Quick Hits: Scary Mommy Manifesto, B'Day Goodness & Gram's Bread

Scary Mommy Manifesto

Saw this 12-step pledge for moms, written by blogger "Scary Mommy" -- Jill Smokler -- on the Huffington Post this morning. Loved it. Well worth your time, unless you're a helicopter parent. Actually, if you're a helicopter parent, perhaps you should read it . . . and take heed.

A couple of items in the pledge:

"I shall not judge the mother in the grocery store who, upon entering, hits the candy aisle and doles out M&Ms to her screaming toddler. It is simply a survival mechanism.

. . . I shall not question the mother who is wearing the same yoga pants, flip-flops and T-shirt she wore to school pickup the day before. She has a good reason."

B'Day Goodness

The Picket Fence Post family, along with other friends and family members, kindly celebrated my birthday with me yesterday. Here are the highlights:

I was kidding around with a nephew of mine on the phone after he asked me how old I was. I told him I was 100. When he balked, I said, "Okay, I'm 101." Then I mentioned that I, along with his father, had a great grandfather who lived to age 99. The pre-schooler responded by asking, "When are you going to die?"

I got to spend the evening with the family -- after enjoying a homemade meal of pan-seared scallops, salad, rice and wine followed up by a mint chocolate brownie sundae (thanks to The Spouse) -- watching the NCAA championship game between Baylor and Notre Dame. We all marveled at the athletic prowess of Baylor's Brittney Griner and the unparalleled success of the Baylor team, the first NCAA hoop team to go 40-0 in a season.

The Girl printed out and colored, a la Andy Warhol, an image of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, with the words, "Great Comedian Figures." The image was taped to my bedroom door and greeted me when I woke up.

This from The Eldest Boy's homemade card: On the front, there was a drawing of me, "What you look like," which was a garden variety woman in a T-shirt (albeit with a sarcastic saying) and jeans. On the inside, there was another drawing of me as "Super Mom" (complete with a cape) with quotes beneath the image such as, "Deals with two teens and a tween without breaking a sweat" and "Her super yell can make anyone deaf," to "Washes dishes, does laundry, writes multiple columns and a novel, cooks dinner, drives kids to places and watched the dog all in a day!" (*big smile*)

Gram's Bread

I am so setting myself up for failure here, especially by writing about this subject in this venue . . . Why? Because I may attempt to make my grandmother Liv's -- Gram's -- Easter bread. (Actually, when I was looking through her recipe boxes, I found two recipes for Easter breads, one where you make the bread dough from scratch and one where you use frozen dough. Even though Gram once had me over to her house and spent hours schooling me on how to make the bread from scratch, if I do this thing I'm going with option two. I seriously don't have a whole day to devote to bread.)

Every year when Gram was with us, she'd proudly present a giant loaf of bread laden with layers upon layers of tangy meats. As it would land on my parents' kitchen counter with a hefty caloric thud, the bread would become a central focus of our Easter meal, giving the ham a serious run for its money. It was a big deal, the unveiling of this culinary masterpiece. And, as with many things Gram did, the bread was larger than life, about the size of an infant it was. Everything seemed bigger when my grandmother was around.

So for me, the lowly griping chef whose will to cook has been beaten into submission by my resident picky eaters no matter how many times I watch Julie & Julia, to even suggest that I'm thinking about attempting to make "Gram's bread" is a feat of enormous ego. I'm hardly a larger-than-life kinda gal. Snarky, dark and twisty, yes, larger-than-life, no.

Will I actually make the bread? It depends. Maybe. I'm making no promises. The Picket Fence Post family will also be hosting a Passover dinner for The Spouse's family this weekend so if I get the chance, I will work on the bread. If I don't get the opportunity, maybe I'll take a stab at making Gram's bread on a less auspicious occasion, like Arbor Day.

Can My Wolf-It-Down Family Eat More Slowly, Mindfully?

I had to laugh when I read an article in the New York Times promoting “mindful” eating. In my house, people eat as though bands of marauders are apt to rampage through the kitchen at any moment, stealing all the “good food” from the table (leaving behind the veggies and anything “weird” looking) and leaving my family bereft and hungry.

To say that we are gulp down our food at a rapid clip is as much of an understatement as saying that Donald Trump has a slightly inflated ego.

The Spouse in particularly is guilty of this. He does it so often that I frequently mutter under my breath, “Slow down!” (When I’ve had too much caffeine during the day and/or am on a tight time schedule, he does the same for me.)

