Last week my 3-year-old fell off the swing and face-planted on the ground. She laid there for a second, and I got down next to her. She wasn’t crying, so I said, “What do you see?” “My necklace,” she replied, and she got rather interested in checking out its detail. “Interesting blades of grass there, too,” […]
It’s the worst feeling: your kid hits another kid (or bites or embeds fingernails in or otherwise mauls another kid) during a play date. You make sure the other kid is OK, and now you turn to yours. The pressure’s on: the kid’s parent is looking at you, or pretending not to look at you. You […]
Does grandma get to see your baby regularly? Grandmothers who take care of their grandchildren once a week, a small study showed, may be at lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Why? Consider a story in Atul Gawande’s excellent book Being Mortal. He tells of seniors shuffling the halls in a nursing home, looking lifeless–until an idealistic director breaks the rules and brings […]
Have you ever felt like you’re talking and talking, saying the same thing over and over, and just being flat-out ignored? This happened to me recently. My daughter’s shorts got muddy (we were camping), and I’d encouraged her to wash them in the water spigot (an object of immense fascination). As she began, I could tell she needed to […]