Carrie Kirby of the blog Wise Bread shares some advice on responding to toy recalls with a little more rationality and less panic in How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Recall. The recent rash of toy recalls sucks, absolutely, but with a little knowledge and patience you can minimize your children’s risks […]

One of the trickiest aspects of being a step-ad is that, unless your partner is a widow or has absolutely no contact with her ex-, you are automatically locked in a relationship with her ex. And, given that your partner left him for a reason, chances are he’s a jerk.
I’m lucky enough to have […]

This is pretty cool: Kids Off The Couch offers a weekly newsletter that recommends a good movie to watch with the family along with an “adventure” to go along with the movie. For instance, they pair a viewing of Raiders of the Lost Ark with a trip to a local museum of antiquities. […]

A few months ago, our 11-year old girl came home from spending the weekend at dad’s with a proposal. Her 11-year old step-sister, a competing martial artist who spends a lot of time out of town at competitions, was going to be homeschooled and her step-mother thought she should join them.
Now, there’s some history […]

The Simple Dollar is a personal finance blog, but every Sunday they offer long, in-depth reviews of personal development books. This week, they reviewed The Read-Aloud Handbook, a book about (as you can probably guess) reading loud to your children. It looks like a fantastic book. Listen:
First, and this is the big one, […]

As the step-father of a “tween” girl — and as a professor of Women’s Studies — I’m deeply concerned about the way “girly” expectations are not just imposed on girls but crammed down their throats (or, better yet, not crammed down their throats, because eating is totally outré for girls these days). Andrea Learned, […]

This is such a good idea: family business cards. The idea is simple: have cards printed up with all your family contact information on them — names, address, cell phone numbers and mail addresses, the whole shebang. Then hand them out when you met new people, arrange play dates or sleepovers, or need people to […]

At the end of last year, I became a step-dad. I’m the kind of person that has an intense curiosity about anything new I do. Being a modern, web-savvy kind of guy (read: “geek”) I set out to do some reading up on stepdadding on the Web. Alas, there’s not much out there. […]