I’m jumping on the media frenzy this week. ..Time Magazine’s latest cover has conjured up a hailstorm of commentary from the media, parenting experts, moms, and pretty much everybody else.  The image of a young mother and her preschool-aged son breast-feeding has mommy bloggers picking sides for and against attachment parenting. Fuel has been added to a fire that has already been burning for years. This week, so it seems, the “Mommy Wars” rage on. As Mother’s Day arrives this… Read More »

I have had a few people ask me what it is like to be done having children. The last time I was asked that I literally stopped in my tracks in front of them to think for a few moments. I guess it hadn’t really sunk in yet that I was done having children. Harper just turned three-months-old on the 1st and everything still seems very new to me. So prior to that moment, I hadn’t really thought too much… Read More »

A week ago Sunday I was out shopping at one of my favorite stores. I didn’t have any kids with me and I was immensely enjoying the much-needed time alone. Then I received a text from my husband. Someone had been shot execution-style in downtown Petaluma. My shopping trip was immediately robbed of joy as fear flooded through my entire body, “don’t take the kids outside” I responded. Upon returning home I learned the truth about what had happened downtown. … Read More »

I’m not going to lie; life with four small kids can be hard. When people find out how many children I have and their ages the first question is always, “Do you have any help?” Because I get this question so often, almost daily in fact, I have begun to take a long hard look at my life. I was pretty bummed last night when my sweet husband subtly pointed out that the chair in our bedroom is not really… Read More »

I remember back when a friend of mine gave her cat away shortly after her second child was born.  At the time, I remember thinking, “How could she do that? Just give her cat away?”  She said that it was because with two children she could no longer give the cat the attention that he needed and wanted. So she gave him to a good friend of hers making sure that he was in a good home. I felt so… Read More »

I grew up in southern California. Down there, so it seems, there isn’t a spot of land that isn’t built on or around. Strip malls run supreme and drive-thrus aren’t hard to come by. Deciding which one to go to, however, is a little more difficult. Shortly after college, I moved to Marin and one of the things I noticed right away was the absence of available drive-thru fast food restaurants. I lived in Larkspur at the time and San… Read More »

Holy, moly! I cannot believe I am a mother of four little girls. When I look around our home I see a lot of tutus, sparkles, ribbon, barrettes, plastic shoes that when worn make a clackety-clack sound on the wooden floors, and lots of pink. My girls are all unique in their personalities and each “girlie” in their own way. Olivia is the queen bee of my princesses; she loves to wear anything with flounce in it so she can… Read More »

The other day my husband came home in a terrible mood. He was short tempered with me and it seemed like the kids had him going crazy. At one point, when I asked him to put a diaper in the trash, he chucked it across the room in the direction of the trashcan. I got pretty upset at his behavior and quite frankly, I got scared. I know that everything wasn’t yet running smoothly with a newborn in the house,… Read More »

I had a friend call me the other day and leave me a very serious message. Harper was born just a week ago this past Wednesday so she was calling to check in on me. This particular friend I hadn’t heard from in quite awhile, so while it was nice to hear from her, I felt her message too be too heavily laden with concern. Her message also lacked all signs of the congratulatory vocabulary one typically hears after they… Read More »

From my limited research, it isn’t 100 percent clear when or how the idea of a “push gift” came into being. Wikipedia sites the “push gift”, which is a gift, most notably jewelry, commemorating the birth of a child and honoring the mother’s nine months of hard work and ultimate delivery of said child, as going back somewhere into 1992. The New York Times noted the uprising of “push gifts” or “baby baubles” starting in 2005 when it became more… Read More »