Giving New Meaning to Parenting

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 [...]

We’ve taken our kids on long and short trips of just about every kind.  They’ve been to London, to California, to Ohio and to New York; We’ve stayed in four star hotels, really marginal motels and rentals.  Other than not doing much camping, we’ve run the gamut of family travel.
When you hear travel horror stories, [...]

Stu and I have both written recently suggesting that as parents we should BE interested, not ACT interested in our kids.  Well, that seems pretty obvious,  can I get a round of “uh….  duhs”?  Of course we should be interested in the Punks. (In case you’re new here,  Punks is short for Pumpkin-heads a.k.a. my [...]

I want to share how proud I am of my husband for realizing that traveling with children is something completely different from traveling with adults. After almost seven years, he’s had an epiphany about his expectations and I think this year’s road-trip is going to be even more fun because of it.
We leave on [...]

I spent the weekend watching Andrew.
Andrew is our 21-year-old son. He’s why I started writing here back in February. I thought it would be interesting to find out what I’ve learned about parenting by writing about him. It has been a good time of reflection on both of our children.
We spent Christmas day with Nancy’s [...]

I should start off by saying that I’m friends with a carseat inspector.  Here in MA, you can go to various fire and police stations and have your carseat installed for free by a certified carseat inspector.  A lot of places also offer free clinics throughout the year.
When we first switched from the bucket seat [...]

I would have killed for a cup of coffee last weekend. And I almost did.
We moved to a quiet quasi-suburban section of San Francisco a few months ago, forsaking a neighborhood surrounded by probably 20 coffee shops within walking distance to one with exactly zero. So if it’s a desperate Saturday morning and I’m out [...]

We just came back from a long weekend away, driving the family minivan. Old Faithful is looking a bit banged up, inside and out, showing some of its 170,000 miles more evidently than in the past. We know we’ll need a new car some day, but in the meantime, we are nursing this [...]