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My boys are now six and ten. With sixteen years between them, they are ready to start taking some more responsibility for themselves and their surroundings. With that in mind, here are several zero-tolerance policies I’ve recently instituted:

If I step on a stray Lego, and it’s not in one of the boys’ bedrooms, […]

I’ve been homeschooling for about 7 months now. When I chose this route I knew that it would take some time to really get it, to figure out what works for my children and what works for me, to learn the best ways my children learn. What I didn’t realize is that I would just […]

The weeks after Christmas are a great time to take a look at organizing the kids’ toy room. Or toy closet… toy area… wherever you have the kids keep their toys. Right now our boys have all their toys in their bedrooms and closets. 4 boys in 2 rooms means that we have […]

As the stay-at-home parent in our family, I have spent many a time rescuing the kids from their own forgetfulness/laziness/etc.
Friday, my son called me, begging me to bring him his cooking class homework (small samples of his meals), which he left in the fridge. I hemmed and hawed, as he’s a frosh in high school. […]

The other day, I was amused to read this article in The New York Times. For the past several years, girls have been outperforming boys academically, and everyone wants to know why. Some entrepreneurial types have decided that the reason is that boys are simply less organized than girls. Taking advantage […]

For some reason I seem to find myself out of the loop when it comes to sports sign-ups. OK, yes, with a 5-year-old, I am new to the game, as it were but how is it that other Moms in the same life stage seem to consistently sign their children up for sports on time?
Each […]

I found a link to a story in the Wall Street Journal this morning that should convince every parent out there that anything is possible for parents with a will and determination to make the world better for their children.
Ma Chen has a daughter with autism. But she doesn’t live in the US, she […]

Parenting is all-consuming, as we all know: the demands of having children expand to fill every free second. For me personally, writing is all-consuming, too — for lack of a better word I’ll call it a hobby, and I imagine that you have an all-consuming hobby also. We’re in the middle of a move requiring […]

Thanksgiving acts as a catapult which throws my family into the holiday season with reckless abandon. Suddenly, life is much busier, to do lists are much longer, and time is much more limited.
Last winter there was some interesting and helpful conversations here at GNMParents about preparing for the holidays. Instead of you spending […]

I am the person you hate.
I am always late, even when I leave the house early. I cannot exit my home in less than 20 minutes, and still, every time, I forget something essential.
When I was single and paid the bills myself, I racked up late fees all the time, because the stamped envelopes would […]