Apr 8 2013
By Alexis Kort at 2:09 pm
Have you, like me, gone down the slide, like a million times, with your toddler on your lap?
Perhaps you vaguely recall reading something or maybe actually learning in a parenting class that there is a high injury rate, especially for broken legs for the kid on the lap, when you go down together. Perhaps like me, you throw caution to the wind, because it’s so much fun to go down the slide with your toddler, to count down one – two – three and weeeeeeee down the slide, just so you can hear them say “Again! Again!” and do the hand-sign for more and climb up and do it again. And probably like me you thought: my baby will never break her leg going down the slide on my lap.
Well, it happened to me. Or more significantly it happened to my 18-month-old who is now in a cast for four to six weeks with a fractured tibia. Read the rest of this entry →
Feb 4 2013
By Renee Septimus at 1:08 pm
Ronnie’s post last week about accidents sure brought back memories!
We’ve all been where she was (or we will be)–speechless with terror that, because we weren’t watching for that half a second, or that we didn’t react quickly enough, our child was hurt. But, believe me, the child will recover a lot faster than we will as we struggle to forgive ourselves. Read the rest of this entry →
Jan 31 2013
By Ronnie Koenig at 12:24 pm
“Tonight I failed my baby daughter.”
This was my status update on the night of November 7, 2012. I was sitting on my couch, feeling like the Worst Parent in the World. My 1-year-old twins were sleeping peacefully in the nursery. My husband had gone to bed, too, but I was wide awake, replaying the incident over and over in my head, trying to figure out how I had allowed myself to commit this lapse of good judgment. I normally reserved Facebook updates for cute pictures of my son and daughter, or of the Food Network recipes I was so proud of myself for successfully replicating, but tonight was different. It was a plea: Let me know I’m not the only one. Read the rest of this entry →
Nov 12 2012
By Stephanie Kanowitz at 9:56 am
Three weeks after Jared was born, he started spitting up. At first it was normal baby barf, but it became heavier and more frequent.
By his 4-week birthday, Scott and I were living out of the washing machine. We left it full of soap and water, dumping soiled onesies, footies, burp cloths, bibs, and our own vomit-soaked clothes into it throughout the day. We ran the washer at night and as we needed new clothes for ourselves or our son, we pulled them out of the dryer. At the height of the worst, Scott changed Jared’s clothes five times in one hour. The footies were soaked from head to toe and front to back. Read the rest of this entry →
Oct 29 2012
By Jordana Horn at 12:05 pm
“There’s something wrong with the baby.”
Those are the words you never want to hear about your 3-day old daughter. You certainly don’t want to hear them at 3 a.m. It was barely 12 hours since we had brought our baby girl home from the hospital for the first time. I sat up in bed, squinting at the baby nurse holding my newest little girl. The hall light shone behind her, blinding me as I wondered if she had really said what I thought she had said, or if this was some sort of bad dream. Read the rest of this entry →
Aug 21 2012
By Melissa Langsam Braunstein at 12:53 pm
My baby's on the move.
My first boss in Washington was like an honorary big brother. In between directing our little staff about housing policy matters, he offered life lessons. “When you have a kid,” he assured me, “you’ll be ready to hurl yourself in front of a moving car just to make sure it doesn’t hit them.” I guffawed. Throw myself in front of a moving car? That sounded dangerous (and crazy).
And yet, he was right. He had the benefit of already being a parent and knowing about danger and fear from the other side. Read the rest of this entry →
Mar 28 2012
By Alina Adams at 10:23 am
Even now, I can't handle a messy room like this.
When I was growing up, any item of mine not put away in its place was, more likely than not, tossed out the window by my mother. At the time, my parents and I were living within an 18-square-meter room (“A very good size by USSR standards,” my father assures me. “Usually it was 4 meters per person.”) in a 1970s Soviet communal apartment (i.e. a single family dwelling crammed with as many people as the government felt like cramming there, with a shared bathroom and kitchen). There wasn’t exactly a lot of space for clutter.
As a result, this was how I learned to clean. Something not in its proper place? Out it goes.
My husband, on the other hand, likes his stuff. He likes his stuff a lot. His love for his stuff extends to a transitive love for all stuff, especially our kids’ stuff. Read the rest of this entry →
