This is the real stuff: dynamic, messy, baffling adoptive parenting, rooted in domestic life.Award-winning columnist and adoptive parent Sally Donovan offers savvy, compassionate advice on how to be 'good enough' in the face of both day-to-day and more bewildering challenges – how to respond to 'red mist' meltdowns, crippling anxieties about new routines and, most importantly, how to meet the intimidating challenge of being strong enough to protect and nurture your child.Full of affecting and hilarious stories drawn from life in the Donovan household, The Unofficial Guide to Adoptive Parenting offers parents a refreshing counterblast to stuffy parenting manuals -- read it, weep, laugh and learn.

    What happens next?A family inters its matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the Atlantic. Another holds a memorial weenie roast at a green burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a contemporary leading burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. 150 years ago, a grieving mother might tend a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected at the spot her daughter was killed. One woman wears a locket containing her brother’s hair, the other, a necklace containing his ashes. Someone dies. What happens next depends both upon our personal stories and where those stories fall in a larger tale--that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale, yet it’s usually hidden from our everyday lives until it happens to us. American Afterlife explores the experiences of individual Americans involved with death in a culture where even discussing such things is practically taboo. These chapters follow ordinary people making memorial choices as well as the purveyors of those choices to investigate how we memorialize our dead, where these practices came from, and what this says about us.The details in these personal stories build upon one another to reveal a landscape that’s usually hidden in our ordinary lives--until the day it’s not. At once strange and familiar, and by turns odd, poignant, and funny, American Afterlife brings fresh insight to the oldest of concerns.

    There are treatments available that can halt, and in some cases, even reverse the aging process.But how do you know what treatments are best for you? Which of the hippest, hottest, and newest are fabulously effective and which are nothing more than new-age snake oil? Let us be your guides. Dr. and Mrs. Guinea Pig Present The Only Guide You'll Ever Need to the Best Anti-Aging Treatments will outline all the best techniques and treatments, from the so-new-you-haven t-heard-of-them-yet to the tried-and-true; from the perfectly legal to the are-you-trying-to-get-me-arrested; from the simple to the outrageous; and from the cheapest drugstore creams to the most complicated surgeries. We will provide you with the information and research you need to create your own, unique anti-aging plan to look and feel your best forever!"