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: Love
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Here’s the thing no one really prepares you for when your kids hit the tween years: love stops being loud. It used to be sticky and constant. It lived in lap-sitting, hand-holding, and dramatic declarations of “I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH,” arms stretched wide like they were trying to hug the entire universe. Love was…
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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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This year didn’t arrive with a syllabus. There was no orientation, no checklist taped to the fridge that said, Here’s what you’ll learn by December. It just showed up, carrying muddy shoes, half-finished conversations, slammed doors, late-night worries, and quiet, ordinary miracles. And somehow—between packing lunches, negotiating screen time, sitting in the car longer than…
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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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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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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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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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For me, October has always had the perfect vibe. The crunch of leaves underfoot, the cozy sweaters, the pumpkin spice everything—it’s a month steeped in drama. But once you’ve entered the magical purgatory known as parenting tweens, you start to notice something unsettling: October is tweendom, in seasonal form. It’s moody. It’s unpredictable. It’s dramatic.…
Fry, Party of Five 