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 [...]

Imagine taking a picture of each person in your family once a year in the same pose. Now imagine doing it for 25 years. That’s what Diego Goldberg of Buenos Aires, Argentina, did in an amazing photo essay. It starts in 1976 with Diego and his wife, Susy. In 1977, Nicolás comes into the world. [...]

Some days it’s easy. Other days, well …

So, the eighth-grader who was punished with pretty harsh measures for buying a bag of Skittles from a classmate against school rules has been cleared of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, the reprieve didn’t come soon enough to allow him to attend an honor society dinner he missed as part of the punishment. If you didn’t see the [...]

So, last week I bought Pumpkin her first outfit of the spring: A darling sunflower dress with cute matching shoes and sweater at babyGap. My mom bought her the matching hat and purse. The price of all this cuteness? Let’s just say more than $100. Ah, but it’s her Easter outfit, you see. That’s how [...]

I’m doing a report in time for Earth Day on the cost of going “Green.” I’m hoping to explore the choices consumers make to spend more money on environmentally friendly products even though there are cheaper conventional alternatives. This can include everything from organic milk to CFLs to chlorine-free bathtub cleaner to the Toyota Prius.

As [...]