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  • Sending the kids off to school….Now what?

    Labor Day is here! The kids are all going off to school and parents everywhere are doing the happy dance. If you’re an old momma like me, you’ve been down this road before. September I get the house back, I find a few extra free hours and I don’t have to feed them over and over again. Even though I work full time, my kid’s summer schedule highly disrupts my…

  • Darth Vader Moments

    I’ve used this analogy before- modern positive parenting= Obi Wan Kanobi…”those are not the droids you’re looking for” and traditional punishment parenting= Darth Vader…”I will blow up your planet if you piss me off.”  Overly simplified but I find it helpful. I often wonder where my Darth Vader side comes from. Most of my adult life I have been working on not blowing people’s planets up just because I am…

  • Are You Parenting on the Same Page?

    The metaphor that I use in“Parenting in Partnership” is driving the family minivan.  When we all try to get somewhere- one of us does the driving and the other one is navigating, sleeping, arguing with the kids, on the cell phone… but not driving. Most drivers hate having our driving critiqued. No one wants a “back seat driver”.  My children somehow think yelling “feedback” to me from the backseat is…

  • Sadness Doesn’t Suck

    If you have been following me for awhile, you may remember when I fell madly in love with Pixar’s Up, the story “a charming, fun little adventure story with flying dogs and balloon-powered houses, but underlying it is a bittersweet little story about loss and love.” Now there is their newest Inside Out about Riley a happy, hockey-loving 11-year-old Minnesota girl whose world turns upside-down when she has to move.…

  • Change might be scary but the alternative….?

    Status quo bias is an emotional bias; a preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. Status quo bias means that we place a higher value on something that we have then on some future thing.  What we have is important to us and we hate giving up…

  • Why Kids Can’t Come with an Instruction Manual

    Of course kids can’t come with instructions. When you go to Ikea and buy a bookcase, you take home a box that looks absolutely nothing like a bookcase but it has all the required pieces, a list of needed tools and one insane sheet of “instructions”.  It might take many frustrating hours but you aren’t done until it looks just like the photo on the box. When they hand us…

  • My Baby is Graduating from Grade School…and so am I

    I made it through! Tomorrow is my last day as the mother of a grade schooler.  Ok, that might not sound like a lot but remember I became a grade school mom in 1989- before some of you were born, in a totally different century. I can’t keep saying I have one grown child and two little ones. Our school does this wonderful thing where they send home a folder…

  • Emergency Husband Alert Network

    Please share. As 96% of my readers are female it is going to take some effort to reach the super secret husband network. If your children are old enough to have jobs and cars- ignore this warning. Those kids are on their own. If your children are not old enough to drive to Target-please pay attention. Sunday is Mother’s Day. I know- it is a Hallmark Holiday. We can and…

  • Hard Lessons and Learning to Apologize

    This week I learned a hard lesson.  After what felt like a great Parenting Genius Bar, I was forwarded a FB post by one of the participants about me, not naming me…and so hurt. I feel like I have been walking around using the N word or something and someone called me out. This mother was horrified that I had offended her over and over again in the group- senselessly,…

  • Building a Strong Home Base…because the people you love make you crazy

    Joey and I had a rough morning. He missed the bus because he was bugging his brother and his new amazing Nike socks actually take time to get on and his glasses weren’t where he left them. He was screwing around and teasing me. He was being 13. I as trying to get both boys out the door while doing my paperwork and scheduling the next few days of meetings.…