KND Quality 99-Centers: Parenting & Families

Three Books in One–USA Best Book Award Winner in Parenting/Divorce & Its Marriage & Pets Sidekicks

How to Screw Up Your Kids: Blended Families, Blendered Style

Married couples with children divorce 40% of the time. In less than three years after that divorce, chances are both mom & dad are remarried, & probably each to someone who has kids of their own. The single most explosive & divisive issue in those marriages? Stepparenting.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all lived in a bubble gum and sugar plum world where, without a ripple on Lake Placid, kids embraced stepparents & appreciated their contributions? Where stepsiblings didn’t compete for attention & argue over favorites & fairness? Well, we don’t.
So what we need when stepparenting is a good plan. A plan for blending, or blendering if you will, the disparate stepchildren & their parents into a chunky smoothie of stepfamily goodness. How To Screw Up Your Kids helps the parents everyone predicts will fail prove all the naysayers wrong. Through the use of practical human relations principles & the author’s achingly honest & often hilarious stories, readers will learn to envision & instill a unique set of family values & culture into their new household, & by God, have fun doing it.

˃˃˃ How to Screw Up Your Marriage: Do-Over Tips For First-Time Failures

Let’s face it. People keep getting into relationships. Yet over 40% of first marriages end in divorce & up to 67% of second do, too, with statistics becoming predictably more dismal as the number of trips to the altar rack up. It seems like, for many of us, the longing to be half of a couple so in love they make other people want to puke is too strong to ignore.
The problem is, we’ve all grown up to expect that fairytale endings happen by accident, that if we wish upon a star, or let down our golden hair, then, blammo, we’ll get our happily ever after. In other words, we’re lazy & feel entitled to have the one thing we want most in the world–the one thing we should work hardest to create and nurture–without doing squat to make our dreams reality. We fall in love, we marry, we pout, we nag, we sulk, & we sabotage.
How to Screw Up Your Marriage interrupts the pity party with a no-nonsense formula for couplehood success, written by a human relations expert who is herself in a wonderfully nauseating marriage with a passel of his & hers kids.

How to Screw Up Your Pets: Puppalicious and Beyond. Who says a whacked sense of humor & animal stories don’t mix?

Do you rank Where The Red Fern Grows along with Wuthering Heights amongst your favorite books of all time? All Creatures Great & Small with Pet Sematary? If so, chances are you get it: there’s something magical about giving literary immortality & a sometimes irreverent voice to the nonhumans that capture our collective imagination. If these are the stories that glue you to the page, then How to Screw Up Your Pets is the book for you. Set in the Caribbean and Texas, it tells both the true & fictionalized versions of the magnificent & interrelated creatures–natural and supernatural — that passed through the authors’ blended family’s life, bringing her delight, fright, & every emotion in between.