Elisa Keay first moved to the area when she realized her neighbourhood at the time wasn’t meeting the needs of her two young children. “I was a die-hard Queen Wester, and we started our family, and I realized I wanted to be somewhere more family-friendly,” she said. Last fall, when she noticed a lack of […]
I spent a whole lot of time worrying about my kids when they were little. Don’t get me wrong, I was functional – working, getting them to school or daycare – but I did worry. I worried about their safety. I worried about their health and their development. In part, I blame those ‘What to […]
As I arrived back from the Labour Day weekend, the conversations at work inevitably moved to everyone’s kids and their first day of school. Everyone had a story of first day jitters and first day excitement, and as most of my colleagues are 10 to 15 years younger than me it was also inevitable that […]
The first time I went shopping for clothes with my husband, The Rational One, he was not quite my husband. We were securing shoes to accompany his wedding suit, in which he would marry me the following month. Never having shopped with my husband, I had no idea what type of shopper he was. Just […]
After writing on parenting for fifteen years, my kids have become used to the lack of privacy experienced by simply being my children and the fodder for my humour. They recently shared that the most common question they are asked by friends and neighbours who read this column is if they are “proud” of my […]
Dear Santa, Thank you again, for honouring the many good people of our neighbourhood last year. As the holiday season approaches, you may find you are short two letters from our household. It seems teenagers have figured out that snail-mail to the North Pole is a waste of time – an email to Mom and […]
Remember Grade 9 geography class? Let’s see … you figured out the locations of South Africa and the East China Sea, used pencil crayons to make a pretty map of Canada with labels for all the provincial capitals, learned to read a topographic map and made neat bar graphs with extra marks for accuracy. Me, […]
I remember the first report card my first child received. It represented such a life-changing stage; our child, in school, receiving a report card. Magic. Twelve years later, it’s a little less magical than in the old days. I have, however, built an interpretive legend over the years, to help me understand the gentle terminology […]
If you’re lucky, they don’t turn into hoodlums or druggies. Okay, I exaggerate. But it is with some trepidation that you should anticipate the changes that happen to your sweet, young child when he or she makes the big leap from grade school to high school. Much like Dr. Frankenstein, you might be saying, “Sweet […]
In my goal to raise good human beings, I’ve been impressed along the way with the quality of parenting I’ve encountered. Some parents are just so naturally good at it, and others such hard workers; but I have also learned, nearly all have a trick. Every parent I know has an item, something they feel […]
