Picturepocket's Blog

Category: parenting

  • Gift Shelf Hack

    Gift Shelf Hack

    About a decade ago, Tim and I both bought the same present for the same person. Instead of returning one, Tim suggested that we save the extra in case we need another present someday. He stuck it in the laundry room and we forgot about it until about a month later. We were headed out…

  • Back to School Daze

    Back to School Daze

    Tim and I attended my oldest kid’s back to school night for high school yesterday. She will be an incoming freshman, so it’s all new to her. We saw the building a little bit during enrollment in the spring, but this was different because she was given her schedule and encouraged to walk the halls,…

  • Perennials 

    Perennials 

    I didn’t grow up with sisters, but I did have girl cousins. One lived in the same town when we were very young and it bonded us early on. Then our parents fell out with each other and we didn’t see each other much over the time of our middle and teen years.  We sort…

  • Today’s Hunger Games

    Netflix is showing all the Hunger Games movies in anticipation of the second prequel come out in theaters. I first read the Suzanne Collins’s series as a young adult, so of course, I imagined myself as one of the main characters, i.e. Katniss. Now, as a mom folding laundry, I am rewatching them from the…

  • Dental PSA

    Dental PSA

    Today was rough, but didn’t start out that way. How it started was I was going to take my kids to the dentist, then back to school and then go to lunch with a friend. We have a lovely children’s dentist. The office ladies always schedule both the children at the same time so when…

  • Genesis 5: Generations

    This chapter repeats the part about God creating man, the word adam meaning of earth, “Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.” Genesis 5:2  Then it says Adam lived another 800 years after Seth was born and had more daughters and sons. After Seth…

  • Genesis 4: Three Brothers

    Adam and Eve have a son and Eve names the boy Cain meaning “gotten a man with the Lord’s help.” She sees this child as a gift from God, as many parents do. They have a second son, Abel, meaning breath.  Abel keeps sheep and Cain works the ground. After a while, Cain brings an…

  • Home

    I had a reoccurring dream last night. One of the classics. It’s where I am running in slow motion. It’s not a nightmare, and I am not struggling get away from something, but trying to get back to something. The locations I am slo-mo traveling through are old neighborhoods of places I used to live…

  • Sweater Weather

    People talk about mental labor of running a household and I will give you a half-day example. In order to feed my children breakfast and make lunch and get them into the car for carpool, it helps to start with a clean kitchen that started the night before.  At eight last night, the kitchen was…

  • Who Not to Friend 

    These days my young daughters are navigating the turns and twists of friendships and I try to give them good advice and also demonstrate what it is to be a good friend.  There are pitfalls to finding good friends. My kids know to avoid bullies, but there are subtle indicators of false friends too. The…