Hoping My Daughter Doesn’t Break Baby Jesus

After decorating our Christmas tree and putting up the stockings and lights, my daughter Brontë and I opened a special box together. I watched my three-year-old daughter’s eyes widen as we pulled out, piece by piece, my treasured crèche set. When I was about eight years old, my mother bought a bunch of Santon figurines […]

Our Daughters Love Putting Up The Christmas Tree

My daughter Brontë is three years old now, just old enough to start getting super excited about Christmas. I love to build anticipation for the holidays too. It’s fun. Also, I figure it helps give her a better sense of time, the passing of the seasons and the yearly rituals that accompany them. She is already enjoying […]

How Not to Be Taken Seriously As a Parent

As a parent, one of your chief responsibilities is bringing your children up to be socially responsible citizens who more-or-less follow the rules of polite society. You need to do this not just for the benefit of society, but also of your kids, since they will end up being miserable if they are so obnoxious that no one wants to […]

What Pregnancy Taught Me About Losing Weight

Please don’t hate me for saying this, but over the past year, I’ve had to gain ten pounds so people would quit accusing me of eating disorders. And I’ve thought long and hard about whether I should write this post at all. I know how easily it could seem like one big, giant, obnoxious humblebrag (“Oh, poor baby, […]

Glitter Unicorns and The Rise of Macho Skincare

The more I watch little kids, the more I’m starting to understand adults. Because if you squint your eyes hard enough to see past all the convoluted posturing and fancy vocabulary, adults look just like the grown-up version of what I’m seeing on the playground every day. For example, lately I’ve been noticing how many little boys love pretending to […]

A Public Service Message to All the Pregnant Ladies Out There

So there I was, pregnant for the second time, after giving birth to my beautiful daughter a year earlier, and stretching my weary limbs in a prenatal yoga class. Looking out across the sea of anxious eyes from mothers-to-be reminded me how frightened I was the first time I saw a double line on a […]

What I’ve Learned About Boys and Girls From Watching Kids

Having kids is, among other things, an interesting social experiment. Growing up, I was always interested in debates about gender: what is innate vs. what is learned. Figuring that much of our identities are a social construct, I tried to give my two daughters a fair shot at developing their own by not jamming them into pink […]