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    How To Be Wrong

    This morning one of my daughters was wrong. Shocking, I know, but it happens from time to time. Our girls have been learning some simple ASL (American Sign Language) through YouTube videos. Our four-year-old, Maeve, who can sing her ABCs but not identify most of the letters yet, has made it from A to C…

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    Roosevelt on Parenting

    From Morris’s Roosevelt biography, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, came this quote: …the highest idea of the family is attainable only where the father and mother stand to each other as lovers and friends. In these homes the children are bound to the father and mother by ties of love, respect, and obedience, which are…

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    Role Play

    We’re outside in a queue, my family and I, about twenty people ahead of us, along an ancient rod-iron fence protecting one of those perfectly manicured Disneyland garden beds. Behind us come the occasional screams from the Matterhorn, a perfunctory sound that’s been added to my memory after the fact, like a laugh track on…

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    Charlotte’s Web

    Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into fall- the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change. In the course of one year, new spring to dying winter, Charlotte’s Web explores the feelings that come with facing our own mortality. I’ve been reading it…

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    Camera Carousel

    I stood next to my daughters as they rode in circles on a carousel. It was the ultimate forced move into helicopter parenting- I’m required to stand there in case my two year old gets thrown from a plaster panda bear, even though she’s four feet off the ground, affixed with a massive leather strap,…