After that night in the Walgreens parking lot, I decided that I would be the village.  If I’m at the park with my children and an unattended child there gets hurt, I will do my best to help, not wonder where their parent is.

Picnics have become our family’s new go-to, and our latest mission is to invite others along.

We love game day in our house, so I am going to share with you a few fun and EASY ways to celebrate a new football season as a family.

In the social media era we live in, where everything gets shared and we constantly know what the Joneses are doing, people feel the pressure to keep up. It is easy to become discontent with areas of our lives.

As summer break winds down and we get ready to restart the school routine, I often wonder – what are teachers thinking about this time of year?

I have this idyllic notion in my head of camping with my family. We are all sitting around a crackling campfire, cozy in our matching flannels. I cook a Pinterest-worthy meal over the open flame while the girls dance around the campsite catching fireflies.

The reality is that devices have become a problem for all of us. I have witnessed this often first-hand, as a middle school teacher in a school where each student has an iPad.

With these simple camping safety hacks, you will be back and running through the sprinkler in no time.

But I would argue that as parents, it is our responsibility to savor every age and stage of our kids’ lives. Even the exhausting ones, where your baby wakes up screaming during the night for a feeding.

I came across a book called The Diaper-Free Baby. I had never heard of Elimination Communication before, but it made sense to me. I read parts of the book to my husband, who is notoriously skeptical of things that are “hippie-dippy,” and he said it seemed reasonable.