• Things That Make Us Nuts Archive

    TGIF! With the first week of school under our belts, the weekend can’t come soon enough. After figuring out how to make umpteen binders fit in one backpack without busting the seams, working out the kinks in an illogical bus route and filling out all that bloody paperwork, I’m ready to head back to the beach and pretend that it’s still summer vacation! No one ever said navigating the long and winding road of parenthood would be easy, but wouldn’t it be nice if you had some sort of road map to get you over some of those bumps all the way? Since that won’t be happening anytime soon, we think we’ve found a handy ‘cheat sheet’ of sorts that can cover some of that [&hellip

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    There’s nothing like a power outage to make your job as a parent that much more difficult. But in my case, Hurricane Irene cut this mom such much-needed slack. It was a typical Sunday morning in our household: Sunday papers strewn across the table as we finished a leisurely breakfast, the hum of the TV in the background. From the sound of things, you wouldn’t have known that Irene had wrecked havoc the night before, knocking down tree limbs in our front and backyards and blowing a mighty wind that had howled as we slept fitfully. Other than those obvious signs, we had remained virtually unscathed…or so we thought. My 7- and 3-year-olds were just in the middle of watching “Yo Gabba Gabba” when Fofa [&hellip

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    It should not be allowed to rain on vacation, especially when you’re in a coastal town with 2 young kids. We’re more than half-way through our annual family vacation trek to New England–this time in the Gloucester, Mass. area–and the last 2 days have been wash-outs. We managed to pass the time yesterday by taking in a kid movie (Cars 2) and then heading to our favorite stop at the Christmas Tree Shops (there’s one not far from where we live, but it just doesn’t compare to the variety in this neck of the woods). But when we awoke today to find more stormy skies, the girls’ enthusiasm  began to wear thin–and rightfully so. We had picked a spot that isn’t too far from the [&hellip

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    Sometimes the best-laid plans just don’t work out. It’s the 2nd to last week of camp, and my 7-year-old has only had swimming lessons about half of the time. Granted the camp is town-run and I didn’t shell out the big bucks for a private program, but I have to admit I’m more than a little disappointed that she hasn’t had much of an opportunity to learn how to swim. Did I mention the camp happens to be held at a beach? When the tide is low, lessons are off because it’s too shallow to swim. I can understand taking that precaution, but why not flip-flop the afternoon’s free swim session with a.m. lessons on those days? This week when the tide’s been right, a [&hellip

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    Sometimes, date night just has too much pressure surrounding it. Or is it that the cost of the entire evening is too much for me to swallow? This past weekend, we were nearly 30 minutes late for our dinner reservation because we couldn’t find parking. It was a beautiful summer night in a seaside town that was hopping with people. Mistake #1. When we finally find a spot on a side street, we walked another 5 or so minutes, got a lovely table indoors…only to have lackluster service–and that’s putting it mildly. By the time, we got our meals it was nearly 10 pm. Mistake #2. We couldn’t figure out why the kitchen couldn’t keep up with the orders as the restaurant was half-empty. While [&hellip

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