With Thanksgiving coming, and the winter holidays zipping up close behind, many families are planning visits or travels with extended family. Those trips are a wonderful time to reconnect — but they can also be fraught. Between expectations and past experience, lots of us are traveling with metaphorical as well…

Nanmowrimo(National Novel Writing Month, held annually in November and challenging writers to draft a 50,000 word novel in a month — that’s 1666.66 words a day) is exactly 7 weeks away as I write. 49 days. And I need a new story. My agent has a draft of the novel…

“Mild” isn’t just the lamest variety of hot sauce. It’s also the state of mind I strive for daily, especially when my kids seem to come only in Devil’s Extra Spicy. …

Admitted: one of these sucks. The other I love. Both help. Here’s the biggest takeaway from the chores chapter of How to Be a Happier Parent: kids will do chores. Seriously. They’re all capable. …

Here’s how a wet, cold, miserable Memorial Day weekend might make you happier than the one you’re imagining. — I know what Memorial Day is supposed to look like. Maybe yours won’t. Maybe your view looks more like this one:

I’ve been thinking for a long time that there is just too much stuff in our house. I spend so much time shuffling the stuff, rearranging the stuff, lifting the stuff off the floor and stuffing it back into someone’s overstuffed cubbie. So. Much. Stuff. In what I thought was…

Here’s what we did at our house last week: swapped rooms. One sister moved to the guest room, the other sister moved to the boys’ room and the boys moved to the biggest bedroom, previously inhabited by their sisters. In the process, we took every single thing out of every…

I love setting goals for the New Year. Or for the summer. Or for February. Whenever, really. I love setting goals and making a plan to achieve them (sometimes an overly ambitious, too elaborate plan, but I’m improving). Maybe you’re the same way, or maybe you hate the very idea…

This year, spend less, stress less and make everyone happier. — What your gut tells you about toys is absolutely true: they’re better in some ways, worse in others and much cheaper and more widely available than the toys your parents bought when you were a kid. Just 3 percent of the world’s children live in the United States, but they…