So when I told him that the New York Times said he should put down his fork in between bites, as I oftentimes suggest, he accused me of ad libbing. But I wasn’t.

“Try this,” the article began, “place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love – let’s say it’s that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.”

“Now comes the hard part,” writer Jeff Gordinier continued. “Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because the first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.”

Gordinier said if you take the time to chew the food s-l-o-w-l-y, appreciate not just the taste and texture of the food, but its smell and appearance on your plate while remaining silent, you’ll likely enjoy your food more AND eat less in the process.

This made me wonder if in my family, where eating is practically a competitive sport – that’s when The Youngest Boy isn’t talking 447 miles per hour as he scarfs in order to tell us the latest fifth grade boy joke about Uranus and something likely involving balls (it’s a comedy sketch a minute at our dinner table) – this could ever work, even for a single meal.

A lot of factors are against it, one being the fact that dinner is usually sandwiched in between youth sports practices, pending homework assignments, The Spouse having a mere 10 minutes to spare before he has to run out again, etc. Another obstacle is that The Youngest Boy has precious little patience with just sitting there like a civilized being and eating at a thoughtful pace. He's got a lot on his mind and on his super-secret To Do list.

I even wonder if The Spouse and I could achieve “mindful” eating on our own, what with being interrupted every other minute (because the kids haven't seen their dad all day and all want to tell him stuff). I guess it’d have to be while we’re out at a dinner someplace, alone.

Do you think you could get your family to slow down, to put down the fork between bites, and actually enjoy the food? Or is this just some Martha Stewart-esque pipe dream, particularly for the Picket Fence Post family where we go 10 rounds with The Youngest Boy in order to get the kid to eat two carrot sticks?

As for the article’s suggestion that the first part of the meal be consumed in silence . . . yeah, that’s not gonna happen my friend, not in our house.

Image credit: Jennifer May/New York Times

Disgruntled Dispatches from the Kitchen

I’m having a senior moment and I’m only in my 40s. Found in the microwave oven this afternoon: Leftover roasted sweet potatoes I had heated up yesterday to go along with a pretty good dinner I'd made but then completely forgot about. Sadly, this is not the first time I've left food in the microwave overnight in the past year.

And while I'm on the subject of the kitchen and food, you know those kids of mine who barely eat the dinners I make for them – last night I spent 1.5 hours preparing dinner and they barely ate any of it,  seriously, their refusal to eat the healthy meals I make is really cheesing me off – they’re eating everything else in the house but dinner and rendering our pantry looking like a photo of a Leningrad grocery store with barren shelves as they complain that there's nothing to eat.

Given that the eldest two Picket Fence Post kids are nearly teenagers (God help me) and The Youngest Boy’s appetite is voracious -- except for good old Mom’s homemade dinners of course -- I think I’m going to be spending way more time than I’d like in the grocery store this summer. The grocery bill is going to bankrupt me.

A Greeting Card that Made My Day

The other night I made the Picket Fence Post kids a healthy, tasty dinner. I marinated chicken breast and Vidalia onions in Soy Vay Island Teriyaki sauce. I stuck them onto skewers along with grape tomatoes, red pepper slices, fresh cilantro, halved mushrooms and freshly sliced oranges. While grilling the shish kebobs, I also put fresh mango slices on a skewer. It was all served with sides of plain yet handmade (not by me) pasta and sliced apples. If they wanted to put a mango salsa onto the food, they could do that too.

The kids hardly ate a thing. One said he was too full from his afterschool snack. Another ate only pasta and sliced apples. The third ate a minuscule amount of food then also claimed a lack of appetite.

Normally, I would’ve been uber-ticked off because I spent a decent amount of time preparing this healthy meal only to have The Ungratefuls scorn it. But today I received a card in the mail from one of my friends. On the front was a drawing of mismatched kitchen chairs, a white wooden kitchen table, a bottle of wine, two wine glasses and what appears to be a salad bowl. The sentiment read as follows: “A good cook knows that it’s not what is on the table that matters. It’s what is in the chairs.”

Thank you Julie for giving me something positive to hang onto while the kids turned their noses up at yet another meal.

Notes from a Snow Day: Ice Rink, Movie Surprise, Chicken Stir Fry & Max in the Snow

Hey, What's This? Could It Be . . . an Actual Skating Rink? In Our Yard? YES!!!

I present to you . . . the ice rink as the foot-and-a-half of snow that fell from the sky since early this morning was being shoveled off of it.

The rink is brought to us by many, many hours of hard work and loving maintenance by The Spouse for his three children.

