Gift Guide for Tween Boys Not all tween boys are the same, and not all gifts are the same. We can spend hours searching for that perfect gift, ask every Facebook group, try to pin down our kids, and still be left wondering. Lucky for you we took the pain out of how hard it can be to shop for…
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Apple Introduces a New Parental Control App for iPhones and iPads With ios 12 Called Screen Time Apple’s iPhones and iPads feature new parent controls through iOS 12, released September 17th, with an app called Screen Time. The new app will give parents more information, on their kids’ device usage, as well as give parents more options to control where and…
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All Our Kids Will Face the Mighty Power of Fear My sixth-grade son stood on stage to sing a song before the entire middle school for their annual talent show. This is no small school. It’s an overcrowded populous of around 1500 kids who packed the gymnasium along with who knows how many teachers. Three years prior, my daughter…
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*Spoiler Alert! Since seeing the trailer on Netflix a week ago, I had this tug to watch “Sierra Burgess is a Loser.” I was scared I would be disappointed, or that it would just be another version of the ugliness that are high school mean girls. But tonight, when my son said, “Let’s watch this” I thought, why not. I…
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My Daughter’s Graduation Was Exciting for Her, But Excruciating For Me As the principal’s speech moved to the fifth-grade class, I felt a catch in my throat and tears welling in my eyes. A familiar chasm between sadness and joy, we are old friends. I felt joy for the pride in my girl and sadness that my baby is growing…
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Making mistakes is a natural and essential part of learning, growing, and life. So how do you respond when your kids mess up? Remember when you were embarrassed by temper tantrums in the grocery store? When they get older, the mistakes change, but sometimes we wonder the same thing. Are we messing up as a mom? Is that why…
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How Much Help For Our Kids is Too Much Help We both sat at my desk with bated breath, a little afraid to open the email that would tell us what teacher she would have for the next nine months. At that moment, it seemed critically important. I had my mom speech all lined up in my head ready to…
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Dear Mom, As I head back to school, here are a few things I want you to know, but chances are I won’t tell you… It would really help me a lot if you’d try to remember what it felt like when you were my age. Do you remember how stressful it was being my age? How badly…
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Ten Habits I Want to Teach My Teens Before They Leave Home In these last years where you will be under my roof and under my rules, I want to make sure you have mastered the following habits. I know you get tired of my incessant requests, reminders, and demands when it comes to these things, but if you…
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My husband and I are overweight. Some of this is genetics, and some is poor habits; but either way, we have been hyper aware of the predisposition for our children to share the same fate. We foster body positivity in this house. Fat is never to be used as an insult, though it is not a bad word in…
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“Cherish every moment? You’ve got to be kidding.” The sweet older lady at the grocery store had just admired my baby. “She’s precious,” she told me kindly. “Cherish every moment with her. You’ll blink, and she’ll be all grown up.” I hope I smiled and nodded politely. I hope I understood, deep down, what she was really trying to…
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I have four children, three of whom are adults and have (thankfully) flown the coop. I thought I had this whole, raising-teenagers-in-a-stress- free-zone thing down. Even patted myself on the back for getting them off to college without an arrest record or a shotgun wedding. And then came wild child number four. This boy is the reason behind the…
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