Melissa Petro

Stock photos seemed to get pregnancy and parenting all wrong. When a Facebook friend posted looking for a real life pregnant stock photo model, I offered.

After gaining as much as forty pounds and pushing a cantaloupe out my vagina, I wondered: will my body ever be the same?

For any couples thinking about moving in together, I thought I’d share my Dos and Don’ts, and how my husband and I are making my small and unattractive (but inexpensive!) apartment work for our family.

Engagements being the universally stressful occasions that they are, what this has meant is that I’m constantly pushing my fiancé to make wedding-related decisions, and he is constantly having to ask me (nicely and less-nicely) to give it a rest. It all came to a head this past weekend.

My relationship with my father was never father-daughter picnics. Maybe when I was very little — or maybe this is less a memory and more of a wish — I have an image of myself as a very little girl sitting on my father’s lap, and we are both laughing. Perhaps my father enjoyed fatherhood when his children were very little, but that joy seemed to curdle into constant frustration as my brother and I grew up.

The other day on Facebook, one of my friends remarked that I was a “later-in-life” bride.

If you missed my weekly column this summer all about getting engaged and planning a wedding, here’s the highlight reel: after doing

It's pretty well understood in 12 step programs that "who you see here and what you say here, stays here."

The biggest fashion mistake of my lifetime may not be what I wore, but what I didn’t.

Sure, "friends forever" sounds nice. In theory. But sometimes it's better that two people just not be friends.