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    Melanie Myatt

    Melanie Myatt

  • Parenting Guru: a Letter to My Husband at Christmas

    To my Dear Husband,Christmas is your favorite time of year. Although you like to deny it, we all know that nothing can bring tears to your eyes like watching the kids put up the Christmas tree ornaments, watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special, frosting sugar cookies as a family (though sometimes I suspect, in this instance, those are tears of frustration) and watching the kids unwrap their Christmas presents.This year, I know that underneath the holiday joy and excitement runs a current of stress and fear about finding a job within the next year. ...

  • Parenting Guru: Learning from My Mistakes in the Toy Room

    One mom shares her tips for getting kids to help with chores like cleaning the toy room.

  • Talking to Kids About Death

    It is hard enough to deal with our own grief over the loss of a loved one, here one parent describes her attempts to talk to her kids about their understanding of death.

  • Parenting Guru: 4 lessons I've learned from my toddler

    I have four kids, so it often feels like I rarely have time to focus on just one, or even myself for that matter. This fall, since my three oldest kids are now in school, I have a little extra time.Or so one would think.

  • Parenting Guru: At Halloween, I've given up doing it "my way"

    This is a picture from Halloween, 2010. What you see is the hodge-podge of costumes (or not) that my kids put together based on what they really wanted.My baby, of course, had no say in the matter. She got dressed as an elephant simply because that was the costume someone gave us that fit her at the

  • Help! My nine-year-old has a job...

    Throughout my daughter's nine years, we have tried different allowance policies. Somehow either we parents couldn't remember to follow through and pay her, or she couldn't follow through with her chores. We finally decided that, until she was older, we would just pay for her clothes and other needs,

  • Parenting Guru: My top five tips for surviving a week at the beach with kids

    As soon as the kids finished school back in June, we hopped in the car for a week-long vacation on the gulf coast. Now we are getting ready to spend another week on the shores of Lake Michigan, which we have done every summer for the past 4 years. Thankfully, since we have done this so often, planni

  • Parenting Guru: Chicago is our family's kind of town

    Our family just returned from a family vacation to the gulf coast in Alabama. We had such a wonderful and relaxing time with extended family. The weather was ideal and the swimming was wonderful; one would think that we would hate to leave.No matter how sad we feel about leaving family, every time w

  • Parenting Guru: How working at summer camp changed my life

    When (it seemed like) everyone else in college was working at summer camp, I was working hard to earn more money at one of the most boring jobs in the world. When I discovered I had a full scholarship to graduate school, I decided to take advantage of my financial freedom to participate in the (envi

  • User Post: "Mother" means "risk-taker"...(in 100 words or less)

    I looked at the positive sign on the pregnancy test feeling overwhelmed with awe. A human life had been placed into my hands for safekeeping on a journey beginning with total dependency and, if I do my job right, moving toward (relative) independence.Now I have four lives depending on me for psychol

  • Parenting Guru: Hindsight makes the best teacher...

    When we moved to Chicago, we knew it would be a challenge to figure out how to work the Chicago Public School system; we just had no idea how difficult it would be.After testing, tours and tearing out our hair, we managed to find a school for each one of our children. We started out the school year

  • User Post: How I stay on top of the laundry mountain

    I have four kids so you had better believe that laundry is one of those never-ending chores that is always threatening to overwhelm me. Even though i would like to just keep buying new clothes for the kids instead of washing their old ones, I recognize that this isn't the best solution to my problem

  • Parenting Guru: My 5 tips for traveling with kids

    We'll be making the long trek from Chicago to Tennessee in the next couple weeks for Spring Break. Even though this is a nine-hour trip, we feel pretty good about it. We used to live in Nebraska which required a twelve-hour trip whenever we wanted to visit family. Needless to say, we've learned a fe

  • User Post: Thank you to my two moms...

    We are in the midst of birthday celebrations for our family. We have four birthdays to celebrate over the course of three months. To help us celebrate, we had my parents over one weekend and my husband's parents over another weekend.Being with both of my "moms" reminded me again of what a fabulous h

  • Parenting Guru: My biggest parenting mistake

    To be honest: I do not want to write this post. One of the things I like about starting my posts with the title, "Parenting Guru," is thinking that I actually have some words of wisdom to share with people. I would rather not come face to face with the fact that I have really messed up when it comes

  • Playing catch-up: online safety

    All of my kids are eight and under, so if you had asked me a week ago, I would have said I didn't need to worry too much about online safety. Our kids have their own user account. Their internet browser is loaded with bookmarks for sites that are safe and appropriate for them. Most of all, they have

  • Parenting Guru: 10 little things I love about my baby girl

    Here's a little secret: when we went to have the ultrasound for our fourth child, I was really hoping for a boy. I have two girls and a boy already so it seemed like good symmetry to have another boy. The real reason, though, is that I just wasn't sure I was up for more girlish drama. My little boy

  • giving up my dream (for her)

    In my (after)life, as a parent, many people wouldn't now know me as an athlete. After (almost) eight consecutive years of being pregnant or nursing, I haven't had much time to pursue my prior love of anything sporty.In my past life, I may have been someone to be feared on the volleyball court or the

  • Parenting Guru: Five dreams for my city kids

    I grew up in a place with a big yard, cornfields behind the house and plenty of freedom to roam the neighborhood with the neighbor kids. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would be raising my own four kids (at least for another few years) in the big city.While I love where we liv

  • Parenting Guru: In our house, Santa only brings each child one gift

    We've all heard the kids shouting in the toy aisle: "I want that Mommy! and that! and that!" No matter how hard we try, we can't get away with pretending those kids aren't ours. My kids immediately want every toy they see in commercials, every toy in the pages of the catalogs we get in the mail, and