Something unexpected happened to me Saturday night at the grocery store. No, I didn’t get into a dust-up over a parking space. This was actually a pleasant surprise: Someone complimented me on my parenting skills. I’m not telling this story to brag; rather I’m sharing it because most parents probably feel that we are more likely to attract negative attention while grocery shopping with two kids than we are to draw praise. Here’s how it went down. I was walking in the last aisle of Wegmans with Isaac in the cart (Lucy and her dad were off in search of one of those coloring books that come with…

I’m going to admit right up front that I didn’t read this 12,000-word piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic because I work 40 hours a week and have two kids, so I just don’t have that kind of time. And if I stumble into some free time to read before I fall asleep tonight, I’m going to pick up “A Storm of Swords,” the third book in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series because I mostly read for escape, and Slaughter’s piece is certainly a whopping dose of reality. She writes about how the feminist movement has set us all up to fail, unless you are …

If a strange woman with glasses walks up to you in the greater Cockeysville-Hunt Valley corridor and shouts “HI-yuh!” or departs your company by hollering and waving “buh-BYE!” chances are that strange woman was me. My 2-year-old son Isaac is waging a one-boy charm offensive these days, and I’m finding it rather infectious. Just as he was slow to start walking, the little man has been slow to start talking. But as he picks up more words and phrases, he is gleefully holding fast to his old standbys and always, always bellows his cheery versions of hello and goodbye. If you had seen and heard …

She looked across the dinner table at me through juicy crocodile teardrops, moaning her new catchphrase without ever breaking eye contact: “I don’t like the spice, mommy, I don’t like the spice!” “The Spice” referred to the flecks of pepper and salt on the grilled edge of the pork tenderloin I cooked for dinner – for all of us, one meal, not the two or even three variations on dinner I usually serve to feed two adults and two kids under 5. Though it wasn’t a hot dog, or “grandpa ham” (what she calls brown sugar ham from Wegmans because she once ate deli ham with her grandfather) or a bagel …

Our region’s newest resident, a wandering young male black bear, has me thinking back to one of my favorite summer memories: Watching black bears eat garbage at a dump in the Adirondack Mountains. We’d go there to a small town called Inlet as a family every August for a week or two, renting a cabin on Limekiln Lake from a guy my dad worked with, and those were some of the best days I can remember from my childhood. It was like the rest of the year just paled by comparison. I loved everything about it, how the power always went out at least once, how sand always followed us into the cabin, …

I could really use a clone right about now. The problem du jour with the kids is sibling rivalry. It’s popping up here and there, whackamole style, for us parents to swiftly descend upon and bop into oblivion. As in, “Isaac took my toy!” Bop. Wailing cries from Isaac when Lucy yanks back said toy. Bop-bop. But sometimes one particular strain of this competitive streaks tugs at my guilty heartstrings in a way that I wish I could really solve the problem rather than bopping it away. Sometimes I am the prize to be won and hoarded, because apparently there isn’t enough of me to go around. This …

I’m drinking Juicy Juice fruit punch over crushed ice as I sit down to write this column about the war on fruit juice. I spotted this story about how fruit juice is the next campaign in the battle against obesity among American children, and it made me both cringe with guilt and roll my eyes. The guilty cringing comes from buying two jugs of Juicy Juice each week, primarily for our 2-year-old son; our 4-year-old daughter has transitioned out of her juice phase and into her junk food phase. The eye roll comes from the fact that this is just another story about yet another way we parents are …

Under duress, yet in the safety of his mother’s arms, Isaac, now 2, uttered his first complete sentence on Memorial Day: “I doe wanna do diss!” This milestone subject and predicate were book-ended by emphatic strings of “No no no no no no no!” The thing he so desperately didn’t want to do was float around in the big pool at the Padonia Park Club while we held onto each other. I’ve ordered a swim tube for him that has yet to arrive, and until it does, we’ll spend our weekends clinging to each other like koalas while he blats his displeasure in my ear. Despite his protestations, I let him …

Scanning through my Twitter feed on Sunday afternoon, I spotted a retweet of a story by the CBS News’ Sunday Morning show. The tweet called out to me about “A rare island of serenity, thanks to the FCC: 13,000 sq. miles where cell phones and WiFi are banned.” The story went on to tell me about a town in West Virginia where cell phones are banned in the “National Radio Quiet Zone,” where radio and Wi-Fi frequencies emitted by things like iPhones and Blackberries and Androids would interfere with sensitive government equipment trying to pick up on noises coming from space. As a happy …

Rather than let Lucy and Isaac park it in front of the TV for a few Disney Jr. offerings while I cook dinner, I’ve been taking the kids for a short walk with the dog as soon as we get home in the evening on weeknights. Due to Ike’s need to shout “Door!” at every turn and to stomp on every water meter manhole cover in the sidewalk, it takes us 20 minutes or more to cover two small courts of townhouses. It’s not very aerobic, unless you’re 2 and you have really short legs, which Ike does. But for me, it’s definitely an exercise of sorts in letting my children have a very limited taste of …

