Latest news with #playdates
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
MGK Is Already Planning Playdates with His Daughter Saga, 3 Months, and Pete Davidson and Elsie Hewitt's Baby on the Way
NEED TO KNOW MGK is already planning his newborn daughter's future playdates, commenting under Pete Davidson's girlfriend's pregnancy announcement post The Saturday Night Live alum and the model are expecting their first baby together MGK welcomed a baby girl with ex Megan Fox in March, making him a father of twoMGK is already setting up playdates for his little one. The rapper and songwriter, 35, who recently welcomed daughter Saga Blade in March with ex Megan Fox, couldn't contain his excitement when Pete Davidson's girlfriend Elsie Hewitt confirmed her pregnancy on Instagram this week. MGK, whose real name is Colson Baker, commented under the post, sharing his sentiments on the future playdates their children will have. "These playdates bout to hittttt" he commented under the expectant mother's post. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. On Wednesday, July 16, a source confirmed with PEOPLE that Davidson, 31, and his girlfriend, 29, are expecting their first baby together. TMZ was first to report the news. Shortly after the news broke, Hewitt shared a series of photos via Instagram, including a couple of shots of her with the Saturday Night Live alum, a sonogram snap and memes from Love Island USA's latest season and Spongebob Squarepants. Hewitt also included a clip of the moment the couple saw their little one. "Welp now everyone knows we had sex," she joked int he caption. A source close to the couple told PEOPLE that the two are excited to welcome their first baby together. "They're both very nurturing people and are very, very happy together and to be starting a family," the insider told PEOPLE. "They've been sharing privately with loved ones, and it's a really sweet time after everything Pete has overcome," the source added. "He's so excited. He's always wanted to be a dad." is now available in the Apple App Store! Download it now for the most binge-worthy celeb content, exclusive video clips, astrology updates and more! A second source told PEOPLE that Davidson has been "more intentional" about letting people into his life and is excited to start this next chapter with Hewitt. "Pete and Elsie are happy and cannot wait to welcome their baby," they said. "He's grown up a lot, and he's so excited about this next chapter as a dad." "He's more intentional about who he lets into his life now, and with Elsie, it was never about headlines or the spotlight, and that's exactly what he needs," the insider concluded. Read the original article on People
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Mom Shares ‘Non-Negotiable' Rule to Prevent Her Kids From Bickering on Playdates
A mom of four has a definitive rule to make sure her children stay 'forever friends': No fighting with your siblings on playdates. 'However you treat your sibling, is how you open the door for other people, including friends, to treat them,' Hannah Driscoll tells Driscoll, whose children are 8, 7, 2 and 1, explained on TikTok: 'I don't let my kids play with friends if they're not getting along,' Driscoll said in her video. 'My big kids just had a bunch of neighborhood kids in our backyard, and they were all playing and my son started being mean to my daughter.' Driscoll said her 8-year-old son kept pushing his 7-year-old sister, down a slide while she yelled, 'Stop!' 'I called both of them in and asked what was wrong, and they talked to me about it,' Driscoll said in the clip. 'I said, 'OK, we're done playing with friends.' I told my son to go tell the other kids that they had to go home.' In Driscoll's video, she said her son took personal responsibility for the canceled playdate because, 'It's not my fault they have to go home.' Driscoll said her son told his friends: 'Hey, you guys have to go home because I'm not getting along with my sister.' She added, 'If they want to play with friends, they have to be getting along with their siblings.' It's not that I expect them to get along 100% of the time — it's that I expect that if they're going to be playing with friends, they treat each other well.' Driscoll said that after the canceled playdate, all was forgotten. 