Balance. It’s always been the strength in my marriage. While I quietly freak out with worry that my children need to be rushed to the emergency room, my husband calmly looks up from his reading fighting an eye roll and says, “Karen, it’s fine.”

While I submit my children to constant examination, poking, prodding, and “let me see it just one more time,” my husband checks out the Phillies’ score.

When I snuck away to Google a bull’s-eye rash that mysteriously appeared on my son…

When I learned Jane O’Connor, author of the Fancy Nancy picture books, planned a book reading at our local bookstore, I was ecstatic, elated, overjoyed. For those of you not familiar with her books, that’s a fancy way of saying I was pretty excited and you can bet I planned to be there.

But my daughter had a soccer game at the same time and she didn’t…

My son collects things. He accumulates armies of knobby creatures that he makes scream and knock each other down. He’s obsessed with Legos. If he gets one set, he wants the entire line to complete his collection. He collects erasers. Just the plain ones that sit on top of a pencil. He lines them up, makes patterns with them, battles them, who knows. During his Cars the movie era, I can’t tell you how many times we patrolled the toy aisle searching for the elusive Tex Dinoco. …

Every Easter morning of my childhood I awoke to a basket brimming with gooey marshmallow eggs, rainbow-colored jellybeans, speckled malted eggs, and other glorious pastel confections. The prize in the basket, though, was always the big chocolate bunny.

Having the sweet tooth, or teeth, that I did, it didn’t take long for me to plow through those springtime delights. By dark, I had eaten all of the good stuff and struggled with my failing elementary schooler’s…