It’s incumbent upon a mom blogger like myself to write something pegged to Mother’s Day. It should be easy to compose, the bread and butter of the trade, an annual slam-dunk kind of thing. And yet I’m doing some head-scratching to come up with an idea this year. So, as someone who fancies herself able to make lemons out of lemonade, I decided to think on why I don’t have much to say on the topic and then write about that. After mulling it over for a while, it has come down to this: I don’t have much to say about Mother’s Day because I don’t get especially jazzed about the idea that one day is…

It’s that time of year when at least once a week, we get a knock at the door at dinnertime. Yes, it’s solicitor season, when everyone from the big utility companies to local contractors sends their sales teams door-to-door to try to drum up business. I’m here to tell you, on behalf of all people with little kids (and probably many who don’t have children) that such sales bombing techniques are not welcome and are not working. Anyone who sends someone with a clipboard to my door when I’m trying to feed or bathe or tuck in two children isn’t going to get my business, and if I’m already using …

Normally I hate wearing nametags of any kind. But I found myself oddly excited to wake up and put a badge on a stretchy string around my neck for two and a half days when I attended an out-of-town conference last week. With the exception of one overnight stay with my husband more than a year ago, it was the first time I had been away from both kids at the same time. And it was the first time I had been “alone,” out in the world totally on my own, in more than four years. I have to say, it was pretty exciting. Aside from the fact that the conference gave me a chance to hang out with other …

My children are many years away from starting their college days. My oldest won’t even start kindergarten until fall 2013, so the latest debate in Congress about student loan interest rates doesn’t affect me as a parent. But it’s sure to have an impact on many Cockeysville parents and young adults. According to a story in the Washington Post, seven million borrowers could see the interest rate on their federally subsidized Stafford loans double to 6.8 percent in July, if legislation enacted in 2007 is allowed to expire. The story in the Post also says that the Obama administration is urging …

Among the handful of parenting columnists and mom bloggers I read, one of my favorites is Linda Sharps, who writes several times a week for The Stir and maintains her own personal blog. I’ve been reading her posts since I became a mom myself a few years ago, and they always make me feel like I’m reading dispatches from a friend who is also in the trenches of motherhood, trying to reconcile how you can love your kids so much while simultaneously feeling frustrated by the challenges of raising them and working for a living and trying to maintain a sense of who you were before becoming a parent…

We should have seen this coming when those strange digital construction signs started popping up along the Jones Falls Expressway a few weeks ago. “Don’t tailgate!” they admonished. “Buckle your seatbelt!” they scolded. I think one of them even reminded us of the 40 miles per hour speed limit during rush hour, which is funny because I don’t think anyone could break the speed limit during most commutes to and from downtown these days. When the announcement was made earlier this month that the city would be closing down one lane in each direction of the highway near the 29th Street exit, …

With Easter Sunday just a few days away, egg hunts are popping up all over town. But one Colorado town cancelled its traditional hunt this year after last year’s event was ruined by a pack of overzealous parents. I’m sure the good people of Colorado Springs were collectively blushing last week when the Associated Press put this story out on the wire, telling the world that hundreds of children there wouldn’t get to pursue their rite of spring because of “the behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park last year, determined that their kids get an egg.” The version of the …

This one goes out to the four people who recently made me cry in the Wegmans parking lot. My story is a reminder that sometimes people genuinely make mistakes and that the rotten things you say to them can make them feel like dirt for no reason at all. While my four fellow shoppers probably went home delighted to tell their story of how they really told off the stupid woman (that would be me) who “stole” someone’s parking space at Wegmans on a hectic Sunday afternoon, I drove home sobbing. Here’s what happened: Like many other shoppers on the Sunday before Easter, I spent 40 minutes driving …

Three parenting stories of the same stripe caught my eye in the past week. Like so many stories aimed at parents, all three of these articles plucked the mom-you-should-worry-about-this-either-retroactively-or-proactively nerve. First up was a story I spotted at the New York Times’ Well blog, “Stairs at Home Remain a Childhood Hazard.” It cited a new study in the medical journal Pediatrics, summarizing that “from 1999 to 2008, an estimated 932,000 children under the age of 5 — or nearly 100,000 children each year — were taken to hospitals for injuries they sustained on a staircase, usually at…

After a couple of springs spent hemming and hawing about whether to join a community supported agriculture program, where local farmers sell their produce directly to consumers when it’s ripe and ready, I finally decided to go for it. Last week, I signed up a half-share – four farm-fresh items of my choice each week, early June through mid-November – from One Straw Farm in White Hall. I had hesitated in the past because I didn’t want any of the goods to go to waste: My two kids shun vegetables of any kind (with the exception being the carrots in a can of chicken soup), and I’ve always been …