About Me

We live in Boulder, Colorado and have two boys and a girl, ages 24, 22, and 19.

After an extended child-raising sabbatical, I am returning to a part-time private practice as a child (and parent) psychologist. The issues my clients’ families bring will likely lead to more frequent blog posting on here–with identities changed, of course.

Play. Fight. Repeat. rose out of my heavy-duty parenting years, or the point in my life when I had three young clients 24/7. My husband is (still) a history professor at a nearby college which means that as a parental unit, we’ve (pretty much still) chosen time over money in our lives. You’ll read more about how this decision affected our parenting experience too.

With a light-hearted style, Play. Fight. Repeat. presents some of the latest ideas in psychology to people who spend time with kids. I’m drawn to current research and thinking about children and parenting, as well as living “green” and “simply” as a family.  I couldn’t help but try many of the suggestions out there on my own family.  My blog posts show you the results of these ‘trials’ in our home.

I also have this little thing about gathering and reading the latest books on parenting, childhood, simplicity, ecology, modern life, etc. So, I’ll let you know which of these books I think are particularly helpful. And by helpful sometimes I mean that the author admitted that his or her parenting experience was as unpredictable and chaotic as mine and I fell in love with the book for this reason alone.

During my “parenting young children” years, I thought and read a lot about how to give our kids the ‘tools’ they’d need to manage and maneuver in the crazy world into which they were entering. I’ve shared with you what we tried with our kids along these lines–complete with successes, and perhaps more importantly, failures.

By the way, I didn’t use my kids’ real names when I wrote about them here. I’ve kept their genders and ages accurate because changing those would throw everything off. Having a parent who is a psychologist can be hard enough, but having a mom who writes a blog on parenting is even harder I would think. To give my kids a modicum of privacy and a tad of control, I let them pick the names they wanted me to use.

However, when I turned some of my most popular Play. Fight. Repeat. blog posts into a book a few years back, we decided as a family–for various reasons–to use their real names. Because why would we want everything to turn out smoothly? This is parenting. So, if you’re curious what their real names are, read my book.   🙂

So there you go, and here we go. Enjoy!

Back to home page.