A New Heartbeat in Our Home (cue the fireworks!)

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Bonjour, les amis! If you are American, happy Fourth of July! This has always been one of my favorite holidays. I am glad to be American, but what I enjoy most about this holiday is the chance to enjoy time outdoors with friends and family. When I was a child, my parents always organized a parade and games for the neighborhood, and the day always ended with a fireworks show put on by neighbors or the city. My parents still plan neighborhood events every Fourth of July, so my husband and I will take our children there to participate today before heading to a friend's home with an amazing view of a fireworks show in the Columbia Gorge.

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Joy Cho & Martha Stewart on Work/Life Balance & Raising Creative Children

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Reflecting on Keynote Speeches at Altitude Summit 2014

Bonjour, les amis! I returned Friday morning from the Altitude Summit conference in Salt Lake City, and it was just as inspiring and informative as I'd hoped it would be. My highlights were dining with Gabrielle Blair of Design Mom (did you catch us on Instagram?), gaining practical insights about blogging, and hearing keynote speakers Joy Cho (of Oh Joy!) and Martha Stewart of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

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Co-sleeping and the Family Bed: Why I'll Miss It

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Today I'm flying to Salt Lake City for the Altitude Summit summer conference--a meet-up for bloggers and designers. I didn't expect to attend because of the cost, but a corporate sponsor gave me a ticket after one of my posts for Every Mom Counts.* I'm so incredibly grateful, and I can't wait to meet Gabrielle Blair of Design Mom and to hear speakers like Martha Stewart and Joy Cho. But as excited as I am to go, I expect I will miss sleeping with my family the most.

That sounds a bit odd, I know, because we Americans (and okay, the French too) are not a family bedsharing culture. Unlike most of the world, we generally give our children a separate bedroom starting from early infancy. While preparing for motherhood, I didn't have any reason to think my children would be raised any differently. My husband and I bought a crib and figured our little one would use it at some point, if not right away.

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Eyes Wide Open: What Children See & Recognize

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My five-year-old daughter and I sat in blinding sunlight yesterday and read a picture book that deeply impacted me. The Man With the Violin follows the story of little Dylan, who notices many things that his mother doesn't. One day he hears a musician in the subway playing beautiful violin music, and though he wants to stop and listen, his mama rushes him on. There's more to the story, since it's based on this American cultural experiment:

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Adventure Playgrounds Outdoors: What and Why?

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Have you heard about adventure playgrounds? They're old news, actually. Adults started establishing such spaces in Europe in the forties because they felt children needed to opportunities to develop courage in the face of a world at war. (There are over 1,000 adventure parks for children in Europe, and more than 400 in Germany alone.) These parks are growing in popularity in the U.S. now as American parents realize that children aren't getting enough playtime outdoors and have few opportunities for play in non-landscaped settings.

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Breastfeeding Five Years Straight: What I've Learned

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I've breastfed my children since I became a mama more than five years ago. Honestly, I can hardly believe I've been nursing one or both children for five years straight, but my firstborn daughter continued to nurse through my pregnancy with her little brother, and now he's two years old and still breastfeeding a few times per day. How much I've learned about breastfeeding in these five years! Here's what I think you should know too:

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10 Myths about Stay-At-Home Moms and Dads

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I'm guilty of believing a few of these stay-at-home parent myths--at least, until I became a stay-at-home mama myself. Have you caught yourself believing any of these statements?

1. Their house is always clean. Sure, stay-at-home parents may have more time to clean, but their homes are in active use much of the day, meaning that no rooms stay clean for long.

2. They have lots of time to accomplish what they want. Modern parenting frequently involves reshuffling personal priorities below the needs of children, according to Jennifer Senior in her book All Fun and No Joy: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (released in January 2014). Parenting certainly requires flexible priorities in light of family schedules and childhood illnesses.

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Examining Alfie Kohn's Myth of the Spoiled Child

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If you're well-versed in current parenting and education discourse, you know that Alfie Kohn is America's gadfly on these topics, consistently challenging the popular views with solid evidence to the contrary. His latest book, The Myth of the Spoiled Child, responds to the prevailing media stance that paints modern parents as both over-involved and indulgent, and children as narcissistic and underprepared for adulthood.

Don't let Kohn's latest title mislead you--this book isn't a lengthy argument for permissive parenting, which Kohn addressed and exchanged for a healthier approach in his book Unconditional Parenting (which I reviewed here). Instead, The Myth of the Spoiled Child is a point-by-point response to common but baseless social criticism of modern American parents and their children. Though Kohn occasionally comes off as peeved and retaliatory towards the researchers he considers biased, he's highly convincing as he meticulously discredits prevalent assumptions about falling school standards, pervasive narcissism, and the overly touted benefits of self-discipline and failure.

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