Raising Kind, Engaged, and Green Kids!

Cartoon of woman with brown hair hugging two boys

Join us in raising kids to be kind, engaged, resilient, and sustainable world citizens! We’ll Eat You Up, We Love You So chronicles my family’s adventures in radical kindness and sustainability.

My book, Growing Sustainable Together: Practical Resources for Raising Kind, Engaged, Resilient Children was released in June 2020 with North Atlantic Books! You can order it anywhere books are sold, including your local bookstore, Amazon, and Barnes & Nobel.

What Watching My Kids Play Video Games Taught Me About Losing

A statue of a T-rex on a Jeep (that has two velociraptors driving it) labeled with Nick's Mini-Golf. There is a structure for a high-ropes course in the background.

“Oh come on!” I yelled with genuine frustration in my voice as my mini-golf ball rolled millimeters past the hole. And yet I was smiling only a few moments later. That would have never happened even a few years ago. I credit my kids for this life lesson.

I’ve never been a particularly good loser. I hate wasting time and losing feels a whole lot like wasting time to me. In board games like Settlers of Caatan or Monopoly where you realize early on if you are going to lose badly and then just have to wait for it to happen, I get antsy and anxious. When playing word and puzzle games, I feel like I’m “supposed” to be good at them and then just feel dumb when I lose. It’s just generally unpleasant for everyone involved.

But I started to get a different perspective on losing while watching my kids play video games.

Continue reading

Supporting Each Other Through Life

My husband and I, who are both white, in hiking clothing, sitting on a rock. I have a backpack on my back and there are trees and low plants in the background.

“We take the backpack during each other’s weak part,” my husband said to me as we were finishing the second half of a hike. He was referring to the fact that I carried the backpack with the water and food on the uphills, where he struggles, and he carried it on the downhills that stress out my fussy knees. I hadn’t even thought of it that way, but that’s exactly what we were doing that day. In fact, that’s what we do through so much of our lives, both for each other and those around us.

My husband and I have been married for 18 years and together for 24. We’re both neurodivergent and have executive function challenges. I joke that if you put us together, you may get one person’s worth of executive function. He has social anxiety, but is charming. I am kind of fearless, but often don’t make a good first impression socially. He’s hilarious with the kids, while I tend to be more emotional. We complement each other well.

Continue reading

Sitting with our Pain from the Election Results

“No no no no,” I whispered to myself as I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at my phone. It was the 2024 Election results. I stared at the map mostly covered in red. I focused on the line showing who got what electoral votes, with Donald Trump easily crossing it with 277 out of the required 270.

Once we got the kids off to school, my husband put his head down on his hands and started crying. I walked over, put my arms around him, and wept too.

All day, I felt empty and raw. A sense of despair buried itself into me and wouldn’t let go. All of the exhaustion from election stress and all of the other shit going on in my life overwhelmed me. A fog settled over my mind.

This was my thought pattern – variations on a theme: “We did everything we could, but it wasn’t enough. I did everything I could, but it wasn’t enough. So what’s the point? Why bother? Why did I spend all of that time phone banking and having people hang up on me? Writing postcards? Why the hell bother with climate action now anyway? What difference does it make when he’s back in office and wants to destroy it all anyway? What the hell is all of my life’s work for anyway?!”

Continue reading

Experiments in Collective Living

Five kids and two adults standing at the edge of the water in the ocean, backs to the camera. The waves are relatively gentle.

“Seriously, they walked seven miles in one day when we were in New York City,” I insisted to my friend, who we were traveling with. She gave me a skeptical look.

Four hours later, my older kid was pulling and my younger kid was pushing a cart that had two of the other kids traveling with us in it, one of them sound asleep. My kids ran / walked the entire length of the boardwalk back to our condo, pushing the cart for most of it.

That was just one example of many conflicting expectations that arose on our recent trip to Ocean City with two other families. With six adults and six kids, there were differences in terms of what to eat, when to eat, bedtime, and screen time. Every family does things differently, but you don’t realize how differently until you live with them for several days. Fortunately, through communication and collaboration, all three families were able to make it work together. It gave us a taste of what it would be like to live more communally.

Continue reading

Passing on the Torch of Live Music

Concert at a baseball stadium, taken from high in the stands. Green Day are on stage, with singer Billy Joe's face projected on giant screens on either side. The area in front of the stage is packed.

From the packed field below to the people in the tippy-top nose-bleed seats (like us), the crowd buzzed with energy. Most sung loudly along with the lyrics from the band: “I wanna be the minority / I don’t need your authority / Down with the moral majority / ‘Cause I wanna be the minority!”

