Giving New Meaning to Parenting

Now that the summer is over and the kids are back in school, I thought I’d take this time to reflect on our latest experience with Summer Camp. The daycare located on site where I work offers summer camp for children entering kindergarten through those entering fifth grade. My son is a veteran now, since [...]

A friend of mine recently found her seven-year-old son watching porn on his new PSP. Understandably, she was devastated. Her son was confused. It’s a toy, after all, and surely if mummy and daddy give you a cool toy you want to press all the buttons and totally expect only fun things to happen as [...]

The Mercenary has of late been acting as if everything I say annoys him. Well. To be completely truthful, I think that my breathing annoys him as well. In and out….in and out…it never stops. Poor kid. The inhumanity of his suffering staggers the mind, no?
Sunday afternoon, I asked him [...]

About four weeks ago I made an announcement to my daughters that there would be no  toys purchased until their birthday. I made this decision because every where we went they would beg for a “small” toy, just a small one, please! I felt bad always saying no so I found myself giving in, again [...]

Every culture has a tradition of oral storytelling. The 35,000-year-old paintings on the walls of the Lascaux Caves are our earliest recorded evidence of storytelling1, and Aesop, a 6th century BC greek slave, wrote tales which even today are used to teach moral behavior to children. Stories are a means to pass [...]

Recently, I found myself stuck in a small Toyota Matrix with a four-year-old, and eleven-month-old, a cat, and my husband for more than thirteen hours.
This, as you may guess, was fairly close to one of the levels of hell described by Dante.  Factor in that we traversed the whole of Ohio on a diagonal and [...]

Lunch boxes! Oh I know, they can be a bore! It’s easy to just throw some junk in there, anything your child will eat without complaining. But during term time, lunch box meals take up quite a chunk of your child’s overall food intake, so it’s best if they have healthy ones. And with some [...]

I realized recently that the boys were flat out using me quite often. In the heat of an argument, one child will show up and demand, “Mom!!! Will you tell him that (insert side of argument here)??” I am not fond of being in the middle of an argument in the first [...]

Our family is experiencing the Summer of the Louse.
It started innocently enough with a family wedding Seven children, all playing and having a good time. Shortly thereafter, one came down with lice. They had managed to spread it to a few of the other cousins and adults, but we made it home [...]

At a time when most parents are counting down the days until school starts, it already started for those of us in Arizona. I was not one of those parents counting down the days, in fact I was dreading them. I was under the impression that kindergarten was going to be a difficult transition for [...]