In a recent post at Privilege of Parenting, Bruce offered some advice to a reader concerned about the sleep issues of her six-year-old son. In his response, he shared the advice of two of my personal parenting heroines, Jennifer Waldburger and Jill Spivack, the dynamic duo behind Sleepy Planet and the authors of the Motherese [...]
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Today it is my pleasure to host the writing of Elizabeth Grant, one-half of the dynamic partnership behind Life in Pencil. After I discovered Life in Pencil last month, it quickly became one of the first stops each morning on my bloggy rounds. Elizabeth, a self-described “change-a-holic,” never fails to impress me with her introspection [...]
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Are you pro-choice? No, I don’t mean it like that. Do you let your kids choose – and, if so, how much? A post at Privilege of Parenting and a comment on a post of mine have me thinking about the choices our kids make and the choices we make for them. On Sunday, Bruce [...]
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Dear friends, I’m over at IslandRoar today, musing about whether blogs are the letters of the 21st century. Please click on over to read my thoughts and to share your own. Thanks, Maureen, for lending your space to me today! Love, Kristen
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And now another selection from Kristen’s Little Shop of Metaphors… I told Husband recently about Anne Lamott’s metaphor (suggesting that writers carve out space to write just like woodpeckers drill holes in trees to make their nests) and the post I wrote about it. His response? “Don’t woodpeckers peck to pick grubs out of trees?” [...]
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I didn’t post on Saturday. Wait. You mean that fact didn’t rock your world? It sort of rocked mine. Since I started blogging on November 2, I had posted every day – weekends, holidays, while on vacation – until Saturday. At first, I posted daily in order to get myself in the habit of daily [...]
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To me, the most resonant of Gretchen Rubin‘s Four Splendid Truths is the third one: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Indeed, as far as this mother of two is concerned, truer words have never been spoken. For the past couple of weeks, I have really been feeling that “long” part of [...]
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Today it is my pleasure to welcome Nicki of Nicki’s Nook, my first guest poster here at Motherese, and the first neighbor I’ve invited in for a chat as part of the Won’t You Be My Neighbor series at The Never-True Tales. I admire Nicki for many reasons: her commitment to writing, her level-headed perspective [...]
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Sorting through piles of past-their-prime periodicals, I happened upon a back issue of the Teach for America alumni magazine, One Day. Since finishing my stint with Teach for America ten years ago and putting my teaching career on hold three years ago, I haven’t given as much thought to issues of education policy as I [...]
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Flying home on Sunday afternoon after another week away, I was actually a bit sad to see the trip come to an end. That is unusual for me: I usually prefer to stay home than to travel. I enjoy planning vacations, mapping out an itinerary, but, as often as not, I find myself counting down [...]
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“My therapist, Rita, has convinced me that every time I say yes when I mean no, I am abandoning myself, and I end up feeling used or resentful or frantic. But when I say no when I mean no, it’s so sane and healthy that it creates a little glade around me in which I [...]
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In the early days of Motherese, I reflected on the November shootings at Fort Hood. Many of the emotions that filled me then resurfaced this week, with perhaps even greater poignancy, in learning about the earthquake in Haiti. I feel like drawing the shades, locking the doors, turning off the television, the radio, the computer. [...]
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Last week my blogging buddy Liz at …but then I had kids presented me with the Happy 101 award, given to bloggers who make you smile. Thanks, Liz! Your witty, insightful writing never fails to make me smile – so that happy thing? It’s reciprocal! Today I give you a special edition of Six Quick [...]
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Several years ago a friend and former student gave me a copy of Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book that had been her freshman summer read at Duke Univeristy. The next spring, the town of Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived and taught, chose the book as its community read. From the first page of Tracy Kidder’s [...]
