Natural as Possible Mom

I am not what you would call an outdoor person and yet some of my most treasured memories took place outside. My sister and I spent all of our waking hours running around our street, biking, playing games, or hanging out at the playground around the corner. We used leaves, sticks, and flowers as props. [...]

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  One of the things I am most proud of is our household ban on plastic. We don’t use plastic if we can help it. I take reusable bags on shopping trips to the supermarket and the mall, and we recycle any plastic that does come into our home. Every bread bag, every piece of [...]

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I recently participated in a food-related Twitter party. During our discussion about Thanksgiving turkey and whether or not stuffing is safe to eat, the host asked about cookware: what were people cooking their turkeys in? I immediately tweeted that I used to cook in a non-stick Teflon pan, but about two years ago I banned [...]

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Every so often — when I am not leaping up to care for children –  I wake up, lie in bed, and wonder what kind of animal would have trampled me had I been born before the introduction of modern ophthalmology. Because someone like me with such a case of myopia (nearsightedness to me and [...]

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Dear Parent of the Kid in My Kid’s Camp: I dropped my daughter off this morning to your child singing away. What a beautiful voice she has, but holy crap, how does she know that song?!? Your little girl — what is she? Seven or eight? — was singing Rihanna’s S&M. What? You don’t remember [...]

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Two women in my life have ovarian cancer. One is my sister’s sister-in-law. She’s in her 30s. She found her cancer by accident; she thought she had a hernia. The other woman is one of my closest friend’s mothers. Her cancer is pretty advanced. She found out thanks to a routine abdominal sonogram. They have [...]

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I’m really mad at the Powers that Be. They have let us down yet again. This past month there has been a flurry of new research and lawmaking related to chemicals and toxins and their effects on our children. I want to know why it’s taken so long to figure some of these out. The [...]

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The memory is burned into my brain. I was a shy, awkward 13. Pin-thin except for the fact that I was way too developed for someone my age. For someone twice my age. As a result, I walked around hunched over, my shoulders curling forward, my head down. One afternoon my seventh grade English teacher [...]

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