We had no big plans for Valentine’s Day. But, we did have a plan. Inspired by a a blog post I read, the kids and I were going to surprise Chris with a fancy “restaurant” dinner at home. I was going to make dinner, and Evie and Mack would be the waiter and waitress. Mack […]

I never pass up an opportunity to keep my kids busy with something creative while I tend to other things around the house. If dinner needs to be prepped, it is easy to plunk them on the sofa with a mindless cartoon buzzing in the background. But, life is already too short, and wasting their […]

Chicago finally got it’s first significant winter storm. A solid 28 hours of blizzarding dumped nearly two feet of snow, and even though the streets and alleys are a mess I think we’re all not-so-secretly excited about it. Everyone here is joking that the East Coast got five days of news coverage for their storm, […]

Ugh. I just watched the Nationwide commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. The one that generated so much buzz for being…well…a buzz kill. As I watched the wretched thing, I prayed for the thousands of families who have suffered the loss of a child due to accident. How many of them tuned into the […]

Mack was overdue for a date night with mom. As he has been reminding me lately, Evie has had THREE special nights out with me (Katy Perry concert, going to see the movie Annie, and the Lyric Opera). In the interest of fairness, I owed him! When I saw that the Chicago Children’s Theatre had […]

Ben. Oh, my sweet lil Ben. At nearly 11 months old, the little bugger still won’t sleep 12 hours through the night. He goes down around 7 and usually wakes for a big snack around 4:30 am. It used to be much, much worse.  Like, waking up four times a night worse. What changed? A […]

Ever since Evie was born nearly 7 years ago we have been a cloth diapering family. While I suppose cloth diapering might require a modicum of extra work (two loads of laundry a week, that’s it), it has never been a decision that we’ve regretted or lamented. Perhaps one of the best lessons cloth diapering […]

Living in the city with four kids requires a bit of sacrifice. We don’t have a big back yard or a spacious basement. Everyone doesn’t have his or her own bedroom. Minimal storage space means that we can have minimal stuff. But…living in the city with four kids also means we have world-class cultural events […]

After I posted yesterday about my internal debate over when to allow my kids to walk the 0.4 miles from school to home without an adult, I decided to go straight to the source for some answers. So, I called the the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services’s child and family policy office in […]

Yesterday I read an article about a couple being investigated for child neglect for allowing their 10 and 6 year olds to walk home together from a neighborhood park. The couple defends their decision, saying they’re responsible parents who are teaching their children self-reliance and responsibility. For so many reasons, I side with the parents on […]