Faith Gong: Parenting teens and saving the planet

One of the best parts of parenting my teenagers is discussing the world’s problems and how to solve them.

It just so happens that I’ve been thinking about loud noises quite a bit lately, because we’re trying to teach our two-year-old son to stop screaming at the cat.

During our family’s early years in Vermont, my friend Deborah warned me that January was the coldest month. “There’s usually one week every January when the temperature never gets above freezing,” she said.

Thirty years after its release, Home Alone now feels like a prophetic clarion call about where our society was headed. And instead of listening, we laughed and called it must-watch holiday entertainment.

I am writing this column on the afternoon of the day after Christmas, while the rest of my family are playing video games out in the yurt.

Like most pivotal events, it started with a simple question: “Mommy, are they doing the gingerbread houses again?”

On Thanksgiving morning, we learned that our entire family had been close contacts with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Our three youngest children, all only partially vaccinated or too young to be vaccinated, would need to quarantine until they … (read more)

How and why were so many individual birds moving as one? I didn’t recall seeing these starling swarms in past autumns: Was this something new, or something I’d failed to notice until now?

I’ll be honest: Sometimes I feel like I’m a hostage to our traditions.

Field hockey season ended yesterday. Cue: Angel choirs, rainbows and unicorns, my husband and I holding hands and skipping towards the sunset through a field of wildflowers.

Sometime in August, as I was beginning to concede defeat, I noticed that a second, unofficial garden had sprung up without my noticing: This one was sprouting out of our compost bin.

In my most recent column, I began writing about the weekend getaway my husband and I – and our 22-month-old son – took to Lake Willoughby in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. This is a continuation of that story.The weather was unseasonably warm and humid when … (read more)

Last week, thanks to the generosity of my mother- and father-in-law who were visiting us from California, my husband and I had a weekend getaway.It’s not quite as romantic as it sounds: Our 22-month-old son came along, too. Still, it was the first time in … (read more)

If you were reading this column back in 2020, you may remember that my “word for the year” — which I chose instead of making a New Year’s resolution — was “THRIVE.”When 2020 began, our baby boy had just been given the diagnosis of “failure to thrive.” Thi … (read more)

It’s that time of year again.Our family has now logged in eight straight weeks of summer vacation. We have spent countless sultry days at the lake, eaten gallons of ice cream, lit sparklers, chased fireflies. Our annual trip to the Maine coast has come an … (read more)