Well, once again I am a tragic victim of revealing TMI – too much information. At a friend's dinner party the other night, in the midst of a fairly intense conversation about my hosts' relationships with their parents, I stepped in with not just one major personal story dump, but two. And while my hosts knew both my stories, the other guests did not. No one seemed overly uncomfortable, no one seemed offended. In fact, one of the guests was genuinely empathetic and incredibly sweet in her… Continue

It's happened again. I am getting ready to attend another pot luck event, and I have once again resorted to brownies by Betty Crocker as my contribution.



Not that they're not delicious – they are. And they are always a hit with kids and adults alike. In fact, I long ago gave up the misperception that brownies from scratch are better. While most baked goods are best made from scratch, brownies are the exception to the rule. Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, or if I'm feeling magnanimous,… Continue

I have a dog eared "Baby Blues" comic strip pasted to my refrigerator that has been offending my kids as long as they have been able to read. In the first panel, the mother is dancing giddily around the room. In the second panel, she continues to dance, looking beatifically at the ceiling and completely ignoring her children.



In the third panel, the older daughter says, flatly, "I hate Mom's annual back-to-school dance."



The son replies: "I hope she pulls a… Continue

A provocative (electronic) conversation sprang up on one of my list-serves recently. A parent of a teenage boy wondered aloud in a long and worried email how those of us who have teens with phones were handling the texting question.



She had not allowed her son to get a phone until his first year of high school, wanting to wait until she thought he was mature enough to self-regulate when it came to texting. In the first three weeks of having his phone, she discovered that he had sent… Continue