We sat down at our weathered farm table together. I fiddled with the salt shaker. He leaned back into one of the mismatched chairs with his hands behind his head. My husband and I were about to ha…
I set up a blue, borrowed card table and tried to steady it on the uneven dirt of Highland Park in Brooklyn, NYC. The dollar store puzzles were opened and ready for my first batch of seven-year-olds…
"Mom, there were about twenty different ways you could have handled that." Although my preteen son got a scolding for saying so, he was much too right. I had just given my kids a Silent Yellin…
The green, three-wheeled taxis drove confidently into the sloping west side of the Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh. My daughter, my team and I drove passed large food distribution centers and a few el…
I don't write very much about raising teenagers, even though by this fall I will have five of them under my jurisdiction. Yeah, I know. Five is a lot. The reason for this writing hole? My lack of p…
We sprawled out in our rented cabana, breathing salt and sun, telling each other how ridiculous this life (of three days) was. The drinks were served, the books were read, the ocean was heard, the ski…
I slipped into the quiet room filled with rocking chairs and slung my thirty gallon diaper bag off of my shoulder. The bag will shrink with each child until it resembles a lone diaper tossed under t…
Who has time to read? This busy parent does. Yes, it is wedged between after school activities and homework. It is interrupted countless times. It is done next to looming piles of I-should-be-clean…
“You have the million-dollar family,” he drawled, “one girl, one boy.” His well-intentioned assessment of our family of four felt like a small stone in my shoe. Each step brought a blistering chafe th…
This guest blogger is my childhood best friend, Andrea Esh. Chill to the core and one of my favorite people in the world. Here is her adoption story. Birth mother. To some that word strikes fear…