless, and it’s all too easy to end up with a house full of abandoned toys. Here are my ideas for toys that last, in five categories: pretend, [...]

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The rush is on…holiday gift ideas

29 November 2010 Gift ideas
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Rolling out of Thanksgiving weekend, I thought we’d take a break from food this week to tackle holiday gifts. With four kids of my own, plus nine nieces and nephews, I’ve done a whole lot of gift buying for infants through teens, and the chinese grandma in me has to research the bejeezus out of [...]

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November in my mom’s garden

17 November 2010 Family
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If my mom isn’t in her kitchen, she’s in her garden. In a fantasy world she could retire from cooking, but gardening is indispensable – it’s refuge, meditation, exercise, creative outlet and the key to her good health. Her dream garden is the green version of a dream house. Instead of a carbon footprint, it [...]

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Choosing schools

13 November 2010 Kids
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All I want for my kids is a good public education. I’m trying to figure out what that is, where it can be found and what are the alternatives if it no longer exists. Public schools – State comparisons Public school rankings are tricky in a nation whose public school system has been struggling for [...]

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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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