The most efficient professional women — the ones who balance career and family demands while also finding hours each week for exercise and leisure activities — don’t give much thought to dinner, time management expert Laura Vanderkam told me for a story I wrote a few years back. Analyzing hour-by-hour time logs from 143 working […]
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Last week, Mark was away at a work conference for four days and four nights, not that I was counting. Sensing the void, and vulnerability on my part, my older son requested pancakes for dinner on the first evening, which we followed up with a maple syrup-fueled dance party to the Trolls soundtrack. Things started […]
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We went to Sugarloaf Mountain for three days during school vacation last week and returned with changed children. The 4- and 6-year-old who had never skied independently began snowplowing down the bunny slope with confidence after a couple of half-day lessons. Cautious and quick-tempered, our kids don’t always take to athletic endeavors easily — both […]
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William Carlos Williams had his red wheelbarrow; for me, the object “so much depends upon” is a child’s birthday cake. I am not a skilled baker, nor am I particularly crafty or proficient with frosting, and, like most working people I know, I have almost zero free time. And yet, twice a year, I spend […]
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When I was in kindergarten, the school bus dropped me off at a construction site. My parents were building their dream home on Cousins Island in Yarmouth and I’d spend my afternoons watching from a rock in the muddy yard as my dad worked alongside a carpenter.
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