recent posts
- Why October Feels Like Tween Season | Dramatic, Moody, and Full of Candy
- Why Gratitude Feels Different in the Tween Years
- When Summer Gets Weird | What to Do When Everyone’s Over It (Including You)
- Tween Fashion Battles | Hoodies, Crocs, and Other Hills We Die On
- Trick-or-Treating With Tweens | Sweet or Sour?
- The Tween Gift Guide No One Asked For (But Everyone Needs)
Category: Love
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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.…
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When you imagine a co-parent, you probably think of another adult—someone who splits the carpool duty, reminds the kids to brush their teeth, and occasionally sneaks them ice cream before dinner. What I didn’t expect was that my co-parent would arrive in the form of a glitter-clad, guitar-strumming, stadium-filling woman named Taylor Swift. Now, let…
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So here’s the thing: telling your kids you have breast cancer is right up there with “explaining algebra” and “teaching someone how to parallel park” on the list of impossible parenting tasks. Only this time, the stakes feel way higher. Matt and I told the kids in the kitchen booth—the place where life happens in…
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Every fall, tucked in between practices and math homework, comes a day mothers everywhere simultaneously dread and secretly cherish: School Picture Day. The reminder slips into backpacks, and just like that, it’s not just about standing in front of a camera—it’s a full-on theatrical event starring tweens, complete with drama, costume changes, sibling rivalries, and…
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There are wars raging in my house every morning before school. Not the “Did you brush your teeth?” battles (though those are alive and well). Not the “Please eat something other than Takis for breakfast” skirmishes. No, the daily wars are fought over tween fashion choices—the hills my children are inexplicably prepared to die on,…
Fry, Party of Five 