Posts filed under 'General'
I’ve been meaning to write about this new effort for some time, and was happy to see Libby and Becca blog about it first. Now I’ll do my bit to spread the word, too. Co-founded by one of MoveOn’s cofounders (so you know these women are going to make an impact), “MomsRising is working to build a massive grassroots online resource to move motherhood and family issues to the forefront of the country’s awareness, and to provide grassroots support for leaders, as well as organizations, addressing key motherhood issues.”
Or, if you like acronyms, this is their agenda:
M - Maternity and paternity leave
O - Open flexible leave
T - TV & after-school programs
H - Healthcare for all kids
E - Excellent childcare
R - Realistic and fair wages
Please, go to the website, sign the petition, and make Mother’s Day mean something this year!
May 13th, 2006
From the Milford (Mass.) Country Gazette.
A Maple Street man called police on Saturday, Dec. 18 about 4:30 p.m. to report that an unknown woman was sleeping in his bed, according to police. After checking his bed again he told police he believed it was his mother, then stated he wasn’t sure. Police went to the house where the man finally definitively identified the woman as his mother.
May 11th, 2006
Ben has been a big brother for almost a year now, and has behaved throughout in fairly predictable ways.
For instance, regression? Check: the day we brought Eli home from the hospital, Ben announced, “I’m going to pee and poop!” “Hurray! ” we cheered, pleased at his new body awareness; “Let’s go to the bathroom!” “No,” said Ben, “I’m going to pee and poop right here in the living room!” And he did.
Jealousy? Sure. Our early days with Eli brought lots of cries from Ben of “Put that down!”
Mimicking my behavior? Oh yes, as Ben would pull up his shirt and “nurse” his baby doll against his belly button.
For the most part, he’s alternated between ignoring and delighting in his baby brother and that’s worked pretty well for us.
Now as Eli has begun to crawl and have more of a direct impact on Ben’s life, it’s been fun to watch Ben find ways to deal with “Eli monster,” rampaging around his room and wrecking the megablocks creations, the train tracks, and the intricate patterns of playing cards.
The best recent development , since our trip back east last month, is a game Ben invented called Travel. He sets up his collapsible mesh fire truck – the airplane—next to the collapsible mesh house – the baggage compartment. Ben fills the baggage compartment with every toy in the house, while Eli crawls in and out of the airplane. Every so often, to Ben’s great delight, Eli crawls back into the baggage compartment. “Uh-oh!” shouts Ben, “Eli suitcase!” The role really suits Eli’s chunky size, though he’s way too wiggly to play the part of a suitcase very well. Still, it’s nice to see them playing “together” at last.
May 10th, 2006
Ben and his buddy M were heading out to ride bikes. We walked into the garage, which would be big enough to park two cars in if we didn’t have so many boxes and bookshelves and leftover renovation materials (floorboards, tile) and other dreck stored there. It’s a bit of a disaster, really. But M’s eyes lit up when he walked in; “Cool!” he shouted, “Let’s play here in the junkyard!”
May 9th, 2006
There’s a lovely essay by Rebecca Steinitz in Andrea Buchanan’s new anthology, It’s a Girl (more on the anthology later this week). Called “Tough Girls,” the essay opens by describing bike shopping for her four year-old daughter and being confronted at the bike shop, surprisingly, by contemporary American gender stereotypes. Boys and girls both ride bikes, of course, but there was a pink one and a blue one: one for girls, one for boys. “Luckily,” she writes, “the bike clearly meant for boys [black and blue with green pawprints] could be framed as neutral, especially to a four-year-old girl who just wanted off her tricycle.”
I was thinking about the essay this weekend when we went bike-shopping with Ben. We walked into the store and he climbed onto the first bike he saw, announcing, “This one!” It was pink. It might even have had pink streamers attached to the handlebars. I did that little mental check you do when your child tests social conventions: can I back this up? My little boy on a pink bike? And of course I could. My hairclip-wearing, lipstick-loving boy is too young to know how fixed, and how limited, our culture’s ideas are about gender, and I guess in some ways I’m too old to care.
The pink bike, in the end, was too small, so he’s now the proud owner of a blue and yellow bike with yellow flames on the frame and a banana-eating monkey on the handlebars. And all he wants to do is ride his bike.
