To top it off, my IUD was lost inside my body — I drove myself to the hospital the day my daughter was born. She’s my third, and logistically it made sense to go it alone as long as possible, so as not to leave my mother-in-law with our two little boys for too long. …

I have fellow moms, or ‘mom friends’ — The other day, a fellow mom brought her girls over for a playdate. Our kids tore around the yard and hollered at us about unfair sharing practices and picked their noses and chased each other and gathered sticks and sweated and giggled and cried. They had a great time. …

What it’s like to parent a social butterfly — My kids and I were at the park the other day when my son turned to me and said, “I want to go play with that kid over there.” My response was basically, “Cool! It’s a free country. Do you!” Which is the equivalent of a blasé shove-off, but LOOK…

Fun ideas for distracting your children for eight whole seconds so you can drink your cold coffee while peeing! — My oldest starts kindergarten in the fall, but he’s been in preschool for the past two years. On the precipice of each summer break, I’ve found myself slack-jawed and dumbed, realizing that the structure of our days is falling off a cliff and I will need to get out some…

And other parenting questions, asked and answered — One of the enduring aspects of motherhood is wanting, badly, to talk to other parents about kid stuff. Do other moms hate going to the park? With a newborn, how/when/how sex? Is it okay if my kid repeatedly jokes that I’m dumb? And on and on. Recently, I reached out…

On learning how to ask for it, even when I don’t want to — Four weeks ago, I gave birth to my third baby. I was expecting the roller coaster of emotions, the exhaustion, the hormonal betrayal. By now, I know the early months are just kind of awful, even as they are peppered with moments of bliss and sleep. But I wasn’t prepared…

Parents and kids torn apart at the border are losing something most of us take for granted — The news these past couple of weeks — families making what is surely a harrowing journey to our border only to see their children taken, to have to listen to their children shriek and cry for them, to have to imagine how their children are faring in some unknown place…

What will having a third do to me? — I’m about to be the mother of three. Three is like 800 percent more than one. That’s just math. Are you even a parent if you only have one child? I’m sorry, that’s my hormones talking, and also my exhaustion, because even though I bought the fancy sleep belt with…

So why do I still feel guilty? — “You know,” I said to my husband the other day, as our youngest was mashing banana into the couch and our oldest was ripping paper into strips and letting them flutter to his feet, “people shouldn’t be so judgy about how clean other people’s homes are. …