Three years ago my husband and I made a decision to move from New York City to Boston.

We had lived in New York for about 10 years and loved it. Well, we didn’t love everything about it: Garbage trucks outside our window at 4am after our daughter had just fallen asleep after hours of crying? No thanks. Paying lots of money for tiny apartments? Not the best. Being stuck in a non-air-conditioned subway car? The worst. But overall we loved living there and while it was more challenging (and a lot more expensive) once our daughter was born, it was also extremely convenient — no need for a car, parks all around, and if we ran out of diapers at midnight there were tons of places around to get some.

But once our daughter turned three we had to face the school dilemma (basically, move into a very expensive area and try to zone into a good public school or pay through the nose and try to get into a private school). My husband and I are both public school fans, so we started to think about moving somewhere where that was a possibility. We thought about California, North Carolina, and Boston, all for different reasons. Boston was last on our list of places each of us really wanted to move to (we wanted something warmer and different from the Northeast that we knew).
Read the rest of this entry

Last Friday I did something with my kiddo that I now realize I should have done much earlier and more often.

She skipped school and we spent the entire day together doing fun stuff like making jewelry, having lunch out, going to the bookstore, and getting some other treats along the way. No work, no errands, no time commitments — just a full day to hang out together.

It was one of our best days together, even given the fact that my foot was killing me (apparently I’ve developed some horrid case of Planter fasciitis, which makes it feel like I am walking on nails and which is supposed to be cured with stretching and icing? Right.) and the fact that our original plan to go to the zoo was shut down by an annoying all-day drizzle. I realize, of course, that it’s a rare luxury for us to be able to do this. I am on a two-week hiatus before I start a new gig and my daughter is in first grade, which means that skipping a day of school isn’t such a big deal (yet).
Read the rest of this entry

When I first saw this video from the New York State Department of Health (thank you, Jezebel, for this gem of a find!), I thought it was a joke. Seriously, just take a look.

(I tried to embed here, but the Internets isn’t cooperating.)

If you can’t view the video or just want a quick re-cap, it’s a short advertisement featuring a new mom (the cute kiddo looks to be a bit over a year old) talking about how happy she is to have lose so much weight by breastfeeding. “Breastfeeding burns up to 500 calories a day,” she tells us, “which is like doing aerobic exercise for 2 hours!”
Read the rest of this entry

I’ve recently been invited to two women-only professional events. I’m on the organizing committee for one other. And this weekend while catching up on my RSS feed reading I came upon this article in the Wall Street Journal, which, among other things, talked about whether a woman-only professional conference (TEDWomen, for example) is a good idea or just acts further to segregate women.

And all this got me thinking about whether women-only professional conferences and events are a good idea or less productive than they might seem.

If you want the truth, I’m pretty torn on this.

Read the rest of this entry