Giving New Meaning to Parenting

I read an article in the New York Times about the difficulty in providing education for autistic children. Fundamentally, the argument goes like this: Autistic children need intensive and expensive education and therapy early on if we hope to have them function independently later in life. Without this education, they will likely be [...]

It’s finally over. Winter. It was, as it always is, so very long and so very dark. February rolled in and then stayed for months and months and then slowly March passed and April began and there we were- finally outside. Outside, desperately searching for the season’s very first sprout. [...]

The following is not a new video, but it is valuable.  Even if you’ve seen it before,  today might be the right day to share it with your daughter/sister/cousin/mother/niece/friend.  And their brothers, fathers and friends, too.

And if you’d like to hear more about developing healthy self-esteem, try this article from NYU’s Child Study Center.
And [...]

My husband travels quite a bit for his job.  The travel is never on a consistent schedule, but it’s fair to say that he’s been gone almost half the year so far.  In fact, he’s out of town this week.  My mother often jokingly calls me a “single mother” since I am often on my [...]

My laptop died this past weekend.
Luckily, we have an identical laptop, so I was able to move my drives over, copy all of my personal data onto an external USB drive, and now I can work on almost any computer that I can get time on.
The problem is that I used my computer to handle [...]

I don’t know when it started, but somewhere in this whole parenting journey I started using short rhyming phrases with the boys. Things like “What’s the story, Glory?” and “What’s the deal, Neil?” or “Buckle up, Buttercup”.
I got to wondering if anyone else does that or am I just crazy? Wait, [...]

We live in Los Angeles, California. Normally, this is a good thing. Warm weather, great foliage, excellent seafood. On the other hand, we’re a big tourist destination, so weird things are not unexpected. And when I heard that the swine flu that was flaring up in Mexico City had come to San Diego, I started [...]

I should have entitled this post Play Date Etiquette Advice for Parents of Older kids. My kids are almost 3 and 5.5. Next year my older son (OS) will be in kindergarten. Since he just missed the cutoff (Sept.2 and the cutoff is August 31) for this year, many of his friends [...]

On Sunday Copy Cat bit Pack Rat really, really hard on the hand. Pack Rat was screaming and crying out in pain. Immediately, Copy Cat crawled behind the rocking chair in their playroom because she knew she was in trouble. Dad when in to discipline her, but she cowered even farther behind the chair where [...]

It seemed like a good idea at the time.
It still is, actually. It’s just driving me crazy at this particular moment.
We decided to go ahead and put an addition on our house. The plans are identical to something our neighbors did with a few tweaks. We’re creating a mud room, turning the [...]