I took my five-year-old on a trip to Paris
Planning a trip like this with Ruby was a little daunting. I was excited to take her away to a foreign culture and experience it through her eyes. The Eiffel Tower! Walks along the Seine! Stepping into a tiny shop, sampling the wares, exploring the bits and pieces of life that make that somewhere else so exciting… but I was also nervous: how would she handle the two long plane rides there and back? Would we find a way to meet in the middle of how a child experiences a foreign place and how an adult does?
Our genderqueer family has a lesbian Dad
Many genderqueer parents pick alternative names for their parental role — nothing felt right for my partner, so we’re using Dad.
Pumping and bottle-feeding saved us
Breastfeeding is awesome, but we sucked at it. Here’s how we got past that.
Why we switched to a midwife 32 weeks into our pregnancy
My decision to switch to this midwife group turned out to be so essential to the beautiful success of my birth not because I got the unmedicalized birth, but because I ended up with a medicalized one.
Buying Time: A feminist mom gets humbled
As a parent, I have accepted and even come to cherish the stages of development my kids weave in and out of … but I also more-recently realized, someday in the not-so-distant future, this little girl is going to fall in love, have sex, and quite likely have her heart broken.
Keeping our Offbeatlings upbeat in the face of gender judgement
The world is a difficult place for children… how can a sensitive child feel free to express himself differently from others in a world where “different” is “bad?”
A not quite co-sleeping, non-Montessori floor bed for a toddler
We didn’t want to co-sleep but weren’t comfortable with a crib, and VOILA! Our toddler floor bed was born.
The hazy magic of night nursing
“…Now pull baby close. Her eyes are still closed. My eyes are starting to strain because I’ve only allowed one to open this whole time. Mustn’t cross over to the waking world. Must return to slumber.”