If These Walls Could Talk (Crash Test Parents, #5)

Don't worry about us; we're doing just fine.
In the parenting world, we readily adjust our masks, pretend we're having a grand old time, do anything we can to avoid admitting that sometimes we don't know what we're doing, sometimes we question our sanity, sometimes we think our kids might be breaking us. Judgment is rife and large in the parenting world, and we dare not say anything vulnerable, lest we be cast into The Bad Parent Camp.
Staring down that very judgment, Rachel opens up the doors of her home and lets the madness spill into the streets. With her characteristic wit and hilarity, Rachel shares her family's most frequent battles (technology time and leaving the house), their failures, their pressure points, their abundant annoyances, and her loudest insecurities as a mother. But even with its ample humor, If These Walls Could Talk is a powerful commentary on modern parenting with a hopeful message: we're all doing the best we can-and that's enough.
If These Walls Could Talk includes humorous essays like:
So Much for a Yell-Free Year
A Realistic Look at Having a Large Family
Welcome to Minecraft Motherhood
No Sane Parent Ever Did it All
What Silence Means in the Life of a Parent
The Madness of Traveling with Children
The Mysterious Lure of Screens: a Love/Hate Story
8 Steps that Comprise a Strong-Willed Child's Meltdown
and many more.
Hailed as "The Erma Bombeck of a new parenting generation," Rachel's fifth full-length book of humor essays will simultaneously amuse and soothe modern parents with the bolstering knowledge that they are not alone.
Rachel is the wife of one man and the mother of six young sons who daily give her inspiration for comical essays. Her work can often be found on Huff Post Parents, Scary Mommy, Babble, and Motherly. She lives with all her males in San Antonio, Texas.

The themes of identity and love amid difficult circumstances often show up in Rachel Toalson's writing, and no matter their age, gender or genre preferences, readers around the world enjoy and anticipate her hopeful message of bravery, transparency and the the human capacity to change the world, at least a small part of it.
She is the author of the middle grade fantasy series, Fairendale, (under the pen name R.L. Toalson) about a tyrant king (who may not be quite as bad as he seems) pursuing a group of magical children who become what we know as fairy tale villains, for one good reason or another; the nonfiction Family on Purpose series, which chronicles her family's daily journey into values; and This is How You Know, a book of poetry on the daily ordinary that becomes extraordinary when filtered through the lens of poetry.
Rachel Toalson's own journey into writing is a long and straight-line one. She began penning stories in small-town Texas on white computer paper back when she was a kid. When she got to college, she rose through the ranks of her college newspaper, this time telling true stories. That's where her writing career began-sitting with sources, gathering information, soaking up the stories of everyday life.
In 2015, Rachel ended her newspaper days as a managing editor, with multiple writing accolades accrued over the years, so that she could become a full-time author of both fiction and nonfiction. In her fiction she enjoys crafting tales of quirky characters who are more than what they seem on first glance. In her nonfiction, she enjoys writing about real life, real love, real struggles and the humor underlining much of our human experience. She writes middle grade fiction and picture books under the pen name R.L. Toalson; poetry, memoir and humor under Rachel Toalson; and narrative nonfiction stories and literature under Rachel L. Toalson.
Rachel is a regular contributor to Huff Post Parents, Scary Mommy, a Bundle of THYME magazine and many other publications across the world.
Born in Houston, Rachel lives with her husband and six boys in San Antonio, Texas, where she faithfully writes 5,000 words a day, five days a week.