PenPenWrites
parenting blog, memoir notes, family punchlines & more
recent posts
- Sharing Family History: What one generation owes another.
- Gifting and Getting: A wish list for gifts from grandkids
- Blast from the Past: Our youthful slang is no longer passé.
- Money Matters: Data on how the Bank of Mom and Dad is doing?
- After the Minneapolis Killings: Nora Ephron on parenting grown children
© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.
recent posts
- Sharing Family History: What one generation owes another.
- Gifting and Getting: A wish list for gifts from grandkids
- Blast from the Past: Our youthful slang is no longer passé.
- Money Matters: Data on how the Bank of Mom and Dad is doing?
- After the Minneapolis Killings: Nora Ephron on parenting grown children
© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.
Category: covid 19
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Our grown children are in their households. We're in ours. We may be in the same city or not. We did whatever we did over Thanksgiving but now the Christmas-New Year holidays are ahead of us. So are worsening pandemic numbers. We all yearn for a "normal" holiday time together. And yet, there is danger…
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Zoom is the answer. That's what we–me, my friends, our families–tell each other when we talk about how we'll be together when we won't be together this Thanksgiving. But what will we do with Zoom–sit in front of a camera and tell each other Hello and Happy Thanksgiving? Eat our separate dinners together in front…
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He's a health and science reporter for the New York Times and was recently awarded the 2020 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism by the Columbia Journalism school. All that background noise is by way of saying that in an interview with a fellow New York Time's reporter, Donald McNeil put the current sorrows…
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The coronavirus has been novel in more than it's medical/scientific ways. There's also been a behavioral effect: Our grown kids are parenting us–or trying to. They are not only worrying more intensely about our health and well-being but setting down guidelines for how we should take care of ourselves–what we should and should not do…
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Thanksgiving is only one of the family get-togethers upended by the coronavirus. Summer vacations, family reunions, birthday celebrations, Father's Day, Mother's Day, even funerals–lots of us have been unable to celebrate or observe any of these in person with our children (and their families) since the coronavirus barged into our lives. How are we coping…
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Two more children have tested positive for Covid-19 at a granddaughter's high school. Where there were none, three have come up positive at my grandson's college. Small numbers. Controls are in place. Not to worry. But my daughter-in-law sends me these reports–"Sheesh" she texts–to confirm how correct we were to cancel the three-family Thanksgiving get-together…
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My neighbor Lisa has made her Thanksgiving plans. Her mother and her two grown children live in a town that's a six hour drive north from her home. For the holidays she has bought–and had delivered to her mother's house–one party tent with roll up sides that can comfortably hold 20 somewhat socially distanced guests…
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In ordinary times, Thanksgiving safety advice starts with the proper way to thaw the turkey. You don't want it to become a salmonella spreader. These are not ordinary times. Safety now has to do with keeping the holiday get-together from becoming a Covid superspreader. Many of us have been following solid public health advice from…
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When economists philosophize, they'll tell you that the young start out liberal and as they gather worldly goods and status they mature into conservatives. In a maxim variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Victor Hugo and a slew of others, the thought bubble goes like this: "Any man who is under 30, and is not a…
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