We need to find a new favorite place to buy scented candles, seasonal decor and wicker furniture. Pier 1 announced today that they would be permanently closing all of their locations. In a news release the retailer stated that they were not able to find a buyer after filing for bankruptcy earlier this year.
Robert Riesbeck, Pier 1’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer said, “We are grateful to our dedicated and hardworking associates, millions of customers and committed vendors who have collectively supported Pier 1 for decades. We deeply value our associates, customers, business partners and the communities in which we operate, and this is not the outcome we expected or hoped to achieve. This decision follows months of working to identify a buyer who would continue to operate our business going forward. Unfortunately, the challenging retail environment has been significantly compounded by the profound impact of COVID-19, hindering our ability to secure such a buyer and requiring us to wind down.”
Pier 1 is still accepting orders on its website and said it will “initiate store closing efforts and liquidation sales once store locations can reopen, in compliance with COVID-19 guidelines from local government and health officials.”
The company says it has approximately 541 U.S. stores and in the court filing says it plans to reopen some stores on or around May 22.
—Jennifer Swartvagher
Featured photo: Mike Mozart from Funny YouTube, USA
The super bowl halftime performance last week caused a lot of noise on social media! One phrase that I noticed being thrown around was “family-friendly” and it got me thinking, what does this even mean? Is it based on values, or morals, or some sort of social indoctrination? Isn’t it subjective, considering every family is different?
Let’s take a step back. If your kids were watching at halftime, you were exercising your right as a parent to let them watch it. If the resulting outcome was disapproval or disgust, does the fault lie with you as the parent or the network? Perhaps the NFL or the artists themselves? Who ultimately has control of the content that goes from the TV directly into your child’s impressionable brain?
My vote: the parents.
Don’t get me wrong, figuring out which content is appropriate for kids (no matter what your version of appropriate is) can be dizzying. The TV and Movie Parental guidelines rating system is fairly helpful, but not always accurate, so parents still have to be aware of what their children are watching all the time.
I’ve watched some PG-13 movies that are benign because the adult humor goes well over my kid’s heads, yet some PG content has caused nightmares in our house (I’m looking at you, Coraline). Unfortunately, this rating system does not apply to news or sports programming, including the super bowl and its halftime performance.
For the record, my kids did not watch it, not because I didn’t allow it, but because they were busy doing other things. When the Seahawks don’t make the cut, my kids lose interest. However, If they had watched, I would have been ok with it and would have addressed questions, if any, as they came up. It was perfectly “family-friendly” for this family.
If for some reason it had been objectionable to one of my kids, it would have been MY responsibility for allowing them to watch. It isn’t up to JLo and Shakira to set a good example for my family. That’s our job as parents.
You might say, “But, I didn’t know it would be that risque!” Ok, fine, but again, isn’t this part of informed parenting? Maybe next time, before letting your kids watch, you could give the performers a google? The content should have been no surprise (the performances and outfits were on par for both artists), and you would have been fully prepared to skip it or hit the off button on your tv. Family-friendly in YOUR home is up to you to decide, not the network, not the producers, not the performers.
Let’s step back even further. If your kids were watching football in the first place, and you were offended by the halftime performance, how do you justify watching the cheerleaders who are scantily clad during each and every game? Before JLo and Shakira took the stage, your kids had already taken in a whole lotta skin, gyrating, and jumping up and down via the sidelines.
How about the commercials for Viagara and violent R rated movies? I know that when my 7-year-old watches football with his dad, I am on guard to turn certain commercials off or ask him to look away. I’ve watched enough football games to KNOW there is content that scares him sometimes! They are not family-friendly in my opinion, but we do our best with the content to make it appropriate for his eyes. Again, it isn’t up to the advertisers to parent my kid. What they watch is ultimately up to us as parents.
If the halftime performance wasn’t your cup of tea, that’s cool! I liked it and found it super entertaining, but I respect and understand the viewpoint of those who thought it was too risque for their taste. We all have our own level of comfort. But ultimately, if your children watched and now you’re offended because it wasn’t “family-friendly,” then it’s a good time to remind yourself who is in charge of your family, and the content they watch. You hold the remote.
Emily is the author of Highlight Real: Finding Honesty & Recovery Beyond The Filtered Life.
As a Certified Professional Recovery Coach, recovery advocate, educator, and speaker, she is passionate about connecting women with resources for healing. Emily lives in Seattle with her husband and their five children.
