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Ten Easy Tips for Hosting a Greener, Healthier Kid’s Birthday Party
I like parties. I always invite most everyone I know, and find it a wonderous thing to get invited to them as well (hint, hint). Nonetheless, for the first two years of Maya’s existence, I thought a...
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DIY Furniture Re-Do: Breathing New Life into Furniture with Chalk Paint
One of my beefs with cheaper types of new furniture is that it’s more or less designed to end up pretty quickly in a landfill. Some of the press-board stuff that you have to assemble can’t even be...
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One-Day Drab-to-Fab Bathroom Makeover with Chalk Paint
Our basement bathroom was until recently a rather drab affair. Since it’s not an area we often use, though, I really didn’t want to spend any significant amount of money to make it more cheerful....
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Our American Faith and Its Follies
constitution ~ The Flame of Democracy… (Photo credit: DazMSmith) Tick. Tock. Time to avert a debt ceiling disaster grows perilously short. While a deal appeared in the works as recently as this...
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What I Told EPA About the Climate Crisis and Parenting
We ask our kids to be responsible. Brave, even. To venture out into the world with a sense that it is theirs — to explore, to learn about, and also to care for. So today I asked the Environmental...
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Toxic Hot Seat on HBO tonight!
Red sofa (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Hallelujah! A new film about the struggle to understand and address the hidden poisons in our sofas — Toxic Hot Seat — airs for the first time tonight on HBO. Slate...
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Parenting Through the Fog: 8 of My Personal “Truths”
No one can tell you what kind of parent to be. Instead, it’s a long performance, consisting of attempts, failures, mistakes, experiments, accidents, snips, scrapes and sniffles and — when you’re lucky...
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Foxy: An Easy Tutorial for a Needle Felted Fox
In legends and myths from cultures around the world, the trickster is always the most interesting character. And they are often a fox, as in the book, The Tale of Tricky Fox, which features an...
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Parenting with Neuroscience, and a Laugh
Parenting via infographic, #8. I’ve recently read two helpful books that use the latest findings by neuroscientists to help parents — more to come on those soon. In the meantime, here’s the most...
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Making a Spartan Dessert Sing: Chocolate Squares with Lemon Curd
Lately, I’ve noticed that anyone who seeks to join an Upright Citizens Brigade of self-satisfied health types is told they should happily be willing to make do with a “dessert” of monastic simplicity:...
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Dump Dora, and 7 More Tips to Help You Enjoy Reading to Your Young Child
We all know we’re supposed to read to our kids. And while I often truly love our snuggle time with a book, reading to a child — let’s be honest — can also sometimes feel like a bit of a chore....
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Let the Wild Rumpus Start: 100+ Dazzling Literary Adventures for Young Children
Very few books are as perfect as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. That classic tale of naughtiness combines slightly unsettling images with an imaginative adventure story and a comforting...
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Welcome to the Plutocracy
As you may have heard, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled in McCutcheon v. FEC that wealthy individuals cannot be limited in the overall amount they can give to political candidates. The First...
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A Walk in the Woods and a Poem
When I walk with my daughter Maya in the woods, I’m often torn between two competing impulses. The urge to discover together and to explain — to point out the wonders of a worm or seed or changing leaf...
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A Facebook for Federal Bureaucrats, or What Real Government Transparency...
Watching Aneesh Chopra rather lamely defend the Obama Administration’s record on its use of information technology on The Daily Show this week, I was struck by the same problem that Stewart was...
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Sowing the Seeds of Change in Chicago: The New “Gardeneers”
Happily cross-posted from the Food Day blog. About forty children were crouched into small balls on the ground in front of vegetable planters. “Let’s pretend we’re seeds,” Adam Zmick, a former...
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