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Poor brave SuperBoy. He has had quite a lot of brushes with the medical world lately, and this week he finally got hit by it. After a chance of Lyme’s Disease with a tick bite, an ER visit with severe breathing problems–wheezing & coughing, a follow up with his allergist and multiple tests for other allergies beyond his peanut & egg, then it came: hernia! or possible hydrocele. All within the month. Thankfully nothing has proven fatal, and nothing too serious, thankfully. The biggest deal was the hernia. He just underwent out-patient surgery to repair it. Initially the pediatric urologist thought it was a hydrocele, but upon opening him up, it turned out to be a larger hernia than expected. A wee longer surgery than expected, but he came out just fine. He slept in my lap for a long time on the hospital bed in the recovery room, then had his pain meds, drank a little, ate a little, and bounced back with enough inertia to read the new Tintin book his BFFs gave him, The Blue Lotus. Although we have all the joined books and a few of the individuals, this one has never surfaced. Tintin. The French journalist boy with his little dog Snowy. We grew up reading it, and SuperBoy loves it now too, as do his best girlfriends. Whisky? Smoking? Opium? Guns? Yes. Tintin has it all–except inappropriate romance, thankfully. Watching your son go into surgery, and come out with an incision on his belly,…
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I love this picture from almost 10 years ago–me and my atrocious Beatles hair cut. My dad cracking some awesome joke. My brother looking overwhelmed by the humor. It’s just an easy, quiet, lovely day around here for Father’s Day. My dad, BABA, is feeding SweetPea her lunch while he reads his Catholic newspaper. My mom, NUNU, is making grilled cheeses sandwiches. We just returned from a gorgeous and peacefilling mass at our beloved parish. SuperBoy was particularly well-behaved, including insisting on folding his hands while walking to communion all by himself, except when he decided to let his baseball free in the pew. All over. Hopefully you and your father are connecting in a meaningful way today. Thank God for all the fathers in our lives, physical and spiritual. It’s a beautiful vocation to be a father, and a real gift to the children/adults whose lives you’ve affected. Me & my sibs lucked out with the best dad in the world, and now I get to watch AA be the best dad to our kids. My dad’s list of accomplishments are many, including, but not limited to: 1) giving us driving directions–from anywhere to anywhere. The man’s mind is google map’s engine. 2) instilling in us a love of classical music, oriental rugs, persian food, and Mel Brooks. 3) teaching us to have a real sense of humor about the human body as he’s a gastro doc. That’s the stomach & colon. 4) helping so many of my friends…
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A few people have remarked lately, Oh, you just do it all, don’t you? Or how do you do it all? You cook from scratch, you probably never eat junk food, you sew all this stuff, you blog, and your children know prayers in Latin. Ahhhh!!! First off, only a few of those are true. Secondly, I fear I’ve become one of those friends we love to hate. And confession–I LOVE unhealthy food! I only eat like this for my kids. And for all this work, you can see what SweetPea’s awkward favorite habit is–she does this any and everywhere!! I’m afraid to become one of the friends whose blog we read and think unmentionables. And then think about how things really aren’t the way they seem. And then compare our lives and happily determine that our life is better than theirs. Come on, unless you’re a saint or waaaaaaaay more saintly than I am (not that hard to be), you know we all have friends we love to hate. We get annoyed at their facebook posts and complain about it to our sisters. We simultaneously think they’re a bad parent but are incensed they haven’t gotten back to us about that missed playdate. We’re petty and small and obsessed with how many people follow our blog/like our facebook status/respond to our emails or texts. We judge. Remember my post on judging {Trying to Retain Judgment Without Being Judgmental}? I just read that social media has enhanced narcissism, or is driven by it.…
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Sleep. Babies. The first question people ask. Does your baby sleep through the night? No? Here are my suggestions as to how to achieve that! Okay, maybe it’s not phrased that way, but that’s their point. Followed by How much does she weight? Oh, she’s tiny. Oh, she’s huge. I got news for the askers of the world: my thirteen month old does not sleep through the night, nor does she weigh very much. *gasp* I must be a lousy parent. Despite my lousy parenting status, I’m going to share my sleep tips and transitions with you. Despite my poor tiny sleeper’s trajectory, I think I’ve got a few things that may help the sleep derangedly deprived parent. Why? How? Because I’ve been that person (am that person still?). I’ve written a lot about sleep. Starting with my unbearable smugness that SuperBoy slept through the night at 12 weeks, simply due to the fact he didn’t want to night nurse anymore. Clearly it was superior parenting skillz. Ending with the fact that SweetPea, although night weaned at 12 months (nota bene, months, not weeks), still awakens at least once a night to be comforted back to sleep. I must be awful at this gig. 1) Birth to 6 months. Shockingly, me and a bunch of other moms and a few experts feel that the first six months of life are to be led primarily by the baby’s needs. Keeping that infant on you, close to you, within smell-shot of your milk means you’re…
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(What’s that yellow stuff on my skirt? Not poop. Yes, that would be the food SuperBoy dropped on the floor at church and I wiped up with ye-old-new-maxi-dress) We’re celebrating four years of marriage today. Four years of being best friends, better halves, parenting partners, and trying our best to help the other person get and stay on the road to the kind of happiness that only comes from a complete gift of yourself. Lord knows my husband’s a saint for many reasons, including but not limited to: taking night shift with kids, bringing me ice cream in bed, binge-watching the new Arrested Development season 4 despite having an early rise for work, being open to living so closely with my family, loving both poker and the Latin Mass with my dad, insisting my mom’s dried up chicken dinners are fabulous (to be fair, she got a new recipe and now her chicken is SO moist!), teaching SuperBoy to be the third base at his law firm softball league’s game, and reading to our squirmy daughter every night, despite her best escape efforts. One of my most necessary parenting partnering elements I need at this point in life is the ability to step away from the needs of a two-children-under-three household for about an hour each night and just do whatever I want. As I write that, I feel guilty. I feel like I should be on 24-7. I feel like taking time to vegetate, or watch a little TV,…
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Who needs a few deliciously wholesome and easy meals under their belt/in their hat? Me! Me! I had tried to do a meal plan through a wholesome mama website. Gotta admit: the recipes she shared were bland, uninteresting, and not well received by the family. The trouble is, I thought I needed someone to give me a list of what I’d make every night, complete with a grocery shopping list, and then, THEN, I’d have a meal plan for the week and always eat healthfully and never cry at 4pm when no meat was defrosted and all I could offer to poor AA was scrambled eggs without bacon (in the freezer, duh). As it turned out, I didn’t need someone else’s meal plan. I needed to take the time to master one new recipe a week, and then write down what I wanted to cook on Sunday afternoon, shop for it Sunday night, and just make myself do it. Just do it. Nike’s slogan should have been, just do it, NOW, for the procrastinators among us. Here are four simple recipes that make a wholesome dinner. It’s less about the recipe, and more about learning how to prepare tasty food from what’s in your pantry (grains and beans), and how to make veggies firm & delish with butter and salt and no soggyness. I firmly believe in Alice Water’s principles of food tasting like the best version of itself, not someone else all gussied up. I can’t recommend Alice Water’s…
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