The Baby-sitters Club: where are they now?
From the moment I first read The Baby-Sitters Club #1: Kristy’s Great Idea what seems like a zillion years ago, I was hooked. I devoured the BSC books, reading all about Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, Stacey, Dawn, Mallory, and Jesse: back before I had “girls,” these ladies were my girls. So I pretty much happily squealed and shrieked when I found this article discussing the likely present-day whereabouts of the club members (you know, if they were real).
Halloween recipe round-up: appetizers, snacks, and desserts
Let’s talk about Halloween FOOD! I found a few cool recipes around the internet — you’ve got your caramel toffee fruit dip, meringue ghosts, and candy corn cupcakes right here, but this list is HARDLY exhaustive. There’s a whole world of Halloween eating goodness out there! After you’ve read these and been inspired, leave your favorite recipes in the comments and share the spooktacular knowledge.
My husband and I expanded our family by placing our twins for adoption
My twins are eleven days old, and they’re so beautiful I can barely look at them. I’m wildly, deeply in love with them, feeling all the feelings I felt when my older two daughters were born. In spite of these feelings (and, paradoxically, because of them), my husband and I chose not to raise these girls ourselves, instead placing them with an adoptive family.
How can I create a peaceful, Buddhist-inspired bedroom for my child?
I’ve been searching for Buddhist-inspired baby and/or kid’s rooms online — and I haven’t found much. Many of the rooms I’m finding are for adults, and I’m not sure how to incorporate the ideas into a kid’s room. I would love to see other people’s creative takes on creating a Buddhist (any branch of Buddhism) baby nursery. How have you created a bedroom inspired by Buddhism for your kids?
Body Autonomy: a feminist, sex-positive perspective on teaching your children body ownership
As people, we get one body, and, as a feminist, it is damn important to me to claim total ownership of mine. The best thing that I can ever do for my children is to give them autonomy over themselves. I want my daughter especially — who came into a world that legally accepts her body has her own but sends messages all the time that reject that truth — to fill out her skin with a personal spirit that is impermeable.
How do you keep from arguing with your partner in front of your kids?
I grew up in a single parent household and I didn’t grow up with a picture of the “right” way to disagree around the kids. My husband and I are under a lot of stress, with little-to-no time alone together to have fun, much less hash out issues.
Taking my son to his first music festival
The last time we went to a music festival, it was summer of 2009 and I was pretty pregnant. We stayed for about a day, and then we bailed — with much navel gazing and obsessing from me. WHAT DID IT MEAN? So that was three years ago. I’ve continued to dance, mostly at dance studios and very occasionally at clubs… but we had not made it back to a music festival. Then along came the Beloved Festival, in Oregon. I was contacted about doing an Offbeat Families workshop at Beloved, and so here’s how it all went down…
The mom stays in the picture: where you are you in your family’s photos?
Allison Tate wrote a fascinating piece on Huffington Post yesterday called The Mom Stays in the Picture. It’s about how she’s realized that while she’s all over kid’s lives, making sure they have the treats they love and staying up all night worrying about preschools, there are very few photos that SHOW HER in their lives — and she wants this to change.