Category: Ages & Stages
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What Now?
When we brought our little, orange baby home from the hospital, we set him down next to the piano, asleep in his car seat, and looked at each other. What now? Did the professionals seriously just send us home with a baby…by ourselves? His entire life so far, I felt like we were being graded. […]
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Before He Leaves
“Jonny!” I yelled up the stairs three times before I gave up and texted him instead. Texting my own kids in my own house irritates me, but I hate it a little less than trying to get the attention of a 17-year-old who always has headphones in. Jonny appears one minute later in the living […]
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The Best Stuff in Life
We sped from the airport to the beach as soon as we landed in Los Angeles for the long weekend to celebrate two big events: our fourteenth wedding anniversary and our daughter’s thirteenth birthday. Perhaps unconventional (like the rest of our lives), we zippered these two celebrations together, as we’ve done from the beginning. On […]
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Prepared for the Pandemic
I say I’m a pinball, and I’m glad the machine belongs to God. I can look back and see that when I started dreaming about things and feeling an urgency to take certain steps, it was God preparing me, gently nudging me into position for what was to come. I had no idea how COVID-19 […]
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Thoughts in Her Head
My daughter walks home alone from school now. She takes the same path we’ve traced year after year, beginning in kindergarten when her backpack touched the backs of her knees, and her baby brother was strapped to my chest, and her little sister was in the stroller. Last year in third grade, I stood at […]
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Unexpected Joys
My oldest son was born six days after we had arrived at our new home, an eight-hour drive from our friends and family, with all our belongings crammed into a Chrysler minivan and U-Haul truck. We thought we would have two to three weeks to settle in before our new bundle would arrive, but my […]
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Well-Loved
I am standing over the kitchen counter, my glue gun in one hand and a tiny square of well-loved fabric—minky and striped with worn satin trim around the edges–in the other. Until a few minutes ago, there was a stuffed elephant head sewn to the center of that square—we call it Lovey. But as I […]
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077 // Ages & Stages: Perceptive Parenting – Jay Jones & Lindsey Cornett
Kindred Mom team members Jay Jones and Lindsey Cornett join host Emily Sue Allen for a conversation about Perceptive Parenting, or the idea of observing your kids and tailoring your parenting approach to the unique needs of individual children. This episode is part of the new Kindred Mom series, “Ages & Stages of Childhood“. Subscribe […]
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Bringing Fuzzy into Focus
It’s a bone-chilling 14 degrees outside. Through the foggy car window, I see Seth bounding out of his house in jeans and a T-shirt to greet us, jumping up and down in the snow with the energy of a 3-year-old. I laugh and say, “He hasn’t changed a bit, has he? Still our bouncy boy!” […]
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Enough
My husband is out of town this week for work. With trepidation, I tuck my boys into their beds. “Good night,” I whisper, and silently I add my own prayer, Please, please, let them stay asleep until morning. Against the silence of the house, my nightly routine sounds louder than usual. I gather the last […]