Posts (page 2)
my friend kris of cheap healthy good had a call out to a bunch of her friends to do a blog entry on her pretty popular blog while she was on vacation. me, my friend cindee of little kitchen mouse and rachel of many things except a blog answered the call. (there will be more people as today is only thursday and kris is gone for a week) it was thrilling! i was gonna be read by other people than just mardi who i think i now write this blog for. how does that make you feel, mardi? i now feel like a stalker.
so, i wrote this entry and was very excited to think that i was writing on food! on a food blog! and woot doesn't that make me so in the blogispher! untiiiiiiil i read the comments. i am so sensitive to the fact that i am not super mom which is what my entry is basically about and the comments, just made me again rethink my heroism in the face of mothering. i want to comment back on the comment part of the awesome blog of kris, instead i shall use my own forum to ask my questions and get their expertise as i make my excuses about my life. you know, here. where i talk about my life and, in general, self absorb.
this is my question to the mothers who make their own baby food from their own dinners
1) do you have a sit down dinner every night with vegetables? i know how ridiculous that sounds! truly, but stan* & i don't have a sit down until after the bot goes down. because, he goes down at 7 and when i get home at 6 PM, i have an hour to feed him, bathe him & read him goodnight moon. maybe! we'll get to play too? maybe not. anyway, it's one hour. i don't cook during holden time.
2) what time do you get home time do you get home to your boo? how much time during the week day do you get with him/her? what's your commute like? do you really cook every night? how am i allowed to have children? because seriously, i work from 9 - 5, no biggie right? well, sure - but i also commute 45 min each way (if i'm lucky) and i'm pumping twice a day at work and i feel like i'm just barely hanging on.
ok - i really only have two questions.
my goal though, after reading the comments, is to make tiny changes. not in making baby food but maybe in time management. i am going to take the month of august and get up @ 5:30 am, an hour before the baby, and every other day, run/walk 20 min a day. the days that i don't run/walk, i'm going to clean a room. then the night time will not be spent with the guilt of not having made baby food - which i am not going to do, sorry! - but when i sit down at my couch at 8, after cooking for my husband** to read some book (oh and mardi, i'm looking for some good books to read. speaking of which, have you read julie & julia? i think it's my new favorite book. it's definitely my favorite book of the summer of 2009.) i'll feel like i'm not such a bad mother after all.
* stan! write in your blog!
** stan often makes dinner and i do other stuff ... often, i am still putting the bot down because i say he goes to bed at 7 but it's more often between 7 & 8
i was raised by a single mom. we had some pretty rocky times. we lived in some off base military apartments which is just another way of saying upper crust ghetto. while there, our next door neighbor shot her husband through the door of their apartment because he was coming in to beat her again. we could hear their fights often. his hand connecting with her cheek, her subsequent screams. once we moved, we moved to a pretty sketchy area of tacoma, wa which in the early 80's was known as being fairly sketchy in and of itself. we were even on welfare at one point for about 6 months. all this to say, i understand living paycheck to paycheck or welfare check to welfare check.
it's been years since i have had to view it up close and personal. my friends and i all say "we're broke". generally, what we mean is, "i can't go out with drinks with you". in my 20's i was taken to housing court for failing to pay my rent on time (i was a month late - i had been unemployed for a few months) but i took care of it quickly. my memory of my childhood and our american poverity had diminished and i am very fine with that.
living in bed-stuy has changed that. living among housing and chicken bones and stray cats and teenagers screaming at their babies has changed that. my heart is often so heavy when i walk from the train, having left my midtown manhattan job where i make a living wage that it takes little to set me on the edge of an bit of an emotional tandrum. last night, i met the edge and went over. on a street corner at the end of my block, i saw a beautiful medium sized brown and white dog with crooked ears tied to the fense at the empty lot alone in the sun. he was standing beside a huge bag of alpo and looked so desperate to please that i had to stop myself from going over to him and hugging on him. i noticed a bunch of kids standing off to the side and in the building across the street were people hanging out of their windows yelling down to the 'crazy' dog. my mind instantly came to the conclusion that someone was abanding this dog and just expecting their unwanted adoption to be taken care of by the neighborhood. like they take care of the literally hundreds of cats and now that it's the right time of years, kittens that wander the streets. i started walking the short walk left to my home and started crying. i rounded to my house and saw my beautiful 6 month old son in the window being held from behind by my amazing husband and the difference in my life and the lives around me struck me incredibly hard and for a few minuets, stan couldn't get out of me what was wrong.
once he did, he went into action and went out to see what we could do about the dog. it turns out that he wasn't just being put out with nary a care. in reality, there was a teenage boy that had to make this brutal decision because his family was being evicted and he couldn't take the dog with him. he was waiting to get the dog a home before he went to the shelter where his family awaited. so, we tried to call the shelter where we got our kitten, cali, we tried 311 which is a number in nyc where you can get the animal people to come and get the dog to his own shelter, we tried friends and we even tried a message board we frequent and we drew a blank.
but! while we were scrambling, this neighborhood DID come to the rescue. someone did adopt the dog and the kid got to go to his new transition home with a lighter heart. so, me and my doubts and my looking down my nose was all a negative waste of time. God's here. He sees. He may not work on my time table and i may not often see His goodness here, but it's always there waiting in the wings.