This week, I've added "buy skates" (for me and The Eldest Boy) to my "To Do" list this week.

The Spouse, who broke his wrist last year while skating on a public rink, is still shying away from skating, in spite of this great effort.

Eat, Pray . . . Whoa!!!

While the males in the family were snuggled up in front of the fireplace this weekend watching NFL playoff games, The Girl and I retreated to my room to watch the PG-13 rated film Eat Pray Love on DVD.

I'd read the book, so I figured that there might be one questionable scene near the last third of the film when the main character Liz is in Bali, which might require fast-forwarding or for me to mute the TV while The Girl averts her eyes. While I waited for Liz's relationship with Felipe, the man who would become her spouse, to commence, I totally did not expect a twentysomething male to drag Liz down to the waterfront and suddenly strip naked as he was trying to entice Liz to go skinny dipping.

Both The Girl and I shrieked as his butt was in the center of the screen and I hit, "Stop." The irony is that when Felipe and Liz were about to physically commence their love affair I suggested that The Girl go fetch a snack from the kitchen, only there was nothing she couldn't have seen, no nudity, no sex.

'Delicious' Chicken Stir Fries

More irony . . .

Whenever I pull out my wok, the Picket Fence Post kids roll their eyes. They're not fans of anything I might create inside of that thing. I've tried making them sweet stir fries, garlicky ones and even plain, soy sauce-based ones. But no matter how I prepared a stir fry, the kiddos usually take one bite, wrinkle their noses and wind up having cereal for dinner while The Spouse and I eat what I made.

Unless, of course, The Eldest Boy and The Girl happen to be the ones who made the stir fry. They're both currently taking Home Ec in their middle school -- which has been relabeled with the politically correct moniker, "Family Consumer Science" -- and in the past week they've both come home from school with a container of a chicken, vegetable noodle stir fry that they'd made. They were absolutely delighted with their creations and gobbled them up while I watched, amazed.

My new plan: The next time I pull out the work, I'm also going to pull The Eldest Boy and The Girl into the kitchen with me so the "experts" can show me how it's really done.

Cute Max Snow Pic

Max the dog -- who still spends much of his time rooting around the house looking for non-edible items that he can eat or gnaw on (tissues, dryer sheets, ball point pens, socks, etc.) -- was startled when we let him out onto our deck this morning and the snow was nearly as high as he is tall. He tried pushing his body through the snow, but stopped after traveling only a few feet and tried to get back into the house. (If snow was up to my eyeballs, I'd want to retreat too.)

However once The Spouse shoveled out several pathways for him, he romped around his little paths as though he were in a hedge maze. 'Twas very cute. The wet dog smell he has now that he's drying off, not so cute.

Exactly How Dysfunctional IS Your Thanksgiving Dinner?

For several years I’ve been writing and posting snarky Dysfunctional Family Bingo cards every November where I have filled the boxes with potentially horrific scenarios that could occur during your Thanksgiving dinner, though you wouldn’t want them to. Unless you’re a sadist. Or post-divorce Don Draper . . . before he hooked up with Megan the secretary.

I decided to go another way this year. Out with the Bingo cards. In with a silly, snarky quiz in which you look at a potentially ominous Thanksgiving dinner scenario – including one inspired by Mad Men’s Betty Draper Francis -- and decide which one, in your opinion, represents the best reaction in the face of insanity. At the end, you can see whether you’ve picked mostly minor dysfunctional responses or seriously dysfunctional ones (which can sometimes be the most entertaining options):

1) The turkey, which was proudly presented to the assembled guests at the Thanksgiving table, is dreadfully dry. We’re talkin’ sawdust. The people with whom you’re eating dinner respond this way:

a) By pouring a bit more gravy onto the turkey and saying nothing so as not to hurt the hosts’ feelings.

b) By pulling the host and hostess aside while they’re doing dishes and offering future turkey roasting tips.

c) By someone announcing, “Damn! This sucker’s dry! How long d’ja cook it for Chrisssake?”

2) The hostess of the dinner, who made all the food, loudly observes, for all the diners to hear, that your 8-year-old nephew doesn’t have any yams on his plate. “What, you don’t like my yams?” she asks from the other side of the table. “Why don’t you try some? They’re really good.”

a) Your sister-in-law frowns, then says, “Sure he likes them, don’t you Tommy?” Then she shovels some into his mouth as he protests and gags.

b) Your sister-in-law says, “Thanks for asking, but he’s not a fan of yams. He loves your cranberry sauce though.”

c) “That’s right!” your brother bellows, “smart boy! Just like his dad. NO ONE likes yams.”

