I am not my daughter’s favorite. This is not something that’s new, or something that seems to be a phase (from my vantage-point). And I’d be lying if I said it’s just a Moment in Time and that surely (surely, please) I will be her favorite eventually. It is a low-down gritty hard-scrabbling difficult thing to consistently find yourself sidelined

Sometimes I feel like being on vacation with a toddler is like being on the road with a tiny Jack Kerouac. It’s fun and great and mystical and magical and also you’re always wondering, are they high, or really high, or drunk, or what? And you’re just trying to make sense of it. It’s not bad, but holy moly, it’s….it’s

The Sleep Regression Sleep regressions are, in my humble blogger opinion, far and away one of the worst regressions. Just when you think life is chugging along merrily, and all your sleep woes have been overcome and climbed like a million tiny Mount Everests, suddenly there you are back at the bottom. For this, I recommend a calming lavender-mead nightcap;

Dear Solo-Parenting Partner, Hi. It’s me. You know, the parent who’s currently at work, while you’re solo-parenting for the majority of this bright, sunny, long summer Saturday. I just got your text about the Extremely Difficult Morning you’ve been having, complete with a Target meltdown, and although I’m still here stuck at work, I wanted to write this down for

I’m a writer. I’m a mother. Recently, I attended a reading by a woman whose bestselling book I really enjoyed, and I admired (still admire!) her greatly. The heart-eyes emoji? That’s me. But I misheard her when she was giving her talk, and thought she mentioned having a young child. My jaw almost dropped. How could this incredible author have

The funny thing about parenthood is how much people will tell you before you become a parent (a lot) and how much you’ll actually listen to (not a lot, if you’re me).  It’s not that I didn’t know that having a child would drastically change our lives as a small family, but the ways it changed weren’t quite what I

“I like these ones best,” I said to my husband, turning my laptop screen so he could see the hampers I’d carefully saved to my Etsy favorites list. “Hmm,” he said in response. “You can fill it with LUSH bath bombs or flowers or something,” I added ever-so-helpfully, more of a joke, but also, you know, if he wanted to,

  My daughter has a mop of red wavy hair.  It’s an adorable delight.  But there have been some surprises along the way with being the mama to a ginger.  If you’ve got a brand new baby ginger human, I’ve got some stuff to share with you from my almost-three-years of experience (I’m clearly an expert now, where’s my certificate?):

Low: My daughter was not quite two and was just finding her freedom at the playground when it happened.  Even as I saw it happening, I couldn’t quite make it to her in time to stop what happened next.  The swing she was blissfully unaware of was hurtling back towards her, bigger kid on it, hard plastic whizzing forwards until

  I’m not quite sure what I did with all the time I had pre-baby. There were weekends, but what did I do with them? There were long stretches of free time in the evenings after work, but where did that time go? Time was so unmanaged, unscripted, free for the taking. Now I have a 2-soon-to-be-3-year old and time