Hands down one of my favorite purchases for Emerson thus far has been our Learning Tower. When I first heard about these, I knew we needed one! Basically, it is a tower that you can pull up to your countertops that your kids can safely stand in and, well, learn! Instead of pulling a chair up to the counter and potentially falling off, Emerson can scoot his tower wherever he wants to go safely. 

I went and spent some time with my friend Kari a couple of weeks ago. Kari is a huge role model of mine. She is an amazing wife and an amazing mother to 5 beautiful kids. [Check out her blog HERE.] I couldn’t help but wonder what Kari’s magic secret was to parenting her kids so well. So while picking her brain about different topics ranging from spanking to baby schedules to education, Kari said something that really blew me away. She said that parenting is a journey. All parents are on the journey, whether we are in the baby phase trying to choose between breastfeeding and formula or in the adolescent phase trying to decide between public school, private school and home school. There is no cut and dry perfect formula to being a parent. As Kari told me, 1 + 1 does not equal 2 in the parenting world. It is all a journey, there is no magic secret, and we are constantly learning what ideas and techniques work best for our family.

Here in our Headquarters, we don't believe a child is ever too young to start learning about responsibility - specifically in the area of chores! Etta Jayne is just shy of 5 months old and is already responsible for vacuuming the floors... Okay, I kid I kid. She is only responsible for eating, sleeping and pooping :) But Emerson on the other hand started helping with little chores probably somewhere around 18 months. We have always made it a point to involve him with housework, even before he could do a lot of the things himself. We want him to know that he has an important role to play in this family.