BLOG
Burnout doesn’t discriminate. You have one child or twenty. You work or you stay home. You are a single parent, you have a partner. Every mom I’ve ever asked has confirmed: she’s experienced burnout. The funny thing is that not only does burnout look different for different people, but we cope with the experience and find our way out of it differently. Last fall I was so burnt to a crunchy crisp of a brussel sprout roasting in the oven after too many commitments. Only after I faced my overcommitting tendency was I able to really look and see, yes, I was burning up & out, but yes, I also can pull back. I also can feed my kids whipping cream for breakfast. How I’ve pulled myself…
READ MORE
Where is the three year old in this photo? Outside the frame, bawling because someone took her favorite fill_in_the_blank. Having a three year old girl, and this SweetPea with her particular temperament, feels so different than having had a three year old boy who is coming up on five in just a few days here (stop the sands of time!!!). His personality presented its own challenges, as does hers. I wrote about his challenges: Three steps to taming your tantruming toddler; Three & a half year old habits & mama bad habits; how I keep my kids from killing each other; and more in the archives under “kid.” In a way, I was prepared for the prefrontal cortex burgeoning and developing at a rapid, can’t-keep-up-with-the-spasm-de-jour…
READ MORE
Dads of the world, I salute you. You’re not mothers. You’re your own thing. Your own way of bonding, loving, disciplining, never-dressing-them-in-enough-layers of a thing. You make Saturday mornings the most sought-after real estate. You can make anything fun and everything safe. My own dad still makes life easier for his five kids. His neverending devotion to finding the right rug for our houses, the best Indian fare for dinner, the best baby holder in the hammock. I’m simply the mom so I don’t know how it feels to be the dad. I know you need the garden to make something right with your hands at the end of the day. I know you need to read a book with our fiercest firiest child,…
READ MORE
My quickie update! Oh, I have so many wonderful posts in draft. All kinds of interesting (only to my mother) things! But as I’ve been down with a stomach flu (good thing I’m such a pro at having all-pregnancy long morning sickness so vomiting doesn’t really phase me::no, not pregnant this vomit-sesh) and had family in town so twirly whirly and not lots of typing. But did you hear??? GRACE had her BABY!! And speaking of me not being pregnant, but apparently needing to work out, this happened today that I shared on Facebook: While nursing today, my daughter wandered over to point out my “big belly that might be growing a new baby.” I let her poke it, prod it, sniff it and then…
READ MORE
You know what they say . . . wisdom comes with age? You learn through experience? Your first child suffers from all your experimental parenting? Oh, maybe they don’t say the third. Maybe it’s just me. When people see the baby and I running errands, he is highly complimented on his blue eyes and sweet clutching chubby hands. I get knowing looks from older women, the look of oh, to have a baby again–so simple, so sweet. I want to assure them all that I’m no spring-chick mother. I have two older kids. I know all the unsolicited advice they’re wishing they could mombard me with because it’s along the same lines of what I’d harbor in my head seeing a new mom. What I’d really…
READ MORE
You are all about this, right? Pics of me and my messy studio and my projects? You know how many people post these photos of their sewing room so orderly and you think, I could totally do that. Well, feast your eyes. I cannot operate in an orderly fashion though I dearly wish I could. But before you do, if you’re on instagram, hop over before friday and enter the $200 loop giveaway for an amazon gift card my friends and I are doing? Katrina and I contacted four other friends who run small mama-made shops and we all pitched in for a gift card for you. COME OVER TO INSTA! It’s a way to connect our friends with our other friends who are crafty. Buy…
READ MORE