Shuffling around under my sink tonight I found a bottle of volumizing mousse that I haven’t touched since I spontaneously tried competing for Miss Wisconsin USA 10 years ago. For those curious, I did awful.  Didn’t even land in the…

Nick just left with the kids for the next hour. He made me promise to not do any work while he’s gone.  I’m lying here breaking chunks of Kentucky Bourbon Bellavitano cheese off the block with my bare hands like…

I’m up late tonight. I need to keep busy for another two hours until kindergarten applications go live “sometime between midnight and 1 AM”. That’s aggressive. Why couldn’t it be 6AM? Or 8? Why an entirely ambiguous range in the…

I just don’t understand the hate the Terrible Two’s get. The newborn phase? Exhausting. Threenagers? Daunting. F***ing Fours? The worst. But give me the Terrible Two’s any day. Two-year-olds walk like drunken gnomes, they blabber 50% nonsense and 50% brilliance,…

My husband has VERY few faults. But he’s really really really bad at negotiating. He’s just so GRACIOUS that he never thinks to bargain. Quotes for home repairs, new appliances… he just smiles and agrees. When I was pregnant with…

After Zary was born I was consumed by constant pelvic floor pain, and crippling anxiety from the c-section it eventually led to. My body didn’t feel like mine. I didn’t feel strong or capable enough to take care of my…

I first said this years ago, and now two kids deep my opinion hasn’t budged an inch: Language is my favorite part of child development. Zary didn’t speak until she was two. Mina can string together words and she’s not…

I have a theory about sleep in our family: there’s a limited number of hours available for sleep in this household, and we all have to share them. Balancing the sleep allocation among the kids is a very important and…

Prior to my pregnancy with Mina, Zary knew me to be kind of over the top on fitness and energy. I’d run her to every playground, sometimes 3 or more a day. We might even hit the grocery store on…