It’s been two years since we started the Parents’ Place blog here at LoHud.com. During these two years, we’ve written 524 posts on everything from breastfeeding to divorce to toy guns. The readers of this blog have been even busier — posting 1,817 comments!

Here’s a link to my first post, where I introduce Pumpkin and [...]

What are you Parents’ Place readers doing this summer? Vote in our poll in the right column of the page to share your plans.

We’re heading to Sesame Place next week in what Pumpkin is already expecting will be the time of her life. We’ve been looking at the brochure and she keeps touching the picture [...]

Raffi, the Canadian artist whose music has been beloved by parents and children since the 1970s, was the No. 1 vote-getter in our poll on children’s musicians. Raffi received 12 out of 45 votes, or 27 percent. Some people might think of Raffi as strictly an artist who appeals to the toddler and preschool set, [...]

I vote sink. While few of us are probably fond of dusting, vacuuming or cleaning up the kitchen crud, I infinitely prefer working around the house to taking a trip to the dentist. But, apparently, not everyone agrees. A new poll from iVillage’s Momtourage site found that more than one in four people (27 percent!) [...]

And no, I don’t mean supernaturally with the aid of a spiritual medium. I mean in thoughts, whether recorded in pen and ink, an audio or video recording or in a final e-mail message.

This is a question every parent needs to think about, whether we are hale and hearty or fresh from a disturbing biopsy. [...]

Who knew that by making Pumpkin a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I’m not just feeding her a protein-packed lunch but helping the planet?

That’s the message of the PB&J Campaign, which exhorts the environmentally minded among us to pass up the chicken salad: “You recycle. You choose organic. You conserve energy. Now take at-home [...]

What is up with these backpacks that are so heavy that kids are being weighed down like mountaineers? At the risk of sounding like someone who should be leaning on a walker and eating dinner at 4 p.m., I’d like to point out that when I was a kid, we didn’t even carry backpacks! Somehow [...]

What is your family’s unique way of celebrating the Fourth of July? For us, it’s a special day in more ways than one. Three years ago tomorrow, we brought Pumpkin home from the hospital — nine weeks to the day after she was born. So for us, it’s not just our nation’s independence we’re celebrating, [...]

Like most kids, Pumpkin is far from immune to the joys of ice cream. This has always been fine with me. She doesn’t drink enough milk to begin with, and we’ve always tried to find ways to get extra healthy calories in her slender body. But this year, she has discovered the pleasure of a [...]

Sunday night, my husband and I spent about four hours at the emergency room of Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco to rule out appendicitis as the cause of the severe abdominal pains he had been experiencing. (He’s OK. Just sick.) We were there from about 9:45 p.m. until about 2 a.m., thankfully without the [...]

Here’s a milestone: Pumpkin just discovered the suffix. Now, instead of saying something is “big, big,” to add emphasis, she can now say that it’s bigg-er. Other things are long-er. She feels happi-er. It’s a neat feat to witness. And a bit of a “told you so” to a pediatrician who scoffed that a couple [...]

What if you can’t stand your child’s pediatrician?

I remember the moment my long-simmering (but still mild) dislike of my daughter’s pediatrician boiled over into actual antipathy. We were discussing Pumpkin’s milestones at her third birthday checkup when the doctor asked if she moved into a bed yet. I said no, and added that Pumpkin loves [...]

As the mom of a daughter, I just had to take a moment to share a wonderful and pithy article I read on how pop culture sometimes ignores the potential for female heroes. NPR’s Peter Sagal, the host of the popular program “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” explains how in a great commentary. He went [...]

Readers of this blog won’t be seeing my posts for a few weeks because I’m taking some family leave to care for my mom, who is recovering from surgery. We hope all will go very well — but this experience puts me for the first time in what’s being called the “sandwich generation.” There’s even [...]

This is a belated post about Easter. We’ve had a busy week in our family. My mom went into the hospital in New York on Wednesday for surgery and I’ve been down there every day. But I wanted to put my thoughts out here on Easter and our traditions because this year they were tested [...]