Sometimes I feel envious of my friends whose families live close by. A good friend of mine lives within several blocks of her brother and his family, and her parents are right down the street and around the corner. This translates into regular Satur...

With the start of summer, I immediately noticed how happy my daughters became. The luxuries of staying up later, sleeping in longer and not having to do homework brought out their carefree, good-natured selves. I heard them laugh more. (I also heard...

“Help! My Child Wants to be a Vegetarian!” This is the title I typed in the search bar at the library, hoping to find a book that would help me deal with my 12-year-old daughter’s decision to give up meat for good. A few months ago, Claire started ...

Normally I don’t like it when the house is messy or cluttered. But when I see that my 7-year-old daughter, Brenna, has once again rearranged the living room, it makes me smile. She has turned the front room of our house into her classroom by moving...

Our youngest daughter is 7 years old and recently got her very first iPod touch. She is ecstatic, and I already don’t know what she is doing on it. We have it set up so that she can’t access the Internet without getting our permission. And when I s...

Before I became a mother, I had all kinds of opinions and ideas as to how I would parent my own children someday, as well as the results I could expect. For example, I knew I would never count to three to try to make my children obey: children shou...

We have several signs in our home with phrases and words that reflect our values around faith and family, except for the purely sarcastic sign in our laundry room that says, “Laundry: Loads and loads of fun.” I am drawn to these signs — like the on...

I have a theory about skipping: I think that many of us start our lives out skipping, and then at some point we realize that we are too old to skip, or we look around and notice that no one else is skipping anymore, so we stop. Sure, from time to ti...

We have had our puppy, Lila, for a year and a half. We have house-trained her and crate-trained her; we’ve taught her to sit and to stay. We take her on regular walks on a regular route, and she regularly does her business in front of her preferred ...