New Year’s is a fun time to congratulate what our kids have accomplished this year at home through their chores, or at school, or in the field, and also help them get excited to take on new big goals. Whether creative, athletic, or intellectual, goals help our kids grow to effective, happy adults. Sticking to the very useful S-M-A-R-T model ensures they’ll have a better chance at reaching their goal.
#1. BE SPECIFIC.The clearer the better. The more focused the efforts and laser targeted the resolutions are, the higher likelihood for success. Help your kids narrow down a specific goal, even if short term. Start with a list of 10 fun things they might see themselves doing in 2020. Then order them according to the time of year most likely to get done.
Finally, have them pick the top 3 tasks they think they SHOULD do along with the top 3 they are EXCITED to do. Encourage them to pick from the ‘excited list over the ‘should list’. This will help them find their voice, value their opinion and stay engaged. Then, if you’re on S’moresUp, organize these into their 2020 chores.
#2. CREATE MEASURABLE LIMITS. Without a measurable endpoint, our kids don’t know when they’ve completed the challenge (this is very familiar to the families I work with on my app, who use S’ mores as rewards). The mind likes to know when to celebrate, when to internalize the “win” as part of their forming identity. Their goal has to have a very clear deadline.
Short term goals help kids associate trying with rewards, keeping them engaged and excited. Long term goals have the added benefit of helping kids set up benchmarks and “build resilience and cope with setbacks”.
Help kids stay motivated by encouraging them to “track their goals;” To revisit their goals and remind the mind to focus on them by rewriting the goal.
#3. STICK TO ACHIEVABLE THINGS. Our mind feels rewarded when we hit our goals. Tiny wins build the momentum of big wins. We want our kids to set achievable goals and know when they are winning. We want them to dream big while building confidence and muscle memory through consistent good habits that yield little rewards.
As they get clear about their big goals, help them set smaller benchmarks easier to consistently achieve. Remind them that they are loved no matter the outcome and that staying the course achieving the little wins is more important than the overall outcome of the big reach goal.
#4. STAY RELEVANT. Help your kids pick something they actually want to do, not something YouTube or their peers say they should do. They are more likely to stick to goals they’re genuinely interested in and can build pride around finishing. The goals they choose should be in alignment with the overall person they are trying to become.
Examples include
Practicing their dance routine every day for 2 weeks leading up to an audition
Reading a new book per month
Shooting 100 free throws a day 5 days/week before screen time
Submitting a poem to a local paper within 2 weeks
Whatever lights them up, make sure it’s very specific and they know what they are aiming for.
#5. BE TIMELY. Timing matters, particularly with growing and always-changing kids! Direct your kids to pick goals that matter to them NOW. They will grow and change and some things won’t be relevant anymore in 3, 4, 5 years. For example, that favorite song they’re trying to learn on the guitar is a hallmark of this point in their life and will motivate them the most right now but may not be relevant in 5 years.
Priya Rajendran is a developer and “Silicon Valley tech mom” who’s created S’moresUp an innovative iPhone and Android solution to the problems of managing family’s day to day life, with over 100,000 moms and dads already on board. She’s a technology veteran who lead the team behind Paypal's Wallet.
The internet has seen many viral threads and stories about the weird and spooky stuff parents have seen on their baby monitors, but one mom’s post about a ghost baby in the crib definitely takes the cake.
Just in time for the Halloween season, mom of two, Maritza Cibuls, got a ghostly vision one night when she took a peek at her 18-month-old son on the baby monitor. On the screen, a second baby’s face appeared to be staring up at her from the crib right next to where her son Lincoln was curled up asleep.
“I spotted the ghost baby right after putting my son down for the night around 8:30 p.m.,” the Chicago mom told TODAY Parents. “At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I tried to ignore it, but it was really starting to creep me out.”
In a panic, Cibuls texted her husband who was working late, her mom, her sister and even posted in a Facebook group for moms, asking if anyone had any thoughts on an explanation for the creepy image. “Even though the first thought that popped into my brain was ‘ghost,’ the rational part of my brain told me there must be some logical explanation,” said Cibuls. “So I grabbed my flashlight and went to check it out, but there was nothing there. All night, I stared at his monitor just waiting to see if the ghost moved, but, of course, it never did. And every time I started feeling myself relax and get drowsy, my son would roll over and I’d be on high alert again. I probably checked on him three more times that night, but each time he seemed completely fine.”
