Thanks to all of you out there who reached out to me in various wonderful ways after I wrote my last post. I very much appreciate the comments, the shares of my post, the texts, the phone calls, the Facebook messages, and everything else. I have spent the last two days alternating between anger and exhaustion over the whole thing, yet I am still able to tell myself that this is a First World Problem, and that it will eventually work itself out. I don’t have any news yet. In this case, no news isn’t good news; it’s just no news. I have sent additional information to Feedburner and am…
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Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bebe” Stirs The Pot On Parenting
There’s been another dust-up in the news this week, and this time the big story is how great the French are at parenting. I mentioned it briefly in yesterday’s vlog, and I really need to expand on it because parenting and its various styles is a topic for which I have endless passion. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here to read the Wall Street Journal essay/excerpt by Pamela Druckerman, author of “Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting”.) First, let me give you the disclaimer: I am not ragging on the author OR the book, which I have not read.…
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The Little Author That Could
“How’s the book going?” It’s a question I get all the time from friends and family. While I appreciate their interest very, very much, I nearly always give the short answer: “Great! Thanks for asking!” The long answer is–frankly–really, really long, and I can’t just say half of it and expect the person I’m answering to fill in the blanks, so the short answer has to suffice under normal circumstances. Here is the long answer, though, in case you’re wondering: My book, considering it was published just last spring and I’m doing the bulk of the marketing for it myself, is doing pretty well for where I’m at on my…
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Mission Accomplished.
When it comes to the stereotypical teenager-parent relationship, it would seem that there is non-stop eye-rolling, sarcasm, and lying on the teens’ part. On the other side of the coin, parents are “supposed to” enjoy embarrassing their teens on a daily basis, intentionally. Jim and I never fed into that. From the time the boys were very little, we have insisted upon mutual respect. MUTUAL respect. When the boys became tweens (11-12 years old) and were influenced a little more by their friends, they both became a little suspicious of us. It seems as though tweens start to talk with their friends about parents’ motives when it comes to everything,…
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Kickin’ It Old School
This morning I got dressed and headed down to the kitchen where I found J making his lunch for school. He looked at me and said, “Um, I have a minor problem. You know how I have finals next week? Well, I can get out early on Wednesday because my second final is my lunch period. The only thing is, I need a permission note from you, it’s due today, and Julesie is still sleeping downstairs.” “So?” I said. “Well, she’s still sleeping, and so you can’t go down to the computer to type out a note and print it out for me.” This time, I was the one who…