Elizabeth

  I’m conflicted about the state of my daughters’ bedrooms. They are thirteen and their rooms are a perpetual state of mess. One occasionally gets tired of her own mess and picks up. Her twin...

​ Do you obsess about milestones and when your child should be doing something? As a mom of two teens, I’d like to offer this advice to moms of littles. Stop. Stop worrying. Don’t compare your own...

I heard something on the radio that surprised me - the first iPhone was introduced in June 2007. Doesn’t it seem that iPhones have been part of our world for longer than ten years?...

Growing up I had a close friend who swam competitively. She and her four brothers all swam on the same team. At the time, I felt sorry for her because she wasn’t allowed to choose her own...

My grandmother died right before Thanksgiving when I was 23. My mother, the family’s quintessential hostess, seemed paralyzed at the thought of cooking for Thanksgiving that year. After talking to my dad, I made...

I caved to the pressure last Christmas and convinced my husband that it was time to get our twelve year old daughters smartphones. They were two of the few sixth graders at their school without...

This year our daughters transferred from a small K-8 school to a large public middle school. To put the change in perspective, their current 7th grade class is about the same size as their...

I recently attended a baby shower and found myself fascinated by some of the gifts - new baby products that did not exist when my almost thirteen year old twins were babies. I thought of...

A friend posted this quote last night on Facebook: The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make. … I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly...

I lived the first 34 years of my life in New Orleans, where my parents and their parents and their parents (and so on) lived their entire lives. I had no intention whatsoever of...

  Parenting Without Power Struggles, by Susan Stiffelman, is the best parenting book I’ve read. That’s high praise considering that I’ve read twenty-six parenting books over the last thirteen years. Stiffelman has a gift for offering logical parenting advice...

  I am a compulsive list maker. I come from a long line of list makers on both sides of my family. The list making gene is both a blessing and a curse. While my friends enviously...

Summer 2016 is quickly winding to a close. At the end of July, we picked up our twelve year old twin daughters at sleep away camp. They spent four weeks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of...

This is “the Summer of Flatbreads” in my kitchen. I’ve rediscovered the simplicity and diversity of flatbreads for dinner. Here's my most recent flatbread creation. I started by spreading jarred bruschetta sauce over the flatbread. Next I...

When my kindergartner twin daughters asked for a slumber party to celebrate their 6th birthday I said, “absolutely no." However, crestfallen faces led me to think of a compromise. We hosted a birthday pajama...