Lisa Endlich's Blog, page 452

Family Weekend: Do’s and Don’ts of Visiting a Kid in College

The first time I visited one of my sons in college was both a wonderful and awkward experience. He was thrilled to see us (thank goodness) and I held back tears of joy at seeing him for the first time since drop off six weeks earlier. But we were on new and unsteady ground. This was my first visit to his world and I was far from sure how to proceed.

Do’s and Don’ts of Family Weekend (and Anytime You Visit Your Kid in College)

DO show up bearing gifts. Nothing makes a parent more endearing th...

How Will a Home Feel on the Other Side of Parenting?

The evening my husband and I came home after dropping our daughter off at college, our sons were both away and we returned to a very quiet house. I went to sleep but woke in the middle of the night to an emptiness I had never felt before. It lurked in the darkened hallway outside my doorway and in the bedrooms beyond. Our home, I realized, would never be the same.

When we bought the house we live in, my children were young – four, two and nine months old. I remember the first night we slept h...

The Gift Of Failure by Jessica Lahey: Review

Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, theNew York Times bestselling parenting book, could have been a source of frustration to parents of teenagers. In her searingly well-written volume, Lahey shows how letting our kids experience setbacks, rather than helping them to avoid failure, is the best way for them to find their own motivation, direction and success. But Lahey is a middle and high school teacher and the mother of two...

College Care Packages From Home: 50 Great Ideas

As freshmen, nothing puts a smile on our faces quite like knowing we have college care packages on the way. It starts with an email notification that a package has arrived at the mailroom and is available to be picked up that afternoon. It’s hard to focus on the differences between classical and operant conditioning that your psychology professor is explaining when you’d rather think about the gifts from home you’ll soon be receiving.

As you walk to the mailroom, anticipation builds and you...

Competing Hopes of Parents and Kids

As my oldest daughter, a high school senior, buckles down on her college applications this fall, I like to think we’re in sync as we consider the four-year journey she’ll take starting next year. We’re assessing the schools we visit using the same scorecard, we’re formulating identical hopes and dreams for every aspect of her college experience, we’re making the most of this final year together to become even more like-minded.

Then I remember: we are still the same two people we’ve always bee...

Stepping Back

Today my baby started her freshman year of high school with a smile on her face.

She got herself up at 6 a.m., did her hair in record time, didn’t have her usual battle with the tempestuous eyeliner, chattered away at breakfast about who she was meeting before first period and where, indulged my first-day-of-school photo session, and with a quick kiss and hug was on her merry way, upbeat and ready to take on 9th grade.

Last night, though? Last night was a different story.

Last night there was...

Our Instant Family Became Our Instant Empty Nest

Eighteen years ago I lay on an operating table and pushed out my first twin girl baby. (Fraternal, since everybody asks.)

I had been in labor for five days. Thirteen weeks of bedrest atrophied every muscle in my body. The residual terbutaline in my bloodstream, designed to keep me out of preterm labor, made my initial contractions strong enough to keep me awake for the better part of four days and nights but not strong enough to deliver. Upon arrival we told the labor nurse that I was having...

Cue the Tears: My Eldest Son Is Off to College

On the day my eldest son left for college, my youngest son got his first zit. This had to be some kind of sign, I thought. Time marches on or some such thing. Maybe this was God’s little joke aimed at a mom whose “baby” is no longer a baby and whose first child was flying the coop. If so: not funny.

So many words have been spilled on this very subject – the first kid heading off to college – that it feels unoriginal to be thinking about it, let alone writing about it. And yet it pierces uniqu...

Brussel Sprouts: What Do We Really Know About Our Kids?

What does cooking for a family and an apartment full of twenty-something hungry roommates have in common? A lot, it turns out.

Yesterday afternoon, my friend Katie Workman gave me her new book, Dinner Solved!: 100 Ingenious Recipes That Make the Whole Family Happy, Including You!

I spent one of the scariest hours of my life with Katie two summers ago and yet she has graciously appeared on Grown and Flown twice to suggest great cooking ideas for college kids and young adults and how to outfit...

When College Freshmen Get Sick

College freshmen, and all other students, get sick — a lot.

“Every year freshmen come into my office and say, ‘I have never been sick like this in my life. There must be something wrong with me,'” said Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, director of medical services at the University of Connecticut student health center. “And I say, ‘Yes, you are a freshman. That is what is wrong.”

But when freshmen are ill, most are dealing with their own health care for the first time, and that can lead to confusion,...