recent posts
- Teaching Love to Tweens Who Pretend They Don’t Need It
- Snow Days Then vs. Snow Days Now
- Winter Parenting Wins That Deserve a Trophy
- January According to My Almost Teenagers
- For the Five of Us, as the Year Begins
- What This Year Taught Me About Motherhood
- Holiday Break with Tweens: A Survival Guide
- The Silent Nights of Motherhood | Staying Up Wrapping & Worrying About Who They’re Becoming
- How to Handle Holiday Overstimulation (For Kids and Grownups)
- The Tween Gift Guide No One Asked For (But Everyone Needs)
Category: Calm
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(An ’80s + ’90s Kid Tries to Understand the New Rules) When Snow Days Were Rare Gems When I was a kid, snow days were a rare gem. A unicorn. A whispered rumor that maybe—just maybe—school would be canceled. Now? Now it feels like someone sneezes and the district says, “Let’s call it.” I say…
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Winter parenting is not for the faint of heart. Or the well-rested. Or anyone who thought parenting would get easier once kids could tie their own shoes. Winter parenting is parenting on hard mode. The sun sets at 4:42 PM. Everyone is overstimulated and under-vitamined. The kids are trapped inside with their hormones and opinions.…
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My Loves— We are standing at the beginning of a new year, and I want to mark this moment. Not with resolutions or promises we can’t keep, not with a highlight reel or a tidy bow—but with truth. With gratitude. With the quiet kind of love that has carried us when nothing else could. This…
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Holiday break arrives the way a snowstorm does—quietly anticipated, wildly romanticized, and then suddenly… everyone is home. All day. Every day. Asking what’s for snack five minutes after breakfast and staring at you like you personally invented boredom. Welcome to holiday break with tweens. This season lives in the messy middle. Our kids are no…
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The house goes quiet in a way it never quite does during the day. Not the noisy quiet—the kind with cartoons humming in the background or a dishwasher sloshing through its last cycle—but the deep, honest quiet. The kind that settles in your bones once everyone else is asleep. This is the hour of motherhood…
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Gratitude looks a little different when you’re raising tweens. Once upon a time, Thanksgiving was all construction paper turkeys with handprint feathers, little lists scrawled in crayon: “I’m thankful for Mommy, Daddy, my dog, candy, and Legos.” Easy. Sweet. Straightforward. Now, with twelve-year-olds under my roof, “gratitude” is no longer a tidy worksheet activity or…
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Ah, homework hour. That magical stretch of time between the end of school and the start of dinner where we all transform into underqualified tutors, short-order snack chefs, and motivational speakers on the brink. If you’ve ever found yourself whisper-screaming, “Just write one sentence!” while stirring spaghetti and Googling “what is new math,” you’re not…
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Ah, August. That magical, messy stretch of time where one foot is still planted firmly in summer’s barefoot freedom—and the other is reaching for a backpack, a planner, and a working pencil sharpener (good luck). If your home feels like a collision of popsicle sticks, pool towels, and piles of Target school supplies, take a…
Fry, Party of Five 