There is a moment, right before the first big firework goes off, when an entire crowd goes quiet and tips their heads back at the same time. Kids and adults, all of them, staring up at the dark and waiting for something to happen. Then it does, and everybody makes...
Summer can be filled with small asks. Can I ride my bike to Jacob’s house? Can I stay home while you run to the store? Can I walk to the corner and back by myself? And so often a parent’s instinct is to say not yet. Maybe when you are...
There is a very specific moment that every reading household knows. Your middle grader finishes a book they loved, closes it, and looks up with a mix of satisfaction and grief. Then comes the question: Do you have another one like that? It sounds simple. It is not. The trick...
The first few days of summer break have a honeymoon quality. Everyone is relaxed, the rules are loose, and if your middle grader spends a long morning glued to a screen, well, they earned it. They survived a whole school year. Then day four arrives, and the loose arrangement you...
Most summer bucket lists are either too young or too vague. Blow bubbles. Have a picnic. Visit a museum. Middle graders need something with a little more edge to it. Something that feels like a real challenge, a real adventure, or at minimum a really good story to tell later....
The last day of school has a particular energy. Backpacks hit the floor. Folders get recycled. And somewhere in the back of every parent’s mind, a quiet concern surfaces: will they read anything this summer, or will the whole thing just slide? The summer reading slide is real. Kids who...
While May is filled with end-of-school activities, June is basically a month-long exhale. School winds down, schedules loosen up, and suddenly, there is actual time to do things just because they sound fun. Lucky for you, June comes loaded with unofficial holidays that are exactly that kind of fun. Here...
The last weeks of school look like excitement from the outside. Field days, yearbook signings, countdown chains taped to bedroom doors. The excitement is real, but for many middle graders, something else is running quietly in the background. This is a transition, and transitions are complicated at any age. At...
There is a window, somewhere between the end of car seat requirements and the beginning of teenage indifference, where traveling with your kid is genuinely great. Not just manageable. Not just fine. Actually great. If you have a child between eight and twelve right now, you are in that window....
Every book starts somewhere. A question, an image, a memory that won't let go. For the Night Buddies series, it started with a little boy who had trouble falling asleep, a father who refused to let that be a problem, and one night when a red crocodile named Crosley showed...
Middle graders are not always easy to impress. But tell a ten-year-old they can grow a pumpkin the size of a small car, or a plant that eats bugs, or popcorn they can actually pop in the microwave, and suddenly they are very interested in going outside. Gardening with kids...
It’s raining. School is out or winding down for the day. Your middle grader has exhausted their usual options and has arrived in the kitchen to deliver the news: they are bored. Completely, desperately, nothing-to-do bored. The instinct, especially on a rainy afternoon with nowhere to be, is to fix...
There comes a point in every middle grader’s life when the egg hunt stops being exciting and starts being something they participate in for the benefit of the adults watching. You can see it happen in real time. They find an egg, drop it into their basket, and look up...
Most readers can point to one. A specific book, usually read at exactly the right moment, that cracked something open. Before it, reading was a chore or just something that happened at school. After it, books were something else entirely. If your middle grader hasn’t found that book yet, they...
Every year around this time, millions of people fill out brackets predicting which college basketball team will take the championship. Most of those brackets are busted by the end of the first weekend. And yet, people love it. There is something genuinely fun about setting up a tournament, picking your...
It starts gradually. Bedtime gets pushed back a little. Then a little more. You walk past their room at 10:00 p.m., and there’s still a light on. By the time spring break rolls around, your middle grader has somehow flipped into a schedule that would make a college student feel...