I'm a DC-area mother with an over-developed sense of irreverence, ADD, socialist tendencies and a blog. All my opinions are entirely my own and not representative of anything officially sanctioned by any political party, my mother, or arbiters of common sense and good taste.
I’m trying to be be more professional about blogging these days. I’m also trying to be less overwhelmed by life. My husband had a suggestion recently that will help with both of those things and I’m talking about it at Babble: The babysitter was my husband’s idea. I was losing my mind while he was away on a business trip and the result was a flurry of angry text messages to him at 5:30am. The gist of…
I know we’ve all heard the awful story about the little boy in Kentucky who accidentally shot and killed his little sister. I can’t talk about the details anymore because it makes me feel so sick and sad. What I can talk about is how disturbed I am by the fact that the gun he used was his own – a hunting rifle sized and marketed for children. Here’s some of what I have to…
Hi all! This week I asked you, my lovely readers, who all look especially pretty today, to weigh in with the bet and worst aspects f being either a working mom or a stay at home mom. Lots of you piped up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds with answers that were funny, smart, and wistful all at once. I cataloged some of the replies over at Babble this week alng with my own thoughts…
There was a study back in 2007 that showed that kids who spent time in daycare were more likely to be disruptive in school than kids who didn’t. Well, a new study comparing US daycare kids and Norwegian daycare kids shows that daycare isn’t the problem; SHITTY daycare is the problem. Here’s what I said about it at Babble: Last week, the New York Times covered a new study from researchers at Harvard and Boston…
Do you ask if there are guns in the house before you let your child go on a playdate? If you have guns, do you offer that information when you invite other children over? Are you squirming at the thought of having a conversation like that? Yeah. Me, too. But I think the time has come to be honest. Not mean. Not judgmental. Just honest about whether or not you have guns in your house.…
I’m over at Babble today talking about why I’m not psyched that my husband got an iPad for work. For all that I love the virtual world of the internet, I’m not into letting kids spend a lot of time playing with high-tech gadgets. Sure, a little tv or a few minutes playing a game on my phone in the waiting room at the dentist is fine. But I’m resistant to letting the iPad become…
The first thing I want to let you all know is that I’m going to be expanding my work at Babble to the Kid pages as well as the Baby pages! I couldn’t be more excited about this because, as my son gets older, the process of parenting him is less about preventing him from falling off of things and more about teaching him about the world around him. Thinking about how to explain difficult…
Having a baby girl presents a set of parenting dilemmas that are different from having a boy For example, I ache over the idea that she’ll be immersed in “mean girl” culture in middle school. I am more grimly determined than ever to make sure she has a full array of reproductive health choices when she reaches adulthood. There’s a particular shade of pink popular among baby girl clothing designers that literally gives me migraines.…
My baby has a few Christmas wishes of her own, apparently. She’s detailed them on Babble today! Anyway, Santa, I’m going to hit the big 6 months the day after Christmas and it’s time I got to roll with the big homies, ya know? My brother isn’t the only kid in town anymore and I expect equal treatment under the Christmas law. So, I’m appending a short list of requests that I hope you’ll consider.…
Between Big Bird and bayonets, there were Binders Full of Women. Mitt Romney’s answer to gender imbalance in Massachusetts leadership. Or actually, a bipartisan women’s interest group’s answer to gender imbalance in Massachusetts leadership. Those binders would have gone to anyone elected governor that year. It wasn’t Mitt’s initiative that led to those binders. But good on him for taking it to heart and appointing women even if it wasn’t his idea. BUT. But…I don’t…