3) Your cousin’s 12-month-old is toddling around your mother-in-law’s glass-topped coffee table, checking out all the items that have been carefully arranged there: A crystal candy dish filled with M&Ms, a stack of hardcover books and a pair of ceramic candle sticks your mother-in-law made in a pottery class. Before you can reach over little Susie’s head and grab the candy dish, she’s knocked it off the coffee table, sending the M&Ms flying and knocking over one of the candlesticks, breaking it. What happens next?

a) The baby’s mother rushes over, grabs her daughter under one arm and then starts one-handedly trying to pick everything up as she profusely apologizes.

b) The baby’s parents do nothing while everyone else looks around waiting for someone to pick up the debris.

c) The baby’s mother shouts to your mother-in-law, “You knew we were coming here. This is what you get when you don’t child-proof!”

Three for Thursday: More on Dad's Stand for Bullied Daughter, Sports Schedule Woes & Saying Good-Bye to Family Car on 'Modern Family'

Item #1: Dad Stands Up for His Daughter, Follow-Up

Remember the story I wrote about last week about the Florida dad who boarded a school bus after his daughter had been bullied on it, demanded to know the identity of her tormentor(s) and was threatened with arrest? Well more info on the story has come to light.

After the father apologized for his behavior – he was charged with two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct and disturbing a school function -- he told the media that his 13-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy and that students on her bus had allegedly repeatedly harassed her, smacked her on the head, spit on her and even tossed a condom at her. Reading all of this and seeing the video below, who can blame this dad for getting angry and storming onto the bus?



Item #2: Sports Schedule Woes

I’m trying to be a good sports parent. Really. I am. *earnest smile plastered on face*

Although I deeply resent how, in order to allow one’s children to participate in youth sports at even a minimum level, one has to assent to having one’s family’s weekends hijacked by uncompromising sports schedules which make visiting family or things like having old fashioned Sunday dinners – as I longed for when I wrote this post – nearly impossible, I’ve been trying to go with the flow these past weeks.

It hasn’t been easy.

The Youngest Boy’s hockey schedule is extremely fluid. Too fluid. To borrow an analogy used on Mad Men on Sunday night, it’s like soup that’s spreading all across the kitchen counter, but no matter how much you try to capture it in a pot or hold it in your hands, there’s still more of it that you’ve missed, that's still on the counter or slips through your fingers and it winds up dripping all over the floor and onto your shoes.

There’s no one regular hockey practice time, therefore, practices pop up in my e-mail box intermittently, most of the time for dates when I’ve already made plans for that particular time slot and have to do major schedule shifting, delaying and appealing to other parents for transportation help in order to accommodate these “new” practice times. (I get that booking hockey times can be extremely challenging, but something that we can at least count on and work with would be nice.)

Just this past weekend, there was a 6:50 p.m. practice scheduled for Sunday. But when The Spouse brought The Youngest Boy to the arena, they were informed that the folks who send out the e-mail schedule updates had mistakenly put “p.m.” instead of “a.m.” The practice was at 6:50 a.m. The Spouse and the other parents who showed up with their kids were admonished to check the hockey web site EVERY DAY to see if there are changes to practice and game schedules that weren’t either e-mailed to us via the hockey calendar e-mail system or the coach. (Like parents have nothing better to do than to chase down the hockey people to see if they’ve decided to switch things around with no notice and without telling anyone. Add it to the list with making sure the kids are fed super-nutritious and home-cooked meals, bathed, clothed, have done their homework and didn’t leave their shoes by the front door so that the dog’ll chew them up.)

Even when the schedules are set, things are still proving rather, shall I say, constraining. The Eldest Boy’s soccer practices go until 8 on Friday nights. One of The Girl’s soccer practices is late on Sunday afternoons, and The Youngest Boy’s hockey games range wildly in their times from very early in the morning – I’m talking 6 a.m., which means he has to be at the arena at 5:30 – on a Saturday or Sunday morning, or they can be in the middle of the day, when he’ll have to wear his uniform to church and race out of there in order to make it to the game. He has a few games on Friday evenings.

What does this all mean? It means that we have practically no weekends where there’s a significant block of free time to, say, drive out to western Massachusetts to visit my parents for an afternoon or spend the day in Boston if we wanted to. I’ve had to tell The Picket Fence Post grandparents that the best way to see their grandchildren is to come to their games.

