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: Chaos
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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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January, as it turns out, is not a fresh start. It is not a clean slate. It is not a gentle reset. It is not an opportunity for growth, reflection, or becoming a better version of yourself. According to my almost teenagers, January is an offense. An inconvenience. A personal attack. A month that should…
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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 holidays arrive dressed like a Hallmark movie—twinkle lights, cinnamon in the air, the promise of magic glittering around the edges. And yet, if we’re honest, December can also feel like trying to drink joy from a firehose. It’s noise-meets-chaos, sugar-meets-expectations, a thousand tiny pressures humming like fluorescent lights. For kids and grownups, overstimulation is…
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There comes a moment in every parent’s life—usually sometime between your child rolling their eyes so dramatically you fear injury and them insisting you “just don’t get it”—when you realize you have no earthly idea what a tween wants for Christmas. Or a birthday.Or a random Tuesday.Or ever. Welcome to the land of the Almost…
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Thanksgiving break: the magical time when school screeches to a halt, turkey takes center stage, and your tweens remind you why teachers deserve hazard pay. While Pinterest shows us candlelit tablescapes with acorn garlands, what we actually get is five full days of “I’m bored,” sticky pumpkin pie residue on the counter, and the eternal…
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Thanksgiving is the season of gratitude. A time when families gather around the table to reflect on life’s blessings: health, home, loved ones, and pie. Lots of pie. But if you ask my three tweens what they’re thankful for, you won’t hear “my sweet, selfless mother who birthed me and makes sure I have clean…
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October arrives with its golden leaves, pumpkin-spiced everything, and one very pressing parental debate: when your kids hit the tween years, do you let them trick-or-treat on their own, or do you tag along like they’re still toddling in a Pluto costume? The answer, like most things in parenting, is less about candy and more…
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Fall parent-teacher conferences are here. And I, for one, am not emotionally prepared. If you’re like me—living on caffeine, running late, trying to remember which kid likes ranch and which one is boycotting sandwiches this week—then you know that nothing sends your fragile heart spiraling quite like those 15-minute meetings of doom (or delight? Who…
Fry, Party of Five 