Everyone reacts to compliments differently. Some people love them. Thrive on them, even. If verbal affirmation is your love language, nothing lights up your day like receiving a positive comment. At work, it might be praise about how well you handled a recent project. Among friends, it might be compliments about your new haircut or…
In mid-March, schools around the United States closed, seemingly overnight. That meant a lot of parents were left with kids at home, possibly for the rest of the school year. It creates a lot of challenges for parents. Every parent is in a different situation right now. Some parents have the capacity to facilitate the…
Most people have heard the word economics before, but there’s a good chance they only have a vague idea what it means … or, if they did know in some dusty old class, they don’t remember it now. Economics is a field that covers many things, but if you were going to try to reduce…
This is a lightly edited and updated version of a post that first appeared on Mumbling Mommy. “Can women really have it all?” This question has been a recent media obsession, but it has an old history. For what seems like forever, workers have struggled to juggle the balance between work and life. The advent…
This is a lightly edited and updated version of a post that first appeared on Mumbling Mommy. A few months ago, just before summer’s end, Rachael and I took the kids to a local splash park. While we were there, I could not help but overhear a working mother wrangling over her kids’ various public and private…
On the day after Christmas, 2018, police in North Little Rock, Arkansas, talked a man out of jumping off a bridge. The police worked with the man for 30 minutes until the man backed down, was put into an ambulance, and taken to a hospital. There isn’t much publicly known about the man or what…
This post originally ran over at Mumbling Mommy. I turned 40 earlier this year, and to mark the occasion my wife offered to help organize a birthday party. I thought that was interesting, but I also didn’t want anything big, as I prefer small groups. After giving the matter some thought, I decided to invite…
When former President George H.W. Bush passed away on November 30, 2018, I was surprised to find out that one of my relatives had not only met the president personally back in the 1990s, but she had the pictures to prove it. The relative in question raved about how George H.W. Bush greeted her. “When…
Not long ago, I was talking to a relative about the business of writing. This relative maintains a very active social media account, and I told the relative that I thought that maybe there was some potential to turn it into a blogging gig, perhaps even a monetized one to help offset the relative’s tight…
When I was in middle school, I once walked out of a speech class in tears because I couldn’t deliver the speech right. The teacher came out into the hallway and told me, “You’re a perfectionist. You like to get everything right the first time.” She encouraged me to go in and just do my…
