Eliana Osborn

I am going to have amazing posture. My neck will look so skinny just from the way I hold my head.

1. Borrow a child.

Ray Nagin. Yes, the former New Orleans mayor who now has a criminal record. Let me explain.

A new, exciting trend is to have food pantries for college students. I talked to an AmeriCorps volunteer running one of these centers and she was matter-of-fact about the need — and how little is being done. Today’s college students may be young and single, living la vida loca. But more and more are what we call ‘nontraditional’: slightly older, employed full-time (or close to it), supporting a family, a veteran, etc.

Hunger for nontraditional students doesn’t mean surviving on ramen: It means they are not the only person in the household who's in need.

When I’m staring at the wall trying to keep my cool when my 6-year-old is hysterical about the tiny bump on his finger, I attempt to channel some of the good parts.

I’m not there yet. But I need to be honest—I’m closer to 40 than any other multiple of five.

1. Write a damn letter.

I get how we want to make our kids successful and everything, right from the start. Feeding into the pressure, here’s the tagline from Starling’s company: “The world’s first word-tracking system that can improve your child’s trajectory for life.”

The most important things my mother taught me included work from Neil Diamond, Billy Joel, Wham! and Whitney Houston.

After years in apartments that should have been condemned, even these sad restroom facilities were vast improvements. And so we stayed, the husband and I, vaguely embarrassed when guests stayed over and commented on the bordello vibe of the bathroom.

Then we had a kid. No working bathtub suddenly seemed like a big deal. And the functional bathroom spaces weren’t places you’d want to hang out. There’s a lot of bathroom time once you’ve got tiny humans. (You’ve been warned.)