Up until last week, disappointment and rejection were two feelings that I had never really thought about my daughter experiencing—at least not at the age of eleven. I'm not talking about small disappointments, like the time she didn’t get the present she had been dreaming about, or the rejection of not being invited to a classmate’s birthday party. These feelings—as painful as they were at the time—were fleeting and soon forgotten.

This time was…

Today, a friend of mine—a stay-at-home-mom—lamented that summer was going much too quickly, and that the end was coming faster than she wanted. She described her days of sleeping a little later in the morning, not having to be somewhere at a given time, and the joy she feels while watching her children get to be carefree kids for a while.

I've been trying so hard to…

We are tossing around the idea of a buying a house—we have been renting the same place since just before our son was born. Even with the housing market in flux, and the economy struggling to improve, there is still something romantic about the idea of owning a home of our own. When I mentioned this to our daughter, her reaction surprised me. She was in complete denial. She told me that she didn’t want to move—that she loved our apartment—it was home. Her strong…

It seems that the most important decisions I have made in my life were made without any planning, and were for the most part made out of necessity. The first—and most significant—of these was actually one that was made for us:  becoming parents. The impact of this life-altering news did more than just turn us into an instant family, it changed everything we knew about our lives.

It was early August 1999, and I had just come home from Istanbul to finalize a few…