February 04, 2017

Link Roundup

Happy Saturday, dear ones!

This stories caught our eye, taught us something, and / or offered a positive spark this week. We hope they have the same impact on you.

To a wonderful weekend!

This story warmed our hearts. Little ones respond in the most beautiful ways! (Also, major props to this nanny for the calmest, most intelligent response to a stressful situation ever.)

Also from A Cup of Jo…for those of you just getting into the realm of hiring babysitters, here are 8 questions to ask a new one.

This beautiful mother worked to remedy her daughter’s bookshelf, so the stories it held matched her skin tone. “But once I noticed the imbalance in our personal collection, I felt the books we actually owned should reflect her. The lack of representation should have been obvious much sooner, but I realized that as a white mother, white privilege afforded me a certain level of oblivion to the racial makeup of our book characters. Part of adopting transracially is learning what to pay attention to. As soon as I was aware of what was missing, I committed myself to filling our bookshelves with stories about smart, talented, strong black females.”

How to get back up after you’ve failed your kids. “Have you ever wondered why? It’s simple. We’re not getting something we want. The reaction we want, the remorse we want, the respect we want, the results we want. On and on. That may catch you off guard but as I think back to that argument I had with my daughter, it stemmed from the fact that I believed she wasn’t giving me the respect I thought I deserved. As a parent, I do deserve respect, but at what cost? Allowing something rather small to escalate into something so big that it emptied her heart?”

Having the open adoption conversation with an acquaintance who doesn’t quite fully understand (and asks a lot of stereotypical questions based on stereotypical assumptions), and committing to debunking myths and stereotypes.

So moved by this story of a woman whose son was diagnosed with autism while she was in graduate school. “I’ll admit that I didn’t quite know what those diagnoses meant in their entirety. I’ll admit the first time I ever Googled “autism” was after my son’s diagnosis. Those are not things I am proud of these days, but they’re the truth. I just didn’t understand. I wasn’t told in terms that made sense to me at the time. I was uneducated and felt so alone as a single parent. I felt like nobody I knew at that time quite knew what I was going through — at least not that I knew of…”