
From piggy banks to paychecks, one chapter at a time.
I'd prefer one dozen versions of the "where do babies come from" talk with my kids before I'd sign up for even one "and this is how money works" discussions. I can cheerfully rattle off twenty-seven slang terms for body parts, but ask me how something amortizes and I...

The new Dyson Canister Vacuum – Watch the dust bunnies cower in terror
I had never given much thought about the old canister vacuum I used for years and years: It was a fair little vacuum with a dust-belching bag that I never remembered to replace, and a "retracting cord" feature had stopped retracting years before. But once my mother...

A four thousand-foot high classroom
Trish Herr takes homeschooling to an entirely new level. Instead of white boards, we are talking white peaks. Her children carry backpacks with more than just pens and pencils--think emergency supplies, whistles, and trail mix. In this very unique memoir, Up: A...

Get ready to rock your socks off at Kindiefest 2012
For the past few years, I've traveled to Brooklyn, grabbed my editor Liz, and headed to the most fun conference filled with some of the best and smartest people making and promoting kids' music.We do it for love of the genre. And to find great new family-friendly...

The perfect book for a new big sister (lucky thing)
We get a lot of requests for books for kids about to welcome a new sibling into the family. Some of the better known titles are pretty sappy, which isn't such a bad thing, but I never really liked the stories about how perfect it is to have a baby around. I'd imagine...

Burp cloths with a secondary purpose
Two important things for new mamas to know: not everything useful has to look utilitarian, and there will be many, many uses for burp cloths. I can justify buying gorgeous ones--despite their intended use--considering how much time they'll spend on my shoulders,...

Fashion and beauty fans – have we got the new site for you.
We may be beauty and fashion fanatics to some degree, but chasing after kids and working full-time means that we have less time than we like to spend on taking care of ourselves. Why do you think we're such fans of online shopping? The one drawback: experimenting with...

Baby feet, you’ve got the cutest little baby feet…
For some reason, every pregnant friend in my life is having a boy these days. So I'm even more attuned to the limited choice there is in terms of motifs on their clothing. While we've worked pretty hard to track down cool boys' clothes that go beyond appliques of...

Growing edibles just got easy. Like black-thumb-proof easy.
Grow-it-yourself is the new do-it-yourself. Unfortunately, I tend have the touch of death for plants. But you know what? I didn't let looking awful in denim overalls stop me from wearing them throughout the 90's, so I haven't let being plant kryptonite stop me from...

Latino cool for the little ones
As a Hispanic mother, I know first-hand how difficult it is to find children's products that celebrate our culture without being cheesy. Sure, it's easy enough to find products for Spanish learners in the US, but there's more to growing up Hispanic than the...