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Rally Your Parenting Village, Now.

Our view from quarantine in Auckland, New Zealand

Jul 28 2022

So. It’s been awhile. Not for lack of inspirational writing material (there’s been plenty), or because our family has had COVID (we’ve had it, but it was mild, thankfully), or because my site crashed (it hasn’t). Full disclosure, I haven’t posted because of my addiction to double-spacing after end punctuation, which I hear is way passe because we no longer use typewriters. But I simply cannot commit myself to unlearning the only thing I could do consistently well in my high school typing class. Oh, and because my family recently moved to New Zealand. One of these “excuses” is actually…

Feb 19 2021

“She’s nice.” “Niiiiicccce!” says my son, ogling the Rolls Royce parallel-parked outside a downtown Boston McDonald’s. (Yup, really….) Nice. (Sarcasm oozing, eyes rolling, when we witness someone else’s blunder.) That was a kind thing to do! Often we consider “nice” and “kind” to be interchangeable descriptors. But let’s try a quick experiment. Try replacing “kind” for “nice” in each of the first three statements above. “Kind” only works for the first, but not for the second or third. We would not describe an expensive car (or any other pricey, stylish object) as kind, or, at least in current vernacular, use…

Feb 05 2021

During a rare outing my daughter and I headed to a local store to buy some makeup. Weird, as makeup seems a relic of another time and place, not one in which she is being homeschooled and wears a mask over half her face whenever we leave the house. But we went anyway, needing any reason at all to break the monotony of being homebound. Excited about our purchases and even more thrilled to be engaging with the real world, we were startled by the older man entering the store as we emerged into the cold, sunny day. Even more…

Nov 05 2020

This has been a tough week for everyone. And we know that after the election results are finally in, waiting in the wings for its (third now?) encore is COVID. And who knows for sure what else. So let’s escape for a few minutes and have a chuckle. Nothing to outright make you pee a little but a little bit of something to turn those frowns upside down. Smiling actually does wonders for mental state. So I’ve curated several signs, etc., over the last few years that our family has seen during past travels, and put them together here for…

“But I Just Know MY People are COVID-Free”: Human Nature Fails Us Yet Again

Oct 22 2020

Don’t shame me, if I want to rent a house and lay on the beach with twenty of my fabulous friends from across the country, that’s what I’m going to do. I thought about this for a moment. Shaming. I didn’t know about her latest vacay plans when I told her about my grandmother’s lonely suffering in a care facility after three surgeries and the death of her daughter, that my own child was at-risk for severe COVID symptoms, and that my husband sees people in hazmat suits every day he goes to work. I’ll give her that: providing a…

Oct 15 2020

I’m really worried. It’s not a secret that our twin boys are the miracles of science. After three rounds of in vitro fertilization, and the mourning of many of our embryonic children, on our fourth attempt our boys were conceived. I had morning sickness like clockwork. I remember the weird little vibration in my abdomen while I was doing charts at work, the boys’ first movements an absolute wonder. The ultrasounds seem like just yesterday. From the first furious fluttering of their little 6-week-old hearts to Baby B turning sommersaults at 20 weeks. He still has that kind of energy…

Oct 01 2020

Where did this year go? (Down the toilet, to the dogs….) Certainly there’s no taking a reminiscent tone when pondering 2020. But seriously, where did it go? Seems like just yesterday we were all closed up in our houses and venturing out to get the paper in our Sunday best. Wait…that actually was yesterday. Except now, we are on the threshold of cold and flu season. This fall, more than in any previous year, getting your and your (older than 6 months) kids the influenza vaccine is of tantamount importance. In this time of a global pandemic and also with…

Sep 24 2020

My 6-year-old cousin sits beside me on the couch, madly typing away on an old-fashioned calculator. She asks me, when the screen can’t handle any more digits, What’s this number? I answer: two million, five hundred sixty-four thousand, eight hundred twenty-three. Or something like that. I can only recall the two million for sure. She asks, Is that a big number? Yes, it is. And I pause, adding, I think that’s the number of photographs your mommy and I have looked at this week. She looks at me, not old enough to have a fully-developed number sense, or understand my…

Sep 03 2020

For quite some time I’ve wanted to introduce guest writers into the fold for fresh perspectives and knowledge. So today I am pleased and proud to bring you the first guest blogger on pulseonparenting.com. Ok, it’s my husband. Maybe I took the easy way out. But he wrote this post for his own blog and it fits right it with Pulse’s mission to bring parents information and answer questions in an easy-to-digest manner. And if you enjoy this post and find it helpful, as my husband states on his blog, feel free to share. I have had an on and…

Aug 27 2020

I wrote this post almost a year ago and never got around to publishing it. So much has happened in the intervening time with the rise of a global pandemic and I am SMDH at how the words below are ringing eerily true now. As an unusual school year is starting, and influenza season is just around the corner, vaccination (or the forgoing of it) is a prescient topic. So now is the time to publish this long-overdue post: My fourteen-year-old son passed on this meme (or is it a Gif? A Tik-Tok? I’ve no idea…) to me the other…

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