Category: family

What Moms want

by Karen, posted in family

The headline this week in The Portland Phoenix is “What Women Want”…which of course echoes the famous Freudian question.

This got me thinking…isn’t the real question, which heretofore has failed to be asked, this: What do Moms want?

Anyone? Anyone?

Well, I’m here with the answer to this never-before-asked question.

Mom’s want (what my friend calls) a “Party for One”. That’s it. That makes us happy. What is a “Party for One” (will I will abbreviate as PFO)? Time alone in our house.   Rules for “PFO”:

  1. Unstructured time. No appointments.
  2. No housework: this means no laundry, no meal preparation (unless it is solely for ourselves and because we really do prefer our own cooking to going out).
  3. No “just picking up a little”  in the kids’ rooms…this is a colossal time sucking vacuum that, once entered, is extremely difficult from which to disengage. Close their doors. Back away.
  4. Do whatever you feel like doing and don’t feel guilty. Watch those Oprah episodes that you’ve been taping for 6 weeks but have had no time to watch. Get out the stack of magazines that you have had no time to read. Grab a book from the pile that you hoped to get to read someday. . . PFO is that day!

Final thought:

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'”
-From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones, 1953

…maybe he should have asked a Mom. 🙂

Homework

by Karen, posted in education, family, Someone's gotta say it, tweens

Well, after only the first month of school we’ve already had 4 homework assignments…for the parents.

  1. The first day of school brings the myriad of (redundant) forms that we have to fill out for each child every year, regardless of whether the information has changed even one iota from last year, regardless of whether it is the same for both (or multiple) children, except for their names and dates of birth.  Here’s an idea: Let us do it online! They let us send lunch money online now, and they send us school notices online as well (so that we have to subject our own printers to wear and tear, use our own ink and paper to print out notices and forms. . .but I digress). Why can’t we have our New School Year Forms online, then update only what needs updating and email them to the school? Time saved: approximately 2-5 hours (or more, depending on how many children you have and how complex their medical histories, etc. might be).
  2. The next assignment we got was this:  In a million words or less, write an essay about your child. Enough said.
  3. Then, a Current Events homework assignment came home for the student, which says the parent must assist them in these projects. Weekly. If it can’t be done without the parents’ help, clearly it is too advanced for most 6th graders to undertake. To me, this translates to: Not Appropriate Homework for a Sixth Grader. Am I wrong?
  4. The Leaf Project. Anyone who has lived in my town for the past decade or two (at least) is familiar with this one. Now, I have to be fair: it isn’t explicitly stated that parents have any involvement, but hey, it’s not like the 6th graders can drive themselves around looking for the 20 different types of leaves they need!

How do you feel about getting homework from your tween-agers’ teachers?

Girls’ Night

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, family, friends, local fun, restaurants, tweens

On the (rare) days when the male members of the family are off at work, but the females have the day off, we have a Girls’ Night. Today, Girls’ Nights started early, at 7:24AM. The men were out for the day so the females were left to  our own pursuits. This is what my daughter and I did today:

  1. Breakfast: Cream of wheat for Izzy and egg white omelet with spinach, mushrooms, and roasted red peppers for me. OJ and coffee, respectively.
  2. Met up with friends at Cafe Perfecto in Kennebunk. We split a gingerbread muffin. We ate it too quickly to photograph it. It was goooooooooooooooooooooooooood. 🙂
  3. Next, browsing at Kennebooks. We bought some cards, some books, and a really cool mushroom shaped eraser with the sharpener built right in. 

    Coolest mushroom eraser/sharpener ever!
  4. Home for lunch: PB&H on homemade bread for me; grilled cheese and bacon on whole wheat bread for Iz. Then she caught up with a friend on the phone, while I caught up on the laundry, chicken tasks, and dishes. Yay.
  5. Next, North Berwick Farmers Market. My friend Rebecca was there so we got to visit a bit. Lucky for us, it was the day of their Pie Contest, and we got to try a piece of the winning pie, baked by a 9 year old girl; very impressive. Besides pie, we got some fudge, some granola, herbs to mix with oil for bread-dipping, oatmeal coconut cookies…hmmm, seems like something is missing. What is it? Oh! The (token healthy food that was the excuse for going to the farmers market) apple! I ate that at the next stop.
  6. Izzy had a riding lesson and I spent the time in the car catching up on the last 2 days of newspapers that I hadn’t gotten to yet.
  7. At 6Pm, lesson over, we headed to Johnson’s Seafood and Steak. This is our new favorite restaurant, partly because it’s right on the way home after riding, but mostly because of the pumpkin cheesecake. OMG. It’s worth going just for that.
  8. Finally, home for a movie night. We watched The Clique. Izzy had seen it before and wanted to watch it again with me. Great mother-daughter movie.

