The Meet: A Lesson in Making a Loss a Win
I sat on the hard bleacher at the gymnastics meet, inhaling the smell of sweat and chalk. Clasping my hands together, I tried to keep from biting my nails.
Lessons learned
I’ve been told often enough that kids need to learn from experience, and I’ve often found this to be true myself, but there are times when I seriously wonder at the lessons they seem to learn.
A Night in Emergency
I want to tell the story of the horrible night I spent waiting in emergency last night.
Bad Behaviour: Taking the sting out of someone else’s response
As the parent of a child who has special needs, I have been in many situations where people have meant well in their response to something but rather, left me feeling like a mess.
What’s your favourite
I’ve discovered over the years that one of the best ways to learn about someone is to ask after their influences.
Sleepover madness
It also just so happened that this year we had fewer family functions, so we’ve had a long, fairly relaxed, mostly uneventful vacation time. Until the sleepovers. The idea was a good one in theory.
Goals worth achieving
I want my children to know how to weigh the cost of a goal, to consider the sacrifice that it will require, and then to do the things that are really important to them.
First day of snow
I’m not sure why the first day of true snow is a disaster every year, but it is.
Believing the lie
One of my frustrations as a parent is when children convince themselves of an untruth so throughly that they act as though it’s true.
Taking responsibility
I got every parent’s favourite call yesterday – the one from the principal where you get asked to come by the office for a little chat about your kid – that call.
Being the big kid
My youngest sometimes feels a little left out and his frustration and jealousy at this situation often comes out in really practical ways.
What could possibly go wrong
I grew up in a house of five boys in one of the safest cities on the planet in an era when helicopter parents (or drone parents, as I prefer to call them) would have been laughed off the playground.
Pink or blue not black and white: gender neutral child rearing
Five years ago, I was planning my daughter’s first birthday party and all I could think of was how not to go pink.
Defusing the situation
Sometimes in our house relatively simple issues end up escalating far further than necessary.