I write Growing Up at Home from a house with two kids five years apart and a hallway that squeaks in all the wrong places. Most of what I know here I learned by doing it badly first, which is why the mistakes stay in the articles.
White couches and pale rugs looked wonderful in photos and lasted about six weeks in real life. Here is what I buy instead now, and why the switch actually reduced my cleaning load.
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I spent two years treating every scattered block as an emergency before I figured out that most toy mess is just proof…
The stretch between the bus dropping off and dinner being ready is short, loud, and somehow the hardest hour of the whole…
Our mornings used to be a countdown to disaster. Here is what actually changed the outcome, and it was not the thing…
There was no test she passed and no birthday that unlocked it. We just kept asking ourselves the same question in smaller…
I used to sprint into every sibling argument like a referee blowing a whistle. Backing off taught me that most fights do…
He could make cereal and toast just fine. What he could not do was feed himself an actual dinner, and I realized…
Most kids' room storage gets replaced every couple of years. Here is the setup we built once and just kept adjusting instead.
It was four blocks with two crosswalks, and I made him walk it with me a dozen times before I ever let…
Something in our house breaks roughly every ten days now that we have kids. I finally built a mental checklist for deciding…