You can freeze sandwiches. Why didn’t I realize this about 3 years ago? I have a school-age daughter, and naturally I want her to have nutritious, healthy lunches. My attempts to send my daughter in with various kinds of frugal, left-over based meals have met with mixed success, and all too often my kid would…
Motherhood
Dear Busy Person: An Open Letter To You
Dear Busy Person, I love you and I’m worried about you. I have noticed that you are spending a lot of time trying to keep up with things. It looks like you are working very hard all the time just to keep everything afloat. I can tell from all the way over here that you…
I'm Like A Pirate, Sorta (What I've Learned From Surgery)
As regular readers know, on Monday I had eye surgery. I had hoped to be back up and ready to talk applesauce and last minute fall crop options but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen for a while. Here’s what’s up: I was put under general anesthesia and my surgeon cut some of…
On A Personal Note… (Or: What I Did On My Summer Vacation)
At this time of year millions of kids have to write essays entitled, “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.” I thought I would write a grown-up version of “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” to explain what’s been going on in life beyond this blog. So, at the risk of getting all Opera…
Mother’s Day: A Radical Act of Defiance
Secretly, creeping through the brain and heart and blood of every mama there is a deep, dark fear that we are Not Mom Enough. We snap at our kids, or grab the sharpie out of their little hand a bit too roughly before they can decorate another piece of furniture, or are the last to…
Side-Dressing: A Feeding Strategy For Plants and Kids
For a year-and-a-half I felt terrible guilt that I was ignoring my daughter. Reasonable observers would assure me that I was not neglecting her, but in my heart I knew that the attention lavished on her had diminished markedly since the birth of our son. You see, our daughter was a home-schooled only-child for six-and-a-half years. She got…
An 18 Month Old's Ode To Broccoli
On Things That Make You Feel Big Broccoli, my broccoli: Nothing brings me more joy I love you more than all my toys. With you I can pretend to be A big ol’ giant, eating trees. On Showing Your True Feelings Broccoli, my broccoli: When I know I get to eat you – and what…
Burning Polly Pocket: My Clutter-Clearing Fantasy
I can tell it’s officially spring because yesterday I was hit with an overwhelming urge to take everything in my house, pile it in the driveway and burn it. In my pyromaniacal fantasy I haul room-fulls of stuff out into the street and pile it up until all my precious individual things have blurred into an undifferentiated mountain…
Escaping The Cult of Busy
Note to Self: Life on Garden Time does not mean Life on Frantic Time. “Oh, I’ve just been so busy.” “With all the kid’s activities, I’ve just been so busy!” “With the new job, I’ve just been so busy!” “I don’t know what it is, it’s just crazy busy right now.” “Wow, I wish I…
The Beauty of The Survivor
Part One My mom will say, if you live long enough, it’ll happen to you or to someone you know. It really doesn’t matter what “it” is – disease, divorce, death, loss of a child, suicide, job loss, tragedy. Live long enough and eventually these things will touch your world. I know friends, mentors, parents of…
The Productivity Junkie Had A Baby
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? So, this productivity junkie had a baby…. I got a very kind email from a reader a few weeks ago that boiled down to this, “how do you do so much while having little kids?” This reader had recently had her own child, and was…
The Slow, Painful Truth About Chores and Patience
It seems like there is this phase kids go through where they really want to imitate their parents. My 14 month old son is in that phase now. This’ll tell you all you need to know about how I’ve spent the last 14 months of my life: he just adores wiping up spills, sweeping and pushing his mini-vacuum…