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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Counting the years through cakes

11 years old – 11 years of fabulous cakes.

I’m generally in charge of choosing and buying my kids’ birthday presents, but my husband does one very special thing for them every year – make a phenomenal cake.  He did go to culinary school, but only spent about a day or so on pastry. It’s mainly self-taught. And it’s such a clear illustration of his love for our kids and how that relationship has evolved over the years. My older son’s 11th birthday brought about the latest of my husband’s creations.

A square cake with grass frosting and a multi-colored orb and 3 little alien looking creatures lined up next to it. There are more “planted” inside the cake below them
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We are all our hands and holders

A gray rabbit with a white face sitting on a striped cushion

As I held the furry gray and white body against my chest, a sense of warmth moved through me. This rabbit had been abandoned in the streets of Washington DC, sitting in her cage for God knows how long before being rescued. And yet she let me pick her up. She could have scratched or bitten me, but she just wanted to be held closely, with love. The fact that she felt safe around me was an honor.

While most of us have never been abandoned as completely as she was, we’ve all be hurt by people in some way or another. Yet like her, we need to rely on others.

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Eating our way through our local plants

A white hand (mine) holding mulberries

As I ran, mulberries bounced out of my hand, trailing behind me as if I was some sort of fruit-based Hansel and Gretel. I paused in my run to pick mulberries from a neighbor’s tree – they littered the sidewalk, so they weren’t going to be missed – and had overestimated how many I could hold while jogging. Bringing them home, I announced, “Mulberries!” and dropped them in a plastic bowl. My older son ate them quickly, staining his mouth dark purple.

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