writing

Mary’s Favorite Post: 2025

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Reflecting on 2025, I’m pleased with the content we’ve produced throughout the year. While I loved exploring topics like the Boy Brain and the Girl Brain, but my top pick has to be Mary’s School Update: New School, Who’s This?

School consolidations and closures have become increasingly common across the country in recent years, especially in cities that are reaching max capacity. On the flip side, new school construction and redistricting in growing communities can be just as challenging for parents to navigate.

When our school closed and we moved to a nearby one, the transition turned out to be far less daunting than we expected. In fact, the kids adapted more easily than the parents. And through it all, what truly makes a school special remains the same: the teachers, staff, and families that make the community.

Enjoy!

I Think We Need a Tutor

| Patti Webb

Every night, not unusually, Troy and I read to A&Z before bed. We had done a bit of a library purge and made sure that they had a variety of Early Reader and Beginner Chapter books, having already gone through all of our picture books. Now that the girls were older, I wanted to make sure the girls were being challenged by the material, instead of reading the same books over and over.

We switched to reading aloud together and let the girls alternate pages or passages. That’s when what used to be an understandable gap turned into one of our kids falling behind.

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Things We Loved: July 2025

| Patti Webb

It’s our last week of summer vacation. We’ve bought our school supplies, gotten our end-of-summer haircuts, and Open House is in a couple days. To close out the season, we’re sharing our end-of-summer Things We Loved before jumping into Back-To-School and regularly scheduled content next week.

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Things We Loved: February 2025

| Patti Webb

Fun Fact: Our Child(ish) Advice Amazon storefront actually made a commission! Oh, how our baby has grown. TBH, it’s only a little bit and it was on items that we haven’t actually promoted. The great algorithmic mysteries of life…

That being said, thank you to our audience and we’re happy you are reading our content.

It’s only been two weeks since our last personal check-in, but since November when we actually shared things we loved.

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Patti’s New Year’s Resolution Check-In

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

I’d like to thank my previous self for the resolution mindset of “Life’s tough. Get a helmet.”, because there is some bad juju going on, on every level. I also got Norovirus over the weekend, so that’s fun and games.

Here’s my quick Resolution recap for the month of January.

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