When the boys were little, the amount of papers and artwork they used to bring home from school (not to mention what they produced at home) was ridiculous. I bought a plastic storage container for each of them and put select items in them to save for posterity. Every now and then, I’d come across something that I didn’t want to put in a time capsule. Of course, I didn’t want it laying around the house, either. I needed a place where I could look at it whenever I wanted to, but it was out of the way at all other times. Enter my kitchen cabinets. The insides of the…
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- Childhood Memories, Confessions, Do I Really Want My Readers To Know This?, Food, My Mom Has Mad Skillz
Old Habits Die Hard.
When he was little, J–like so many other young kids–had a strong aversion to bread crust. Unfortunately for him, I had a strong aversion to making a sandwich and then cutting off the crusts for my kid. Call me mean if you want, but I just figured that if he didn’t like the bread crust that much, he could just eat around it. I did help him out a little bit, though, by cutting his sandwiches into quarters on the diagonal. This way, he could nibble what he considered “the good stuff” all the way down to the crust. That picture above, though? That was my sandwich, from yesterday’s lunch.…
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Creative Parenting 101: Put Your Kids To Work
Some of the best (and funniest) moments in parenting for me have been when I suddenly figured out why my parents did something a certain way when raising my sister and me. Let me give you an example. Our mom loves to put on garage sales. LOVES. I don’t think she’s a fan of the work (sorting, pricing, displaying) before the sale–not too many people are, I imagine–but she loves making money from stuff she’s had sitting around the house (and who wouldn’t love that?). Back in the 70’s when we were kids in the south suburbs of Chicago, Mom had a couple of garage sales each year. Each time,…
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He Never Made THAT Mistake Again…
When you’re a parent and dealing with a little person who’s getting older every day and whose brain isn’t as malleable as he was when he was a baby, it can be very difficult to find ways to teach right and wrong. What works for one of your offspring may not work for the other, and that’s definitely been the case in this house. D has always had a sense of not wanting to make mistakes, ever. Of course, nobody is perfect, and it was only natural that he made some poor choices on his path to becoming the fine young man he is today. For example, there was the…
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Creative Parenting 101: Take A Picture. It’ll Last Longer!
I often say that photographs are my favorite souvenirs. In addition to the wonderful memory* that you can preserve with just one picture, a picture–or thirty–takes up much less space than, say, that jumbo Disney World snowglobe that costs you the same amount as a brand-new Geo Metro and will be in next year’s garage sale. My pictures-take-up-less-space philosophy came in handy when the older boy was younger. We discovered early-on that he had packrat-like tendencies. He came by it honestly; his mother’s** side of the family has the packrat gene in a big way. With intensive therapy***, I finally learned how to get rid of stuff. Halleluyah! When our…