MSI Press Blog

Temper tantrums. Whether you're navigating your toddler's grocery-store meltdown or managing a child whose frustration has hit peak volume during bedtime, tantrums can feel like the emotional equivalent of walking barefoot across Legos. It’s in these loud, chaotic, soul-draining moments that we parents are asked to summon something superhuman: calm. Franki Bagdade’s award-winning parenting guide,  I Love My Kids, But I Don’t Always Like Them , doesn’t offer a fairy tale version of parenting—it delivers real talk for real life. With a career in behavioral observation and a deeply personal understanding of parenting exhaustion, Franki meets parents where they are: frazzled, burned out, and wondering what on earth just happened. The book is refreshingly honest, peppered with humor, and built on hard-earned wisdom. Franki’s stories and strategies help parents stay grounded, even when their child’s emotions are spinning out like a top in a tornado. Her approach is not about perfecti...

Loss has a way of rearranging the soul. When someone we love is taken from us—especially a child—no belief system, no comforting platitude, no well-meaning words from others can fully meet the depth of that pain. For many mothers, grief cracks open their theology, their identity, and their sense of purpose. Yet it is sometimes in the shadow of that brokenness that something surprising can emerge: not answers, but connection. Not certainty, but presence. Steven Greenebaum’s  An Afternoon’s Dictation: Inclusive Revelation for the Twenty-First Century  was born from his own spiritual crisis. It was not a moment of peace, but of anguish. And it is this raw honesty that makes his work so meaningful to those navigating the long arc of loss—especially mothers who have experienced unimaginable grief. This is not a book that demands belief or offers easy reassurance. Instead,  An Afternoon’s Dictation  offers what many grieving parents hunger for: a sense that the conversatio...

Most language learners aim for fluency. Some even reach what’s called Professional Level Proficiency —that sweet spot where you can function in a workplace, navigate nuance, even toss in an idiom or two. But those aiming beyond that—toward near-native proficiency —often find themselves mysteriously stuck. Stalled. Plateaued. Why? The answer, according to Shekhtman (in Developing Professional Level Language Proficiency ), lies in one of the most stubborn and often ignored culprits in language acquisition: grammatical fossilization . He breaks down language use into three categories: Automatic-correct Automatic-incorrect Not-automatic Ideally, we all move from not-automatic to automatic-correct. But what often happens instead? Learners get comfy with automatic-incorrect. These are speech habits that have been internalized—and once they're habitual, they’re hard to undo. That's grammatical fossilization: the incorrect gets baked in, and it won’t unbake itself . Fossilization: Y...