Friday, January 25, 2013
A Patch blogger's post about not helping her children on the slide is being debated across the country.
A Patch blog from Alameda, Calif., called “Please Don’t Help My Kids” has struck a nerve with readers across the country. Posted in September, the blog has taken off over the past few weeks as it has found a second life through social media sharing. The blog has 124,000 Facebook recommendations and 833 people have tweeted the blog. The blog is an open letter to other parents at the playground. The blogger Kate Bassford Baker’s basic request is for parents to not help her daughters on the slide. She wrote that she wants her daughters to do things and learn things on their own. Learning to walk up the slide’s ladder is the first step to learning new things and overcoming obstacles, she wrote. “Because, as they grow up, the ladders will only…
Saturday, August 11, 2012
A New England mother was asked to cover up while feeding her child at a restaurant this week.
The topic of breastfeeding in public forged into the spotlight in New England this week, after a mother chose to breastfeed her child in a Hillsborough, N.H. restaurant. Protesters gathered outside the Tooky Mills Pub in Hillsborough on Wednesday, after a local mother was asked to cover up while breastfeeding her 10-month-old child, exposing a breast in the restaurant's dining room, according to a report on WCVB.com. The request to cover up, which was followed by customer complaints, resulted in a protest outside the restaurant Wednesday night. Those protestors spoke out in awareness and support of the mother, as well as in support of breastfeeding in public. Where do you stand on this issue? Do you think mothers should be able to …
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
What's missing: two nighttime breathing monitors.
Friends of ours welcomed home a baby boy last week. Every day, they post his photos on their Facebook page. His sweet face pokes out of swaddling wrapped tight as a Tootsie Roll. His eyes are closed in most of the pictures taken the day he was born. It's nearly 17 years since we brought home our baby daughter. How well I remember the intensity of her sleep. When she was very new her Rip Van Winkle slumber was a little scary. Through the haze of my boomeranging hormones and sleeplessness, I paid attention to every sniffle, whimper, and yawn. Sometimes, I would place a finger under our daughter's tiny nostrils to feel her baby soft exhalations. Once I put a hand mirror to her nose and inspected the circles of condensation confirming the …
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
There are no correct answers where parenting is concerned.
Every year around this time, we ask the same question, incredulous that we are growing older as our children are growing up. "Where did the school year go?" We shake our heads and grope for an answer, knowing that we have none. Test jitters and nights of cramming blur into a collage of school memories. Our children, more buoyant than we, leap into the lazy days of summer with a lighter step and an airy mind. Gone are the restrictions of assigned seating and tests with true or false answers. Our kids can occupy their days with barefoot walks on sun warmed grass, dips in the cool surf, sandcastle building, the camaraderie of camp friends, the excitement of their first jobs, and books read for pleasure. Teachers tally up test scores …
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Handwritten note and the story behind it inspire her.
Somewhere in my attic, held together by flabby rubber bands and stored in broken-down shoe boxes, reside the letters of my youth. They tell the story of my family's visit to relatives in California through the letters that crossed the country between me and my best friend back home when we were in the sixth grade. There are letters from old beaus, whose names are as faint in my memory as the ink on the paper. There are the notes written in my Aunt Dotty's Palmer Method script that she sent along with checks to mark all the major events of my life. My Aunt Dotty is gone, but her generous spirit and her letters live on. I was reminded about my storehouse of paper correspondence when I read about a project inviting people all over the world …
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Now, it's Happ-'e' 2012.
The scanty number of cards filling our mailbox this holiday season caused me to question our family's popularity. "No one likes us anymore," I said half joking to my husband. Sorting through the stack of envelopes in my hand, I opened the one holiday card we received that day. Could it be that our once-a-year friends from our past jobs and past lives stopped sending cards for reasons that have nothing to do with their attachment to us? After all, we didn't send them cards this year either. Are we part of a trend? The Opinion Research Corporation polled more than 1,000 U.S. consumers and found that although 83 percent liked the idea of sending holiday cards, one in four did not plan to send them in 2011. Why? People cited lack of time, the …
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
The Sharon Patch Moms Council discusses this issue. Join the discussion.
- LOCAL CONNECTIONS
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Moms Talk is a feature on Sharon Patch that is part of a new initiative on our Patch sites to reach out to moms and families. Sharon Patch invites you and your circle of friends to help build a community of support for mothers and their families right here in Sharon Patch. Each week in Moms Talk, our Moms Council of experts and smart moms take your questions, give advice and share solutions. Moms, dads, grandparents and the diverse families who make up our community will have a new resource for questions about local neighborhood schools, the best pediatricians, 24-hour pharmacies and the thousands of other issues that arise while raising children. Moms Talk will also be the place to drop in for a talk about the latest parenting hot topic. …
That first lesson was in the rain, on the road.
On the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, I took my daughter out for her first driving lesson. From now on, this day of national remembrance will also remind me of a landmark event in our family history. It was the day I taught my daughter how to put her foot to the gas pedal and go forward without destroying anything in her path. When I slid into the passenger seat and saw my teenaged daughter behind the wheel, I shut out visions of bashed bumpers ad fractured fenders. "Put the key in the ignition and turn it," I instructed her." Good, now do it again," I said. This was my teaching strategy. Three is a charm. Three is a lucky number in our family. Three is the number of times I had her perform each new automotive maneuver …
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Columnist thanks her readers for a year of support.
It is traditional to conduct a New Year's review on Jan. 1, in the season of the blackest nights and the whitest days of winter. I think the multi-colored fall is a more suitable season to harvest our accomplishments and look to our future. When dark nippy mornings lighten to crisp bright afternoons, the possibility of transformation is in the air. Last fall heralded two big changes in my life: both professional, but in two very different professions. On Oct. 16, I started a job as an occupational therapist at the Wrentham Developmental Center working with physically and intellectually impaired adults. Two days later, on Oct. 18, Sharon Patch published my first "This, That and The Other Thing" column. Frankly, I was more concerned about …
GreenMom
5:05 pm on Monday, January 28, 2013
Agreed more ›