Perspectives in Parenting

Before my son was born, when the question came up as to whether or not I would breastfeed him, the answer was always a resounding YES! Breastfeeding was something I very much wanted to do for him. (Ha! Parenting is SO easy before you actually have a baby.) Our son surprised us by coming almost six weeks early. I was still reading the pregnancy books and hadn't yet moved onto the "now-I-have-a-baby-what-the-heck-do-I-do?" books. Fortunately, he didn't have to spend any time in the NICU but as I worked through the shock that my baby was actually here, I also struggled to breastfeed. The nurses and the lactation consultants kept telling me "He's a preemie; it will take him a little longer to figure it out,...

I’m a worse case scenario kind of person. If my husband calls me on his way home from work, I answer assuming he’s been in a car accident. If I hear one of my children fall in his bedroom, I’m mentally preparing myself for a trip to the ER. Granted, these worse cases rarely ever happen in real life, but I can’t help myself from readying for them. So when my 4-year-old son failed an eye exam – despite having new glasses – I was prepared to hear some sort of bad news. As it turns out, we didn’t get the worse possible news, which of course would be cancer or some other life threatening condition. But what I did...

This is a hard post to write.  I want to show my passion for diversity, but I don’t want to be preachy.  I want to be real and honest, but I don’t want to offend.  I want to be bold, but I don’t want to be bossy. All I can share is what is in my heart and what we have chosen to do as a family. It’s said that Sunday mornings are the most segregated time of the week in our great country.  Though our social worlds and occupational worlds may be fully integrated, for some reason, our faith communities remain, in large part, fairly homogenous.  Our separations can stem from differences in race, class, economics, and culture.  My...

This holiday season, abused and neglected children need safe, permanent homes more than any other gift. Your voice can help make that gift possible. As you prepare for a holiday season filled with family and friends, Capital Area CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) Association urges you to remember the children in our community who are spending the holidays living in foster care rather than in permanent homes with families of their own. CASA volunteers provide a voice for these children, speaking up for them to help them reach safe, permanent homes and ensure their needs are being met. Capital Area CASA needs volunteers in order to continue providing a volunteer advocate for every child in East Baton Rouge Parish who...

I don't breathe deeply enough. "Take a deep breath" is so easy to ignore when I'm going or planning or worrying or cooking or working or feeding or cleaning or driving or... you can fill in the blank. I need this air to live and most of the time I'm breathing so shallow, not taking enough of it in. That's not good. We're supposed to breathe deeply to calm down and even to manage pain and I HAVE to do it to survive, so how can I forget to just do it better? One quick Google search and I find this. (I did NOT know there was an American Institute of Stress! Cool.) So, I'm sitting here, writing, taking some deep...