Motherhood is an interesting job. I find that I grow up alongside each child. Now, I am the mother of a newborn. Now, I am the mother of a 5-year-old. Now, I am the mother of a tween. And so on.

With each age and phase, the job of motherhood...

This morning while I was running, my thoughts drifted back to Mother's Day 2003. A decade ago, a lifetime ago. I rarely think about that time, and if I do, it is only on the periphery of my mind.

I touch on it with words like grief and loss,...

Aujourd'hui, j'ai rendu visite à une amie, N. qui a des jumeaux âgés de 8 semaines. Elle a également un enfant de 1 an. Trois bébés en bonne santé, une bénédiction que souhaiteraient recevoir des millions de personnes. Mais avec ces trois beaux bébés, elle et son mari ont aussi...

Tonight I went to visit a friend, N, who has 8-week-old twins. She also has a 1-year-old. Three healthy babies, a blessing millions of people wish for.

And along with those three beautiful babies, she and her husband have a house full of chaos, no sleep, mounting financial concerns...

Before I had kids, I possessed many ideas about what kind of parent I would be. Below are ten of those assumptions -- and the reality that followed, post-kids.

1. I will not bribe my kids. They will behave because they have such great internal moral compasses, and complying will...

I have spent months trying to find a collection of Star Wars underpants featuring strong female characters such as Princess Leia and Ahsoka Tano for my tween daughter. I'm still looking.

If my tween were in the market for, oh, say, highly inappropriate sexy thongs, she would be awash in...

Dear Katie,

Today is the eighth anniversary of the day we got custody of you. You did not grow in my stomach, Katie, but you grew in my heart.

My labor with you did not last 18 or 24 or 48 hours. It lasted months, and it took more...

I took my third-grade daughter with me to Arizona recently. As we were driving from the airport to the hotel, Katie noticed something we don't see that much of in Chicago -- there were Romney signs stuck in the front lawns. She asked me about the Romney signs, and I...

The first time I met my daughter K's birth mother, she laughed about how different we look. There is no doubt that K was created outside of my gene pool. K's birth family has a genetic tendency to be large -- her birth mother is a head taller than me...

We were playing at the park and Annie Rose noticed several little girls about her same age hanging off the monkey bars.

She stared at them, openly admiring their ability to hang and then drop, landing in a cloud of dust on the ground. I watched her watching them, knowing...

Dear Tables of People Gaping at Us in the Restaurant,

I know what you saw. You saw one of my three daughters jump abruptly up from the table during lunch, knocking her chair to the ground. You saw her rip at her clothes, trying to remove them from touching her...

In honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, Mary Tyler Mom is devoting the month of September to blogging about her daughter Donna's 31 months of cancer treatment. The story begins when Donna is diagnosed with a rare, malignant brain tumor called papillary meningioma before she turns 2.

Some...

On Sunday, Annie Rose was feeling restless. She was unable to go stomping in the rain with her two sisters because she was wearing a cast for her broken leg. She had watched a movie and was now scooting around the house, trying to find an activity.

My husband was...

In November 2010, I wrote a post called "Anti-Bullying Starts in the First Grade" for my blog, Portrait of an Adoption. I was concerned because my daughter, Katie, was upset about being teased for carrying a Star Wars water bottle. Apparently, Star Wars was "only for boys, not...

For several days I have been reading and watching coverage about the horrifying story of the bullied bus monitor. A viral YouTube video shows a group of middle school boys from New York relentlessly and cruelly taunting 68-year-old bus monitor Karen Klein, who has worked in the school...