Family
Gratitude From An 11-Year Old
I’ll tell you what I’m grateful for: my son, who decided to take over as today’s guest blogger and gave me a little extra vacation time….
Oy Vey: Tips to Non-Jews About Bar & Bat Mitzvah Giving
I received an email from an old friend not too long ago. She sounded kinda panicky:
Renna:
I have been invited to go to a Bat Mitzvah in NYC for a co-worker’s daughter. What do I give? Help!
Jenna 🙂
That Jenna. She brought me right back to October 25, 1979 when I celebrated my own bat mitzvah in Syracuse, New York. …
Are You Proud of Your Sweet Little Bully?
In the all the bullying literature that is out there, there is one piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been particularly well documented, and so I’m putting out there. Guess what? Sometimes parents of bullies are proud that their children are bullies. I have heard parents admit they would rather have their children be the ones “standing up for themselves” than the ones being bullied: that they have actually encouraged their children to get physical first, so that they are never made targets themselves. For me, this is the ugliest, darkest side to parenting….
The Teenage Years: It's All in the Brain
Apparently in the last decade, a fair bit of research has been conducted to gather biological evidence as to why teenagers go a little bit haywire. Apparently, the teenage brain begins a massive shift around the pre-frontal cortex around 12-13 years of age. The pre-frontal cortex is the thinking part of the brain that allows us to consider the consequences of our actions, and that part of the brain kind of stops working as well as it had before. Parents don’t always understand the neurological changes that their children’s brains are undergoing: changes that can cause their once docile children to take big risks and make big mistakes. …
The Secret To Finding The Best Babysitters
The best babysitters are, of course, the ones who love interacting with your children and know how to take care of them in any circumstance. But now that my son is older, I have found that the best sitters – the one’s who not only take care of his physical and emotional needs – are the ones who like to linger around after my child (and usually my husband) have gone to bed so we can discuss life. And books!…
What Our Actions Teach Our Kids About The Earth
I try to remain optimistic, but I find myself wondering if our efforts are merely an exercise in too little, too late? As thousands of gallons of oil oozed into the Gulf just off the coast of my beloved former home of Louisiana, I found myself thinking about how the more we try to fix things, the more we muck things up….
"Out of The Closet" by Chrissy Teague
What are you holding onto that might benefit someone else? Needs have never been greater. What better time to give than now? You may feel like you don’t have much. I understand. I’m a jobless single mother coming out of two closets. I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to give. I challenge you to do what you can. Our relatives, our friends, our neighbors need us. The quality of community is in our hands. …
Being Neighborly
Growing up, I knew everyone in my neighborhood. The girls across the street were my babysitters, and they let me sit in the funky purple bedroom and play with their Barbies. The older couple who lived next door to my parents had a tiny little poodle, and the Mrs Z. liked to watch me practice my gymnastics on the lawn. The neighbors on our other side were a little standoffish, but we understood this about them and still waved as they passed in their beige car. There was an older woman who nurtured a fantastic garden in her backyard. She taught me my first words in French: “J’adore les fleurs.” The people behind us had children, and my brother and I would stay out late playing kickball and running barefoot in their tall grass until it grew dark and we could no longer see the ball. I loved knowing my neighbors, and I suppose I have tried to reproduce similar kinds of connections no matter the type of community in which I found myself living….
Lessons in Losing It: The Sequel
Last week, something happened to my stupid iPhone which resulted in the voice activation feature to accidentally turn on. I don’t have a clue as to what series of keys I may have pressed, and I’d like to know so I never do it again, because suddenly this computer generated female voice – let’s call her iJill – is shouting all kinds of commands at me in her terrible and very unstoppable voice: “Settings. General. Settings. Settings. Settings. On. Settings. iPod. Email. Settings…”
I fiddled with my phone, which made iJill furious and the screen locked up on me. I tried turning the phone off and doing a soft return. It was all for naught, when the phone turned on again, iJill was still shouting at me, my screen would not move and, I started to lose it. …
Kids Throwing Money Away at the Mall
Once, when I was about 10 years old, I made the mistake of tossing out a few pennies while emptying out a junk drawer, and my father gave me a lecture that I would never forget. It started generally – with how people come to this country with big dreams and nothing in their pockets – and moved to the specific at which point he explained that he worked his ass off every day to make sure that our family had everything that we needed, and he’d be damned if I was going to be so ungrateful and selfish (*insert in a few million more shameful terms here*) as to throw away money, even a penny, when there were people starving all over the world, people who would love to have my pennies. Let’s just say, the speech made a major impression….