Tag Archives: parenting

{interlude} Time to post

Posted on by — Leave a reply

At tonight’s dinner party for family, an interesting conversation broke out (as one often does) – this time, one the subject of this blog. My mother, sitting across from me, commented that she wanted the cookbooks that were used in the generation of the meal, and I explained that one recipe was a mish-mash mod that I will be posting (next post I PROMISE) and the other did come 100% from a cookbook. I then commented a bit about how infrequently I’ve been posting lately. It is, after all, fairly hard to post frequently about all the lovely recipes I’m creating when much of our routine is built on…well, routine, and that means that we tend to cycle through a number of the same recipes every month because that’s what keeps our schedule from flying completely off the rails.

My sweet BIL then commented about how that’s actually fine. That’s my M.O., basically. My sister then chided me to remain true to my brand (tee hee), and thus that means dealing with the balancing act that my life is so much of the time. Really, creating new recipes daily just isn’t for me; I simply don’t have the time. I whined a bit about how I wish I could post as frequently as some of my other friends, and then I was swiftly reminded by dh that most of the frequent posters I know are people either A) work from home/stay at home, B) have no children, or C) both. Good point. Working outside of the home and having a husband who does the same, plus having two kids, it’s sometimes a wonder that I get out of the house with underwear on and my teeth brushed. (Trust me, on the days when you can’t have it all, best to go with the underwear; mints cover many evils.)

And thus we have this reminder: I may not post a ton, but I’ll post when I have something to say. Hopefully you’ll find it worth reading. If I ranted every time I got ticked off at the rampant attacks on women, I’d be posting every five minutes. If I posted only every time I create or discover a new recipe, IT MAY BE A WHILE. Thus, balance. You get some rant, you get some recipe. Sometimes, you get some parenting stuff as I discover things like how incredibly frakking smart dd is (she read everyone’s fortunes to them after our Chinese dinner the other night…which would be unremarkable if she weren’t still < 5-1/2 and waiting to enter Kindergarten). I will also note that I don’t post recipes that fall flat. If I don’t think I’d want to eat it again and/or if it needs significant adjustment, it won’t get posted until said adjustment(s) have been made. No point in posting something that’s only half-baked (no pun intended); when I fish around for recipes online, I’m assuming that they don’t suck. I just try to return the favor by posting recipes that I think absolutely are worth having again and again.

So, there you have it. And, as for the dinner party that we had tonight…there WILL be a recipe posted soon for the main dish: a crock pot Carolina-style BBQ pulled chicken. I can truly vouch for that recipe NOT SUCKING. And that’s what makes for a post, at least for me.

Question: What’s for lunch?

Posted on by — Leave a reply

As we gear up for dd’s first run at camp, in a few months, we have to make a decision as to whether we want to have the camp provide her with a lunch or if we should make the lunch ourselves. We’ve had it easy the last few years; ever since she was able to eat solids 100% of the time, she was getting her lunch and snacks from day care. Now, we’re on the cusp of Kindergarten, and camp is a bit of an informal dress rehearsal for some of that.

Of course, setting aside the cost issue (buying lunch daily isn’t cheap) and the nutrition issue (she’d pick chicken nuggets and fries or pizza EVERY DAY if we’d let her), there’s the other concern of her spending so much time in line that she won’t have enough time to EAT her lunch.

So, I’m curious to hear from the parents who already have kids in school and/or those who have to provide the lunch for their kids at day care. What do you do? How do you keep the food cold/fresh if you send it in with your child? Do you switch it up or have pretty much the same lunch all week long? How do you work around pickiness (like, say, a child who isn’t naturally inclined to liking sandwiches).

Inquiring minds want to know and operators are standing by…

Progress? What Progress?

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Yet again, Time Magazine has something interesting to read. This time out, I guess in observation of “International Womens Day” (who comes UP with these holidays?), Jessica Winter wrote a fabulously funny commentary asking that most obvious of all questions these days: “Are Women People?”

The answer is, sadly, no. We’re just about everything BUT people. Of course, according to former Massachusetts Governor and eternally animatronic GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, “Corporations are people, my friend!” Yes, dear, of course they are. And the first day that a corporation shows up asking to date dd, I will drive to BassPro and buy the biggest shotgun I can get my hands on.

I also found it quite amusing that Winter came to the same conclusion I was discussing with a co-worker just yesterday: the lack of a Y chromosome is NOT a disability. Women can do all kinds of amazing things, excepting that whole (reliably) peeing standing up thing, and yet we’re still treated as second-class citizens. Even now, it still seems highly unlikely that this country is ready to elect a woman President – although I really did think Hilary had a good shot at it. The only female brought up to the podium on the GOP debate stage this cycle was just Rick Santorum in bad drag.

I feel like women are just under attack lately. Maybe it’s not lately – maybe it’s been a lot longer than that with seemingly no end in sight – but it seems like any lull has certainly been broken by just a spate of really horrifically anti-woman statements and actions that managed to make it to the news. Whether it’s being called “sluts” for using contraception, being threatened with transvaginal ultrasounds when deciding to have an abortion (I’ve had a transvag ultrasound – NOT comfortable) or just about any of the other WTF-inducing moments, I can’t decide whether I should strap my breasts down or whip ’em out and stand in the middle of an intersection.

Part of what frustrates me is that things continue to move backwards, even as we move forward in time. I’m a statistic, many times over, whether we’re counting the times I was sexually harassed at a workplace (years ago) or when I fended off a sexual assault so that it could stay in the “attempted” category. I probably know lots of other women who are statistics, too. I would like to think that all the complete tools that are out there trying to degrade the public standing of women, like the Limbaughs and the Santorums of the world, will one day WAKE THE F*%K UP and realize that they know women. The women they know deserve better than what they’re trying to do to all the women that they don’t know.

The other part is that I can’t protect dd from all of it. When I was a little kid, Gloria Steinem was always in the news, and Ms. was a title that working women were proud to use as a symbol of their independence from a male-dominated hierarchy. Now, I wonder how many women below the age of 30 could even pick Gloria out of a lineup, would even know what she went through to help get it to the point where it could be commonplace for women to be in roles other than steno pool, waitress, or on our backs. I want things to be better for dd than they were for me, as they were better for me than they were for my mom. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right?

There’s no reason to have to accept a male-dominated dialogue that favors mean soundbites over sound reasoning. There’s no reason to have to accept being treated like a walking incubator instead of a thinking, feeling person with an ability to make rational decisions about my own health care. And there’s just never a reason to listen to a hate-filled windbag from either extreme end of the partisan scale. Extreme views may win ratings, but they rarely win arguments.

When I go into the voting booth this November, I plan to fill in the oval for the candidates I believe to be least detrimental to women. None of them are really pro-woman (excepting maybe someone like Elizabeth Warren, who seems to be fairly self-aware about her whole XX chromosome situation). See, I don’t just owe it to dd to make things better…I owe it to myself.