Unless you are an immigrant or the child of immigrants, the move from one country to another can be a hard thing for kids to understand. The transplanting of a life is about more than just a physical shift. It’s about holding onto one’s culture, ideals, and heritage during a shift onto new soil, and it’s no small thing. In honor of such a move, here are 15 books to help your child grasp what …

It’s happening. The thing you thought would never come has come. We’re back to school. Pools are closing. Backpacks are fattening up with things to be done. Buses are rounding the corners like jumbo jets ready to take your kids up and away to higher learning. And on those mornings as you stand at the end of your road and wave them off, the air is just a degree or two cooler and you feel …

Hey moms, let’s talk! Over a glass of wine, or not. The whole wine-mom thing is out of control. Not the drinking per say, although that’s another topic for another day, but the idea of it. This idea that we moms are surviving on wine, caffeine, and chocolate to get us through our happily-harried lives is a myth, an airbrushed reality that only the likes of Facebook and Instagram can manage. We all get it. …

Well, here’s our first day of school picture…three days late. Let me explain. The twins had a first day of a sort-of preschool last week (also didn’t get a picture). It’s like starter school for three-year-olds. And then on their second day, Jonas pooped. Everybody poops, right? Apparently not everybody poops at school. Because I got a phone call that maybe just maybe I should keep him home for two weeks and really “knock out” …

The NICU is not the place you go to meet people. It’s an intensive care unit, not Cheers. Chances are, if you’re here, it’s a high-pressure situation. The background noise is beeps and buzzes and the whooshing of air in and out of ventilators. There’s a clicking, too, a “tck, tck, tck” of the feeding pumping, counting down the milliliters of milk and vitamins dripping down tubes and into bellies. This is not the soundtrack …

I see you giving the side-eye to those school supplies at Target while you’re cruising down the aisle with your Starbuck’s Frapp and kids hanging off every corner of the cart. I know you’d like to ram the Crayola display, just cut a swath of destruction through the notebooks and glitter pens and Moana backpacks. You’d rain down fire on the grocery store for even having back-to-school sales on Lunchables if you could. Because you …

Game of Thrones has destroyed my life. If John Snow could hold a hand out through the television, I’d take it. I don’t care if he died and came back. I don’t care if he’d rather hunt White Walkers than settle down. And that he’s  in love with Daenerys. We all still know he’s just a Millennial with his beard-grooming shears in his pocket and flannel shirt under all those furs. But it’s Cersei that’s …

The special needs life is small and big. It’s small in that you feel like 90% of the other parents you meet can’t even picture what goes on within your four walls on a daily basis. And it’s big in the fact that it opens your life and heart wide open to other people who can help you and at least feel for you if not like you. It also makes you brave. I shared …

I grew up working in the yard. This wasn’t making daisy chains and dancing through the daffodils. This was dirt under your fingernails and grubs in the mud. By five I was the designated mulch spreader, by eight the lawn mower, by ten the the edger and weed eater. Adolescence saw me earning every penny of my ten-dollar allowance through sweat and blisters and grass stains. I never thought of it as exercise though. It …

“Rub some dirt on it.” It’s the standard-issue command to shake it off and move on when life knocks you down. Everywhere you look, the message is clear. Don’t worry. Be happy. Worry is every mom’s ugly step sister – the one who lolls about all day forcing her to do the heavy lifting and locking her up when the party starts. Worry, however, can be a good thing. Worry, in all its glory, can …