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A version of this post was first published on my personal blog in May 2010. I love my firstborn, Mason. I love him with a ferocity that is both grand and fragile as glass — and sometimes, that love just shatters into a million pieces of shards that stick right into my heart and make…

  As I have written before, I love zulily. There may or may not be a zulily package on its way to me right now that may or may not contain a baby doll wearing a smocked dress for a certain baby girl’s first Christmas. I’m just saying. Said baby girl might also have a…

The piece of paper sat on the kitchen counter for days before I even noticed. It was a permission slip. With three school-age children, our house sees many permission slips, but I didn’t happen to notice this one because it did not come out of one of the boys’ backpacks. This permission slip was not…

Before I began blogging for the Huffington Post, I had been a mother for almost ten years and a blogger for almost five. Until this fall, the majority of my blogging was anonymous, because, quite frankly, anonymity was both comfortable and more liberating. Parenting is a very personal topic, and writing about my own parenting…

I did it. I scheduled a photographer to take our family holiday pictures. I warned her to get sleep the night before and to eat her Wheaties that morning. I somehow convinced all three boys to put on the “fancy” shirts (read: they have buttons and collars) I bought for them. Their new cords were…

{This post was originally published March 19, 2011, on my personal blog.} Tonight we piled into the car, the older boys and I, and Charlie gasped at the sight of the moon. “The moon! It’s huge and it’s gold!” It was a gold moon, at least at dusk. As the night wore on, it became…

The other night, we stopped at 7-11 on our way home, and my husband and my oldest son went inside to buy Slurpees for us all. That’s right, Slurpees. Because we are Americans, and we like Slurpees. As they walked out, I couldn’t help but watch my firstborn child as he stumbled out the door,…

When I was pregnant with my first child, ten years and a million sleepless nights ago, I went about pregnancy the same way I had gone about my college courses: by reading everything I could get my hands on, studying notes, attending classes, and joining message boards. I was always a great student — and…

It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and today I did laundry, listened to the kids run in and out of the house while they played in the backyard and on the computers, made caramel apples with the kids, took the kids to see Rise of the Guardians with friends, and ate pizza at a local Italian…

All three of my children who can talk have told me that they hate me this week. In fact, at least two of them have told me that all they want for Christmas is a new mother. On the upside, that might be cheaper than the iPod Touches and the new bikes we were considering….