Ahh… bedtime routines. They have been my saving grace with the girls. The cornerstone of their lives, if you will. I nailed a good one down, early on with Pea, since passed down to include Coco, and it’s stuck with us through three years of goodnights. There have been tweaks along the way, the largest [...]

Do you remember Madeline? The sweet little redheaded French girl? As a kid, I adored her. She was so small and sweet and fierce. A winning combination. We had all of the books, it was all I ever wanted to read. As I grew, I discovered other “sassy and smart” girls to look up to. [...]

Love & Logic? Jim Fay? Foster Cline? I love you. So much. So very, very much. The past couple of weeks, taking Pea to camp, have been brutal. A place that she loves and by her own admission has so much fun at has become, apparently, some kind of torture for her. Starting first thing [...]

I have over 22,000 photos stored on my computer. And those are just the shots from my digital camera. In a closet, I have 10 more storage containers, each larger than a shoe box, that I have pictures in that were developed from film. Remember the good old days? I much prefer the digital storage [...]

During my first pregnancy with Pea, I was reading every book under the sun about pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, etc., I was always reading about this intense urge to nest that was going to come over me, presumably in my third trimester. But it never happened. I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t. There was no [...]

After I wrote last about my passion for Love & Logic, I received quite a few emails asking me to go into further detail about what this theory of parenting entails. And now that it’s been about one month since my last post on the topic, I can say with delight that it’s really working [...]

What is it with little kids and spaghetti? I’m willing to bet that there’s a picture of you in your parent’s home, sitting in a highchair, all of about one-year old, with spaghetti sauce smeared all over your face, in your hair. A noodle dangling from your nose. I can now add Coco to that [...]

I thought I should write a little follow-up regarding the Love & Logic class that my husband and I are taking. Because I had such high hopes for it. If you recall, I had already ordered the book, which has spent, more or less, the last month lost in a huge stack of books on [...]

So, I’ve never had a puppy before. Atticus was 8-months old when I adopted him from the shelter. And so while he had a whole host of issues that I had to address immediately, at least he was house-trained! He was a rescue dog. He had been living on an old man’s farm and had [...]

I love Katharine Hepburn. Like really, really love her. As in worship. Idolize. Adore. In fact, I’ll just say it… I wish I could have been her. Just for a day, even. She was so smooth and sophisticated and… masculine. But she was still all woman. That’s a feat. I’ve often found myself thinking, “What [...]

My husband and I have been struggling here and there with how to discipline Pea. She’s one month shy of three. She’s intelligent, clever, beautiful, funny, loving and all of those wonderful things we want our children to be. Are you sensing an oncoming “but?” I hate to use that word, it’s as if it [...]

We have tried potty training Pea on several occasions. Those occasions usually ended with me saying “screw it,” and tossing another diaper on her. It’s not that I didn’t think she was ready, I’m sure she was. Perhaps I was lazy? Or just the most impatient mother in the world? Seriously, you pull down your [...]

Pea called horses “hee-haws” for the longest time. We thought maybe she got it from “yee-haw,” which would make a lot of sense, right? Cowboys ride horses and say things like “yee-haw!” But… it’s not like we walk around yelling out “yee-haw!” We’re just not those kind of people. Even if we did live in [...]

It seems to me that the universal theme of bloggers is that they love words, in all their manners of conveyance… books, magazines, newspapers, blogs. Am I right? My husband seems to think so. He gave me a book called “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” recently, and I just started [...]

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Pea just refuses to stop and have her diaper changed. It’s infuriating. She will run around, stinking up the joint, and when one of us asks her if she has a poop, she will defiantly answer “no.” And we know she does, so we take the opportunity to explain [...]