Dear Pippi -- I completely missed your birthday month on the blog this year. Not your actual birthday , of course -- for that there was t...

Yesterday morning, a friend texted me following a tour of our assigned middle school. Our oldest kids are slated to go there after next scho...

I don't do Black Friday. Fighting my way through crowded stores filled with frantic bargain hunters does not put me in a holiday spiri...

Last week I took the kids with me to wander around Stone's Education & Toys store -- it's a beautiful, environmentally-friendly...

My nephew Andrew died last week. That's not a sentence I ever expected to write. When I was maybe 13, a boy whose family went to my ...

We don't leave for the beach until Saturday, but I've already started mentally packing. Books, towels, chairs, swimsuit, sun hat, um...

Dear Junius -- Technically it's still your birth month for a couple more hours, so I'm going to just call this a victory. If you...