Raising a vegetarian child is kind of tricky.  There aren't as many options at McDonald's, although they are doing an admirable job with sliced apples.  It can be awkward going to other people's homes for dinner.  And the traditional Thanksgiving mac and cheese is not what the pilgrims imagined.

But it turns out that the tricky part of raising a vegetarian kid isn't the food, it's the talking.  Her talking.  About being a vegetarian.  All the time.  To everyone.

Here is a typical exchange: 
Stranger:  "Would you like paper or plastic?"
Me:  "Shoot, I forgot my bags!  Ok, paper."
My daughter:  "I'm a vegetarian!"
Stranger: "Do you have any coupons?" Read More »

My mornings begin the same way each day. Get up to the sound of children calling to Mommy and Daddy, stumble bleary-eyed into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, and only when a hot cup of java is in my hands do I make my way to the couch to sit down and acknowledge the day ahead. This process takes maybe 7 minutes, which is enough time for several bins of toys to explode in my living room. The catalysts for these explosions are two, smallish children who seem to get immense joy from literally tossing toys into the air. Where these toys land doesn't matter; they're typically out of the room before the toys hit the ground. I've hit the end of my rope with this and have had to declare a War on Toys. General Mom is on a mission and Operation Pick Those Toys Up Right Now, Young Ladies is officially underway.

I don't recall from my own childhood what it is about dumping every toy I owned into sporadic heaps around ... Read More »

One of my favorite hobbies lately is family tree making.  Please don't be intimidated by my overt hipness.  I know you are thinking, "Wow, she makes family trees?  How could I ever be as cool and sophisticated as she is?"  Well, you can't, because I am just that cool and sophisticated, and really, could anything be as cool as looking at 100 year old census documents and death certificates?  I don't think so.

In truth, I do realize that family tree making is not exactly revolutionary and stylish.  It is hard to imagine someone painfully fashionable like Lady Gaga trying to trace who her great-great-grand uncle was (Lord Gaga, perhaps?), but there is just something about it that I find fascinating.  I have learned things like how I am related to Ulysses S. Grant, while my husband is related to Robert E. Lee- Lincoln would be happy to kno Read More »

Every now and then my husband and I will engage in a conversation that makes us wistful for days of yore. We speak longingly of a time before kids when we had freedom, when a good night of sleep was an absolute certainty and not a desperate plea to God or whoever out there in the universe might be listening. It was a time when we could go to a movie on a whim, or run errands in the late evening. It's almost sadistic that we even go there, knowing that we didn't fully appreciate those times or realize how good we had it. The next time we throw ourselves a pity party, I have a new item to add to that list: Sick days. Real, old-fashioned sick days.

Do you remember sick days before kids? The kind where you got to stay home from work and watch television all day while dozing on and off. No cares and no worries, just you, some juice, and Oprah. Come on, I know you remember. And remember how sometimes when you wok ... Read More »

I have a love/hate relationship with vacuum cleaners.  Actually, let me clarify that.  I have a "willing to acknowledge"/hate relationship.  I am willing to acknowledge their usefulness, but it isn't like I get a lot of joy out of them.  On the other hand, vacuums probably have a hate/hate relationship with me.  Because I kill vacuum cleaners.  We're talking smoke-and-sparks-and-fire kill.  I am a vacuum destroying goddess. 

It doesn't really make sense, though.  I'm generally good with gadgets.  And I once read that vacuum cleaners were the single most important factor in freeing women from traditional gender roles, so you would think I'd appreciate them more.  (I have also read that it was birth control that freed women- I guess we are to assume that the modern woman is a sex fiend with sparkling Read More »

I am terrible at making decisions. I'm like a child: It's best to only offer me two choices and even then I can barely function. Even decisions like where to go on vacation, which should be fun and simple, involve me polling everyone from my closest friends to the mail carrier. Despite this, most of the big decisions I've had to make in my life were quite easy to make. Baby names, buying our home, choosing a college, that was no problem. I'm finding (unsurprisingly) the harder decisions involve outcomes that will have a significant impact on my children. Take education, for instance. When my oldest daughter started preschool two years ago, I was in turmoil for weeks. I agonized over where to apply and which school to accept, as if my daughter's life depended on where the best place for her to ingest paste would be. Once it was all said and done, and both my daughter and I were pleased with her school, I sat back with a sigh of relief. "At least I won't ha ... Read More »

This afternoon, I walked in on my three year old in the dining room, with her face buried in the butter dish.  I gasped when I saw this, alerting her to my presence.  Slowly she lifted her head and looked at me warily. It was like a scene from a National Geographic special, only instead of a lioness interrupted from a meal of freshly caught gazelle, my daughter had eaten half a stick of butter and was busily gnawing teeth marks into the rest. 

I struggled to figure out what I should do in this situation, since I don't remember seeing "butter, eating whole stick of" in any of my parenting manuals.  But before I could get my head together, she gave me a big, buttery grin, and all I could do was laugh.  The truth is, these kinds of moments, the ones that make wonderful stories, are the moments I have been waiting for since she was born.  Read More »

As the mother of two girls, when I think of quality mother-daughter bonding time I often go the stereotypical, traditional route. I picture us shopping, watching chick flicks together, and sighing over dreamy Hollywood hunks. That leaves activities like coaching soccer teams, teaching the girls to drive, and showing them how to change a flat to my husband. I certainly never expected to bond with my girls over something like video games, which if I had to categorize by gender would most definitely be a father-daughter activity. But on a regular basis my husband comes home from work in the evening to find his wife and daughters bouncing on a couch, yelling at our television as we frantically play Mario Kart, and ignoring him until we have finished our races.

While visiting family in December, I was challenged to a game of Mario Kart by my 5 year-old nephew. Being that I'm a fairly  competiti ... Read More »

Tantrums.  You can't spell it without "um," as in, "Um, what the heck am I supposed to do about this tantrum?"  You also can't spell it without "ant" or "tan," but that is pretty irrelevant here, so don't focus on that, ok?

Anyway, I had an "um-tantrum" moment a few weeks ago.  I was in the grocery store with my four year old when I came into the dairy section and discovered another child of about two, face down on the floor, mid-tantrum.  On a scale from one to demonic, it was a solidly mid-range tantrum:  no limb-flailing or head spinning, and definitely no projectile vomiting, but there was Read More »

Ah, a new year. A fresh start. A clean slate. It's time for magazines, websites, and television programs to bombard us with information on how to better ourselves. We're overwhelmed with tips on how to lose weight, reorganize closets, shed emotional baggage, and fix whatever else is apparently so fundamentally wrong in our lives which we didn't even realize was there but that we now see so clearly has been holding us back. Yawn. For a new year, it feels so... old. Doesn't it? No matter. I get sucked in during the last days of December and early days of January when the fervor is at its peak. I can't escape it because frankly there is nowhere to hide from the New Year.

I may have skated through unscathed except I watched Julie & Julia a mere two days before New Year's Eve. Watching Julie improve her life by cooking her way through Julia Child's cookbook not only made me hungry, b ... Read More »