'Do you know what all my kids are doing right now?' Driscoll said in the video. 'They're all in the same room playing together and having fun. Because they know that those are their forever friends.' Moms with more than one child, agreed. 'We call it, 'The Same Team Rule.' Siblings are on the same team, always, and I'm the coach. If you're not playing like a team, the game is over.' 'I tell mine, 'If you treat your brother/sister bad, your friends are going to think that they can also treat your brother/sister bad.' 'YES! I always told my kids, 'If you can't get along with each other, you can't get along with your friends.' This made such a difference in how my children treated each other.' 'We don't tolerate meanness. Good on you for setting this standard with your kids.' 'My rule has always been, 'Everyone plays or no one plays. They have grown to respect this rule, whether they like it or not.' 'Also ... my kids will not allow other kids to mistreat one of their sisters.' Driscoll tells that her eldest are 17 months apart and share neighborhood friends, who are between the ages of 6 and 9. 'My kids fight sometimes, but they typically get along and have always had a close relationship,' she says. 'Learning how to resolve conflict with a sibling will help you do it at school or in the workplace,' says Driscoll, adding that she doesn't want other kids to mistreat her children based on what they see between her children. Driscoll knows from experience since she grew up with a similar rule. 'When my brother and I would fight, my mom wouldn't separate us — she would make us sit on the couch and hold hands,' says Driscoll. 'As a kid, I was annoyed by this but my brother and I ... are super close now. I appreciate it.' When her children's playdate ended early, Driscoll says her children begged for a second chance, but she insisted. After the neighborhood children left, says Driscoll, her kids continued playing with each other, explaining to 'They didn't miss a beat.' 'Removing a privilege like a playdate when siblings are not getting along is grounded in basic behavioral principles,' Francyne Zeltser, clinical director of mental health and testing services at Manhattan Psychology Group, tells in an email. 'From a clinical perspective, playdates are privileges, not rights,' says Zeltser. 'If the family rule is that playdates are contingent on sibling cooperation, then it's logical that conflict between siblings may result in that privilege being revoked.' Zeltser says 'prioritizing family relationships' is the message. 'Reinforcing the value of getting along with siblings before engaging with peers can help children learn to maintain harmony in their closest relationships,' she explains. 'As children grow older, peers often become more influential than parents or siblings. By establishing early on that family comes first, parents can instill a sense of loyalty, mutual respect and advocacy within the family unit. This can serve as a protective factor during adolescence, when peer influence becomes stronger and not always positive.' Zeltser notes the potential downside of canceling a playdate, especially if it happens a lot and kids continue to argue. 'It could result in fewer invitations from peers who don't want to risk their time being cut short,' says Zeltser. 'In that case, it's worth reassessing the approach and possibly incorporating other strategies, like coaching the children on conflict-resolution skills or using positive reinforcement for cooperative behavior.' This article was originally published on
Washington Post
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Miss Manners: Child's party must include neighbor
Dear Miss Manners: My daughter is turning 9 soon, and we will be having a small party with four of her closest friends. We are hosting the party at the clubhouse facility in our condo complex. There is a fifth girl we know, 'Kiara,' who also lives in the complex, with whom my daughter sometimes plays. I consider her mom somewhat of a friend, though we do not spend time together without the kids. Our older sons are friends, as well.
Globe and Mail
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
An honest mess: Is the pressure to deep clean for guests sabotaging our social time?
