Archive for 'Adventures in Parenting'

Don’t Fear the Suburbs

It’s a common rite of passage for young parents in many urban areas, but especially New York City: the move to the suburbs. Obviously, not everyone goes that route (or getting into middle school would be a whole lot easier) but for some, the question isn’t if, but when, how and where.

Where is obviously important. But while most people know to consider the basics, like the commute, the housing stock and the schools, Alison Bernstein of Suburban Jungle Realty advises ...

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Don’t Dismiss the Conversation About Marissa Mayer’s Pregnancy

Do we really need to debate whether commentators should discuss Marissa Mayer’s pregnancy, and its impact both on her role as the new chief executive of Yahoo and on the options for pregnant women in the workplace?

What Ms. Mayer is doing is, by all accounts so far, a first: she is the first person to become the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company while pregnant. It’s a first for a reason. For most of the history of the Fortune ...

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Rolling the Dice of a Genetic Legacy

“Don’t worry. She won’t break.”

This is a classic cliché of new parenthood. “Don’t worry,” nurses say to insecure new parents hesitant to hold their infants. “She won’t break.”

But I know the truth: Babies can break. I broke when I was eight months old, and a year old, and again and again and again. Three dozen broken bones before my twelfth birthday.

And then, at 31, I passed a flawed gene on to my daughter—the gene that caused my osteogenesis imperfecta (OI ...

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Aurora and a Mother’s Memories of Columbine

This is the fear every parent knows.

We’ll have innocently sent our children off to school or to a movie, or like the parents of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, allowed them to go off with a neighbor to meet a local congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, and then…the phone call will come and we’ll be told there is a dead body where there was once a life we valued more than anything in the entire universe.

Today, it happened in Aurora, Colo., where a man, ...

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Naming a Son for a Brother Who Died Young

The doctor pressed the ultrasound wand to my swollen belly and grinned. “Do you want to know the baby’s sex?” My husband and I nodded. At 42, I should have just been thankful to be pregnant. Yet, I lay on the examining table and hoped. Let our baby be a boy.

For years, I knew exactly what I would name my first son: Kevin, in memory of my brother, who died in a car accident at age 23. My son would ...

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