The Kiddy Pool: Where the Heart Is
“To love is to trust someone else with one’s heart, and that is quite a burden for a child to bear.”
The Kiddy Pool: It’s My Party
Learning hospitality and gratitude at a party.
The Kiddy Pool: Remembering September 11
“We define ourselves and our cultures by what we choose to remember”
The Kiddy Pool: Growing Up Duggar
“What happens to children when the advice passed from one generation to the next bears the curse of sin instead of the gift of salvation?”
The Kiddy Pool: In Pursuit of Perfection
“I cannot be flawless or produce children without flaw”
The Kiddy Pool: Feeling and Memory in The Giver
“The beauty of the book is that we, like the characters, grapple with the hazy divide between utopia and dystopia.”
The Kiddy Pool: It’s the Small Things
“Discipline is really another word for self control, for choosing a path and sticking to it”
In Defense of YA: The Pleasure and Value in Young Adult Literature Rightly Read
Reading YA literature is not a matter of abandoning maturity and wisdom but of reflecting on how time can change readers as people.
The Kiddy Pool: Class Consciousness and the Baby Shower
The Kiddy Pool: My Grandfather’s House
“The loss of my grandfather aches within me, and it stings all the more because the line feels broken now.”
The Kiddy Pool: A Perspective on Parentology
Dalton Conley’s Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask does not fulfill the promise of its subtitle; instead, his tongue-in-cheek memoir demonstrates how exhausting, exhilarating, and impossible it is to avoid a trial-and-error approach to rearing our young.
The Kiddy Pool: Disneynature’s Bears
Fear and joy and parenting, for bears and people.
The Kiddy Pool: Streamlining Care Work with “Take Them A Meal”
Even if it’s not comfort food per se, food is a way of offering people comfort, of taking care of those we love by relieving the stress and burden of meal preparations.
The Kiddy Pool: The Case of the Prodigal Pegasus
I felt saddened by her sadness at losing Butterfly and happy for her happiness in rediscovering the pony at last. I care about her, I explained, so I care about what she cares about.
The Kiddy Pool: A Thank-You Note at the End of the Semester
Thankfulness, like the Spirit itself and a good education, changes our perspective and moves us outside of ourselves, in uncomfortable, nonlinear ways.
The Kiddy Pool: The First Sleepover
I didn’t expect my child’s first sleepover to be such a major milestone, but it felt as significant as that first time sleeping through the night.
