“Mom! Max is trying to put a booger on me!”
“Mom! Josie won’t let me play fairies with her!”
And so it goes. I’d like to tell you that time off from school means time spent baking gluten-free organic muffins and jamming joyfully with our family bluegrass band. But not so much. Intensive togetherness in our house ...

The Annotated Child: Coping with the December dilemma

Last week, we looked at the best Jewish picture books of 2009. Now let us applaud the year’s best chapter books.

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarita Engle (Macmillan). It’s 1939. Daniel, age 13, is a German-Jewish refugee. His grandfather was killed on Kristallnacht; his parents, poor musicians, wiped out their savings to shove ...

Here are my favorite picture books of the year. Next week we’ll look at chapter books. Sorry, no board books—this year either I didn’t love them or I didn’t deem them sufficiently Jewy. (But if you wanna pick up Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy, knock yourself out.)

New Year at the Pier: A Rosh Hashanah Story by April ...

It can be so hard to find the perfect Hanukkah gift. Here are some non-starters to non-inspire you. Peruse them all, then buy your child a book.

I’ve been writing about parenting for eight years. And for eight years I’ve joked that if you want to make readers crazy, you only need two words: “vaccines” and “breastfeeding.” So I shouldn’t have been struck by the passionate rantings on Facebook following my colleague Allison Hoffman’s story on how anti-vaccine fears caused a ...

The other day, Josie was reading my dad’s website. Dad died in 2004, when Josie was almost three. His site, which he started in the late ’90s, is a living testament to his entertaining lunacy. A stream-of-consciousness blog from an era before blogs, it contains Dad’s epic restaurant reviews, copies of his ranting letters to ...

As a child, I was obsessed with Where the Wild Things Are. My favorite scene wasn’t the famous six-page wordless rumpus. It was the three pages in which Max’s room turns into a forest. I’d flip back and forth (the pages aren’t consecutive spreads, as the rumpus pages are—they’re separated by pages of white space, ...

We are Jewish women. We are high achievers. Many things have come easily to us. We can bring home the Faken; fry it up in a pan.
Which means that when we fail at something supposedly so easy any mammal can do it, we feel horrible.
Breastfeeding is supposed to be a cinch. We educated ladies of ...