Maybe I’m parenting wrong because I bribe my kid. Maybe I’m parenting wrong because I potty trained too early. Maybe I’m parenting wrong because an article Great Aunt Edna* shared is insisting that if I don’t curb my daughter’s enjoyment of Peppa Pig now, her whole life will be squandered in front of screens. Maybe I’m parenting wrong because I

  Have family friends over for dinner. Enjoy a wonderful, rosy, innocent time watching your kids all play together.  Suspect nothing. Awaken with a start at 2 in the morning to your child crying and running hot with a fever. Administer fever-reducing treatment, snuggle, and then go back to bed while groggily hoping that by the morning, this will all

For the longest time, I looked forward to the time when my little girl could do some extracurricular activities.  But as my daughter gets closer and closer to turning three, I find myself caring less.  Before, I kept thinking of three as the gamechanger age; the age where my daughter could finally start taking a fun toddler class somewhere.  Would

Cue the dirge music over the montage of this motherhood documentary.  Imagine a narrator providing a voiceover of my daily motherhood log. The camera sweeps over images of an empty backyard covered in frost, wind whipping through the bare branches of trees, an empty swing rocking in the breeze.  It’s mid-March.  We have run out of fingerpaints.  We have run

I love a good chatty check-in, especially with the mom-friends in my life who I know always have things changing in their lives.  So let me catch up with you!  If you and I were sitting down to grab some coffee or tea together, I’d want to tell you… Life with a little one gets easier in so many ways! 

Motherhood has so many unspoken rules. You have to remind your child to share at the park (even if your child is not listening), you have to try and make your own purees (story of my motherhood in six words: for sale, babyfood processor, never used), you have to buy Baby’s First [Fill in the Blank] merchandise (and if you

When I found out that our recent attempt at IVF using the last of our frozen embryos did not work, I felt gutted.  This was the first week in December or so, the final month in what was a very difficult year.  In a way, it felt inevitable — the cherry of failure to cap off the year.  Maybe I

Written by Megan Ernst When I was pregnant with my son I became a research machine.  If you asked me the best way to bathe a baby, get through a birth contraction, or soothe a newborn baby to sleep, chances are I had read an article about it or watched a YouTube video.  I read breastfeeding books, bought supplies, and

Dog hair.  Dog hair everywhere. Stacks of junk mail.  It’s not that I don’t ever throw the stuff away — it’s that my daughter thinks junk mail is the best thing on earth.  And who am I to argue?  It’s free, it brings her an incredible amount of glee, and it’s easily recyclable when she gets bored with the current

Before my daughter arrived, I swore I would never… Say no to reading a book. I’m a librarian and a mama to a toddler; I took whole classes on children’s literature and picture books!  So you’d think of all the things for me to unequivocally say yes to, it’d be reading more books.  But even librarians have their limits —