Big Brother just finished his first year of preschool. Seemingly worn out by nine months of twice weekly two hour play and snack fests, he recently declared himself ready for summer vacation. I was slightly less ready, apparently, and forgot to buy his wonderful teacher an end-of-the-year gift until the night before. I remembered in [...]
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where I am heading professionally. As you may recall, I was a high school history teacher for nearly a decade before I took some time off to have my kids. I had planned to go back into teaching all along, but I’ve hit a few roadblocks since September [...]
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I was at book club the other night, enjoying the usual rhythms of our post-book chat, cozy and content inside as the skies prepared to blanket us with snow overnight. I found myself in conversation with a lovely new friend. She and I were comparing our geographical histories, parts of which saw us living in [...]
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Today it is my pleasure to welcome my buddy Liz of …but then I had kids to Motherese for a neighborly chat. I met Liz – like so many of my other favorite blogging buddies – through Momalom’s Five for Ten and I have been greedily devouring her posts ever since. The word that first [...]
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As you probably know by now, I am an avid reader. My adoration for Anne Lamott and Judith Warner notwithstanding, I am pulled quite strongly to fiction. But despite my love of a great piece of literature and my newfound passion for writing, I cannot imagine writing fiction. I am currently rereading Harry Potter and [...]
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I have been in five book clubs since graduating from college and I still haven’t quite figured out what they’re all about. My first book club was a pleasing melange of my work and college friends. We were all young and living in New York, and enjoyed our monthly meetings over dinner and wine at [...]
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A recent article in the New York Times captured my attention, not only for its subject matter, but also for the comments that it drew. In “How to Speak Nanny”, Hilary Stout explored the uneasy relationships that exist between many working mothers and the women they hire to care for their children. According to Stout: [...]
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As I have mentioned before, Tiny Baby is not a fan of tummy time. Put him on his tummy and he becomes irritated. Ornery. Sometimes he’ll push up and roll over as quickly as he can. Other times, he’ll surrender to gravity, burying his face in the blanket, admitting defeat. Not surprisingly, Tiny Baby’s aversion [...]
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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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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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Last week I had lunch with a friend, the mother of three young boys. She passed along to me a number of books that deal with shaping the moral, emotional, and mental lives of boys. She also recommended another book, which addresses, among other things, the phenomenon of the “anomalous male,” one whose interests in [...]
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Have you ever played the Game of Life? My older brother and I played constantly, both of us longing to land on one of the squares at the beginning of the game that entitled us to a career as a lawyer or a doctor (and the $50,000 annual salary that went with it – I [...]
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