My child and I will be bilingual, but my husband isn’t: how will this impact our family?
Though babies are not yet on the to-do list, my husband and I have been thinking about what having a child would mean. One of the things that came up is language — my mother tongue is Dutch and both my husband and I agree that I should teach our kids(s) how to speak it as well, so they can communicate when visiting my family and other advantages. The problem is… my husband doesn’t understand Dutch at all, save the odd word here and there. He won’t be able to understand us and has previously expressed discomfort and annoyance at not being able to join in conversations.
6 reasons toddlers are smarter than the rest of us
I don’t know a lot about parenting, since I’ve only been a step-parent for four years and a bio parent for less time than that. What I do know, aside from having ALL my notions about motherhood, children, and life-after-kids utterly demolished, is that my daughter navigates this world better than I do. Thus, I present my case that my toddler — and really, most kids her age — is smarter than me.
My husband and I are big-time introverts: will having kids and losing our personal space be crazy for us?
I fear that the lack of privacy, personal space, quiet and time for us to recharge, could bring out a bad side of us and we’d slowly slide the horrible steep slope in becoming horrible parents that scar their children for life.
Water birth of a third generation mermaid
As a Valentine’s Day gift my dad boiled countless pots of water to fill a tub for each of us. I feel safe in that story and in the memory of a perfect expression of love. And every splash of water I heard at that moment made me feel safe, too. The midwife smiled. She says my mom and I must be mermaid girls, the way we find such peace in the water. I thought of the next mermaid girl to come, an Aquarius baby born in water.
It takes a village to raise a tween
As my baby grows into this new, beautiful, moody, long-legged creature, I know she will have questions I can’t answer, problems I can’t solve, fears I can’t comfort. I know our friends won’t be able to solve all these problems either, but I’m enormously grateful that I’m not alone in this new stage of our lives, and neither is Alice.
The inherent privilege of being a “slacker” mum
Michelle, the blogger at Crooked Fences recently spent some time pondering the idea of a “slacker” parent — in her definition, this is akin to free-range parenting. She observed that many parents espousing free-range ideas also tend to be white and middle-to-upper class… and that this is a problem.
Mini day-tripping with my little dude: I let my kid skip school and we went to the art museum
While my (almost four-year-old) son was bustling around deciding what toy he wanted to bring to school with him and I was mid-bagel, I asked if he wanted to go skip school and go to the art museum. He was somewhat incredulous at first (we haven’t visited this museum yet) and I was somewhat unsure of how he’d be once we got there (he’s generally well-behaved, but a huge building filled with things to knock over/touch? HARD.), but we decided yes: we were going to do it.
Is our second child still a “little sister” if our first child passed away?
I am about to have my second daughter. Most people will look at my daughter and see her as an only child, but I cannot help but think of her as a little sister. Her big sister passed away almost a year ago. Because most people won’t know the story of how our eldest child passed away, is it wrong to present my second daughter to the world as a “little sister?”