By Kelly My two-year-old was eating a bag of snack mix this morning, courtesy of her Daddy’s flight home from Chicago last night. At one point, I turned around and saw a small, wet pile of something on the floor. “What is that Teyla?” I said, pointing to the quarter-sized mess. “Gross!” she said, wrinkling…
Category Archives: 5 Minutes For Parenting
Chelsea Getting Married
By Michael President Obama was on The View last week, chatting up the ladies about all sorts of earthshaking issues, when he was asked about his attendance at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. He indicated he had not been invited and, of course, the media were filled with other names of people who were excluded from the…
Journeys, The Pink and The Blue
By Megan I’ll spend this week packing and training and mentally preparing to participate in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure in my adopted home city, Chicago, starting Friday. But the busy-ness and excitement of this culminating week, after many months of fundraising and walking and shoe-fittings and sock-experimentation hasn’t in the least…
Harvest
By Mary This afternoon I sat in my shady corner of the deck next to our pool, and watched my kids splash into the water one by one. With only one child in the water, waves were small. But as more kids splashed and leaped their way in, the water got choppier, the waves bigger,…
Calm your heart
By Sarah For some reason, when my tinies are all wound up, I press my hand to their chest and quietly say “Calm your heart.” I don’t know why I do it. I’ve never heard or seen anyone else do it. I don’t remember when it started. But whenever Anne (4) or Joseph (2) seem…
Pushing Them Away, But Always a Fan
By Michael I was watching a hummingbird feeding its young and I wondered when the clock would run out. At what point would the mamabird stop bringing nectar or nits or whatever to her brood and force them out on their own? Would she actually kick them out of their very tiny nest and hope…
Putting Down the Books
By Megan I cleaned out and organized my desk on Saturday, unearthing, among many other long lost treasures, my dog-eared copy of Paul Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Bean gaped over my shoulder at it, as if she were looking at the Ghost of Christmas Past, and then she looked up at me with…
Never the same again
By Melodee This afternoon, my husband drove our mini-van past a beige house with a tall evergreen tree crowding the front lawn. “You should take a picture,” he said. “I can’t take a picture. The people living there would think we are so weird!” I said. Besides, I don’t need a picture to remind me…
In which cleaning and scrubbing can wait
By Sarah On that afternoon, I was going to be productive. You know those days….eight times more on your “to-do” list than you could possibly accomplish even if you didn’t have two tinies, one of whom is potty training and the other, just 11 days old. But, full of good intentions and a little self-delusion,…
Not My Child
By Beck Almost a year ago exactly, she was born. And that is the way with other people’s babies, who grow up in sudden startling lurches – one minute, someone is a sleepy little baby, and the next finds them shoving exuberant handfuls of birthday cake into their mouths. She was born after a hard,…