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That’s it.  She’s gone to bed; I’m getting ready to. We had a great day. 🙂

These are a few of my fa-vor-ite B’s~revised

by Karen, posted in books, family, health
Drakes Island Beach

When you have to schedule a not-so-fun medical or dental procedure on your day off, it can be hard not to look at the day as a total loss. If I can schedule it for earlier in the day rather than later, that helps some; at least I don’t spend the whole day with a root canal hanging over my head. Just get up; get the kid off to school, go to the appointment, then when it’s over, the rest of the day (such as it is, depending on your pain and/or anxiety threshold) is your own.

Shortly after it was over, I thought of some positive things on which to focus my attention:

  1. Beach: I went to the beach to sit and look at the ocean for the extra 20 minutes I had between dropping off child at school and getting to appointment.
  2. Books: I stopped off at Nonesuch Books, newly located in Biddeford (next to Best Buy), to “be with the books” for a half an hour. Just because I could. Also, buy a present (for someone else). I bought some cute little horse magnetic book clips for someone…(reference said child who loves horses above). Nonesuch has (besides books, magazines, newspapers) a lot of gifty-type things…good for stocking stuffers, I’m thinking.
  3. Breakfast: Pumpkin Muffin from Tim Horton’s. The best pumpkin muffin in Southern Maine thus far (and I have
    Tim Horton's Pumpkin Muffin

    been doing my homework). 

  4. Bed. Fear (of medical procedures) is exhausting. 🙂
  5. Best root canal ever! After thinking it through, I realized that this was true; Tina Kell at Dental Specialists of Maine is the best endodontist ever!
  6. Oh yes: the most important B of all: my husband BILL! Bill, who took me to my appointment, who took me to see the ocean, who brought me to be with the books, who took me to get my pumpkin muffin (…I think that I’ll skip over the bed part…)…thank you, Bill, for making a difficult day so much better than it might have been.

“The true creator may be recognized by his ability to always find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.”~ Igor Stravinsky 

Sometimes I have to look hard, but the good moments are usually there.

Heart Rocks

by Karen, posted in family, friends
Heart rock from Susan

I started collecting heart-shaped rocks a few years ago. I have them in all shapes and sizes; many I found at the beach myself, but some are gifts from friends who know of my collection. These gifts are actually the best ones that I have. This is my most recent addition: from my friend Susan. She found it at the beach after Hurricane Earl (didn’t) hit.

One thing that I’ve found helpful when looking for heart shaped rocks is not to be too rigid; it’s not likely that you will find a perfectly heart-shaped rock. What I’m looking for is something…approaching (hmm, this is somehow giving me deja vu for math of some sort…calculus maybe? I can’t think why) a heart shape. Keep an open mind (I’m just sayin’).

Did you know that there are books about heart-shaped rocks? My son gifted me with one recently. There is even a (well, at least one) blog about collecting heart rocks: Farm Girl Fare. At over 300, she has me beat, but I do have a half filled (reusable!) shopping full of them at this moment.

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Quest for the best fried clams

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, local fun, restaurants, tweens

 

Tom’s Fried Clams

We recently read an article in the York Independent newspaper rating local restaurants by how good their fried clams were.

One of the restaurants mentioned was Tom’s Fried Clams, located on Rt. 1 in York, Maine. We’d never been there, so off we went.

We had a coupon to receive $4 off a clam platter. Good thing, too; even with the coupon, it cost us $18. Actually, first it cost us $36, because the cashier charged us for two platters instead of just the one that we ordered. Fortunately, my husband was paying attention, and we got the extra platter deleted from the bill before we paid.  We also orderd lobster rangoons, mozzarella sticks (after all, we had a tweenager with us; it’s the law) and a drink.

It was lucky for us that it was a nice day: the dining room is outside. There were a couple of tables inside the fish market, but no one was sitting in there.

The platter came with the usual suspects: fries and slaw. The food was great, actually.

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 I wouldn’t go out of my way to go there again, but if I was in the area and was hungry, I would go. I would also check my receipt very carefully. 🙂

(Chicken) Food for Thought

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, raising chickens
The flock

 

To all my gardener friends and friends of friends local to Wells: 

Want to do a good deed for your feathered fowl friends? Give us your tired, wretched masses…of produce!
Reasons to bring your inedible, unappetizing, or otherwise unappealing garden food items to my house:
  1. Drive by and drop off! You don’t even have to get out of your car; just lean out and place your unwanted items on the bottom shelf of the egg stand at the bottom of the driveway.
  2. You will feel good because you will be supporting a local farm.
  3. Chickens LOVE most produce.
What to bring?
  1. Unwanted post-halloween pumpkins
  2. Baseball bat sized zucchinis or cukes
  3. Apples and tomatoes (of any color and ripeness) that fell to the ground before you got to pick them
  4. The tired looking, wilty lettuce from the bottom of the crisper that you forgot about
  5. Banged up produce of any kind that you are too nervous to eat..

