“The Kiddy Pool” Articles

“Discipline is really another word for self control, for choosing a path and sticking to it”

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.

Fear and joy and parenting, for bears and people.

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.

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.

Thankfulness, like the Spirit itself and a good education, changes our perspective and moves us outside of ourselves, in uncomfortable, nonlinear ways.

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.

We might find a yard scattered with candy-filled eggs and we might find an empty tomb. Neither one can fill us or satisfy us like the Resurrected Christ

At birthday parties, kids want to binge on fun and the parents want to binge on memory.

The decision-making process of enrolling my daughter in dance class reflected the tension of choosing and letting go.

Our stuffed animals see us and cuddle us at our most vulnerable, and never complain as we lose our hair or our original shape or the full functioning of our limbs.

When my husband chafes at the line “These things are fun, and fun is good” in Dr. Seuss’ One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, I get it—because neither one of us sees fun as something we ought to be striving for.

Parenting: “I just let it happen, because I’ve got to do the dishes at some point.”

The Olympics and the Church.

“Every relationship with an addict follows the same patterns of peripheral powerlessness.”