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I’m a sucker for lists. Three kids in and now I have a very strong sense of what I love in kids’ decor, clothing, utensils, you name it, because I’ve wasted a lot of money and time figuring it out. Sometimes you learn by experience. And sometimes you get luckily gifted something that you fall in love with. I’ve written my brain dump on registering already, and five items that make parenting easier, and nine toys for the first year, but let me foist yet another list on you because a girlfriend is expecting her first and asked me if I had to only have five things in my nursery, what would they be?? (Also listed allll my Whole Parenting Goods crib & wall &…
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She never ceases to shower her children with unending, personalized attention without fatigue or Jim Weiss. They engaged all day long with things like a detailed painting project wherein the child ne’er slides their paintbrush OVER ALL THE FURNITURE IN SIGHT whilst the mother is rummaging through the pantry after the toddler discovered the grandmother’s green food dye and now everything on lower shelves has to be moved. She never shrieks at them to please LEAVE HER ALONE at the swimming pool changing areas, only to emerge and discover the two older had strewn their clothing, wet and dry alike, all over the changing room. All the whilst she was not struggling to get her wet clam-like suit off over her not untanned, unwaxed legs.…
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We ate like royalty on our vacation. As promised, a run down. The kids ate everything! The marathon-training-husband needed lots of calories so we ate and ate and ate. It was so easy to cook and clean up with another adult around to play and be with the kids. Rocket science, right? When I devised our grocery list before going on the trip, I wanted foods that could do double duty and that I knew the kids would eat. They’re good eaters and eat just about everything we do so that wasn’t too terrible. When in doubt, oatmeal and yogurt and blueberries, right? I had to fuel up with chai every day because the baby took to sleeping like a newborn, literally. He had been…
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I can’t actually throw any towels in because they’re almost all in the laundry pile. In the basement. In the basement whose carpeting is about to be ripped out because MOLD {delights of Monday discoveries} where the leaking dishwasher led to a partially ripped out ceiling that promptly shed small nails that went into my husband’s foot. The piles of laundry are slow going because I simply cannot haul the tot down there with me to change it over because of ^^conditions and the only place I can safely corral him is his crib on the second floor of the house but that needs to be lowered like yesterday because it’s on the middle rung and I think he’s going to catapult himself over the…
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We had never taken a family vacation with all three kids before this summer. A vacation with just our family of five. Not to visit family or friends. Not for a wedding. Not for a baptism. Just away. Just us. And clearly now I know what we were missing. We spent almost five days at our place in Wisconsin and could have stayed a million years. My mom has outfitted it with all the books and games of our childhood, and even though we go almost weekly for a day trip, this was our first time simply immersing ourselves in its over 100 acres of beauty with all three kids. No agenda. No schedules. No obligations. Just us. We picked apples from an ancient apple…
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Before I had kids, I thought bribing your child to do something was akin to derelict parenting. In fact, I thought it was derelict parenting. I thought children should be treated like mini-adults, such that once they hit about 4 years old, they would understand the causal relationship between action & consequence and sorry, pal, you blew it, try again, would work. Bribing them with baseball cards, ice cream, trips to the train store, opportunities to get out of bed earlier and go to bed later, I mean, who would do such things? ME! ME! I used to say, Don’t do this or that or you won’t get this or that. And then I’d have to make good on my threats. And it always felt like…
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