When it comes to finding the right mom group, things can get complicated fast.  Does everyone have the same schedule as you?  Do people have childrearing opinions that fundamentally clash with yours?  Will there be snacks for the adults?  Will someone judge you if you take some of the goldfish crackers for myself if the prior question’s answer is negative?

Pumping at work sucks (pun, yes, forgive me).  These are the things I did when I pumped at work to help myself not go totally crazy.  Please share what you did or are doing right now, too.  I have a feeling all the pumping mamas out there could use all the encouragement they can get! Load up those podcasts. You’re

  We kill time.  We kill so much time.  Of course you’d think having time to kill in Europe wouldn’t be the worst-case scenario, and you’d be sort of right, but rainy cold weather and hormones that have “depression” and “drowsiness” in the small print add up to more quiet reading in bed than anything else.  I felt waves of

Cue the shock and outrage that Target is already full of Christmas decorations and the fact that I saw the Starbucks Thanksgiving Blend available the week before Halloween and then watched it get switched over to the Christmas Blend the first week of November…ahh yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year! Before you settle down to create a

So you want to take your tot to the library!  Yay!  Librarians love that.  I’m one of them, and I’m not lying when I say sometimes I wake up and think, ‘People are gonna to come to the library today! Yay!’  We librarians really love you. But maybe you’re scared.  Maybe you’re worried that things will go badly.  After all,

Ahh, maternity leave.  That long (sometimes) stretch of time we (sometimes) get to see on the horizon as a pregnancy draws to its end.  Nine months of baking a tiny human is a lot to undergo, but maternity leave — well, that’s just a huge, blank canvas for a new mom.  If you’re used to a 40-hour-a-week work schedule, then

I lay on the floor in my daughter’s room.  She’s almost two and a half, and has a tooth coming in, and has a cold, and a cough, and an on-and-off fever.  I’m not in much better shape.  The medication I’m taking for our upcoming IVF trip is knocking me around, and laying on the floor by her bed and

It happens in the coffee shop, when my daughter is dangling like a noodle from my arm, trying to break free. It can happen in the store as she tosses the toilet paper package I let her hold out of the cart and onto the floor with glee. It’s happened in the post office when the only thing in the

Part One: Booking   Suddenly realize that you wanted to get family photos done in time for holiday cards. Discover that photographer who did the photos you loooooved last year isn’t in the biz anymore.    Sigh deeply.  Google family photographers.  Google them forever and ever and ever and ever… Find a photographer whose style makes you gasp. She’s perfect. 

OK, before you read any further I just have to state for the record: I do not hate dinosaurs.   Really.   Just wanted to make that super clear.   Alrighty then.   In her book How to Celebrate Everything, Jenny Rosenstratch appeals to us to do just that: celebrate everything, create rituals, connect.  But as I paged through the