Boyd Meets Girl

Let me preface this blog post with the proclamation that YES, the grass is indeed always greener on the other side, and that NO, being a part-time mom isn't better or worse than being a full-time mom or full-time employee. I'm just writing from the standpoint of my life, in which I have my paint brush in a million buckets of paint and am starting to realize that I will never finish my masterpiece. Ok, maybe that is a bit excessive, but any mom who has gone to bed at night feeling like an utter failure at LIFE gets my dramatization. Let's go back to the beginning. The beginning of my life as a mom, a sleep-deprived blur of trying to do it all but failing miserably, probably because I spent all of my "free time" perusing Pinterest for the best crockpot recipe and posting a trillion pictures of my newborn child on Facebook. I think that is maybe where it all started, this desire, no self expectation , to do it all. With the internet, full of ideas and words and t...

The holidays are right around the corner! If you are anything like me, you have all intents and purposes of getting all the Christmas presents bought and wrapped by the Friday after Thanksgiving, but end up doing it all online the week before Christmas. I feel ya girl.  This year, I have two goals, well really THREE goals in mind in regards to Christmas: 1) Budget appropriately to allow for Christmas NOT breaking the bank. 2) Getting Christmas put up and presents wrapped the weekend after Thanksgiving while avoiding and not supporting Black Friday (which I find to be one of the most annoying celebrated holidays in American culture). 3) Not buy my kids and niece annoying, pointless toys that serve no real purpose after the initial excitement than to collect dust in the closet. While it is true that every parent's dream is a zoo membership or 10 visits to Gymboree as a gift for their children, kids like to open presents. I don't need to tell you that, for one can only assu...

Preface: I'm doing a little bit of internal research, and I am finding that what is of most interest to a lot of my blog readers has to do with a) children and b) their speech development. Well, good thing I'm a speech therapist, am I right??? So, I decided that I'm going to start a mini-series showing parents specific developmentally-appropriate toys and how to play with them . By day, I work with children ages 0-3 and their families doing precisely that: teaching families/caregivers strategies of how to facilitate speech and communication development through play. So you're in good hands, people. There is no specific age group that I will be focusing on for this, but I can tell you that a majority of my therapeutic experience in the pediatric realm falls between 18 months to 4 years of age, give or take. However, the beautiful thing about these posts is that I will share activities scaffolding both down and up to cover a variety of concepts and skills. Some of the...