When I glanced over at my kids, they didn’t know the lyrics, but were definitely engaged. My older kid had his “I’m not smiling because I’m so intensely paying attention to what’s going on” look on his face and my younger son was bouncing on his seat and clapping. They don’t know Green Day songs well, but between Weird Al parodies of them (my older kid went through a big Weird Al phase) and hearing them on the “classic alternative” iTunes station, they recognized a good number of the songs.

Continue reading

Accusations, Shame, and Thinking Twice

A plant leaf with googly eyes on it hanging over a shelf

“Why did you do this?” Reading the email from my coworker with those words about a mistake I had made, I was taken aback. I stared at the screen in shame and confusion. I replied out loud to myself, “I don’t know! It was a mistake, not on purpose.”

I don’t remember how I replied to her, but that feeling stuck with me. That voice in the back of my head arose just before I would send her an email.

In some ways, that accusatory tone was effective at getting me to avoid making mistakes. I was much more likely to double-check my emails before sending them to her. But it made every exchange with her tinged with stress, knowing she felt that way about me.

Over time, I realized that when we have that passive aggressive “Why did you do *that*?” attitude towards our kids, we end up with the same response from them.

Continue reading

Imperfect Choices and Messed-Up Realities

The U.S. capital building with a huge crowd of people waving American flags in front of it
At Obama’s inauguration. It was so cold.

Shivering with my feet hurting, my mouth nevertheless formed a wide smile as I watched the screen. My own hands grasping the sleeves of my coat, I watched Barack Obama hold his hand up as part of his swearing-in as the President of the United States of America. I blinked away tears against the cold wind, knowing that my own work had helped bring our country to this point. I had knocked on doors, talked to potential voters, and built relationships with other volunteers. After witnessing Bush’s legacy through my college years, I had fully bought into Hope and Change. As a new federal employee, I was proud that I helped choose my next boss and the leader of our government. Standing in the dead January grass on the National Mall at the Presidential inauguration – yet still too far away to see what was going on – was the proudest I ever felt as an American.

A little less than eight years later, I sat on my bed weeping. I had gone to bed before the election results had come in, frustrated but still hoping against hope. Upon waking, I learned that Donald Trump had been elected president. I feared for my job, my friends in less privileged positions, and my children’s futures. My younger son was only six months old at the time. I wrote a letter to my children apologizing for our generation failing to stop it and promising them to fight as hard as I could for better things. And I did. But it constantly felt like a failing fight, two steps backward for every half-step forward. It was exhausting and unsustainable. 

Continue reading

Cultivating an Environment for Growth

Small purple crocuses and red berries among grasses

Digging a tiny hole to transplant my peppers, I smiled as the soil crumbled in my hands. It was dark, moist soil, the result of years of adding organic matter (straw, compost, and leaves) to the heavy clay in our yard. While I care for my plants by watering and weeding them, the soil is probably the most important part of my garden’s success. There’s nothing you can do to force a plant to grow, but there are lots of ways we can create an environment that nurtures them. The same goes for people and situations as well.

Continue reading

Allowing Wonder to Overcome Fear

A view up at the dark blue night sky with stars through dark trees

The sky was dark and smattered with stars. The Big Dipper shone out, bright and prominent. I stood on the campground road, looking up, my mouth partly open as if I was about to say something but then stopped in surprise. I watched the sky for a few minutes and then walked up the road to our campsite, my flashlight off. I gazed upwards every few moments, trying to cement the sight into my memory.

As I reached the campsite, my kids were getting ready to walk to the bathroom. “Keep your flashlight off!” I recommended. “You’ll see the stars so much better.” They hesitated, then turned them off, trusting me and the desire to see that beauty themselves.

Continue reading

Cutting Kids Slack When They Whine About Summer

My older son (a white boy in shorts and a t-shirt) bounding up the stone stairs of a hiking trail in Great Smoky Mountain National Park while my younger son (a white boy in a black sweatshirt) looks on at the bottom of the stairs.

Driving home on the second hour of a seven hour drive with the windows down because our air conditioner broke, I wondered how my kids would remember this experience. Would they remember it in the same way I remembered getting stuck in stop and go traffic without air conditioning outside of Washington D.C. when I was 10? (Sorry Mom and Dad – that was *awful.*) Or will they look back on it fondly as “well, we got through that”? After all, people took plenty of road trips before air conditioning was introduced in cars and survived. I’ve read many people say their family road trips were some of their favorite parts of childhood.

In a way, this conundrum extends to all of summer. So often, adults’ memories of childhood summers are full of nostalgia – memories of ice cream, the pool and playing outside until the sun goes down. My older son loves Calvin and Hobbes, with the pages of his four volume collection well-worn and the spines chomped on by our pet rabbit. The comics about summer reflect this perspective. Calvin romps around in the forest all day with Hobbes and turns cardboard boxes into fantastical devices at home. Summer is endless, innocent and free. It’s the epitome of a “simpler time.”

But like all nostalgia, it’s not accurate.

Continue reading