Finally the next morning she got her long awaited answer. In the center of the mattress was a manufacturers sticker featuring a baby’s face. When her husband had changed the crib sheets he had neglected to replace the mattress cover which had previously prevented the face from showing through.
Cibuls shared the entire ordeal and hilarious outcome online in a post that has since gone viral. While Cibuls has forgiven her husband, he is never allowed to change the sheets again.
During those nine months of pregnancy, expectant moms can expectant to spend a lot of time at their doctor’s office being weighed, measured and checked. A new study examines a prenatal care app that could replace some of those in-person visits and it’s working.
A study conducted by researchers at George Washington University and published in the journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth has found that Babyscripts, a virtual care app for managing obstetrics was successful in reducing the amount of in-person prenatal care visits needed during pregnancy while maintaining patient satisfaction.
photo: Jacob Sippel via U.S. Navy
The study included pregnant women between the ages of 18 and 40 who were diagnosed with a low-risk pregnancy, meaning that they had no patient history of hypertension, diabetes, renal disease or other condition that could negatively affect the outcome of the pregnancy. According to the results of the study Babyscripts users visited their obstetrician an average of 7.8 times while those who did not use the app visited theirs an average of 10.2 times.
“The positive results of this study are a huge validation of our belief in the power of technology to support mothers and providers without compromising quality,” Anish Sebastian, CEO and co-founder of Babyscripts, said in a press release. “This research shows that mobile health has the potential to deliver precision care to mothers while allowing providers to allocate time to the most vulnerable of their patients, and ultimately save lives.”
If you’re looking for a pick-me-up, this sweet Instagram post will melt your heart. When these preemie twins meet for the first time, what happens next absolutely everything.
A high-risk pregnancy is never easy. When Australian mama Ann Le found out her twins were mono-chorionic and mono-amniotic—meaning they shared both an amniotic sac and placenta—she was understandably worried about the outcome. At 29 weeks gestation, the twins’ heart rates became erratic, forcing Le to undergo an emergency c-section.
After delivering daughters Olivia and Zoe in January, Le’s girls spent 27 days in the NICU. After almost a month of separation, the twins were reunited on Feb. 22—in an absolutely adorable scene. The sisters snuggled in for a hug-filled huddle with mom. Le told TODAY, “Olivia was placed on my chest first, followed by Zoe who reached out her left arm in preparation to hug her sister.”
While the sisters’ health has improved, they aren’t out of the woods yet. Le and her husband recently learned their daughters will need heart surgery before they get to go home. Hopefully, now that they’ve connected, the girls’ bond will help them keep each other strong on the next phase of their journey together.
Becoming a parent is one of life’s greatest joys, but that doesn’t mean every moment is a happy one. New research has found that, in general, fathers are happier than mothers when it comes to the daily roles of parenthood.
Psychologists at the University of Riverside analyzed three separate studies with a total of more than 18,000 participants to determine whether moms or dads experience greater happiness from their parenting roles. For all three studies, the results showed fatherhood was more often linked with greater well-being than motherhood.
All three studies recorded measures of parental well-being that included happiness, depressive symptoms, psychological satisfaction and stress. The first two studies looked at the well-being of parents versus people without kids and in both cases dads reported greater satisfaction with their lives and fewer symptoms of depression than men without kids.
Moms, however, reported more depressive symptoms than women who don’t have kids. The third study looked at happiness while engaged in childcare or interacting with kids versus other daily activities. Men were happier while caring for their children, while women were less happy.
“Fathers may fare better than mothers in part due to how they spend their time with their children,” said study author Katherine Nelson-Coffey. The researchers surmised that one of the reasons for the outcome was that dads were more likely to say that they were playing with their kids while they were caring for them.
All parents-to-be have two big wishes: a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. Now experts are saying there is one thing you can do to help lower health risks for both babies and moms. According to a new study, women should wait a year between pregnancies.
New research published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that pregnancies with shorter intervals less than 18 months apart were at increased risk for adverse fetal and infant outcomes, as well as higher risk of maternal mortality and severe morbidity. The study included 123,122 women of various ages and 148,544 pregnancies.
For women 35 and older, the risk of maternal mortality was 0.62 percent when there were only six months between pregnancies (between the birth of one and the conception of another), versus only 0.26 percent with an 18 month interval. For younger moms (those 20 to 34) the increase in maternal mortality was not as significant, however those moms had a higher risk of spontaneous preterm delivery, 5.3 percent at a six month interval versus 3.2 percent at 18 months, and adverse fetal and infant outcomes, 2.0 percent at six months, compared with 1.4 percent at 18 months.