When guests are coming to Katherine Goldstein's house, there is no frantic vacuuming, no hiding of clutter, no race to make the home 'presentable' before the doorbell rings. Instead, the author and mother of three leaves the reality of her life in plain sight. On a recent spring day, shoes, jackets and lunch bags are piled high near the front door. The kitchen island brims with bowls, cutting boards and water bottles, pens, mail, a basket of random stuff, a hummingbird feeder. No one seems to mind – not Ms. Goldstein and not her friends, who come by often to her home in Durham, N.C., for casual dinners and playdates with their kids. 'Letting people see our messy houses, it's a way to show vulnerability and build relationships,' says Ms. Goldstein, whose forthcoming book is How To Find Your People: A Guide to the Transformative Power of Community. For many, the thought of inviting friends to a clutter-strewn house is embarrassing. There's a sense that we can't play host until things are 'under control' – even if it means rarely opening up our homes to family and friends because of the time involved in a deep clean. A proliferation of domestic content on TikTok and Instagram isn't helping, with women posting endless cleaning hacks and meal prep marathons, showing off their sparkling kitchens and meticulously organized closets. Celebrities up the ante: Try Meghan Markle's rainbow fruit trays for your kids, or colour-code the fridge and stage the pantry like a museum, as Khloe Kardashian does. Much of it feels disconnected from reality, from houses and routines upended through life's chaotic phases. Fed up with domestic pressure, others are pulling back the curtain on their imperfect homes. On TikTok, women do walk-throughs of grimy, toy-strewn rooms. 'Normalize being normal,' Emily Feret, an Illinois mother, tells her 1.3 million followers, showing her overflowing junk drawer and a refrigerator brimming with expired relish and other mysteries. From the TikTok account @domesticblisters (1.7 million followers), Texas therapist KC Davis shares what a home inhabited by children looks like: a sea of toys blanketing the living room; food scattered near a high chair; a laptop and kids' stuff vying for space on the kitchen island. Commenters sound relieved, seeing a reflection of their own lives. Others are dropping the front by openly asking for help at home. Instead of baby showers, some expectant parents opt for nesting parties. Guests help set up nurseries, build cribs, fold onesies and burp cloths. The idea is this: By letting our guard down at home – by leaving our mess in sight, or accepting assistance – we might deepen our relationships. In the end, friends and family aren't coming over for a white-glove test; they're coming to connect. It was the pandemic years that made Ms. Goldstein reconsider hosting and household mess. A month before lockdowns hit, she and her husband had twins, while raising a preschooler. Socializing got complicated. So Ms. Goldstein simplified things, getting friends together in her yard and ordering a pizza. She's maintained this relaxed hosting stance. Instead of saving dates months out, she'll invite people over with a few days' notice. She'll cook more of what she's making for her kids: Costco pesto pasta, air-fryer chicken. And then she'll do a 'minimum viable cleanliness' check. 'That means making sure there is nothing disgusting happening in the guest bathroom and picking things off the kitchen and living-room floors that the kids have left that would trip someone.' Friends tell her these visits feel relaxed, which makes them more likely to keep plans even when they're tired after a busy week. Because these aren't big productions, it's also easier for them to reciprocate, which helps them meet more often. 'If you feel you have to clean for two days, cook for half a day and then spend half a day cleaning up, you're just not going to do it,' Ms. Goldstein said. 'If you are able to reframe – 'I'll spend 10 minutes cleaning up, order pizza and we'll eat on paper plates on the porch' – that becomes a much lower bar for creating connection, which is ultimately one of the most important parts of having people over.' For some hosts, letting go this way is a relief, a less punishing way to operate. It's also more genuine. When we nervously stage our homes for guests, we're trying to convey that we have it together – that we're 'self-sufficient,' as Ms. Goldstein puts it. Some are questioning whether this façade is worth the time and effort. What message do we actually want to send when we open the front door? Guests are on the way, and Gayle Waters-Waters is nervous. Duking it out with the vacuum cleaner and fluffing throw pillows until they're like 'microwaveable popcorn bags, three minutes deep,' Gayle is overwhelmed. Gayle stars in Company is Coming, a cult skit created by Massachusetts comedian Chris Fleming. He modelled Gayle, an easily excitable suburban mom, after people he grew up around, though he's said Gayle really came to life after he watched a woman diving into a vat of placemats at Crate & Barrel. In the skit, Gayle's on a housecleaning rampage before a dinner party. 