1 year old Burst Your Bubble Go old-school fun with this classic game. Materials: Bubble solution – lots of it – and bubble wands of all sorts. What to Do: Create a sea of bubbles around your child by blowing …
The Memory of Every Day
This was my first year as a mom of a full-time student. My littlest is still home with me in the mornings, but my oldest daughter, Iris, is a full-fledged, all-day kindergartner and proud of it. As it is our …
Wholeness Within
The normal to-do list is overwhelming. The holiday to-do list makes me wish for hospitalization or incarceration just to escape it. The truth is we all can escape it by cultivating an interior life of wholeness. In my opinion, wholeness …
Four Strategies to Raise Compassionate Kids
In a me-centered, selfie society, how do you raise compassionate, tender-hearted children? Teaching kids to care about others takes thought and effort. Knowing it wouldn’t just happen spontaneously, my husband and I came up with four strategies to help our …
Laborare est Ludere: To Work Is Play
Laborare est Ludere There is a Latin phrase derived from the Benedictine motto that goes “laborare est orare” (to work is to pray), often said simply as work is prayer. As an adult, I can all too easily view the …
How Play Can Grow the Imagination
It was good. This one word describes God’s creation, the original playground for the first kids. It was a good garden. So God’s children were free to eat from every tree in sight, except one. That park was a widely …
Brazen: Pick Pomegranates
What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65 . . . and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life? —Anne Lamott When I was a kid my …
Mommy Doesn’t Want to Play Right Now
Please don’t invite me to your tea party … “Mommy, are you going to come to the birthday party?” “Umm … I have a lot of stuff I have to do right now. Maybe later.” Ever feel like you just …
5 Ways to Encourage Play in Children
They only needed pen and paper in order to get started yesterday. Somehow, making lists turned into drawing pictures of fire, and drawing fire turned into a game of Fire Chief for the next hour. Two little boys ran around …