Patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to parenting.

My most recent journey into impatience came last night as my 2-year-old daughter twirled and sang her way into the wee hours of the night.

I had been trying to put her to sleep for three hours, and it just wasn’t working. Given the fact that she had experienced a transatlantic flight, and we arrived in Israel a few hours before (and that she was excited about being in a new place, and sharing a room with her older brother and being out of a crib, and and…) I had to cut her a little slack. But my ability to empathize and (what seemed like) the Herculean task of mustering the patience I needed had grown thin. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: bedtime, Israel, patience, sleep, Travel

I’ve been thinking about the kind of mother I want to be since the moment I found out I was pregnant for the first time. Several possibilities usually come to mind: patient, happy, loving, empathic, and engaged (but not too much). These are all wonderful, and sometimes I do pretty well, while other times I miss the mark. But I’ve often felt like my list wasn’t complete, that some quality of parenting isn’t quite captured in my aspirational adjectives. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: parenting style, patience