Each night after supper, we gather our three toddlers, lace up our sneakers, and walk down to the old railroad tracks. My husband pushes the twins in our double stroller and I push the four-year-old on his tricycle, and we bump along down the path through potholes, puddles, and large rocks. On the way home,…
I’m scrambling up the climbing wall behind my four-year-old. It’s Wednesday morning at 9:47 AM. Two nannies and a clutch of coffee cup cradling moms-with-toddlers are glancing nervously at the middle-aged woman in a skirt giving full battle cry while scaling Mount Etna behind her fearsome warrior. He reaches the top, gives a piercing ululation…
This summer, we dove into Roald Dahl. He accompanied our family across the state of Washington, up mountainsides and deep into green pastures, baking in the smoke-hazed sun. Charlie and Danny and Willy and Mr. Fox were our clever, British-accented companions as our long days danced past on beaches and baseball fields, under fireworks and…
I wasn’t really expecting it. It even seemed a little presumptuous to say that a day would come when I would be parenting my parents. The call came the morning of the 23 rd of April. I jolted awake as the realization dawned that this was no dream. My mom was describing my dad’s symptoms…
When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do? A few years ago, my sister gifted me an old, retold story: The Three Questions by John J. Muth. Based on a tale by Leo Tolstoy, rewritten especially for little ones and featuring a…
We have a wild child. A full-fledged Lost Boy. His name is Lachlan. When he was 2 he was permanently uninvited from being in the church nursery because he figured out how to escape all the child locks and was making weekly Sabbatical pilgrimages to the church parking lot, unnoticed. When he was three he…
This article first appeared in Wild Things and Castles in the Sky, from Square Halo Press. When I was a child, the world seemed infinite. The horizon, which ever recedes no matter how far you chase it, seemed literal: perhaps the world really did go on forever. Omniscience was easy to envision: perhaps my dad…
One day I was mentally wandering through ideas, searching for the next great homeschool project for our kids. Or perhaps I was musing about ways to connect with our neighbors. I guess I don’t remember my exact train of thought, but when I landed on the idea of The Neighborhood News, I knew I was…
A few nights ago, I was on an airplane home from an incredible trip to Colorado Springs. My eyes were glued to the view outside the window as we were literally flying through a sea of clouds, enveloped in light and water, set afire by the sunset at our backs. The entire trip was encounter…
This article first appeared on desiringGod.org. How the Best Stories Point Kids to Christ For the past two years, the realities of life in a pandemic have posed enormous challenges for parents. In the best cases, masks and testing, remote learning and limited childcare have strained family rhythms and routines. In the worst, COVID has claimed…
As a child, I actively avoided sports. A bookish child in an active family, sports and games were an uncomfortable opportunity for embarrassment in the Southern humidity. My parents, though active (think water skiing and dirt bikes), were not particularly sporty, and didn’t sign us up for little league practices or soccer camp. They watched…
So I finally made my sowing schedule. 150 seeds; some indoor, some outdoor. The dates are staggered, dependent on soil temperature, or rainfall. I have the indoor peat pots on the way, and 8 lbs of organic dirt is nestled next to my backdoor, much to my husband’s befuddlement (why are we paying for dirt,…
