Toddlers

Disclosure :: This post is sponsored by The Dunham School.  3 Questions to Ask When Searching for a Preschool It happens gradually. The rattles turn to toys. The bottles turn to forks and spoons. The potty-training charts turn to chore charts. Before we know it, the diaper bags turn to backpacks, and we’re sending our little ones off to school wondering where the last few years went. As the mother of a four-year-old daughter, I just walked this path. Is my child ready? Am I ready? How will she adjust? Did we choose the right school? If this was/is you, please hear me when I say: You are normal. Working in school admissions, I watch families every day come to our office in hopes of finding the...

Every time I go out to eat, my eyes always get glued to the kid sitting at a table quietly with his/her family either coloring or on a piece of technology. What I think? Never in a million years would that be my family. Does it make me sad? Yes. Am I blessed, though? Also, yes. Going almost anywhere… out to eat, to the zoo, to the library to check out a book, to the store, or even to an amusement park is not what this mom calls “fun for the whole family.” I am a boy mom with wild 3-year-old twins and a wild 5-year-old who started Kindergarten this year. One day, we had a whole tub of flour dumped all...

In 2022, we’re all aware of the need for self-care. Whether it be a corporate office pretending to give a crap by extending lunch breaks or a spouse that feels they exemplified selflessness by “letting” a mom shower in peace, there’s a lot of pretending out there when it comes to self-care. Self-care in Motherhood It shouldn’t even be such a buzzword in motherhood because the idea around self-care when you’re a mom is to simply take tiny bits of time to “recharge,” just to go back to motherhood. When will society accept moms are people, too? The thing is, while there’s a ton of support around taking care of yourself, even as a mom *gasp*, there’s a lot of judgment in the...

Happy, Angry, Sad, Afraid: basic emotions that set the foundation for all of the emotions we experience. It seems so simple, yet so many struggle to process and experience emotions. Somewhere along the way, we were told that boys don’t cry (The Cure had a song about it) and that girls don’t get angry, “sugar and spice and everything nice” right? What we were really hearing, and internalizing, was that our feelings didn’t matter if they weren’t the “right” feelings.  As a mental health professional, I’ve worked with countless people who struggle with identifying and therefore expressing basic emotions. The ability to understand emotions, and then process them for yourself also makes it difficult to display empathy. Both can be...

I swore I would never be that parent who gave their child a phone or a tablet in a restaurant, but here we are. Here we are also getting stares dragging my twins through a restaurant barefoot because they keep throwing their shoes. No one tells you just how tough the 2- to 4-year-old stage is, especially when you have three toddlers under four. Yes, I got told about the ‘terrible twos’, but I had no clue what it meant. Whether I would be a stay-at-home mom or doing what I am doing now, which is working multiple jobs, this current stage is hard… period. I have 2-year-old twin boys and an almost-four-year-old boy. A typical day for me is getting woken...