My husband and I spent yesterday evening trying to calculate when he must have graduated from middle school. And when I say “we spent yesterday evening,” I mean the entire evening. We took breaks to get snacks and to watch an episode of The Three-Body Problem, so we’d feel a bit...

Spring break is a great time for me to take a breather after a busy school term and to re-organize parts of my life that have become a little frayed. During the school year, there's not much time or energy to be spent doing those deep cleaning tasks that...

So I sat down in front of my computer to write this week’s column, but all of my open tabs sort of called to me, and I started going through them instead. You guys.  There are so many things to do when you have one kid in Grade 12...

I must admit that I’ve always been a bit of an anxious parent. I always had this nagging feeling that something terrible would happen if I didn’t worry. I can’t tell you to this day what I thought worrying would accomplish, but at 3 am, that didn’t seem to...

Being the parent of teenagers is fun, weird, and frustrating. You live with people who are as tall as (or taller than) you but still seem to need so much help.  They know more than you about niche subjects like TikTok or pre-calculus, but they don’t know how to...

Parenting is a challenge no matter where you live. It doesn’t seem like there’s a way to truly prepare yourself for how different your life is going to be. However, from the very beginning, I knew that having my children in Mexico, far from my home country of Canada,...

I’ve been living in Puerto Vallarta for about twenty-four years now, which means I’ve acquired a great deal of Vallartan life experience. I am happy to share some of the wisdom I’ve gathered because it’s been so helpful to me when others have done the same.  Some of that...

It’s the month of love and friendship, which always gets me in the mood to talk about kindness and kids. It’s one of the hardest things to do; to raise kind, compassionate children who set healthy boundaries in their relationships. And yet, it’s possible. I promise. I think it’s...

One of my Facebook friends recently shared some pictures of his trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, and it brought back memories. My husband and I took our two children on that same journey back in 2015, and I wanted to dig through my pictures and compare notes with my...

I’m a kindergarten teacher and early childhood coordinator at the American School in Puerto Vallarta, and I love this time of year. As a kindergarten teacher, I’m watching my five-year-old students turn six, which means they are starting to do all kinds of amazing things.  For example, some...