This is making Mommy extremely frazzled – especially with new hockey practice times cropping up like time bombs waiting to blow the family schedule all to hell – but I’m trying, really, I am, to be a good sport about all this. Go team!. . . and please pass the ginormous cup of java. I really need it.

Item #3: Modern Family: Saying Goodbye to the Old Family Car

Modern Family returned last night for its sophomore season debut and it was funny – I laughed out loud at Cameron’s flinching when Mitchell used the nail gun and the nails went through a wall and nearly impaled Cameron’s back – but I think my expectations for this wonderful show were too high because I wanted it to be off-the-charts hilarious, and it fell short of that.

But there were moments that resonated nonetheless, like the story arc about the old Dunphy family station wagon that Claire wanted Phil to sell because it’d been sitting in their garage, unused, for years. It was the car they used when their children were very young, when Luke was a toddler (and used to frequently puke in it, thus they nicknamed his puke bucket they kept in the car, “Buckety”). While going through the car to prepare it for sale, Claire began to feel nostalgic about when they were a young family, so they took the old bucket of bolts out for one last hurrah and the video below is what happened.



This reminded me of how attached members of the Picket Fence Post family were to our tan mini-van – christened the “funny van” by The Eldest Boy when he was 2, who’d misheard us call it a mini-van; the “funny van” name stuck – when we got rid of it a few years ago. We got it when I was pregnant with my 9-year-old, and when we got rid of it, it was a very sad day for one unnamed member of the Picket Fence Post family.

Summer Shorts: 'Caring' Too Much, 'Despicable Me,' Sabbath Family Dinners Feed the Soul?

During a recent trip to the public library with the Picket Fence Post kids, The Eldest Boy saw the book, Parents Who Care Too Much, displayed atop a book case. “You should read that,” he said, a twinkle in his eyes.

***

We were on our way to go see Despicable Me, our trip timed so that we’d miss the coming attractions because we’ve had some bad experiences with violent/inappropriate trailers for films freakin’ my kids out in the past. The way I calculated it, we’d make it into the theater approximately 15 minutes after the listed start time so I figured we’d be sitting down just as the feature presentation began. (Before Toy Story 3 began on opening weekend, the trailers went on for 20+ minutes.)

Until I heard this from The Youngest boy when we were a third of the way there: “Oh no! I forgot my shoes!”

***

Speaking of Despicable Me . . . I really liked the movie (as did the kids), particularly its amusing reference to The Bank of Evil, “formerly known as Lehman Brothers.” I was similarly amused to see the villain/adopted dad Gru having trouble balancing working from home with caring for his three adopted daughters, particularly when he was on a “work call” and doing a presentation that was messed up by the kiddos, causing embarrassment and leading to Gru’s colleagues questioning his dedication to his craft of supreme, treacherous villainy.

At least I’m not the only work-from-home parent who feels torn between work and cute-by-intrusive kiddos every 10 minutes.

***

 

Read an intriguing piece in the New York Times yesterday about a mini-trend (if indeed it’s actually a trend, because sometimes I'm skeptical when I see "trend" stories): Restoring the observance of a Sabbath, not necessarily to worship or pray, but as a way to connect with others.

The article discussed Jewish folks who were trying to cut back on Saturday activities, avoiding engaging in “commerce,” scaling back on the use of technology, etc. and instead spending time with one another’s family, friends and community by sharing a weekly meal together, maybe getting outside more often. There were some Christians who were also quoted who are trying to do the same thing only on Sundays.

A former priest/author provided this fascinating quote about observing a “Sabbath” weekend day which includes a family meal: “Its roots are religious. As Christians, we have completely lost the sense of the origins of the Mass, which is the Eucharist, which is a meal. If Jesus were to visit us, it would have the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on being a part of, not the worship service at church.” Was he saying that the Sabbath/Sunday family meal is as sacred as the Eucharist, that it feeds the soul?

‘Twas an interesting concept which I tried in vain to discuss with The Spouse over the breakfast table, musing about whether we should commit to our own dinner ritual on Sunday afternoons (when Patriots' games could be DVRed in the fall and we’d be done with dinner in time for The Spouse to make his men’s basketball league games on Sunday evenings, RIGHT in the middle of the dinner hour). However The Spouse was too consumed with playing the game of Life with The Youngest Boy and The Girl to have a real discussion about it. Or perhaps he was simply avoiding getting sucked into one of my new crusades which would mean we’d have to spend part of Sundays afternoons cooking. Hmm.