Tag
siblings
Generations
The Step-Grandmother and the Blended Family History
On the wall of the Saunders-Mott family kitchen in Burlington, Vermont, there are seventeen framed photographs. The newest, from June 2025, shows a Christmas dinner with twenty-three people in it. The family has been counting itself, with some difficulty, since 2009.
Outdoor Childhood
A Week With No Schedule in Late June
After a school year of camps, classes, and color-coded calendars, one family in Bloomington, Indiana tried a week in late June with nothing on it, and discovered how slowly children fill an empty day.
Generations
The Family Archive: A Shoebox, a Hard Drive, and a Shelf
Eliot Bracken has been the unofficial archivist of his extended family for nineteen years. He is forty-four, an actuary, and lives in St. Paul. He keeps the family photographs on three external hard drives, the family letters in two Bankers Boxes, and the family stories on a Google Doc that is eighty-one pages long.
Outdoor Childhood
A Creek Three Blocks From Home
For nineteen months, a family in Decatur, Georgia let their two children, ages seven and nine, walk to a small urban creek alone, and kept a small notebook of what they brought back.
Sleep
A Week in a Bedtime Routine
Marisol Fuentes spent seven evenings observing the bedtime routine of an Austin family with three children, ages eight, five, and two. The choreography is precise.
Schools & Learning
Homeschooling Two Siblings on a Wisconsin Dairy Road
On a stretch of County Road P outside Viroqua, Wisconsin, a former civil engineer named Sarah Holst-Larsen has been homeschooling her two sons for four years. Their school day begins at 9:00 and ends, on most days, by 1:00.