At first, she was so excited. Her first baby, her first time to hear a heartbeat inside her womb, her first I’m-really-a-mom moment. You were excited with her–but then suddenly she disappeared. No social events, no church, no driving, and no shopping–ESPECIALLY for groceries! The beast of scary pregnancies just struck: hyperemesis gravidarum. That’s a long and very difficult name for…
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Classical versus Montessori Education: the Preschool Years
Classical versus Montessori education—could there be two philosophies more different? One is very structured, with a formal progression from early ages to high school. (Read Dorothy Sayers’ influential essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” to better understand the trivium concept of classical education.) Classical education attempts to use rigorous, structured academics to train students to be individual thinkers by the time…
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Montessori Versus Waldorf for Babies & Preschoolers
Because education begins informally as soon as a child is born, I’ve been researching and playing with ideas for the past year for Baby J’s education. Part of that is the teacher in me, but I know every loving parent at some point has to make decisions about his/her child’s training. TV or no TV? What if we’re watching educational…
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Be All There: A Message to My Disconnected Generation
About a week ago, when my husband and I were at a restaurant in Wichita, I noticed a scene that to me summed up the changes in the past few generations: At the table close to us, two girls in their early 20s were sitting across from each other. They were texting and taking pictures for Snapchat and Instagram while not…
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An Honest Review of Honest Diapers
When the doorbell rang this afternoon and a box full of three free replacement packages of diapers from The Honest Company arrived, I knew I had to write a review of the company. An honest review, to fit their name. 🙂 I had several reasons for deciding to try out Honest diapers. 1)I was very excited about their advertisement of…
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