“My main takeaway is that this association between short interpregnancy interval and poor pregnancy outcome is well-known, but this shows that it’s for all maternal ages. It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or you’re 40,” said Dr. Laura Riley, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian, who was not involved in the study.
If it’s not even lunchtime yet and you’ve already had to mediate more injustices than Ruth Bader Ginsberg, then the Amazon Alexa Kids Court skill could be just the thing you’ve been looking for.
Kids Court is a new free skill on Amazon Alexa and Judge Lexy is the honorable digital judge that presides over all unfair kid matters. After you ask Alexa to open Kids Court you’ll hear the sound of a blaring bugle and a gavel rapping bringing the court to order. Judge Lexy then asks for statements from both parties, calls any witnesses and asks for any evidence to be presented. Finally, a verdict is issued and you can get back to life as normal… until the next battle emerges in about two minutes.
Pretty cool interview with the creator of 'Kids Court' – an Alexa skill that won the Alexa Kids Challenge! https://t.co/Fm2jIrsWfu
The verdict also comes along with a silly dare that the losing party has to do, like try to stand on your hands. Hopefully, it’s funny enough to make kids forget the sting of a loss, but if they still aren’t happy with the outcome they can file an appeal.
The Alexa skill was designed by Adva Levin who explained that the idea is for kids to “learn to stand up for themselves in a calm manner, to articulate their problems coherently, and to take responsibility for their actions.” Of course, just because it was designed with kids in mind doesn’t mean you can’t use Judge Lexy to settle some grown-up disputes too, like when someone tries to get out of diaper duty.
If you’re feeling uneasy at the thought of airing all your dirty laundry to Big Brother, don’t worry as the app is compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which means no data is stored… or so the AI overlords want you to think.
Would you use Kids Court to settle family arguments? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
From mixed media wall reliefs to watercolors of carousels, here is artwork from local D.C. area artists (often original pieces) for the nursery, the playroom, or even the homework nook in the kitchen. This is artwork that the kids won’t outgrow and that the whole family will love getting lost in.
Photo and Artwork: copyright Sean Hennessey
Sean Hennessey
Sean Hennessey is an artist whose main body of work includes a glass wall relief sculpture, a combination of drawing, painting and photography and found objects with kiln-cast window glass (think: a modern take on the wall reliefs you’d see in old, historic buildings done in vibrantly colored mixed media). Sean studied sculpture and philosophy in college, had brief stints working as an electrician and a beekeeper, was the painter and sculptor for the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C. and is now a full time artist. His eye for beauty, eclectic travels and child-like curiosity are reflected in his work. Pieces and prints start at $350.
Jill Telford
Jill is a D.C. artist, author and educator and her influences include Jackson Pollock, Romare Bearden and Jean Michel Basquiat. Her work reflects a joyful curiosity as she tries to capture images and personal stories that resonate with her. She loves the process of creating art and believes it is process over product. Jill loves the unique feeling of the canvas and only does originals. Jill believes that art is for creating and sharing and all prices on her work are negotiable. She is also available to commission pieces.
Lynn Putney
Lynn’s work in casein paint on wood calls to mind the most gorgeous illustrations you’ve seen in your favorite kids’ books. The bright combinations of colors, rich textures and unexpected curves are images that your little one can daydream into. Lynn’s original paintings range in scale from 6 to 30 inches square and start at $300. Visit her studio (Off the Beaten Track Warehouse in Northeast D.C.) to get a close up look at her paintings and prints.
Mary Belcher/Washington Watercolors
Mary’s piece “A Watercolor Map of the Neighborhoods of Washington, D.C.” shows district nabes done in dreamy contrasting colors that reflect emotional and psychological boundaries (for now, kiddo will just think it’s a pretty cool map). Check out Mary’s other watercolor maps and city scenes like the Glen Echo carousel, Ben’s Chili Bowl and Georgetown rowhouses. Mary’s prints are sold matted, ready for standard-size frames and start at $15. Go out and meet Mary in person, as it’s the only way you can buy her beautiful watercolors. She’s at Eastern Market most weekends.
Paige Hirsch
Paige is an abstract painter living in the D.C. suburbs. She values the process over outcome and her work reflects lively interaction of shape and color and unexpected combinations. Paige’s work starts at $20 and she sells prints through her website.
