My husband likes cars.  And trucks.  And SUV’s.  And motorcycles.  And ATV’s.  And jet skis.  Basically, if it has an engine, he loves it.  Some friends were kidding him recently, saying that he changes cars like other people change clothes.  When we did the math, it was a bit surprising: ...

Meet Jeanne, our tenth MOMumental Mom of the week. Name: Jeanne City: Plano Marital Status: married Mom to: 19 year old son, Chris and 16 year old daughter, Alex. Occupation: Founder and principal of a strategy consulting firm What was the last movie you saw and what did you think about it? The Sisterhood...

My husband and I are prolific list-makers. Take our to-do lists, for example. His is a 200-line Excel spreadsheet color-coded by “type” of to-do and ordered by priority and updated daily, meaning some items stay on there for a year or longer (case in point: “sell jet ski’s”...

Yesterday was Jim’s birthday. He’d kill me if I told you how old, so let’s just say: he’s older than me. We decided to splurge and take the kids to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner before coming home to have homemade birthday cake (which almost-three-year-old Jack helped make….it...

Life with toddlers. It’s so simple, really. For them. Their world is pretty much black and white. They have no hidden agendas (or at least ones so hidden that an adult can’t pretty easily figure them out). They have two speeds: high gear (for running on the playground and eating birthday...

Child development experts have different theories about the best way to encourage learning in your children. Some believe that you shouldn’t constantly correct children, because that can lower their self-esteem and make them less motivated to learn and explore on their own. Others believe that...

My older son, Jack (almost 3) has been the lucky recipient of dozens of books from his older cousins. He is a book-fiend and we probably go through at least 15 books a weekday and more on a weekend. But at that rate of reading, we have exhausted all his age-appropriate books and wind up reading some...

When I started in consulting . . . (for a top-tier-strategy-consulting-firm-that-will-remain-nameless), one of the first things they taught us was to “Ask Why 5 Times”. This, they taught us, is the key to getting to the REAL answer, to the root cause. And it does work. Take this illustration: “Our...

Jim and I recently went on a short overnight trip to celebrate our fourth anniversary.  (Yes – only our fourth…two babies, four houses, and four and a half jobs later, here we are!) When I was describing to our son Jack why we were taking this trip, I found myself talking about marriage. ...