Annie Nicol is homeschooling her grandson, who lives with her son in a tiny home on her property. Annie Nicol
It’s a trend in our family that we take care of our own.
My parents, who both lived into their 90s, were retired educators and played a big role in caring for my kids. My son and I shared caregiving responsibilities for them. My husband is 80 and works part-time as a therapist, and he takes care of his grandkids every Friday and on some Tuesdays.
My grandson, who lives with me, lost his mother when he was an infant. He has an auntie he’s very close to, but it took some time because she lives out of town. Continue reading
For working parents managing busy children’s schedules, the week can feel like an endless relay of pickups, practices, late homework, and forgotten gear. The core tension is real: supporting kids’ interests and tackling children’s productivity challenges can quietly squeeze out dinners, downtime, and simple connection, until balancing family time becomes another task to juggle. When child activity management is unclear, the whole household runs on urgency instead of rhythm. A calmer, more intentional pace is possible. 
Americans, living in what is called the richest nation on earth, seem always to be short of money. Wives are working in unprecedented numbers, husbands hope for overtime hours to earn more, or take part-time jobs evenings and weekends, children look for odd jobs for spending money, the family debt climbs higher, and psychologists say one of the biggest causes of family quarrels and breakups is “arguments over money.” Much of this trouble can be traced to our present “debt-money” system. 
Few have had as profound an effect on modern scientific understanding as Sir Isaac Newton.
I grew up in a little town about 25 miles north of Chicago called Northbrook, Ilinois at a time when everyone treated each other with respect. We didn’t eat a lot of fast food. We drank Kool-aid, ate lunch meat sandwiches, PB&J sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, hot dogs, but mostly home made meal such as meatloaf, fried chicken, roast beef & pork chops, black eye peas, snap peas…
Despite the rapid pace of the digital age, it’s still too soon to toss the paper and pen. Actually, you may never want to stop writing for good as long as you want to further develop your brain.
I never took “social studies.” To this day, I’m not really sure what it even is! But every year when we took the state-standardized test as homeschoolers, my scores – as well as those of my siblings – came back in the 90th percentile or higher for all subjects, including social studies. This had nothing to do with luck or even smarts, but it had everything to do with the fact that we didn’t waste time on the social studies curriculum taught in schools in the first place.
The fire had burned down to a bed of glowing coals that night, the way fires do when the wood has settled into embers and the heat rises steady and quiet. My grandkids sat around me in a loose circle, wrapped in blankets, their faces flickering with amber light, their eyes wide the way young eyes get when they sense that the old man is about to say something he’s never said before. The cicadas hummed in the trees, and the air smelled of maple and river birch smoke, and for a moment I felt the years folding in on themselves – all the decades I’ve lived in Murfreesboro, all the changes I’ve watched come and go, all the things I’ve held in my chest because no one seemed to want to hear them.