I’ve been on quite the hiatus from This is Not Advice because it is crunch time for the preorder campaign of Not What I Had in Mind: A Motherhood Origin Story. Soon, you’ll be able to order my debut memoir, but I have a lot of work to do before that happens. So please excuse the interruption of …
“Mama está muy lejos,” my daughter says her mother is too far away. I haven’t heard this one as part of her bedtime avoidance routine. She repeats it over and over like maybe it will create an alternate reality in which I am not sitting in the rocking chair six feet away. We have been …
This post was originally published in my newsletter This is Not Advice. This is Not Advice (TINA) is weekly publication by me—Laura Freeland, blogger, soon-to-be-published-author, the world’s okayest mom, and avid plant eater—where I explore motherhood, the creative life, and other topics I know almost nothing about. If you love these emails please forward to …
This is Not Advice (TINA) ↓ This is Not Advice (TINA) is a weekly publication by me—Laura Freeland, blogger, soon-to-be-published-author, the world’s okayest mom, and avid plant eater—where I explore motherhood, the creative life, and other topics I know almost nothing about. It comes out on Thursdays via email, and it eventually makes it’s way onto …
Hello and good morning to you, worthy friend. This is the first of a few very exciting updates coming your way this month. So let’s do this… In 2015–a whole decade late to the party—I started watching Grey’s Anatomy. It was the year Derek Shepherd died. He witnesses a car accident on a road in the middle …
It’s been a while. We’ve been underwater—literally. A week and a half ago, I noticed a strange smell coming from the nursery. I spent a week looking for a peed pullup set aside by a sleepy dad in the middle of the night. But when the floorboards started lifting and the baseboards popped off, it …
A year ago, I submitted the essay below to the New York Times’ Modern Love Column. Modern Love accepts less than one percent of the over 8,000 submissions they get each year. So here I am, on this beautiful Sunday morning, sharing my rejected essay. Because, why not? When my daughters were born, I didn’t want …
Sugar is sugar, no matter what it was before it was sugar. I’ve never been much of a baker, and I’ve always taken my coffee black, so there’s rarely been a bag of sugar in my pantry. I’ve never given it much thought. In my mid-20s, when I was trying to lose the freshman 25, …
Prematurity is one of those things you have to be there to understand. I can tell you my daughters weighed one pound four ounces each and went to surgery just days after they were born weighing less than that. I can tell you I couldn’t hold my daughters for months, and even once I could, …
We (meaning me and the babies) got on the 1000 hours outside movement, which is hilarious considering I spent most of my life trying to spend zero hours outside. What can I say? I didn’t have Instagram to influence my decisions in early adulthood, so I stayed inside on account of the heat and the …