General Parenting

by Julie Chen Allen

If you want to be intimate with your spouse …

You’ll have to put the kids to bed early.

By Julie Chen Allen

I’m a newcomer to summer camp registration. Some of the veteran moms tried to warn me, but I did not listen. Now I am uncovering the painstaking problems to procrastinating on camp enrollment. Apparently, there seems to be a secret code to securing the perfect summer camp schedule. It involves some combination of mental torture, Zen meditation, sheer luck, and mathematical genius.

If the week-long art camp is full, and the two-week-long nature camp has five people on the waitlist, should we wait or sign up for acting camp costing twice as much? Or if the science camp is held in July but not in August, and the soccer camp is only four days in June, when do we want to squeeze in a trip to Sea World? Oy. It feels like a standardized test.

Maybe I could try sheer annoyance.

Me:

by Julie Chen Allen

I’ve always wondered…

by Julie Chen Allen

While I was digging for my wallet the other day, the cashier commented to me: “That’s a big ol’ purse you have there!”

• More research that drinking coffee is good for my health.
• Naps. Any time, any place.
• Not letting toddler out of the house again with two left shoes.

by Julie Chen Allen

So I have this idea… Some might call it attention deficit, but I call it maximizing time. Or rather, as I’d really like to call it, squeezing more into my life.

For instance, rather than joining a book club, I plan to host a magazine club instead. My magazine club meetings would take place during a 30-minute lunch break or coffee break. If you don’t work with me, I guess you can’t join.

by Julie Chen Allen

I admit, when I encounter a parenting dilemma, I often don’t call my mom. I don’t run to the library or reach for my dusty child development books. I don’t pull up my DVR-ed episodes of Nanny 911, or even call the pediatrician. And sometimes, I don’t even turn to my spouse.

When I am truly at a loss for parenting solutions, I turn to the Google search engine. Welcome to my parenting style: Google-parenting.

These days, I’ll just type in any combination of my feelings…my kids hate me!…and

by Julie Chen Allen

In keeping with the theme of getting more time out of the day, here are a few ideas not guaranteed to work very well - or at all:

by Julie Chen Allen

It should be no surprise that I obsess about time. I spend a lot of time I don’t have in order to figure out how to get more of it. And now that it’s February, a month where I not only lose the 31st, but also the 30th and, this year, even the 29th day, you can guess what I'll be obsessing about. Hint: it's not who's gonna be my Valentine. Yes, much to my dismay, Leap Year only comes once every 4 years, keeping that extra 24 hours torturously afar. As my 5 year old would put it, that is just soooooo unfair!

Fortunately, while I was wasting time sifting through the closet, I stumbled upon a really useful article from a May 2007 edition of Oprah Magazine that offered hints on how to get more time into your day. I hope it will help you, too.