Vulnerability became a household name thanks to the groundbreaking research of Brene Brown. Her 2010 TEDx talk titled The Power of Vulnerability is one of the top 10 most viewed TED Talks in the world. Her work facilitated a shift in perspective and allowed people to look differently at their imperfect selves. Reading Brene’s work…
Fashion Police
I like to think that my daughter’s stylish peak occurred sometime between birth and Kindergarten. It’s no coincidence that during this time period I had total control of her clothing. After that, I was fired as her stylist and became the fashion police. When she was a baby, I had fun dressing her up. I…
80’s hair: High and Mighty
I grew up in the 80’s with Madonna, Tiffany, Hair Metal. Big hair was everywhere and I wanted in on it. Unfortunately for me, I’d inherited my mother’s fine hair and had no chance of ever achieving the volume or height of Big Hair naturally. My decade-long spiral perm was probably the only time in…
The art of the apology should be practised at home
As a big fan of the handwritten note, I was touched when my 9-year-old daughter first came to me with a written apology. It read: “I’m sorry for the way I behaved. I hope you can forgive me.” I clutched the note to my chest and smiled with pride for raising a child who is…
If I can raise a puppy during the pandemic, maybe I can raise my children, too
Several weeks into sheltering at home with my husband and two small children, after we had finished all the jigsaw puzzles, baked the sourdough and stopped hoarding toilet paper, we needed another project. So we got a puppy. This wasn’t a rash decision brought on by cabin fever. We had thought about getting a pet for…
If the Tooth Fairy forgets (again), am I a bad parent?
The tooth fairy is only human My daughter lost her first tooth playing outside on a late summer evening. Minutes later, I lost my parental halo after throwing the tooth fairy under the bus. We had anticipated this milestone for weeks. We did daily tests and teased about how best to speed up the process….
Don’t let busy schedules define your family
It was the swimming lessons that did it. That caused our family to reevaluate the busyness of our lives. I rushed from work to pick up my two kids from two different locations for their swimming lessons and spent the next 30 minutes catching my breath. After the lesson, the three of us crammed into a…
It’s never too late to reclaim the playfulness of youth
On a recent family vacation to the Okanagan, my husband (who clearly felt our marriage was on solid-footing) squirted me repeatedly in the face from his bumper boat. I laughed … and I had an epiphany: I need more play in my life. As parents, we cultivate incredible lives for our children. We put time…
All it took to finally break the thumb-sucking habit was … a worm
I’m a parent of thumb-sucking children who traded a good night’s sleep for a self-soothing habit. I got them started but it took a worm to get them to stop. Who wants to wake up at all hours of the night to repeatedly replace a soother into an infant’s mouth? I didn’t. Thumb-sucking seemed more…
I dropped my son. Does that make me a bad mother?
Some people say that the most dangerous place to stand is between a mother and her child. But in my case possibly the most dangerous place to be is in my arms. The first few ‘incidents’ when I was new to motherhood were benign enough; a chubby baby leg wedged between the slats of the…