My gardening skills are subpar, at best. When we moved into our house, we were blessed with beautifully organized and manicured gardens. Now, it's a bit overgrown with who-knows-what growing in between. And it's the who-knows-whats that scare me. Not just because there could be weeds or invasive plants, which there are. But also lurking: poison ivy. The mosquitoes torture us enough -- the last thing my family needs is another excuse to itch.

My 10-year-old daughter was an enthusiastic and avid reader from the day she figured out how to sound out words. She reads everything: novels, biographies, Ranger Rick, the side of the cereal box. In contrast, my son was much harder to interest in books. He was so disinterested, in fact, that I went into his 1st grade teacher conference convinced he needed outside help with reading. Imagine my surprise, then, when we learned he was one of only two boys in the top reading group, and that his aptitude was galloping ahead.

Do your kids wake up cranky? Do they complain about (or sleep through) the alarm? Do your mornings begin with chaos and just get worse? Then consider incorporating a waking ritual into your morning. Just as bedtime rituals can help kids transition to sleep, waking rituals can ease kids into the day. Not long after my husband and I adopted our preschoolers (who, at the time, were just as likely to bite us as hug us) we discovered how important waking rituals were for our kids.

One of my favorite forms of art is floral arranging. It need not be inexpensive and you end up with a beautiful end result really fast. Many people find flower arranging daunting, so they buy a pre-arranged bouquet, pull it out of its cellophane wrapping, and stick it in a vase (and then wonder why it doesn't look quite right!). Today I'm here to help with a super easy how-to prepping and arranging flowers, including five easy flower arrangements.

Last month, not long after we had put our kids to bed, all of our fire alarms went off simultaneously without any obvious reason; no one was cooking and we didn't have a fire burning in the fireplace. I reflexively went looking for the trigger, and my husband immediately went upstairs to get the kids. When the episode was over, it occurred to me that Pete and I should devise a fire safety plan, particularly given that we know two families in our own town whose homes were destroyed by fires. Fortunately, our incident was merely a function of alarm malfunction, but it motivated us to get more prepared. I wanted to share our process with you:

I love gifting personalized book plates. Book plates may seem, I realize, old-fashioned, but I adore them. They celebrate reading and speak to a child's deep desire to mark things as their own. My children loved choosing which of their books deserved book plates, and to this day, when I happen upon their book plated copies of Goodnight Moon or Make Way for Ducklings, tears spring to my eyes when I remember their chubby toddler hands smoothing the stickers into the books. The crooked angle at which some of these plates are adhered reminds me of their fierce determination to "do it my own self!"