Perspectives in Parenting

As I reflect on the past four weeks of life, I am a huge ball of emotions. I find myself just as uneasy as I was on day one. I am completely sick to my stomach that we are starting our fifth week of quarantine. I am an absolute basket case thinking about the fact that my oldest will start kindergarten next year and he did not get the chance to finish his year of PreK 4. My hurt hearts for everyone who is hurting right now. There is still no normalcy, but we are beginning to make new normals. Awkward Distancing... I reflect on our community of Southern extroverts who find social distancing very awkward. No one knows what to...

We are over a month into staying at home, and every week has been a little different. The first couple of weeks were like a novelty as I erased events off of our family calendar and adapted other activities to virtual versions. We had family dinner on the patio, caught up on Netflix, went for walks every day, played board games, and went fishing. Zoom meetings popped up all over, we adapted to Distance Learning, and we developed a new routine. As we got into weeks 3 and 4, it became more challenging for me as a mom as I realized this was going to last longer than we originally thought. I tried to be more creative in our new...

Do you remember all those times before you had kids that you would look at parents or other moms in public and think to yourself “I will never be that mom”! The mom that allows her kid to have her cellphone at the restaurant, be the parents that let their kid run in front of them at the airport, or how about the mom who allows her kid to eat a doughnut from the bakery at the grocery store while still shopping? Ugh, those people! Ridiculous, am I right? How about those kids that throw the big public tantrums? Why would they let them act like that? I will never be that mom. Jump ahead a few years… Hi there. That was...

These are tough and tragic times for our world, country, state and city. I say “our” because we are truly all in this together. It’s been almost three weeks since my family has been “staying at home” (other than my partner, an essential worker) and the order feels more like a prescription than a punishment. I know those feelings seem strange and I definitely fall into the unpopular opinion on this, but we are happy being homebound. My family has regrouped…we’ve reconnected, and I find myself refocused on what truly matters. Perhaps I’ve been a hot mess for so long now, I fully anticipate lemons with my lemonade, I can’t really say… but here are some of the reasons why I think my...

For as long as I can remember, I have been a reader. I remember my mom reading to my sister and I growing up - even long past the point that we could read for ourselves, she would have a chapter book and would read a chapter aloud to us each night. We also did not have television growing up, so my main form of entertainment was from books. We would ask for books for Christmas, and within a week's time, would have stayed up late greedily reading the entire stack. It's no surprise then, that I became an English teacher. That love of literature could not be quenched, and I wanted to instill that love of reading in someone...