A couple of months ago I put a fair bit of research into my awesome list of favorite discipline/parenting books, and in the course of putting it together came up with a few more books to check out.  A couple weren’t so great, but one has totally changed the way I relate to my middle [...]

Marie at Make and Takes posted last week about ways that she encourages independence in her kids.  I’ll admit that I sometimes have to let go of my clean-house-hangups, but I try to give my little ones age-appropriate opportunities to serve themselves rather than continuing to depend on me for, well, everything!  As they’ve gotten [...]

So, after reading all those great books and setting out some good rules with varying levels of success, nothing seemed to work with the very different personalities of my two oldest children (now 6 and 3 1/2) until we stumbled upon the button jar. This is the crux of discipline in our house.

The [...]

Once I filled my head with all these great disciplinary ideas, I realized that I had to set out a concise set of rules for the kids to follow. I sat down a wrote out a (very long) list of things that I thought were particularly important. Here’s a small portion of that [...]

My evening duties are pretty light around the Kiddio house–we eat dinner, I clean the kitchen up while Daddio plays with the little ones, then he gets the two older ones to bed while I take care of the easy one baby. 
Most of the time.
Like a lot of husbands and wives, though, dear Daddio [...]

As a female Developmental Psychologist, I heard and read a lot about the specific socio-emotional and academic needs of girls, how we were being marginalized out of math and the hard sciences, and how our self-esteem was being diminished by a global patriarchy.  Only in the past seven or eight years does it feel like [...]

Luckybeans has a great post today about helping her son deal with routine doctors’ visits following traumatic medical care. Her ideas were really spot on, and I wanted to share this with others who might have the same issues with their children and the doctor (or dentist?). You might click around her blog [...]

I really mean to have a baby book, or a journal, or something to keep track of all the milestones, ticket stubs, and cute things the kids say, but I’m awful at keeping up. I am absolutely notorious for never finishing most things that I start. I’ve tried a baby book and journal [...]