Perhaps if I hadn’t been so confident, I might have heard the discussion about the amount of pain that comes with a C-section. My post is not meant to scare anyone. But I’m hoping that by sharing my experience with pain, those of you who go through a C-Section are a little better prepped for the pain than I was.

When you’re struggling with infertility, babies enter your mind countless times a day. And not just in the jealousy of seeing a new mom pushing a stroller, or the countless pregnancy announcements on Facebook. Your whole future seems blurry and full of what-ifs. The size of your family quietly creeps into daily decisions.

It’s okay to cry.  It’s okay to be angry, to feel betrayed by your own body.  It’s okay to feel bitter when your friends share miraculous stories about getting pregnant on the first try.  It’s okay to sit quietly as one of your friends complains about their pregnancy, and then excuse yourself to go sob silently in the bathroom.

We started very simply when my daughters hunted for the first letters of their names by going on a “letter hunt.” I wrote the letter N on five star-shaped Post-it notes and the letter A on five more. I asked my girls to sit in a special spot out of view from the area I planned to hide the Post-its.

When I ended the blog last time, I found myself sitting in the office of a pediatric rheumatologist with my 4-year-old daughter, whose knee was the size of a softball, wondering how in the world we ended up here. We had been through knee aspirations at the surgery center, specialists, testing, etc., with no answers yet. Did kids really get arthritis? Or–was it something worse?

always knew that I would have to teach my children how to be patient, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that it dawned on me that I needed to teach myself as well.

Spring is here! Pending any awful pranks from Mother Nature, we will start being regulars at the park very soon. While we haven’t come close to listing all the wonderful parks the Fox Valley offers, here are 15 worth visiting this year. If we missed your favorite, leave it in the comments.

March is National Nutrition Month and the perfect time to think about ways to improve your family’s eating habits. We can always do better when it comes to feeding our children and ourselves. My husband and I have experimented with various ways of eating in the past, but now that we’ve added children into the mix, meals (and eating in general) have definitely changed.

Reading is one of the most important life skills. Yet some children and adults will never know the joy reading can bring. So, how do we instill in our children the love of reading? Here are some steps that we can take to start fueling the desire to read even before they can.

Trying to think back to that hectic time in our lives, I can honestly say that I don’t remember if it was the orthopedic surgeon or our pediatrician who recommended that we see a rheumatologist. Again, we were dumbfounded, looking for answers and logic in a situation that seemed anything but logical or explanatory. As I sat there that day, I remember staring at the bio of Dr. David Keim. A rheumatologist? For a 4-year-old? How did we get here?