February 2014

In September my husband received the call he had been crossing his fingers for and I’d been dreading: A job in Atlanta was his. Oh goody. Our new life in Virginia was about to be history. Long-story-short: We ended up staying (and the angels sang), but those few months of…

When my daughter Lily gave me tickets to a roller derby bout for Mother’s Day last year, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I like sports, and I’m always up for a new experience. But roller derby? I envisioned women’s staged wrestling on wheels, complete with booty shorts and evil-stripper…

Theodora von Hohenstaufen Noll is the first to admit that she had a tendency to hover over her children. Letting them loose in the kitchen, where sharp knives and hot burners could threaten their safety, was obviously out of the question. I was always very much a helicopter parent,” she…

The hour was drawing near. It was go-to-the-printer time, and there was a gaping hole where my publisher’s note belonged. Something usually comes to me, but this time, I was drawing a complete blank. In recent days, we’ve had a death in the family, a cancer diagnosis, and we’ve all…

    My sister married her high school sweetheart. My cousin found the love of his life in sixth-grade English class. Not so for me. By the time I met and married the man who would, as they say, complete me, I was in my late twenties and a work…

  Our homeschooling journey started when our son’s school suggested cognitive development testing for him. Rather than work with the school system to create an IEP or 504 plan, we chose to homeschool him so that he could receive year-round (not just school-year) therapy to overcome his delays. Because we…

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the cookie aisle, I bring you research from the hallowed halls of Connecticut College that suggests Oreo cookies may be as addictive as cocaine. Shocking as this news may be, we cannot dismiss it as hyperbolic speculation. It was…

After a routine ultrasound twenty weeks into her pregnancy, Jodi Lemacks heard the words no parent ever wants to hear: Your baby has a heart defect. It is one hundred percent fatal unless he has three open-heart surgeries. She and her husband, Mark, were devastated. This was the couple’s third…

All of a sudden, you feel the onset of warmth in your face, neck, and chest. Your best friend suggests that it might be a hot flash. “A hot flash?” you say, “I’m way too young to be going into menopause.” In the United States, menopause occurs naturally on average…

Q. All of my son’s friends are on Instagram and most of them have Facebook pages. He’s twelve. What do you think about kids and social media? A. Social media is an increasingly larger part of the way we all communicate with family, friends, and acquaintances. Most adolescents are using…

February is the month of romance – a time when we reflect on those who make our lives sweeter just by being there. Words that are seldom spoken may be written in cards or communicated through gifts. However, as a financial professional, I notice that too often innermost thoughts and…

Anyone can be a victim of stalking, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or age. I think we all know that intellectually, but take a moment and ponder what that really means. It means no one is immune from being a potential stalking victim. Not you, not your spouse or…

Did you know that 85 percent of our family pets over the age of four have some form of dental disease? This includes not only the tooth itself but also the gum tissue, or gingiva, and underlying bone. Dental disease, also referred to as periodontal disease, can affect your pet’s…

Choose a night this month, have the kids pack a picnic dinner to enjoy on the family room floor (baby carrots and chicken nuggets, anyone?) And the stage is set for a romantic dinner for two. While sharing the meal together would be a lovely gift idea, cooking it as…

Art History is Not Linear (VMFA), a commissioned painting by Virginia-born artist Ryan McGinness, draws inspiration for its two hundred symbols from artwork in VMFA’s collection. Follow these steps and create your own screenprinted symbolic exploration of whatever you’d like. What you need: • Foam core, cut into a 5-…