I recommend that you do not join the Elf on the Shelf holiday craze. This is the full tale of our elfin struggles.

When my parents decided to build our family home, they wanted to provide a better life for us. Moving out of Philadelphia to a better school district was their number one priority; accessibility wasn’t even on the radar. After all, why should it have been? They were in their late 30s, both healthy individuals with a young active family. How would they have known that six years after moving my mom would break her leg? Who would’ve guessed that fall, and the many subsequent ones that followed, would eventually lead to diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis?

If we are Pro-Life, we are Pro-All Life. And so we, as a group, need to use the same firepower that is used to defend an unborn baby to defend the lives of refugee men, women and children and any person who calls America “home.”

I’m exhausted. But I am lucky that I am awoken each morning by the cries of my healthy, happy baby and not the sound of bombs or gunfire.

I know that in the days and weeks leading up to the inauguration, lots of us are disheartened, but here is my plea to you—let's not use this occasion to divide ourselves further.

Everyday you as parents change the world. We are raising the future.

Maybe that's just the battle of growing. It's the remembering the past and looking forward to the future all at once and trying so hard to be present enough through it all.

Families are all alike in the best and worse ways.

I remember wondering what it might feel like to experience just one charmed day in which none of my children shed a single tear.