Graceful Parenting in Austin

This post is co-authored by my 10-year-old, Noel. If I haven’t mentioned this yet, she is very smart, funny and creative. Since I’m on leave from work now, we get to hang out together after school and I love our time together.
So, one morning a few days ago, I’m loading the dishwasher or washing bottles [...]

Thanks to everyone who entered the Poop Story Contest. I’m not sure if it helped me or not, to know how common these stories are, but I imagine I can handle whatever Sophia might surprise us with next. This contest isn’t a traditional contest with place winners and prizes, it is more about sharing. Here [...]

This time, I was the one with homework. Noel, my 10-year-old, is great about her homework. She does it when she first gets home from school. Now I’m the one with homework from my parenting class.
I tell Noel that I need to tell her a story using a picture or memento. She say she MUST [...]

How did my Ponytail Hairdo, the one for my big date to the Oscars, I mean to the Paramount, go? Well, I got a little nuts for one thing. I thought I had it all together, but I left a few things to do on Saturday, which at first seemed to be going all right. [...]

Well, I promised a Poop Story Contest and I have been worried about this today. Contests have rules and deadlines and judges and a process for appeal and it can all be so formal. So, this may be the most informal Poop Story Contest there is, but here it goes. Submit your poop story by [...]

I got a call from the editor of a local parent’s magazine this week. She said the story I submitted for the humor column made her laugh, she thought it was hilarious, but the magazine has a policy to not print Poop Stories. I said you have got to be kidding, that is funny, because [...]

So much of what we experience day-to-day is so packaged for sale to a demographic, so averaged and simplified for mass consumption. I just love that the land from the old airport is being developed and how lucky we are to have another Old Navy.
That’s one of the reasons I love my hairdresser Cameo. For [...]

Oh, to be young again and to see my favorite rock band at 2 AM in a smoky bar while standing shoulder to shoulder on concrete floors. I think. Music changes when you are a parent. I used to think it meant less, now I think it just means different.
Even though Spoon’s new album is [...]

The inside jacket for “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (Khaled Hosseini) says the book is “a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years - from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding - that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, [...]

Someone has been reading my journal, taking notes and sending them to Emily Bloch. How else would she be able to describe my and my husband’s parenting styles so accurately in her article The Daddy Way: Celebrate Parenting Differences?
Her main idea is that fathers tend to parent differently than mothers and that isn’t a bad [...]