We’ve been linking to Asha Dornfest’s amazing Parent Hacks blog for more than a decade, and we loved her 2013 Minmalist Parenting. Dornfest’s strength is her ability to choose “hacks” that are simultaneously useful and simple, a welcome contrast from the Martha Stewart-ish norm, which amounts to, “Given an entire free afternoon, here’s something you can do to impress your friends (maybe).”
As you’ll see from the samples below, Dornfest’s picked out the best of these from her deep drawersful of great ideas, thematically grouping them for parenting’s greatest daily challenges: pregnancy, sleeping, eating, bath time, travel, etc. At least one of them comes from me: using panty-liners (which airplanes and trains have spares of in the bathroom) to extend the life of a diaper (which you can’t replenish in-flight!) when you’re caught short.
With friendly, subject-sorted tips that can be used for easy reference, this is the perfect kind of parenting book: one you don’t need to read from cover-to-cover while you’re juggling your kid(s), but which you can turn to whenever you’re in need.
Excerpted from Parent Hacks:134 Genius Shortcuts for Life with Kids by Asha Dornfest (Workman Publishing). Copyright © 2016. Illustrations © Craighton Berman.