After nine years in a private Christian grammar school our son stepped into his freshman year at the local public high school with 600 people he didn't know.  Almost every student in his graduating class of 80 went on to attend the private Christian high school.  He didn't want ...

Ms. Baker passed me the bag with the wet shirt at school pick-up. My shirt-sucking 6-year-old ran to me with a big smile and latched onto my leg. Since my husband lost his job last summer, our house had become all hills and valleys—mostly valleys. It was starting to show in ...

I have a new article for Christianity Today's magazine that is now available online: The New School Choice Agenda. In it, I write about a group of friends who moved into a low-income neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia who have decided to send their children to the local public ...

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that the demands of family life are a constant source of tension in our household (see Friday's post for but the most recent example), which often doesn't look as cheery as this photo might suggest. You also know that I want to ...

My friend Ellen Painter Dollar invited me to join her in her "Best Thing" Blog Hop, in which she features fellow bloggers who have posted the "best thing" they've ever written. I'm not sure this is actually the best post I've ever written. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not. ...

Perhaps it is fitting that today was a day with William screaming in the night, with two overtired parents responding with anger, with a morning filled with tears and yelling.

Perhaps it is fitting that after I had locked him in his room for an escalated time-out, as I closed ...

Beautiful post by Mama Monk about the perpetual trials of being a parent of small children. She writes,

I'm a stressed mom. I'm stressed too often. I worry that August's most prominent memory of his childhood will be my contorted anxiety face leaning over his carseat, snapping ...