The chickens say thank you for any and all efforts! 

It’s all good

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, health, italian, local fun, restaurants, tweens

I was annoyed the other night, thinking that even though I was lucky to have had an extra day off from work this week, it had been all used up with medical appointments. Deciding to make them, scheduling them, dealing with insurance company in advance to try to make sure they didn’t weasel out of paying for them, transporting to and from them, waiting to be seen after arrival, waiting for test results…

The ocean

That evening, as I was telling my husband how annoyed I was, I decided to stop and change course. Why? As I was talking, I noticed that he was quickly becoming tense and seemed to be losing his good mood. I decided to change course and instead started listing what had been good about the day.

  1. I did not talk myself out of exercising in the morning!
  2. I had time to finish reading book that I was loving while I waited for my husband at his appointment
  3. My daughter told me things about her day that she probably wouldn’t have otherwise while we waited for doctor at her appointment (“Guess what! I’m an alto in the chorus this year!”).
  4. Lunch (Chinese lunch specials from Maple Leaves!) and dinner (Quattro Formaggi pizza from Pizza Napoli!) and dessert (Mocha Mousse Torte and a chocolate chip cookie as big as your head from Bread and Roses in Ogunquit!) dates with spouse.
  5. Drove down to say “Hi” the ocean for a few minutes. 🙂
  6. Appreciated having my son around the house more, now that college has started back up again.

After reviewing list, noticed that yoga was missing, and immediately jumped to the floor into “down dog” so I could include it on my list, and in my day.

I realized that my day had actually included many of my favorite things, but if I hadn’t noticed my husband’s reaction to my complaining, I may not have taken the time to stop and appreciate that it had, in fact, been a really great day!

Sometimes, when you try to do something nice for someone else, you are actually doing something really nice for yourself!

A child’s “firsts”

by Karen, posted in family, good grief

I had my first child when I was 29 years old. I started back to school and back to work when he was 8 weeks old. As a full-time student and working mother, I missed a lot of my child’s “firsts”.

Certainly, I knew it was going to be a trade-off; get better educated to get better employed and to be able to give said child a better life. I reminded myself of this often; like, when my mother called excitedly to describe my son’s first time saying “Mama”, or when my or mother-in-law called to tell me how my son lost his first tooth…you know, little things like that.

Well, my son turned 19 last month. Of course, we get used to our kids not sharing with us every detail of their lives as the get older like they do (how could they avoid it?) when they are very young.

Recently, my son took his first airplane ride (well, almost his first. He did go up in a small plane with his dad and sister many years ago…but I don’t count that. Plus, there was a parent present). For this plane ride, he was with a friend, and without parent. I guess it was sort of like the first day of kindergarten (or college, for that matter); the child adapts in 5 minutes to new people and new surroundings; the parent? Not so much.

He was good about it. He offered to call every day while away on his trip, and then remembered to actually do it. We parents tried to do our part by being supportive but not stifling. It was hard. It is hard… to go to sleep at night when your whole family is not home, safe in bed. “Hello, Dad? I finally get it.”

How do you deal with your child(ren) growing up?

Hey, we’re not ALL tourists!

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, restaurants, tweens

Here in southern Maine, our population multiplies exponentially in the summer. Some of the more popular restaurants are overrun, especially the good ones, so I usually am very forgiving.

On Sunday morning, my daughter and I went out for doughnuts to our favorite donut-making restaurant, which I typically would avoid doing on a weekend morning in the summer, but we had a great coupon that was soon to expire, and my daughter really, really wanted doughnuts. 

So, off we went for our free half-dozen. We were lucky to get the last parking space in the lot, but certainly a full lot does not a short wait make. Seeing that the line for ordering to-go items was out the door (literally) was no surprise, but now we were in it for the long haul. Once you’ve promised doughnuts to the kid(s), there’s no turning back

While we waited, an owner type guy was walking around with tray of free honey dipped munchkins. I thought this was great, until he walked right by us, and offered them to some adults ahead of us in line, but none to my child. “Well, that wasn’t very nice!” my daughter said.

Then, when we finally got to the counter (half an hour later), the older lady that waited on us never smiled, barely made eye contact, and did not acknowledge my “thank you very much!” except to say “Next in line!”. To add insult to injury, she even shorted us a doughnut! To add insult to injury, our half-dozen only contained five doughnuts, which I didn’t notice until we got home.  

All in all, a very negative experience, but who can complain (except to you all!) since they were free. I guess the point is that they had generated a ton of good will towards their business by sending us that coupon, but the way we were treated when we were there to redeem it actually cost them,  in that it lowered our opinion of them.

And that’s too bad, because when all of the tourists go home…we will still be here, and there is a lot of competition for the doughnut dollar in southern Maine.