'These chairs need to be pushed in! There cannot be any sign of LIVING in this house!' she bellows. 'I want this place looking like a new Mediterranean fusion restaurant by noon!' The skit is absurdist, clearly. But with 15 million views on YouTube, it's obviously struck a chord. Commenters write about recognizing their own mothers in Gayle's harried tailspin. I have sympathy for Gayle. The morning of a dinner party, I can be found hunched over, maniacally weeding the garden. Or scrubbing the walls in the guest bathroom, questioning how we can live like animals. When showtime finally arrives, I can be tired and cranky, the opposite of an easy host. For KC Davis, the ridiculous part is how harshly we judge ourselves even though we rarely see anyone else's normal home, on a normal day. 'When we go over to people's houses, they cleaned before we got there. Before people started putting that raw stuff on TikTok, we didn't have a good sense of what the average person's home looks like. We just knew what ours looks like, and what our families' looked like growing up,' says Ms. Davis, who wrote the 2022 book How To Keep House While Drowning. Oppressive expectations to make a home 'presentable' land on top of the daily burden of chores. In Canada, women spend double the time that men do on indoor house cleaning, dishwashing and laundry – a daily average of 64 minutes compared with men's 32 minutes, according to the 2022 Time Use Survey from Statistics Canada. Still, these hours of domestic drudgery can feel inadequate when women peer in on immaculate palaces paraded all over Instagram. 'Social media presents these rarefied, unrealistic versions of what people's homes look like, and what entertaining should look like it. Even if we see it and think, 'That's ridiculous, I know my house doesn't have to look like that,' it still seeps in,' Ms. Goldstein says. 'Women are highly socialized to see our worth around homemaking, cleanliness and domesticity, even if we think we're not susceptible to that.' As a therapist, Ms. Davis proposes a more compassionate approach to 'keeping house': Make home functional, not museum-perfect. When visitors show up at her front door, she makes a point of not immediately apologizing that her place is messy. Fundamentally, she thinks it's time to rethink what it means to host. 'For most of history, people either had staff, or the women giving all this labour. Now we're feeling like, 'I'm hosting people – and I'm supposed to be enjoying this also.' But you can't if you're working yourself like staff," said Ms. Davis, whose new book is Who Deserves Your Love. Instead of obsessing about what her guests might think, she tries to focus on how they feel when they're over. Her baseboards might be coated in a film of dust, she admits, but who cares? No one's lying on the floor. She puts her energy into more relevant details, leaving travel-size toiletries in the guest bathroom and a carafe of water in the guest bedroom. 'People care if you've thought about them,' Ms. Davis says. The therapist also challenges hosts to ask for help. Make dinner a potluck, and when the night winds down, let friends wash the dishes. These are simple gestures some women are still reluctant to accept, as if doing so means falling down on the domestic front somehow. 'The best way to create an environment where people feel like they can start to depend on each other,' Ms. Davis says, 'is somebody has to be the first to say, 'Hey, I need something.'' Jack King and his wife, Emily, used to run a 'fast and furious sprint' together before guests arrived at their home in Knoxville, Tenn.: Plan a menu, grocery shop, sweep and vacuum, mow the lawn and clean their young children's playroom (twice). Behind it all hummed unwritten rules about Southern hospitality – high standards that collided with the havoc of raising two toddlers. 'Those invisible things that were underneath the surface, those weren't facilitating connection, they were actually impeding it,' said Mr. King, an Anglican priest. The couple decided to start thinking differently about hosting. 'Scruffy hospitality,' Mr. King called it in one of his sermons. In practice, it meant the toddlers' playroom might not be presentable. Dinner might come from the frozen-food aisle at Trader Joe's. 'Scruffy hospitality means you're not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home,' Mr. King wrote in a 2014 blog post. 'Hospitality is not a house inspection, it's friendship.' Essentially, he was asking about the goal of hosting. Is it a mentality of serving people? An exchange of friendship? Or a means of impressing people? 'In meditating about hospitality, at the heart of it is, you put your guests at ease. It's not for the sake of the host,' the priest says. 