Pam Moore

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“More Goldfish!” my 5-year-old demands.

I summon all my patience. “Can you try that again?”

“I’m hungry!”

I take a long blink. “Honey? Can you—”

Her face is still beet red, but her body has relaxed. She takes a deep breath, then slowly blows the air through her pursed lips. This is the “birthday cake” breathing she learned in kindergarten.

“Mom, can I please have more Goldfish?”

My daughter attends public school in Boulder, Colo., where her teacher is one of a handful of educators in...

Pam Moore | Longreads | July 2017 | 16 minutes (4,065 words)
1. My face—and my life—split in half ten days after my second daughter was born.
In the grainy iPhone photos taken immediately after Lucy’s birth, I am looking at the ceiling, not at her. The gray-gold glow of dusk peeks through the bli...

Before we found out our younger child had severe, life-threatening food allergies, we kept the kids’ emergency information on a crumpled piece of paper, shoved in a drawer between the vegetable peeler and the wine opener.

But when Ellie was 8 months old, we went to the allergist, hoping to figure out why she was chronically congested and why nothing we tried could touch her eczema. Going into the appointment, I was hopeful. Leaving the appointment, I was deflated. We learned our baby was alle...

My carefree life had already been obliterated with the birth of our first child. We'd barely notice the addition of a mere 8 to 10 pounds' worth of additional human in our household. This was what I told myself, along with a few other handy lies......

Setting up rock climbs, backing up the trailer and navigating the trail are just a few of the tasks that need to be done at an outdoor education summer camp. At Women’s Wilderness, women do it all. And that’s huge, says executive director Emily Isaacs, as it’s key for girls to look up to their instructors and think: “That person looks like me.”

Women’s Wilderness summer camps provide girls ages 8 to 18 opportunities to learn outdoor skills like backpacking, rock climbing, navigation, backcoun...

My five-year-old daughter and I tend to get into major power struggles in the morning. I make her the “wrong” breakfast. She wails like I’m torturing her as I attempt brush her tangled curls. Fresh snow covers the ground and her party shoes are the only shoes she’s willing to wear.
She’s on the floor, crying and flailing her arms before I can finish saying “snow boots.” We are running late (again) but I take a minute to lock the bathroom door, turn the vent on, and cry. Why is this is hard? W...

“Are you taking the sick chicken to the vet today?” my daughter asked me.
She’d been awake less than five minutes and she was already talking about the one thing I didn’t want to discuss – our chickens. We’d raised them since they were chicks. For two long, smelly months, we kept them under a heat lamp in a dog crate in our basement. Once they were big enough, we relocated them to a coop in our backyard where they’d lived not even two weeks when we woke one morning to find nothing but their b...

If there was something you could do to reduce carbon emissions and
traffic, create more parking and help provide affordable transportation in low-income neighborhoods, would you do it? For eGo CarShare users the answer is a resounding yes. eGo is Colorado’s only nonprofit carshare, serving Boulder, Denver and Longmont. The company’s mission is “to provide and promote alternatives to individual car ownership, thereby reducing the environmental and social impacts associated with motor vehicle u...

Sometimes your kid just needs a ride somewhere, not a sitter to watch them. In the age of the smartphone, there’s an app for that – if you happen to live in a city where it’s available.
Apps like HopSkipDrive, GoKart, Zum, and Kango, among others, are essentially Uber for kids. They offer all the convenience of a typical rideshare app, plus a thorough vetting process to ensure your child’s safety. Shannon Stacy, the North Carolina single mom who founded GoKart, describes her company as a comb...

“Mom, can I have the vacuum?” asked my five-year-old daughter.
I was confused and also reluctant to turn over my beloved cordless Dyson.
“Why, sweetheart?”
Normally you cannot see my daughter’s floor through the forest of books, dolls, and clothes. She grinned while imploring me: “Come see.” She marched down the hall and into her room, leading me by the hand. When we got to her doorway I laughed in surprise. The floor was completely clear. I ceded control of the Dyson until my daughter got bo...

They say there are no dumb questions. They are wrong. There are, in fact, many dumb questions. I know because I ask them more often than Kim Kardashian posts a selfie. In the spirit of conscious parenting and minimizing the urge to stab myself with a Lego, I’ve composed a list of dumb questions to stop asking my kids.
1 | Are you ready to go?
Before asking this question, assess the situation. Are the child’s shoes on? Has the child gone to the bathroom? (Alternatively: Is her diaper smuggling...

I was pregnant with our first child when my husband and I attended a friend’s 40th birthday party. Over thumping music and margaritas (a Shirley Temple for me), we wished the guest of honor another happy journey around the sun.

“How does 40 feel?” My husband asked.

“It’s good,” he said. “But I’m tired.” He and his wife had two young kids at the time. “I don’t remember the last time I slept through the night.”

Our friend turned his gaze to his wife. Beaming in her direction, he told us how exc...

Chickens might be the most underrated pets of our time. My husband and I have kept backyard chickens for six years. While they're not snuggly, keeping one flock of chickens offers all the richness of adopting one adorable mutt and requires only a fraction of the work. What they lack in snuggles they make up for in eggs.

Still not convinced your family needs chickens? Read on.

Chickens offer a chance to discuss death with your kids

Although they generally live about eight years, they only lay ...