Babies

Before having children, my husband and I always discussed how we would like to pass down healthy eating habits to our children, but after having our first child, this evolved into something more than either one of us ever...

I put the jar of food back on the shelf, turned to Jensen and openly shared my truth: I’ve never been much of a cook, but if he was willing to be my sous-chef, I was willing to learn how to make our own baby food. 

It's that in between stage - your baby cannot talk or walk, but he crawls everywhere and demands your constant attention.  His nap times are shorter than when he was a newborn and when he gets bored, he tends...

Every mom has heard of (or lived through!) the separation anxiety stage of development . . . and I would argue a fair number of us have also experienced our own share of separation anxiety when it comes to leaving...

At dinner time, I fed my kids frozen peas because I was too tired to heat them. My baby's shirt . . . pants . . . socks . . . and hair ate all her mashed potatoes, and I had to bathe her while the preschooler made some sort of suspicious noise doing some sort of suspicious activity in the adjacent room. I was right to be suspicious.

When it came to understanding and communicating with my baby, I continued to build on the baby sign language being taught at daycare. In doing so, communication between us is becoming more clear. I spend less time wondering if I’m guessing correctly and more time trusting in his growing independence, knowing that he will tell me his needs and wants. 

I was the girl who spent hours working on scrapbooks of childhood photos, artfully accenting with stickers, quotes and mementos. It's entirely possible that I still have my ticket stub for the 1997 film Titanic, because that certainly needed lifelong documentation. I'm a sucker for the sentimental. But I learned quickly after the birth of my first child that this working mom wasn't quite living up to her baby book expectations. Not. at. all.