People very often say to me, “I don’t know how you do it with so many kids at home.” Sometimes I don’t know how I do it either. It’s often a shakedown cruise here at my house. But sometimes, we are a (sort of) well-oiled machine. And it’s for one reason: our kids have responsibilities […]
Life at My House
12 Things I Do To Stick To a Modest Food Budget For a Family of Eight
Today a friend of mine tagged me in this question she posted on Facebook: Friends with large families — how do you stick to a reasonable food budget? Ooooh. I love a question about a food budget. And it’s certainly one of the questions I’m asked or comments I hear most often. How much money do […]
The Best Laid Plans
One of the biggest challenges of parenting (for me, anyway) is having a plan for the day and knowing that it’s all going to run like clockwork. And then having reality set in. That’s when you wonder why ever you plan anything at all. Last week I had scheduled my first business call with the woman […]
The Little Bear
For the first time in the history of, um… ever, I have all my Christmas shopping done. And all of my presents are wrapped. It’s a Christmas miracle. Of course, that means that one of the kids was going to add something onto their Christmas list, something that they wanted MORE. THAN. ANYTHING. Number 4, […]
Last night we made a pretty great memory.
A little over an hour from my house in Essex, CT, there’s an historic railroad company where you can ride on old school steam trains. And at Christmas time, they transform their trains into the “Polar Express”, and you can ride a vintage car to the North Pole. For the last four years, I have very […]
The Hardest Part of Parenting
You know what the hardest part of being a parent is? It’s not getting through those first couple months after the baby is born. It’s not colic. It’s not the teething stage. It’s not the breastfeeding. It’s not sleep training or potty training. It’s not the terrible twos or the trying threes or the fucking […]