May 8th, 2006
I love breakfast. I love it so much I’m happy to eat it for dinner (though dinner for breakfast? Except for a brief period in high school when I ate minute steaks for breakfast –I’m sure I was just trying to get a rise out of my mother, but it didn’t work–that’s not my thing.)
I’m a traditionalist about the meal. Eggs, muffins, pancakes, all delicious. Still, just as dinner isn’t dinner for some folks without meat and two veg, breakfast isn’t breakfast for me without a bowl of cold cereal, and I’ll eat that happily before moving on to something egg-y or a baked treat.
Part of breakfast’s appeal, for me, is you’re allowed to eat the same thing day after day in a way that we don’t approve of at dinner time. When I lived in New York City, I ate cereal at home and then picked up a toasted bagel or roll on the way to work every day; my mouth still waters at the memory of those buttery rolls, toasted on the griddle next to (and certainly absorbing some delicious grease from) other folks’ bacon and sausage. I ate Special K through graduate school, oatmeal and wheat germ through my first pregnancy, and now for the past several years I’ve been eating a mix of Trader Joe’s O’s and granola, most recently homemade granola.
Lately, Ben and I are eating breakfast at the same time, and it’s fun to see what he’ll assemble for his meal. In the past, he’s eaten whatever I put in front of him, even a hippie-mom mix of oat and wheat germs, flax and other grains that I rolled into lumps we called sludge balls. Last summer, his breakfast of choice was a graham cracker and a bowl of sundried tomatoes — not the fancy ones packed in oil, but fruit leather-y dried ones that he chewed and chewed. Often he’ll eat o’s and granola with me, but now he’s starting to innovate the cereal and milk model. Yesterday, he ate Special K with sliced banana, dried apple rings, and cashews with milk; today it was Special K, banana, strawberries, dried blueberries and peanuts with milk. I wonder what he’ll put in the bowl tomorrow?
May 3rd, 2006
I’ve always been a pretty careful reader of food labels, but the Michael Pollan talk I went to the other night has renewed my interest in trying to make the food purchases I make good choices for the environment, too. Organic trumps factory-farmed, in most circumstances, and local (because it requires less fossil fuel to get it from the farm to my kitchen) usually trumps organic. OK.
So there I was at Trader Joe’s, trying to buy milk. Do I buy the organic milk in paper cartons that I can compost, or the locally produced organic milk in plastic jugs that I can recycle? I went with local, even though I don’t much like the plastic jugs.
Then on to peanut butter. Here the choice is between organic in plastic containers or salt-free, non-organic in glass. I’m sure we could all eat less salt, so I went with salt-free.
Flour? Trader Joe’s carries King Arthur brand flours, which are neither organic nor local (the company is based in Vermont). But, it’s a worker-owned company with an excellent product, so into the cart it goes.
Finally, I need eggs. I can get organic, cage-free, brown, vegetarian diet, and omega-3 fortified — but not all in the same carton. Does my vegetarian family need to eat vegetarian eggs? What are the chickens eating that’s not vegetarian? I don’t like to imagine. And if I spring for omega-3 fortified, do we really get much health benefit? I’m dubious, grab a carton, and flee.
I’m not really complaining. I’m lucky to live in a city where I have so many choices for food and even where to buy it. I could skip the drive to Trader Joe’s entirely and walk to the local, family-owned grocery store. Or ride public transit to the farmer’s market. Still, the decision-making gets exhausting sometimes!
April 30th, 2006
Tony’s birthday is coming up, so I won’t be changing Ben’s (mistaken) impression of my kitchen duties any time soon. There is a cake to be baked, after all. But before I do that, I thought I’d try something new: chocolate croissants.
Now, I’ve done my fair share of baking; I’m familiar with recipe elements like “the sponge,” “the filling,” of course, or “the crust.” But this one is new to me: “the butter.” The butter. And indeed it is, nearly a pound of it, mixed with half a cup of flour, and kneaded into an already buttery dough. Mmmmm.
April 29th, 2006
I went to hear Michael Pollan speak about his new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He was talking about how our decisions about food are influenced by culture, and then interrupted himself: “Of course, culture is just a fancy way of saying your mom.”
April 28th, 2006
Tony and I have been struggling this year to figure out how to do the work we each want to do, give the kids the attention they need, and not step on each other’s toes. Some days go better than others.
Ben, however, is very clear about our roles, at least in the kitchen. “Dada cooks dinner,” he announced recently, “But Mama only bakes.”
April 28th, 2006
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