Avant Parenting Archives
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Avant! Welcome to my parenting blog archives
As you can see by the dates below, this blog is no longer being updated. However, there’s lots of good stuff here, much of it as true now as when it was written. Please feel free to browse, or follow these links: One last piece of parenting advice: Enjoy today even if it’s a rough…
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Existential angst
In the past, I always liked feeling like I could just up and change my life if I wanted to. At one point I decided to take the LSAT and apply to law schools. I have to say that from my present vantage-point, I think it’s highly likely I never intended to go. I just…
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A conference for people who work with kids with special needs
I spent the weekend at the California Association for the Gifted Conference in Sacramento. This isn’t a conference for people who doubt what “gifted” means, though I would guess that most people at the conference dislike the term as much as I do because of its implication of a value judgment. The conference focuses on…
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Buy local, be local
It is no secret that my local health foods store has, to put it mildly, somewhat high prices. I have also noted that our local pharmacy, owned by the pharmacist and staffed, along with others, by his wife, can’t offer me the same discounts as my health insurance company’s online pharmacy. When I tell people…
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Learning to read
I have a vivid memory of how reading was taught in my son’s first grade classroom. His teacher had returned to the classroom after working as a homeschool teacher, and had brought some pretty unusual (from the perspective of public school, that is) ideas back with her. One of those ideas was the given the…
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Tell me the truth
OK, so tell me the truth: are my kids weird? Last week did your kids think that chicken apple sausage was the very best thing they’d ever eaten, and this week did they deny ever putting such a thing in their mouths? Do your kids get in fights over such deep insults as “You were…