Modern Parents Messy Kids

The best ideas on how to raise engaged kids, organize your life, and create a stylish home.

Parenting Styles: The Kid Who Doesn’t Eat

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  The other night at dinner – and I don’t need to tell you about all the work that goes into planning, preparing and serving dinner for six, let alone the legwork involved in actually getting all six people to sit down in one spot at the same time – our two-year-old took one look at her bowl of some shredded-chicken-and-quinoa dish and slapped the entire thing onto the bench, where it fell to the floor. Cue… absolute silence. The three older kids were wide-eyed, forks halfway to … [Read more...]

Parenting Styles: Taking a 2-Year-Old on a 9 Hour Road Trip to Disneyland

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  Fun fact – our two oldest kids have the same April birthday. Our son was two weeks early, and two years later, his new little sister was a week early. So far, the dual birthday party thing has worked out, but now they’re ten and eight, and I think that window is coming to a close. So this year, we decided to surprise them with a trip to Disneyland instead of a party. My husband and I were extra secretive about our internet research, ferreting out bargains on three-day hopper passes … [Read more...]

Parenting Styles: When Your Child Just Isn’t Ready for Childcare

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Image Credit: © Presidio of Monterey | Month of Military Child Parade | CC by 1.0   After spring break ended – sob – and three kiddos went off to school today, I tried taking our youngest, three in July, to the playcare thing at our gym. It did not go well. She’s been going on weekends for months now, with all three siblings, and it’s been great. She comes out proudly bearing scribbles and curls of tissue paper haphazardly glued to more tissue paper. She excitedly tells me about … [Read more...]

Parenting Styles: The “Spring Break (Is Over) Blues”

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Is it just me, or is spring break awesome? And not the college kind of spring break, which, if memory serves me here, was fun in an alcohol-specific way. But I’m talking about spring break in my mid-thirties, four kids deep, when two weeks off of school doesn’t even mean a vacation. Instead, it means three things that I’ve come to deeply appreciate: No alarm clocks (except for my husband, and we all feel terrible for him). No making school lunches, and for some reason, this feels … [Read more...]

Parenting Styles: The One about Choking and the Internet

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One of the things that really, truly scares me as a parent is a choking child. Give me bloody knees and elbows and hematomas sprouting from foreheads, even sprains, and fractures. None of that is a party, sure, but it’s all manageable stuff. A kid who’s actually choking is a race against the clock, and it makes me kind of panicky just writing that. I’ve never had been put to this particular test, probably because the powers that be know it’s beyond my abilities. But a few weeks ago, my … [Read more...]

Parenting Styles: When You Have 3 Siblings, You Share Your Parents

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  This morning, our two-year-old woke up crying. She’s a sunny kid most of the time, padding downstairs to beam and greet us all, “Good merning!” However, we’ve been dealing with runny noses and terrible coughs and croup and double ear infections in our house over the last two weeks – horror – and E was the last of the kids to go down. I scooped her up and climbed into my bed with her. She snuggled up and closed her eyes until her big sister slid in to join us. E took immediate, … [Read more...]

Parenting Styles: I’m NOT Teaching My Kid to Have Grit… And It’s Totally Fine

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Our five-year-old locked himself in the bathroom at the neighborhood coffee shop a few months ago, and now we're dealing with the fallout. At the start of the school year, I fell into the habit of a latte and a chat with a few other moms before the 3:30 pm chaos, so we hit this place up regularly. It’s not every single school day, but we’re there enough that the baristas all know me by name and drink order – and my husband has pointed out more than once that an espresso machine would be a lot … [Read more...]

Mom Rant: Stop Calling Your Husband Your Biggest Kid

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I'm so interested to know how you guys feel about Jessica's post today- she certainly has some strong opinions! Do you agree? Not agree? Does the whole thing just make you smirk? Stop by our facebook or instagram pages and let me know... I saw something on Pinterest the other day, one of those e-cards or memes or whatever that had a picture of a goofy guy in his 30s giving a thumbs up and the caption, “Your husband will always be your biggest and oldest child that requires the most … [Read more...]

Parenting Styles: We Took Our Two-Year-Old to the Movies

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Happy New Year guys!  And what better way to start off the year than with a parenting story we can all relate to? I really enjoyed Jessica's tale of trying her hardest to accomplish a family night out at the movies with a 2-year-old... and I could feel her pain. We tried this ourselves recently with the movie Moana and had success for what, I think, might be five critical differences: We didn't pick a movie that lasted for two and a half hours. We picked a very kid-friendly … [Read more...]