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Take kindergarten graduation photos to celebrate your kids

I honestly cannot believe how fast this school year has flown by! This is my firstborn’s last week in kindergarten and I’m in disbelief. It is just as emotional as the first day of kindergarten was, in the sense that it reminds me how fast my little girl is growing up — and how quickly time is flying by.   I don’t know about your school district, but in ours they don’t have a kindergarten graduation ceremony. When I found out I was really bummed. I wanted the whole picture-perfect moment of my little girl finishing out her first year in school. To that end, I have ...

‘IF’ is a wild card that plays well

I have always been the serious one. I gravitate toward people who love play, but my natural tendencies lean toward cynicism and somberness. Imaginative play has never been something that I excel at, so I have a slightly complicated relationship with media that puts that at the center. I want to love it, but it’s not always easy for me to get on board. So I had some trepidation about John Krasinski’s newest film, “IF.”  Bea (Cailey Fleming) loses her mother at a young age, forcing her to grow up too fast. When her Dad (John Krasinski) returns to the same hospital for ...

Wildlife news from North and South America

In 2006 a hunter shot what he thought was a polar bear on Banks Island, off the coast of the Northwest Territories. The fur was creamy white, which is typical in polar bears, but it had a hump on its back and brown patches around the eyes and nose and all those traits are typical of grizzly bears. If the bear was judged to be a grizzly bear the hunter would have had to pay a $1,000 fine since it was illegal to hunt grizzlies there. A DNA test showed it to be a hybrid with a grizzly bear mother and polar bear father. Between 2012 and 2014 another six hybrids were either killed ...

On a quest to eliminate plastic from our food

PREGNANT WITH MY DAUGHTER ALMOST 10 YEARS AGO, I fell down many a rabbit hole researching the best products for infant care. By best I meant healthiest. I knew car seats, laundry detergents and other necessary items often contain toxins from fire retardants, fragrances and other chemicals. I knew before my obsessive pregnancy-driven research that I wanted to avoid plastics as well. For the first six months of my daughter’s life, I kept plastic out of her reach. She didn’t have any plastic toys until I broke my rule with a baby toy that I still think is really cool — the ...

COLUMN: Wren Baker unsure if there is an end in sight with Bob Huggins drama

MORGANTOWN -- After a summer filled with fireworks, it’s been too quiet lately, maybe eerily so, where it concerns the soap opera between Bob Huggins and WVU. It’s been more than a month now since we’ve seen any correspondence between Huggins’ lawyer, David Campbell, and WVU Vice ...