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Growing up, holiday parties were always big family affairs. I have a large extended family, with a dozen aunts & uncles (and even more cousins). Think standing room only in the kitchen, kids weaving through the maze of adults, laughter rising above the buzz of conversation & more Italian food than you could stomach.  As […]

Parenting can be tough, and it can also be lonely. It can be hard to find time to go on a much-needed date night, let alone get together with other couples, and sometimes the idea of hosting another family just sounds exhausting. Kids are picky, the house is messy, you haven’t finished painting the kitchen, […]

I never imagined that on the day I became a mother, I’d be living 9,928 miles away from family.  We live in Australia, and we have a one-year-old daughter. We love our life here—my husband and I both have great jobs, and mine has even given me a year off to spend with our daughter. […]

I currently live 700 miles from my family, but I have never felt more at home anywhere else. It didn’t start out that way, though. Because of my husband’s job, we had the choice of only two cities in which to live. We started out in Chicago, but once we became pregnant with our second […]

When I was a young girl, I always dreamed of living on a farm. Even though I had never lived on one before, I just knew I always wanted to—someday. Little did I know that I would actually end up living that dream. I grew up in the suburbs, went to college for engineering and […]

When we bought our home four years ago, it was in bad shape. It was over 70 years old, a vacant, leaking, neglected foreclosure, filled with dirt, dog hair, and junk. But it was on 16 beautifully wooded acres, right next door to my parents, had tons of historic charm (it was originally given as […]