Category: family

  • What Parenting, Teaching, and Purring Cats Taught Me This Week about Reframing

    College students, it turns out, are not all that different from babies. They sleep. They eat. They play. Seeing my kids fall into that pattern over their semester break reminded me of early TwinLife, before things got activity-busy. My kids’ lives were organized around very basic needs; my husband and I had to adjust to…

  • Skiers for Life

    When my husband was about 6 years old, his parents purchased a small vacation home on a lake in Vermont. Because my mother-in-law won a motor boat by getting the secret square on Hollywood Squares (that’s a fun story!), my husband started water skiing when he was young. More importantly, because the house was just…

  • Doing All the Things–But Mostly Work

    When I work alone, it takes two hours to deconstruct my house of Christmas decorations. This is always how I spend my time on New Year’s Day. It was not how I spent the bulk of my time last week, however. Though most people assume that professors get lots of time off–summer, fall, winter, and…

  • A Different Kind of Christmas

    This was a different kind of Christmas. Something had fundamentally shifted. It wasn’t just that we changed the traditions, though that’s where the story starts. For as long as my kids have been alive, Christmas has happened at our house. My brother usually comes back to the East Coast, and because he’s home—and because I…