Our family has quite a few holiday traditions. We love to watch “Elf” on Thanksgiving day. Then, Terrence and his mom go out shopping early in the morning on Black Friday, and I go out later that evening after the crowds have died down. There’s hot cocoa just about every day for nearly a month,…
Category: Motherhood
Let Merry People Be Happy
In 2003, on Christmas Day, my maternal grandmother, and my (middle) namesake Elaine, went to the hospital due to complications from cancer and heart disease. The doctors sent her home, but she went back in a couple of days later. She stayed in the hospital for a month before finally succumbing. That next Christmas was…
Wiggly Teeth (A Kindergarten Curiosity)
It’s the phrase that parents of 5-year-olds everywhere dread. Sure, we know it’s coming eventually. Until it does, though, we push it to the back of our minds, and go about living our lives in a make-believe fantasy world where parts of our children’s body don’t just arbitrarily fall out. Then it happens. The day your…
How Ayva Got Her Name
It’s been a little over a month since Ayva started kindergarten, and I’m incredibly amazed at the young scholar my baby girl is becoming. Every week she comes home with all of the work she’s completed in class in a folder, and it’s hard to believe that she does that much in less than 6…
Help Your Child Understand Ferguson (And Other Tragedies)
I was 6 years old when the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on a house in a residential neighborhood in the city. The house was inhabited by members of the group MOVE, a Black liberation organization founded by John Africa. There had been a lot of conflict between MOVE, the community, and the police for a…