My Family Blog

by Betsy Shaw posted in Mom Stories Last week, The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the FDA warned parents and caregivers against using infant sleep positioning products. The warning apparently comes after two recent infant deaths, which were believed to be a direct result of sleep positioning devices. Twelve suffocation deaths linked to ...

by Joyce Slaton posted in Mom Stories A rather odd article in the New York Times advises divorced parents who can’t speak to each other without fighting to use electronic means of communicating instead. “These days, the cool aloofness of technology is helping temper sticky emotional exchanges between former spouses,” writes ...

Before I cast my vote today, my 8-year-old daughter asked me who I was going to vote for. I told her honestly that I didn’t know, and she made a heartfelt case for Jill Stein. Jill Stein! She didn’t pick that up at school. She’s probably heard me mention Dr. Stein, but she’d also clearly [...]

by Stacie Lewis posted in Mom Stories Last week, the New York Times published ‘How do you raise a prodigy?‘ The article quickly dissolved into another “woe is me” piece about the burden of raising gifted children. The stunning realization that their child is “different”. The impossibility of filling their ...

by Amy Graff posted in Mom Stories As Hurricane Sandy’s powerful winds and rains swept across the East Coast earlier this week, people in 17 states were holed up in their homes and left in the dark without power, television and Internet access. In fact, many of them are still without power. What do you [...]

Chew on this: gum is good for you. Some school rules have stood the test of time: no running in the hallways, no name-calling, no chewing gum. But that last one is a relic, New York Times OpEd contributor Ezekiel J. Emanuel wrote recently, and a full-on reversal could do no less than drastically improve [...]

Couldn't you just die over the cuteness? It must be some kind of rite of passage for parents. Tracking down a lost lovey, trying to secretly replace a worn out lovey, or trying to fix it on our own, which, if, like me, you were at the back of the line when God was doling [...]

With the return of fall comes a widespread desire to consume anything pumpkin. The beloved pumpkin makes its return to grocery store aisles, local coffee shops even cosmetic counters. Log on to Pinterest and an image of just about any dessert can be found, only during this season its ingredients include pumpkin. I think it [...]

by Samantha Schoech posted in Mom Stories There’s parenting advice and then there’s parenting advice. So much of it is silly and undesired and only serves to make us feel inadequate or defensive or bad about ourselves. But sometimes, we really do need it. None of us, not even Mrs. I-have-eight-kids-and-sixteen-grandkids, knows ...

For the first nine years of our relationship, my husband and I were renters. We jumped from city to city and apartment to apartment.  For many years, apartment dwelling made the most sense – financially and practically. We didn’t have funding for a down payment, and we weren’t sure what city we wanted to put [...]