'Your guests, they may feel more uptight if everything's too polished.' British author Oliver Burkeman featured scruffy hospitality in his 2024 book Meditations for Mortals, which explores how we squander our precious time. How did it become normal, Mr. Burkeman writes, for hosts to hide 'the daily reality of their lives'? He was guilty of it too, scurrying to conceal any trace of everyday life – 'crumbs underneath our fridge, or mail stacked inexplicably on top of our toaster.' And yet, when he visited other people's homes, their messes made him feel 'obscurely privileged, as if I'd been granted the VIP access pass to their lives – so we must really be friends.' Hosting offers a window into more beyond your home life. It can telegraph how you were raised and what you prioritize in life, now. In Poland, where I was born, domestic expectations still run high for women. Before Easter gatherings, many will scrub windows, beat rugs, tidy linen closets and wash 'firanke,' delicate curtains. A 'rebirth of your house anew' – an 'inner necessity,' even – is how Radio Poland hosts describe the deep spring clean. My mother was mostly indifferent to such practices. She hired a weekly cleaner and didn't go overboard. Before a party, she'd drape decorative scarves over stacks of paperwork in our living room, concealing the mess. We teased her for this deal-with-it-later approach. Today, I'm a decidedly more uptight host. But I also feel no 'inner necessity' to wash curtains at Easter, like some of my Polish compatriots do. I have my mother to thank for lowering the bar this way. For other hosts, keeping a home presentable remains culturally hard-wired. To Amrita Maharaj-Dube, a mother of two in Elmira, Ont., the idea of letting guests peer into your mess is a non-starter: 'Your house is like a physical manifestation of your values,' she said. Ms. Maharaj-Dube described growing up in Trinidad and Tobago with parents who placed importance on keeping the home spotless, especially when guests came over. An even more thorough cleaning took place before Hindu festivals, religious observances and special gatherings, with curtains changed and the glassware hutch dusted. 'Part of the fasting and cleansing process is decluttering your house and making sure it's clean to welcome the spiritual presence,' said Ms. Maharaj-Dube, noting that these routines were drilled in 'from a very young age.' Today, her home is tidy and minimalist; the family is diligent with a rotating schedule of chores. Before any planned gatherings, they mop floors and fully sanitize the bathroom, plus blankets and throw-pillow covers. 'Kids can be grimy; those things need to be washed,' the mother laughed. If her son, 9, and daughter, 6, want friends over, they need to tidy their rooms, collect toys and deploy the Clorox wipes for surfaces. To Ms. Maharaj-Dube, the cleanup isn't really about wowing guests. It's about respecting those who visit and cultivating good habits. But the high standards sometimes come at a social cost. Already, busy work and school schedules keep the family from having people over more often. The cleaning can get exhausting, Ms. Maharaj-Dube acknowledged, so visits need to be spaced out. 'I can't do entertaining on back-to-back weekends because I need time to clean. I need time to prepare. I'm not really good with spur-of-the-moment things.' The way we host sends a signal: How much do we want to share with the outside world? Some people prefer clean, minimalist sightlines – any evidence of day-to-day life hidden away. Others leave more out in the open. Mary Randolph Carter doesn't ascribe to putting things away. When guests arrive at the Manhattan apartment she's shared with her husband for five decades, she'll often leave her work desk, an old farm table in the living room, piled high with research materials. 'People like to see it. They're like, 'What are you working on?'' said Ms. Carter, a photographer and long-time creative director at Ralph Lauren whose new book is Live With The Things You Love. In her apartment, treasures crowd every surface; piles of books sit under tables and the sofa. 'I call clutter 'the poetry of our lives,'' she says. 'People have walked in here and felt like they weren't in the city but in the country. It felt warm and comforting because we wore our heart on our sleeves. It's kind of like a big scrapbook of our lives.' She titled her 2010 book A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of a Misspent Life, after a line on a doormat she and her sisters spotted at Walmart one Christmas. It became a mantra both for daily life and times of hosting. 'If everything is in its place, it does send this message of, 'How does she do it? She has a job, she has children, and yet everything's in its place,'' Ms. Carter said. 'We do put up barriers around what we present to the outside world – to even our closest friends.' There are tightly wound hosts and those with an easier sense of hospitality. Ms. Carter described a friend, a European photographer who entertained frequently at his apartment. He'd set out fruit and roses on the dinner table but never bothered with napkins. 'He would stand in his open kitchen cooking his pasta while we stood around sipping wine, some of us watching,' Ms. Carter said. 'People would sit around talking, really enjoying themselves. The moment you walked in, there was this spirit of, 'This is the way I live, this is informal, welcome in.' You feel honoured to be part of that kind of reality.'
