TGIS

Kids are such naturals

He's just like Calvin with the Crisco

It's that time of the year when every school has a million events. One day you're chaperoning a field trip for one kid, and the next day you're attending a choir concert for the other. As a kid, I loved the end of the school year for precisely this reason. I loved being busy! In hindsight, I can only imagine how stressful May was for my parents. Field Day was the best day of my young life, but it likely wasn't my mom's favorite day by any means. Not to mention, kids are so wound up by the beaut…

Mommy Facebook Groups are by no means a new phenomenon. I have been making fun of them since I was a teenager, which didn't go unnoticed by my suburban community. Long story short, I was a member of my high school's sketch comedy team. I know, extremely cool, very popular, and totally not lame of me. We had to perform sketches at loud and rowdy pep rallies that had something to do with school spirit. My best friend/comedy writing partner/high school sweetheart (we had an incredibly multifaceted…

Mind your business

I'm so glad I'm not in school anymore and no longer have to be the “buffer student.” Almost every former girl child knows what it's like to be the “buffer student." When teachers have “problem kids” in their class, they often seat them next to quiet and well-behaved kids (mostly girls) to attempt to mitigate the problem (or buffer it). Teachers think that well-behaved kids will rub off on the rowdy ones, but usually, it results in well-behaved kids becoming miserable. I always seemed to end up…

How dare she?

Remember those "May the 4th" jokes today, dads!

There is no group of people more unfairly scrutinized online than parents. Okay, maybe that's not 100% true, but I am baffled by the comments on nearly every parenting video I see on reels and TikTok. No matter what a parent does, no matter how normal their video is, some weirdos in the comments will pick apart and criticize them for no reason. I know this isn't wholly a problem of the internet. People have been giving parents unsolicited advice since man developed the ability to speak. The iss…

Twenty years ago, parenting books used to be where it was at. Parents who had a million questions about how they should raise their kids didn't go around posting about it on their MySpace pages. They went to Borders, Books A Million, and other now-defunct stores and bought a bunch of books about it! While not all parenting books are written by experts, they're at least a bit more inherently trustworthy than strangers on the internet . When I was a kid, all of the adults in my life told me to be…

One of the most challenging parts of being a parent is the lack of sleep . Kids wear you down to the point of exhaustion and keep you up at night worrying about them. It's an incredibly unfair catch-22 of the human experience. My poor mother has been unable to sleep since I was born, and I wish I hadn't done that to her. I'm a sprite 23-year-old baby, so naturally, I've never had any problem with sleeping. I just know that if and when I pop a child out of my body, I'm going to stay up all night…

Like many other towns across the country, my hometown had an infamous mommy Facebook group . The group was a running joke at my high school because the mothers involved just didn't know how to behave themselves. They would constantly bicker with each other over everything and nothing at the same time. Popular topics of conversation were politics, religion, how evil doctors were, and their children's behavioral problems. The number of women who would divulge their children's medical history to a…

It's difficult to keep the magic of the Easter Bunny alive for your kids. Santa is relatively easy because you can meet a man at a shopping mall that will convincingly portray him. The Tooth Fairy is simple: your kid never sees her unless you mess up or they're a super light sleeper. The Easter Bunny is a hard sell because it's unclear what form he takes. Is he a normal rabbit? Is he one of those scary bunnies in fursuits? Is he a horrifying anthropomorphic half-man, half-rabbit that will haunt…

Best Actress 2024 is a cinch

What's the matter with kids these days? Why can't they be like we were: perfect in every way? Every generation has gripes with “kids these days.” These days, kids are more rebellious and less hardworking than kids used to be! If you're not a member of Gen Z or Generation Alpha, this thought might have crossed your mind. If you're a millennial parent, you might be “kids these days” curious, and I beg you to resist this urge! Don't you remember when adults criticized you for liking 98 Degrees