Posts from December 2022

Things are not always what they seem. Knowing how important a good night’s rest is for health and well-being, people often ask me how much sleep I get—and for good reason. As a mother of five kids, I’ve spent many nights awake, feeding and soothing babies, cleaning up vomit from sick kids, and tending children having an asthma attack at 2 a.m. The assumption is that being up with kids at night is torturous and completely exhausting. And while the…

A few years into our marriage, my husband started calling me “The Nose.” There was some irony in this because it is my husband’s side of the family that is known for their large noses. But the reason Phil gave me this nickname had nothing to do with the size of my nose. In fact, it is pretty small. Rather, by the time our fifth anniversary rolled around, I had smelled four different gas leaks in the various apartments and…

When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I took a childbirth class at the local hospital where I would be giving birth. It was not a class that favored natural childbirth per se—it was more of an overview of the different ways that women give birth, whether that be with many interventions like epidurals and Caesarean sections, or with few. I loved the vibe of the class—the happy expectant parents, the supportive dads who wanted what…