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The Power of a Hug

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments
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I know this is kissing, but we seriously have zero photos of us hugging.

My arms wrapped around him, grasping him, clutching him. I squeezed his sides as hard as I could. His back straightened under my arms. I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against his chest.

This scene has played out over and over again between my husband and I throughout the 16 years of our relationship.

In a park before a high school make-out session on a picnic table. In my college’s parking lot, just before he drove away for another six weeks. In our kitchen next to a sink piled high with dishes.

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My Top Five Parenting Posts of 2016

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

2017 is in full swing, but it’s worth looking back on the good times of 2016. (Yes, there were some!) As part of a group of parenting bloggers, I’m participating in a round-up summarizing our most popular parenting posts of 2016.

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Admittedly, almost none of mine are “tips.” Unless you count “don’t bring a three-year-old to a wedding when it’s a zillion degrees outside.”

So what was popular in 2016? It was all over the place, from getting outdoors to contemplating the personal in the political. One caveat – a lot of my popular posts in 2016 were actually from my archives. I’m leaving those out and just including the ones that I originally posted last year.

  1. A Holiday Gift Guide for Outdoor Families: Even though Christmas is past, this is still a great list of gifts for your outdoor-loving kid!
  2. Green Kids: A Toddler’s Guide to Starting Seeds: I’m hoping to order my seeds this weekend, so I’ll be looking back on this soon to see how our experience this year is different from the last.
  3. Weddings, Threenagers and Grace: People love a good story about bratty three-year-olds.
  4. To My Children Upon the Election of Donald Trump : I stand by every word.
  5. The Agony and Ecstasy of the Third Trimester: It’s not all bad, especially when it’s three and one-half weeks shorter than it’s supposed to be.

For more bloggers’ top parenting posts from the year, be sure to check out The Most Popular Parenting Posts of 2016 on The Jenny Evolution!

 

My Blogging Best of 2016

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

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2016 was an interesting year, if you mean interesting in the “old curse” sense. While 2016 was the year where democracy apparently went to die (and not just because of Trump), I had a much better personal life than last year. It was damn hard, but good in so many ways.

We welcomed Little Bird into the world, watched Sprout go through a lot of transitions, and missed out on a shit-ton of sleep. (My children don’t hate sleep so much as love everything else in the world so much more, especially driving their mother and father slightly bonkers.)

Plus, my blog readership grew substantially! Thank you so much to everyone who has read and enjoyed these posts in the last year. Although it’s dinky compared to a lot of other people, I’m still proud that I’ve nearly hit 10,000 views this year.

Looking back, many of my favorite posts were the ones where I was honest and vulnerable about my struggles as a parent:

 

I also messed around with format and structure a bit, which I hope was as much fun to read as it was to write:

 

Some of my most important posts described lessons learned, especially as connected to a lot of the awful events of this year:

 

Others reminded me of some of the more off-the-beaten path places we visited in Washington D.C. and beyond:

 

And last but not least, I greatly enjoyed both doing and seeing people’s reactions to the Outdoors Family Challenge and my profiles of biking families for Bike Month!

If you want updates and more articles, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Better luck to us all in 2017!

What Worked and What Didn’t For My Parenting in 2016

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Text: "What Worked and What Didn't for my Parenting in 2016 / We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So" Picture of a calendar by Freepic from FlatIcon.com

Before we can look forward to our New Years resolutions, it’s useful to reflect back, examining what worked and what didn’t this year. In the best case scenario, you know what to continue; at worst, you know what to stop doing. For us, we had such big changes this year that we had to learn a lot just to keep up.

Here’s what worked for us and totally failed this year in parenting. Hopefully, some our lessons learned will help you too!

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Why Our Kids Aren’t Our Accomplishments

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

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The overly cheerful Christmas letter is a relentlessly parodied cliche. Yet it and its cousin, the perfectly cultivated Facebook feed, call to us: “You want us, don’t you? Your life should be like this. Your kids should be like this.” And then we wonder – “Maybe I’m not trying hard enough. Maybe if I tried a little more, my kids would be like that.”

But for the sake of us and our kids, we need to resist the siren song. Not just of comparison – because that’s a shitty, dark hole to end up in as well – but of treating our children like our personal accomplishments. Believe me – I speak from experience.

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Sharing Values with Family Stories

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 9 Comments

 

sharing-values-with-family-storiesSitting around the Thanksgiving table, letting the food settle before dessert, was prime storytelling time in my family. At my aunt’s house in New Jersey, we’d cram as many chairs as we could around the table. Instead of focusing on the vastly different places family members ended up, we looked to the past. Even outside of holidays, my family often shared stories, of struggles and triumphs, of funny incidents and serious ones.

As an adult, I now see that these stories influenced my values so much more than any amount of lecturing would have. In fact, children who hear family stories about both good and bad times have more resilience in the face of difficult circumstances than those who don’t. Here are a few of my family’s stories and the values they passed on to me.

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A Holiday Gift Guide for Outdoor Families

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 10 Comments

Text: "Holiday Gift Guide for Outdoor Families, We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So" Photos of a plastic watering can for children, a board book called Hello, National Parks, a rain jacket, and a blue headlamp.
Getting kids outside has a whole host of benefits, from stronger immune systems to the sheer joy of play. While sometimes all that’s needed is a stick and a bit of imagination, having certain gear can help bringing kids outside easier, safer and more fun. Whether you’re in the mountains or your own backyard, this gift guide – which is mainly focused on kids in preschool and elementary school – should provide a few helpful suggestions. (Note – none of these are affiliate or sponsored links, just products and/or companies I personally like.)

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Birth Stories Part I: My Older Son

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

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This week, I’m going to be telling the stories of how Sprout and Little Bird were born. For two babies born in the same place in the same way, the births of my two sons could not have been more different.

It was three days after Sprout’s due date. My abdomen kept getting rock hard. The feeling was sporadic, but I had been more than a centimeter dilated a few days earlier. Just in case, I called my family.

“I think I might be going into labor,” I said. They must have heard, “I am going to have the baby right this minute,” because they traveled down to see us as fast as possible.

But when they arrived seven hours later, I wasn’t in labor. That night, I still wasn’t in labor. The next day, still not in labor.

Instead of greeting a beautiful baby, my parents, in-laws and sister-in-law were just sitting around, staring at my belly.

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Science Adventures: Feathers

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Photo: Black feather on multi-colored gravel. Text: "Science Adventures: Feathers; We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So"

This post explores the biology and ecology of feathers. It’s part of a series I’m doing on using everyday situations to help young kids explore science – particularly ecology and biology – more in depth. 

The opportunity:
With birds winging their way south for the winter, it’s the perfect time to investigate their most unique trait: feathers. Find a feather on the ground to examine it!

The scientific context:
While feathers are unique to birds these days, they’ve been around for far longer. Unlike when I was a kid, scientists now think that many dinosaurs had feathers as well. Although they didn’t fly, dinosaurs’ feathers probably served many of the same purposes bird feathers do today.

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