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Getting to the Heart of Parenting...

1
Rally Your Parenting Village, Now.
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The Kindness Series: No More Mr. Nice Guy, Be Kind Instead
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When Kindness Hits You Like a Ton of Bricks, Build a Home
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8 (non-political) Signs to Make You Smile
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“But I Just Know MY People are COVID-Free”: Human Nature Fails Us Yet Again
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In Vitro Fertilization Grows Families: #ThanksIVF
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Teens Need Control, Independence, and Straight Teeth
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9 Undebatable Points: Get Your Influenza Vaccine Now
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Respect Life: 9 Ways to Get it Right, Now
10
What I’ve Learned From Growing Up With Loss

Rally Your Parenting Village, Now.

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…

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The Kindness Series: No More Mr. Nice Guy, Be Kind Instead

“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…

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When Kindness Hits You Like a Ton of Bricks, Build a Home

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…

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8 (non-political) Signs to Make You Smile

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…

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

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…

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In Vitro Fertilization Grows Families: #ThanksIVF

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…

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Teens Need Control, Independence, and Straight Teeth

“I don’t WANT someone to marry me!!!” That was the climactic point in a tearful exchange with my 14-year-old daughter. Shamefully, I smiled a little to myself despite her distress, because my husband and I often joke to each other how some poor (but INCREDIBLY lucky) shmuck will get to marry our headstrong, determined daughter. He better be ready for space travel because, as our older son says, “D is gonna colonize the moon.” This is a girl who could out run her older brothers through the back acre behind her grandparents house, who once wore a set of laboratory…

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9 Undebatable Points: Get Your Influenza Vaccine Now

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…

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Respect Life: 9 Ways to Get it Right, Now

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…

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What I’ve Learned From Growing Up With Loss

Mommy, what happens when we die? My oldest is always good for minivan-stopping moments. Trying to toss his velcro shoe out the window. Determining that blank-staring milking cows are maniacs. Going waaaay existential. At four-years-old, he again (yes, again) flew his old-soul flag and asked the ages-old question. While other children focused on the flying house fueled by colorful balloons in the movie Up, my son was deeply troubled that the main character’s wife died. Thus our first conversation about death and dying. And I thought the birds-and-bees talk would be the tough one. Turns out, I am much better…

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