Without making any general announcement, my partner decided to put a couple of presents aside as “Christmas Eve” presents. Given the thorough inspection that every package put out for Christmas gets from the kids, of course it only took them .04 microseconds to realize that a couple of packages were marked “Christmas Eve Present”, and […]

The Simple Dollar is the only finance-related website I read on any sort of regular basis, mostly because of posts like this one: A Talk With My Niece. The author, Trent, is thinking about things he wants to say to a 15-year old niece of his, someone he sees struggling to put together a future […]

With the kids finally off quarantine (only one got sick, but the other two were excluded from school just in case) we can get back to the business of daily life, which this time of year means Christmas. Which means shopping.
We don’t give the kids much of an allowance, and usually they haven’t worried too […]

Things have been pretty hectic around here, what with the kids all home, the end of the semester looming (I’ve been grading like mad for weeks now!), new duties at lifehack.org (I’m managing the promotion and community activities now, as well as editing contributions and writing my own posts three times a week), and a […]

The hits keep on rolling at our house. I wrote before about my partner coming down with mumps — a form not indigenous to the US and not included in our immunizations — and while she was never officially quarantined, she’s been out of work for three weeks (so far). Of course, she’s […]

Readers of StepDadding might be interested in a post I wrote for lifehack.org as a kind of remedy for the rampant consumerism of “Black Friday”: Teaching Kids Charity and Clarity with Pre-Christmas Cleaning. The idea is one I got from my brother and sister-in-law (and they got it from who-knows-where) — go through your kids’ […]

Lisa Hendey of Productivity @ Home suggests several ways to encourage thankfulness in children. At the top of the list is “pray together”, and we’re not a praying family at all, but the rest of the tips are good, especialy the fourth, “Remember to thank your children”:
Next time your child brings home a test that […]

Parent Hacks describes a situation perilously close to what we deal with here:
Both my kids are notoriously tight-lipped about what happens at school. The general answer to “what did you do?” is nothing, and “what was your favorite activity today?” is I don’t remember.
A few weeks ago, I turned to my step-daughter at the […]

Well, not yet, but on the table. Here’s the story:
My partner works for the division of the health department that monitors and reports infectious outbreaks. Last month, she was sent our to gather samples from several neighboring families of Ethiopian refugees, some of whom had mumps. Since this kind of exposure is part of […]

About 10 weeks ago now, my two oldest stepkids’ (12-year old boy and 11-year old girl) dad dropped a bomb on them (and us). During their bi-weekly weekend stay-over at his house, he sat them down and told them that him and their stepmother were going to go to a lawyer and file to terminate […]