Last week was moving week here in my household -- and it was about time. Up until Thursday, my husband, son and I lived in a 1-bedroom apartment. Obviously, this is not the world's biggest tragedy but it was becoming a major source of family tension nonetheless. We grown-ups had...

(Part 8 in the Core Competency Moms series)

The scene: Monday night, 7:30pm. I've put in a full day of work. I've gone for a run. I've read Fuzzy Bee and Friends six times to my 1-year-old son. And yet, the aroma of rack of lamb with orzo pasta is...

(part 7 in the Core Competency Moms series)

In journalism we have a saying: Dog bites man is not a story. Man bites dog is. Which is why it says something about our society that reporter Lisa Belkin chose to profile Marc and Amy Vachon for her recent New York...

(Part 6 in the Core Competency Moms series)

Theresa Daytner was having one of those Mondays that make moms with young kids and jobs cringe. Her assistant was home taking care of a sick child. Daytner understood - she has six kids herself. She'd just come back to Mt. Airy,...

(Part 5 in the Core Competency Moms series)

You can't set foot in a grocery store these days without noticing a certain trend in prices. By some calculations, milk costs 25% more than it did at this time last year; egg prices have risen 40%. Many vegetable and fruit prices...

(Part 4 in the "Core Competency Moms" series)

Sarah, a Philadelphia-based mom of several small children, has a dirty secret: She doesn't wash her own clothes.

No, she doesn't employ a maid or "laundress." She's not wealthy. Nor is she working 60 hour weeks at a corporate job that...

(Part 3 in the "Core Competency Moms" series)

One of the great things about being a writer is having an excuse to interview fascinating people. For instance: Carol Fassbinder-Orth, a rising young biologist I profiled recently for Scientific American. She grew up on an apiary featuring 100 million bees....

It is a truth universally acknowledged that major life changes tend to involve a lot of stuff. My husband Michael and my wedding four years ago increased the amount of glassware in our apartment exponentially. The birth of our son last spring - without trading up from our 1-bedroom apartment...

"My kids come first," the smiling woman in the television ad says. Images of her and other moms playing with their children flash across the screen as inspirational music plays. It's the kind of ad that celebrates modern motherhood, family, and is selling -- of all things -- Dixie disposable...

This year is my first "real" Mother's Day. I spent the holiday last year going on long walks, eating spicy foods, and trying anything else people claimed would get an overdue baby moving. To no avail. I eventually had to be induced. My son, Jasper, is now proving equally strong-willed...

This morning, as I usually do, I dropped my 11-month-old son off at the Tutor Time day care center two blocks from my apartment. Then, as I began my workday, I saw a fascinating headline in USA Today: "Day care's new frontier: Your baby at your desk."

According...

No one could help cringing through Silda Wall Spitzer's public humiliation last week - standing by her husband's side as he resigned after getting caught up in a prostitution scandal. Fortunately for her, even New York's snarling media has moved on to other topics. Bear Stearns has disappeared. Cranes are...

One of my first activities every morning -- post-feeding baby, pre-coffee -- is to scan the headlines of the Wall Street Journal. Lately, it's become an exercise in masochism. Bank after bank owns up to risky investments. The stock market flirts with bear territory. Oil hits $100 a barrel. Homes...

Like many election junkies, I spent tonight watching the Iowa caucus returns. It was a surreal experience. Rarely, when watching election results scroll across the bottom of the screen, do the percentage numbers in each precinct that go to a particular candidate actually top the number of votes each candidate...

I have an extremely small kitchen. Purchasing anything that takes up counter space would be an aggressively anti-social act. Nonetheless, as the holidays approach, I find myself paging through the Williams-Sonoma catalogue with a lust akin to that of a 12-year-old boy who's discovered his uncle's dirty magazines. For $59.95,...

A few weeks ago, the World Economic Forum released a report documenting the "Global Gender Gap." Each country was ranked according to the parity it had achieved on a number of dimensions such as workforce participation and health outcomes. To no one's surprise, the Nordic countries topped the list. The...

Paula Radcliffe, the British distance runner and women's marathon world record holder, won the ING New York City Marathon on Sunday for the second time in four years. Her all-out sprint at the end of a hard-fought 26.2 miles was a testament to human endurance. But what's even more amazing...

I thought my life was pretty environmentally sound. My family lives in New York City, so we don't own a car. I take public transportation or walk. We live in a one bedroom apartment, rather than a McMansion. I work at home so I don't have to commute. I recycle...

WellPoint's new CEO, Angela Braly, made headlines when she took the helm in June. Partly that's because her first responsibility was dealing with the resignation of CFO David Colby, who was maintaining numerous fiancées and mistresses across the country. But also, as the only woman head of a Fortune 50...

Stocks recently hit record highs, which means, barring an autumn crash, this will be a very good year on Wall Street. It may even beat last year, when the average year-end bonus hit $137,580 (in January, the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park dutifully offered a "Friends with Money" package including accommodations...