Adoption is a balance of many elements, a yin and yang of people and emotions. One mother’s greatest lost becomes another mother’s greatest gain. A child in pain and trauma leads to a child in a loving family. Adoption is not a fairy tale but it is my dream come true and I have spent my time in motherhood trying to find my balance in these conflicting truths.

Do you wage a daily battle when you try to dress your kids? Is it more of an all-out war? Put down that dinosaur sweatshirt because I’m here with good news. With a little bit of help, your kids can dress themselves. In fact, it’s good for them!

When it comes to children and sleep, one of the biggest concerns from parents is getting them to bed on time every night. Let’s face it, life is busy. Having a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep tests our limits, frustrates us, and can leave us feeling overwhelmed and beat. Nearly every parent has had to deal with the difficulty of putting a restless child to bed at some point, and for many parents, bedtime is a recurring disastrous nightmare.

It’s no doubt that our children become our world and we want the best-of-the-best for them. But what happens when the best happens to be just mediocre? Many times our expectations will fall short, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make adjustments to course correct. My daughter is 3-going-on-13 (I mean, about to turn 4) and we have switched her preschool 3 times already. I’ve learned a lot in my search for the perfect preschool, so take a lesson out of my book. These are the top things to consider when picking a great preschool for your little one.

Is your baby up all day? Up all night? Is “napping” a word that left your vocabulary ages ago? Is “sleeping through the night” just a phrase you think someone made up to drive new parents crazy? Here are nine signs you need a little help with your little one’s sleep habits!

At some point or another, most of us have yelled at our kids (and yes – we all know it doesn’t help!). As Steven Marche from the New York Times points out bluntly, “Yelling may be the most widespread parental stupidity around today.”

It feels awful. The guilt is real. After our anger has erupted, what comes next? How do we recover, and conduct ourselves afterward?