I've held naive assumptions about both abortion and adoption in the past, and I've asked naive questions. One of those questions brings the two together as I've had trouble understanding why women who are unexpectedly pregnant chose abortion instead of adoption, especially when many of those women believe ...

This post started out with a different title: "Things I Love, Hate, and Wish I Loved About Being a Mother." And then I thought, well, I don't allow my kids to use the word hate, so I'll modify that to say "things I really don't like" about being a mother. And then I started writing, and although I came ...

Many years ago, a mentor told me, "Be careful what you teach on, because the Lord will probably make you live it as well as teach it." This has proven true for me over the past decade as my husband and I have begun our family here in Venice, California.

For 5 of the 10 years before we married, I was ...

Many years ago, my husband John asked me to consider homeschooling our children. I immediately responded, "Are you nuts?" John pointed out that I was judging something I knew little about, and he asked me to research homeschooling, so I could make an informed decision. I reluctantly agreed, but my mind ...

There are very few absolutes in this life. What kind of school our children attend is not one of them.

Home schools, private schools of kinds, public schools, each in their different ways are places where good parents hope for a good education, knowing that at the end of the day they are responsible ...

Christian school was never in the plan or the budget for my kids. I liked their school just fine and we were set on them finishing out their schooling at our local public school.

Until one day when my sweet son, then at the beginning of his seventh grade year, asked me if he could transfer to the Christian ...

When I was 6 and my dad had been hired by the U.S. government to work as an economist, one of the first things he and my mom did after we moved was to call the few fellow Korean immigrants they knew in the D.C. area.

"Where are the good schools?" they interrogated. When they ran out of people to call, ...

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 to be like everyone else. ...

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 the kids.

At our kindergarten ...

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 schools. I also had a ...

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 follow God in and know God's ...

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. But I couldn't choose among ...

I meant to share the link to this great post by my friend Karen Swallow Prior a while back when she wrote it. Thankfully, the truths it contains are timeless. Although they boil down to "get enough sleep, it's good for your soul," the post is very worth reading in full: Want to Follow God? Go to Sleep. ...

It might seem odd, but I don't read very many blogs. I read magazines in the good old-fashioned way, and I read articles from the New York Times on my phone, but blogs kind of overwhelm me. There are too many out there, and I just can't keep up. So I generally stick to Time, The Atlantic, Christianity ...

So the doctor told us to expect a 5-7 day recovery. But Penny woke up on Saturday morning (after 17 hours of sleep, including the time under anesthesia) with her eyes wide open. "Does anything hurt?" She shook her head.

Two hours later, I listened to her narrate what happened. "I went to Target and buyed ...

We don't celebrate Valentine's Day in our house. We feel rather curmudgeonly about the amount of money spent on the holiday (billions and billions of dollars) and the amount of paper wasted on all those little cards sent to school for Penny's and William's classes. And we try to sprinkle some romance ...

Prayer paralyzes me. It's just too much. Too many people in need. Too many world events to consider. Too many personal needs and wants. Too many "oughts" and "shoulds" inside my head. And too many other things, practical things, to get done.

Which is exactly why I need to pray, not as I ought, but as ...

Penny will have surgery on her eyes and ears next week, on February 17th. She's had a few minor surgeries before–tubes in her ears twice, a heart procedure when she was 14 months old, stints placed in her tear ducts to help them open up. But this will be the first time that she's aware of what's happening ...

My friend Sara Hagerty, who writes about her family of four children (three girls and a boy adopted from Ethiopia and Uganda) on the blog Every Bitter Thing is Sweet, has written two posts about their daughter Hope. Yes, these are posts about adoption, but they say as much about parenting and about ...

That baby on the cover of "Why I'm Both Spiritual and Religious" is, yes, our son. William cried a lot as a baby, and he cried a lot in the night. Sometimes he screamed so hard I wondered if he might hyperventilate. And I remember one night, when I was traveling alone with him, rocking him for the third ...