Friends,
Did you know that tough economic times may be making it harder for women to breastfeed? According to a recent ABC news story, one of the fall-outs from the recession is that some new mothers are feeling forced to take shorter maternity leaves due to concerns about finances and job stability.
Unfortunately, women who have to cut their maternity leave short often can’t continue to breastfeed their infants because many workplaces don't adequately support breastfeeding. That's a big problem when you consider that 56% of women with infants are now the in the labor force--we need common-sense workplace policies to make sure that moms who want to breastfeed can.
Luckily for me, I am able to but for those women out there who can't, please sign.
Thanks,
Michele
this has been the most exciting 6 months ever.
my son is a little over five months old. i wish that i felt old enough to be a parent. old enough, worthy enough - that kind of thing. i watch him sleep and still get tripped up with so much love - then he awakes and i think ooooh, boy - couldn't you have slept just 10 mins more so i could get my to do list done?
he's probably pretty normal for a 5 month old but to me, he's a magical being. much like a unicorn - instead of a hard pointy thing out of his head, he has pointy little finger nails that never stay cut.
milestones are as follows:
- rolling back and forth since he was 3 1/2 months ... stan and i didn't see it until last week
- can sit up with some assistance
- can stand with assistance - in fact he would rather be standing
- we recently added cereal to his diet ... each bite he takes his little face says, what are you doing, you ass? and the he begrugendly takes it. half of it goes down
- been sleeping through the night since 3 1/2 months
- eats his feet - i've tried them and i gotta say, they're really not as bad as i imagined
- he has been chatting with me / you / the wall since he was a month and this has continued
- he lights up when he sees stan or i. i've almost completely forgotten about being cut into for him
what i've learned so far from this experience is that there is way too much to learn. i still lives in a state of fear. i wait for a pair of shoes to drop since we've been so incredibly blessed and so far, no shoes. he's had a few fevers, many colds and one ear infection and through it all, he's incredibly happy. watching stan hold him and talk to him and take care of him has made my love of him grow 10 fold.
so, yeah - there's my baby update. i'll put up a couple pictures tomorrow
this weekend i went to the wedding of one of the sweetest women i know. she married a guy who i wanna like for her sake and so that's what i've made myself do but i stand back and silently judge him and his treatment of her. he's not abusive per se but well, she deserves so much more. the wedding was lovely. she wore her mothers wedding dress and look perfect. the maid of honor, a friend from college - for that matter, the bride is also technically a friend from college but we've also grown up together in the sense that 18 - 38 are years you grow up in and the maid of honor was just a friend of mine from college that i grew distant from in the way you do with friends from college - phew! - anyway, the maid of honor was a bit of a mess. here i sit again, judging silently. she's one of those people who knows what's good for you and your life while her own life is a bit like pig pen. it just keeps getting messier and rising up around her. sooooooo why am i telling you this? i don't know. i am having big time guilt about a) judging b) not helping. this weekend brought up a lot of feelings that i've been pushing down. i didn't want to be in a friendship where i felt the need to constantly help when people can fix their own lives without me. i wanted to actually become interestingly less like the messy maid of honor. however, the guilt doesn't really go away. in fact, i now just feel guilty because i don't want to help. i want to not have drama and so what do i do? create drama by escaping drama filled friendships. what am i going to actively do about this? learn to live with the guilt because guilt is a wasted and useless emotion. i have no more use for guilt & drama. typing makes it so, right?
HOWEVER, i became re-aquainted with a friend that i had in college who i'm really glad is back in my life. so, this weekend had a lot of great in it as well as guilt.
i'll be over here sticking with my crazy feelings.
why am i posting this crap?
i have slowed down on taking a picture a day. there are only so many angles you can get on the bot with an iphone. there are so many things i 'should' do that i'm giving myself a pass on this. here's a picture that well, isn't the best but it shows his blue, blue eyes and my white, white feet.
i will not go on about how amazing he is becuase well pictures speak louder than words.
in other news, stan and i are going to la for a visit. while we're there, i may meet with a couple of agents. i don't know really what to think about it other than wait and see. do i want to move to la? sometimes. do i want a backyard? more than a lot of things. do i care where it is? not really. is my indifference feigned? no - i really just wanna love on my baby and my husband and get out of debt. where we do it isn't no nevermind.
hi! how are you peoples of the internet?
so yeah - i'm back to work. it's tolerable. holden loves his daycare lady. i love her for him loving her. i don't really understand much of what she says but it could just be because i'm tired.
on the subway a couple days ago, i think it was this week, i was reading the history of love
(which if you can - read, please) and i see this guy kind of caressing his phone, you know the polishing that goes on because of the face grease. however, it's more loving this cleaning of the phone, more thoughtful and he keeps opening it to the email part and then closing it. so, the next time he opens it i look over his shoulder - what! i'm nosy! - and see that the first two emails are from julia and the third is from alexandra. julia's subject in the first email says "i don't think i understand what is happening" and the body of the email is blank, the second email i don't know what it said becuase the third email, alexandra's, says "i can't wait to spend tonight all alone with you." and the body says - "i get to have you all night long." this dude then opens up julia's first email and sits there for awhile and then finally he laboriously types "i can't love you exactly as you are until i figure out myself."
history of love indeed
so, hi!
