parenting

There wasn’t going to be any sparkle. There wasn’t going to be any new mommy magic.

Most of my friends have kids who are much younger than mine. We often share our parenting woes and victories, and I am always talking about the light at the end of the all-consuming-toddler-stage tunnel. There are things that were challenging, daunting, or slightly dreaded in my mind when my kids were toddlers. Now, these are wonderful cherished times with my teens:

Being a single dad can be tough. So why wouldn’t we want a little help? Why would we avoid new relationships? It’s not so simple. To a single dad, a relationship is a scary proposition.

You know how awful stress makes you feel…but seeing stress on your child’s face or hearing it in his or her voice? That feels even worse!

Somewhere between the birth of my first child and the first time my youngest hurt himself and I told him to “walk it off,” I lost much of my mom guilt. It helps that a very good friend of mine, who'd already raised her children years before, shared some of her own hard-earned wisdom with me.

Science has finally confirmed what moms have been saying forever –– that newborn baby smell is intoxicating.

“We are all starting for a place of complete and utter crazy love for our kids. If we can start there, when differences come up, hopefully we can approach people that are doing things in a totally different way from us in a inclusive, loving and non-judgmental way,” Stewart-Douglas says.

What I’ve learned about kids (after having five — no, really, it's taken that long) is that some of what they are is how you raise them, and some of what they are is what is born in them. And some of it you think you can control, but that’s a dirty lie.