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“What on earth are they saying?!?” It’s a question I ask myself quite regularly as a mom of two teenage boys. It mostly occurs when they’re on their headsets gaming with friends. I’ll hear laughing, yelling, squealing, and then there will be conversations that I swear are in a different language. It’s like a secret teenage code. A code…that I’m about to crack! As parents, I feel like we should at least have an idea of what our kids are talking about, right? So, with a little help from my kids and a few Google searches, I now know what they’re saying – and so do you! Let’s dive in, shall we? “Sty” You know how our parents always called us lazy? Well, it’s like this generation said “Here, hold my Root Beer”. If you overhear your child saying things like… “He’s got so much sty!” or “That’s so sty!”,…

I love that my kids are confident. I love that they’re kind and they’re successful. But it’s important through all of it to keep them humble. I saw this come across my social media feeds, and it triggered a few feelings about staying humble and teaching our kids the same—especially these days with positive parenting. Of course, we want to be gentle and positive parents, but too much telling them they’re brilliant isn’t positive, because are they? Or are they just the same as everyone else, no better- no worse, just different. Value them I don’t think we have to make our kids feel like they are the most extraordinary creatures that ever existed. Instead, we should have conversations and show that we value them for who they are and what they’re passionate about. But, again, it doesn’t have to be spectacular. They are just humans – as incredible and,…

As a mom of a whole bunch of teenagers, my home has been filled with people having periods over the last few years. I have now joined the ranks of the peri-menopausal. It’s not awesome – I live never knowing when my period may or may not turn up. I deal with a constant state of hot flashes triggered by kid hugs and face masks. Most annoying? I seem to be carrying an unexplained 10lbs extra on my body. I have done nothing differently, and yet my jeans don’t fit. Hormones are a bit rude that way. Hormones; why ya gotta be like that The critical thing to remember about hormones is that they can indeed cause us grief at any age. Girls are getting their periods a year younger than in the ’70s and remember that adrenarche begins years before that! The average age is 12 years old. However, precocious puberty is…

Yesterday I texted my daughter’s teacher the word pancakes.

Because, you know, we’re living in a pandemic and it’s back to work and trying to keep things ‘normal’ and not panic our faces off and do all the things while worrying about our jobs and waiting on the vaccine / worrying it will give us rickets (it won’t, don’t @ me) and not letting our eyes roll right out of our heads when someone says they’re doing ‘dry January’  and constantly answering questions like ‘hey mom, is a hot dog a sandwich?’ or ‘hey mom, would you rather fight a bear-sized duck or a duck-sized bear?’

I don’t play the lottery very often. I have seen the odds and it barely seems worth it. 1/30,000 isn’t something that could happen to me, so I always brushed-off those odds. When you are told your baby has a rare chromosome abnormality, and that the odds are about 1/million, you learn to never assume those odds can’t happen to you. Receiving a rare diagnosis Nine months after my baby was born we were told she has Uniparental Disomy. This is, in a nutshell, when a person inherits 2 chromosomes from one parent, and none from the other. Rather than one of each. The clinical results can differ greatly depending on the chromosome affected. We had received prenatal genetic testing when I was pregnant and were told that it looked good, we moved forward thinking that the odds of our baby having down syndrome (which was the only genetic disorder…