In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. […]
kids
A friend recently took his kids on a much-anticipated trip to Disneyland. When I saw him afterward and asked how it was, he shook his head. “We went on Space Mountain,” he said, by way of explanation. He has two kids under six, so I figured they’d gotten scared. Later, my husband told me what […]
I remember the day the horses arrived. It had been raining, and for two kids cooped up inside, the afternoon seemed to stretch into years . And then there were horses. Some were dark as thunderclouds, some roan, some palomino. There were wild mustangs and Icelandic horses with manes like clouds. My best friend and […]
Cassie, when you proposed this series of posts—well, the truth is, I was worried. There’s nothing that seems to make a comments section ignite like someone pontificating on motherhood. And I’m embarrassed to say, I’m not quite sure if my—our—decision to have kids had much to do with science, beyond that biology might have conquered […]
When my grandma got married, the question of whether to have children wasn’t something that one pondered. If you could have kids, you did. My grandma had eight. Luckily she loves children. When my mom got pregnant at 17, she decided to keep me even though she had to drop out of high school. She […]
This summer I put my Lilkid, as I call him online, on the school bus for the first time ever. Evidently I have “socialized” him enough with other lilkids, because he got on without a backwards glance, ignoring his mother getting all teary and father waving goodbye. He chose a seat and then mouthed through […]
As the parent of a three-year-old, I spend a lot of time reading kids’ books. Some are wonderful, a lot are so-so, and a few are so frigging annoying that — I confess — I hide them. I always expect to like science-themed books — this is my kind of brainwashing, I think — but […]
Kids will put anything in their mouths. My aunt, who lived briefly in Hawaii, once found my cousin gnawing on a dead lizard. My childhood tastes were less exotic. I loved dirt. Eating dirt was forbidden. I was old enough to understand that. But I could. not. help. myself. My mother would often find me […]