It’s that time of year! Your aunt is asking what the kids want for the holidays, the kids are dropping hints or outright requests every five seconds, and you are looking around at your house filled with junk that goes ignored 80% of the time and wondering why you are thinking about getting a seasonal job to cover everyone’s wish list. It goes without saying that not one person has asked or will ask what Mom wants for Christmas...

Tis the season for gratitude - something that can be hard to find and even harder to teach when you live with a gaggle of middle schoolers who are focused on me, me, me. This of course is totally age appropriate (thank you, books like Untangled and Brainstorm, which are great at explaining the adolescent brain and calming the fears of a middle-aged mother). It may be age appropriate, but I find lack of gratitude nearly intoler...

When we studied Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in high school (and for English nerds like me, in college), we all read the line “into each life, some rain must fall” and we never ever knew how applicable it would become to every day life until the great rain debacle of Halloween 2019. 

Do we have technology to blame? In the 80s or 90s, it would it have been some sidebar conversation in the parking lot at the preschool? “Hey, Jen, h...

On top of all the normal stuff you have to do, day in and day out, with free time you can count in minutes on some days, please add in the following: Halloween and all its associated madness including finishing the costumes, making plans to bring your children places wearing them, buying sorting hiding and donating candy; Thanksgiving and all its associated madness including finding and shopping recipes, making travel plans, s...

Conductor: Gotta keep the trains running on time. Give her a conductor hat and hang a whistle from her neck - she can alert everyone in listening range when it’s time to board, which train is going where, and what they need for their journey. She knows which family members will intersect with other family members and when, in order to change tracks and have everyone arrived unscathed at their final destination. All aboard! Cli...

We’ve got the Sunday Scaries over here. The Halloween costumes have arrived and are in their amazon packages sitting in the foyer, waiting for a little bit of homespun attention to half-ass the homemade Halloween costume concept that I was raised on and worked hard at for about 6 or 7 years. 

But another 7 years have gone by and here we are, applying to high schools. We know what happens next: the costumes get assembled, we tur...

Have kids, they said. They’re so cute. Look at all those tiny outfits and tiny socks and tiny hats. So cute. Don’t you want more? So adorable. Couldn’t you just eat them up? They’ll sleep eventually. They’ll eat it one day. Just look at how sweet they are, asleep in your arms.

Here’s what they don’t tell you, and maybe you figured it out on your own but maybe you put it out of your mind for a while or a decade: those cute adora...

Chatter at Book Club this week turned to the age old question of what’s for dinner, who has time to cook it and when, and how many of us rely on prepared meal delivery, grocery delivery, Trader Joe’s shortcuts. And we remembered those places that were so popular for a while, like Dream Dinners or Dinner A Faire, where you’d go with a group of friends and a cooler and do all of your meal prep for 10 or so meals and ziplock bag...

When you are a middle school mom, it’s time to lower your standards. Like seriously low. The new theme of my life is one that came to me as I was exiting a porta-potty at a tailgate at UD over the weekend. Don’t get me wrong, the porta-potty was gross in comparison to regular restroom standards. But in comparison to other porta-potties I’ve visited in my life, it wasn’t bad. It could be worse. This is now how I approach nearly...

Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Time to make the donuts. Groundhogs Day. We know all the jokes - you wake up, you make the breakfast, you move the dishes from the counter to the sink to the dishwasher, you make the lunches, you move the cutting board from the counter to the sink to the draining board to the cabinet. You do a hundred million billion little tiny things day in and day out, one after the other in a rhythmic routine that feel...