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Dear friends, I’m guest-posting today at Amy Whitley’s place, The Never-True Tales. Please click on over to check out my post, “Perfect Imperfection,” the inaugural contribution to her Won’t You Be My Neighbor series. Cheers,Kristen
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“‘Here, what do you think of this proposition? Men are built of words. Wouldn’t you say that’s true?’ At this he leaned forward and slapped my knee heartily, as if we were a pair of thrown-togethers at the beginning of a long train ride, discovering our common love of bookish pursuit. ‘Men are defined by [...]
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Dear M and S, After your shower on Saturday, thoughts of you mixed with the forced air of the heater to warm me on my drive home. About an hour after I left you, a squall filled the air with snow; the flakes danced horizontally, then vertically, seeming to grow up from the highway. And [...]
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“It was strange to have been reminded of Simon while standing in this guest cottage on the Blackwell vacation compound, strange to think how different this place was, surely, from the pea farm where Simon’s family lived. He would, I imagined, find the Blackwells indulgent and vulgar and self-satisfied, and they in turn would find [...]
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Because 13 nights away from home over Christmas just wasn’t enough for this vagabond family of four, we’re off again. In just a few short hours, we will be flying south, heading for the Happiest Place on Earth. No, not Denmark. (Hi, S!) Nope, not Costa Rica either. (Hi, Gwen!) That’s right, boys and girls, [...]
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My beloved Big Little Wolf e-mailed me yesterday to ask: “‘Tiny Baby’ isn’t that tiny anymore, is he? When he turns one, what will you call him online?” A provocative question indeed, especially since Tiny Baby has never been all that, well, tiny. In fact, “Tiny Baby” was a nickname given to him – perhaps [...]
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In this week’s edition of Six Quick Picks, I offer up a list of the best books I read in 2009. I hope you’ll join in the conversation and offer me and the Motherese community the names of some of your recent literary finds. 1. Home, by Marilynne Robinson (2008): Robinson won the 2005 Pulitzer [...]
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I am a big sports fan. Part of my morning routine includes watching a snippet of SportsCenter while nursing Tiny Baby. This morning I learned that Washington Wizards superstar (and popular blogger) Gilbert Arenas has been suspended indefinitely after bringing guns into his team’s locker room and, allegedy, drawing a gun on a teammate. (Arenas [...]
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Last week the incomparable Jane at Theycallmejane’s Blog treated me to my very own Lemonade Stand – the Lemonade Stand Award for “those who show great attitude and gratitude.” Funny, I usually think of myself as a person whose attitude tends a little too far toward the melancholy, and one who doesn’t spend quite enough [...]
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I have just come up with a hypothesis so revolutionary that I wanted to share it with you right away: Youth just might be wasted on the young. My first piece of evidence: Big Boy has recently decided that he will not deign to eat dinner, regardless of what is served to him. Whether it [...]
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During my recent Holiday Hiatus, I took a break from daily writing. I fired off a few trifling posts, set up Blogger to post one each morning, and then closed my laptop, giving it two weeks of true hibernation. Up to that point, I had made time every day since launching Motherese to sit down [...]
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Husband and I were recently talking about time. How it passes both quickly and slowly. How “the days are endless and the years fly by.” How we wish we had more of it. More of it for ourselves, at least. I reminded him then of my theory of time. I was reminded of it myself [...]
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Two weeks of family time over the holidays got me thinking about birth order and how it affects us as kids and as adults. When I was pregnant with Tiny Baby, I spent some of my weeks of bed rest reading uniquely unhelpful books about birth order, gender, and age spacing between kids. These books [...]
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In this week’s edition of Six Quick Picks, I bring you some highlights from my own personal 2009. 1. January: Big Boy and I traveled to Orlando, Florida with my parents. It was on this trip that his language skills really began to explode. He started naming everything in sight. We started having conversations. At [...]
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Because a holiday season packed with Hanukkah, my birthday, and Christmas just wasn’t enough for Husband and me, we decided to get married, six years ago today, on New Year’s Day in the city where we met, fell in love, and lived for several years – both as students and as adults. I knew then [...]
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