My cousin stopped chopping carrots and asked me, “Does your family have any special traditions during the holidays? Do you eat something special?” She was looking at me as if she really wanted an answer. She cared about what I had to say. I hadn’t met this cousin before. At the time, I was in my early twenties, living near
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It isn’t often you allow yourself to learn from young teachers, to take a step back and see the lesson right in front of you. My son, struggling to read, gave me a lesson in the moment, but truthfully, it was a lesson for life. He didn’t speak until he was almost three. He communicated what he wanted and needed
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I’ve been in the middle of a very large storm. My oldest son, my 19-year-old, has been really sick. We’ve spent the past couple of weeks going to different doctors, trying different diets, and trying to figure out why his digestive system is completely inflamed. This is the kind of stress that makes it hard to do anything else. It’s
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I used to make long lists of New Year’s resolutions: Everything broken that I would fix about myself. Everything wrong that I would perfect. Everything not good enough that I would make better. A long list of new little failures as life, reality, time, and me being who I am caused one resolution after another to be broken. Then I
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I did not realize what exactly made me feel so often overwhelmed by my 3 young children (a 4-year-old and 18-month-old twins), or how my actions could be impacting their behavior. I was careful from early on not to build dependence playing with me, hoping they would learn to play on their own, which was generally successful. So I was very confused
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We’ve always been a homeschool family, and we love it. I love the flexibility of being able to travel and visit theme parks during the week (we live about an hour from Orlando), and generally do things however and whenever I want to do them. We are eclectic homeschoolers, taking bits and pieces from different curricula to find the right
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Shoe shopping with a child with social and sensory issues is NOT our favourite thing. First there’s the loud music, then there’s the other kids in the shop, next there’s the strange people touching your feet, and then it’s wrinkled socks and them wanting to pull trousers up to see your feet. That’s before you’ve even tried some shoes. So
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Adolescence is upon us. I’m officially the mother of a teenager. Everyone says it, but when you’re a brand new mother with a newborn, you can’t possibly imagine that it really will fly by so fast. “The days are long but the years are short,” they say. They are right. I never thought I’d be excited about my children reaching
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Excerpt from Nurturing Connection, Rebecca’s 3rd book in the Consciously Parenting series What do our children really need to be emotionally healthy and to feel nurtured in our relationship with them? Playing is one of six things discussed in Rebecca’s upcoming book that we can do to nurture connection with our children (and our friends and partner, too). We take parenting really
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All of the houses in the neighborhood where I live look the same. When I first moved in a year ago, for a full two weeks, I would pull into the wrong driveway. My kids thought it was hysterical, and often didn’t even mention the wrong turn. They only giggled. I finally put a funky pillow on my porch in
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