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Parenting Rule #1: Any Song Sung Softly Enough is a Lullaby

A friend recently said "Parenting is like folding a fitted sheet. Nobody knows how to do it."  This is more true than anything I've heard in a long time. And if I'm being completely honest, I roll fitted sheets into a ball and shove them into the back of the linen closet. So what does that tell you about my parenting skills? My kid doesn't usually sleep more than twenty minutes at a time during the day. But he sleeps ten straight...

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Talitha Kaum

"No, it's never too late to get an epidural." No greater lie has ever been spoken. On September 9th I checked my blood pressure at home as I often did. I had been suffering from a headache that week, which was abnormal for me during pregnancy (even with high blood pressure). It was 153/113. We threw the hospital bags in the car "just in case" and drove to Rice Lake where we were late to our one and only birth class. We...

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Breaking Bread

Tonight, I'm sitting in our sunroom with all the windows open, and I'm thinking about our summer. It was packed with meetings, surgeries, trips, and camps. But it was also packed with people. I loved every minute of youth group this summer. While our house will never be quite perfect enough for guests (I'm my mother's child), students came over almost every week this summer and played yard games and made s'mores. They don't count as guests because they'd probably...

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The {Messy} Art of Intentionality

On March 17th, it happened again. That moment where I read exactly what I needed to read. Patrick and I were in the middle of a disagreement. It had been one of those weeks where we had about thirteen and a half seconds in between work, meetings, and youth to look at each other and say "Hi! How was your day? What's for dinner?" Between prior engagements, work obligations, and general busyness of day-to-day life, we had failed to have any...

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