Last week I enjoyed three days of quiet, a rare luxury for a parent. Even more unusual, I had no access to email or the Internet, so whatever David Brooks and Maureen Dowd had to say about the candidates, I missed it. I also missed the ups and downs of the stock market. I didn’t [...]

Lately I’ve been feeling annoyed with my children for not being grateful for all they have. I’m pretty sure that I can’t force them to be appreciative and that it’s not helpful to lecture them on the children I taught when I was in the Peace Corps in Africa (“They were lucky to have one [...]

I’ve been given two blog awards recently, which is very flattering. The first came from Natural Mom a few weeks ago. I enjoy her blog Speaking Life and enjoyed meeting her at the Parenting interest group at FGC Gathering this summer. Thank you, Stephanie!The Brilliante award comes from Jennifer, who writes Tree of Life Musings, [...]

Amid all the emails I've been getting about the election, two different people this week sent me this quiz by Bill Quigley, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. His intention is to shake up our complacency and make us think about what justice really means on a global scale. [...]

Maybe it’s all the talk of sexism in the news (Newsweek’s Anna Quinlen points out that the Republicans have used the word more in the past week than in the past fifty years.), but sexism seems more visible this week. Or may it’s because I’m reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd’s [...]

No, this is not a post on the Democratic National Convention. It’s a review of a very interesting book I read over vacation, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. Author George Lakoff, a Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, argues that Democrats have long made a strategic mistake [...]

Still no time to write a review of that book, but here are a few photos of amazingly active whales in Massachusetts and the stunning scenery in Maine.Trying to savor that summer feel back in Philadelphia.

A few interesting things have happened since I last posted. First, my computer died. Hard drive kaput. The good news is that it happened when we were preparing for a week of vacation, during which I wasn't going to use it anyway. I had just enough time to get it to my computer repair guy [...]

It’s August, the month where school seems to be rushing toward us in slow motion. This week we dug out the list of books my daughter was supposed to read over the summer and discovered that she has three “projects” due in less than three weeks, reflecting on three of the books on the list. [...]

Yesterday I stumbled on the book The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine. This discovery came on the heels of Judith Warner's New York Times piece on $10,000summer camps where the counselors make the kids' beds. My daughter says she'd [...]