Tag: daughters

Angels and the creative process

by Karen, posted in Angels, family, tweens, writing

Instead of writing my blog post and examiner.com article and more NaNoWriMo words yesterday afternoon (and well into the evening…), I helped my tween daughter with her project for school.

The assignment was to make a collage that showcased the following:

  1. Your career aspirations
  2. Your interests
  3. Your talents
  4. Something else that I can’t remember (*midlife disclaimer)

She had already made a good start on it. We spread out the construction paper on the extra kitchen table that we brought up from the cellar and put in the living room for Thanksgiving (yep; it’s still there taking up every bit of extra space there is in that room. Don’t care. It’s very useful for… collage projects and such).

As we went through the stack of pristine magazines (that I had been too busy to read in November) looking for images to fill up the page, we talked about what her likes, talents, aspirations are. Want to get to know your tween better? Spend three hours making a collage with them.

As an aside, maybe it will help you get to know yourself better too. I started cutting out images to make my own collage as a result of this process!

Anyway, as I staring at a page, some words caught my eye: Joy, Peace, and Noel. I started cutting them out and then remembered the angel picture I’d seen on the previous page, which reminded me of an angel message I received from Stacey (Mainely You Massage) a few weeks ago.  She said that a Christmas angel had come through for me and my daughter, and was showing her the words “Joy” and “Noel” for us. There we were, sitting at that table, looking at those words in the presence of a (print) Christmas angel.  Oh my gosh!!! 

I suddenly felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

As an added bonus, all that cutting and pasting fired me up to write. I have notes all over the place containing story ideas that came to my during and after our project.

**In the collage, the Christmas Angel is toward the bottom left corner, and the words “Joy, Peace, and Noel” are toward the top right corner, just above the raccoon..

Vacation week (continued, day 2)

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

Saturday (Day 2) was a full day.  Yoga in the morning at Windsong Yoga with my favorite yoga teacher Kristen. Then stopped in at Fetch’n Fun for their fundraiser for The Lucky Pup Rescue.

Chicken Parm made by the tweens

Then my daughter and I picked up her friend Madi for a tween day. Library first (the girls did a scavenger hunt and got a prize), then The Smurfs movie at the Wells Five Star Cinema. The movie was much less annoying than I thought it was going to be. I was even asked by my daughter to stop laughing so loudly, so there you go. The nice surprise of this movie was that I knew and liked some of the actors: Hank Azaria (where’s he been?) and Jayma Mays (Glee).

Next, we headed down to the Wells Harbor for the All Together Now concert. The bugs were out in full force so we left halfway through it (no reflection on the band; they were great!) and stopped at Big Daddy’s for ice cream, right on the way home. Good day. Got to do lots of stuff on my (vacation) wish list.  At the end of the day, I read an email from my cousin Kathy (who’s two weeks and two days older than I) asking me if I’d made a “Bucket List” for the second half.

Nope. Not yet.

(Just put that bucket list on my to-do list).

Then a quick stop at the grocery store to buy the missing ingredients for the Chicken Parmigiano recipe that the tweens wanted to make for dinner. Home to play some Wii Just Dance 2, then cooked dinner, which turned out to be wonderful (worth putting the oven on in the heat of the summer for).

Oh, and did I mention that I did two rounds of dishwasher filling and emptying and 5 loads of laundry as well? And my online class that I had hoped to do on the day it posted (Friday) is still not done. Here’s hoping for a Sunday completion.

Change of life

by Karen, posted in family, health, Midlife Crisis, no fear, tweens

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that phrase? I’m betting that it will have something to do with a midlife woman navigating the perimenopausal years. It certainly always did for me. Now that I’m in the thick of it, however, I’m realizing that this phrase has multiple layers of meaning and can be applied to people at any phase of life, not just midlife.

  1. Graduating from high school (or trade school or college) will amount to a huge change of life(style). No longer confined by the relentless schedule of classes and homework and studying, I still remember the feeling of enormous relief that I experienced the last day of classes when I left the room after the last final. It was a weightlessness, a “lightness of being”. Freedom!
  2. First car after years of taking public transportation. For me, this also brought with it a feeling of freedom, independence. Conversely, I wonder if going back to public transportation after years of carrying the burden of the inherent (read: crushing) costs of owning a car today would bring the same feeling of relief that finishing school brought.
  3. Having a baby. I used to just shake my head at the people (parents) who told me over and over that I didn’t know what it was like to have a child and wouldn’t until I had one. Now I just shake my head at my own naiveté. They don’t say “A baby changes everything” for nothing. A baby does change everything.
  4. Job change. Really, like the man you marry, the job you choose influences every last corner of your life. Every. Last. Corner. Once you’ve chosen, it’s easy to get stuck. Sometimes you are freed without warning (and without any say, for that matter)…angst-tinged freedom.

Of course, that feeling is quickly followed by the inevitable “Now what?” thought that follows so closely on its heels. Here’s hoping that old saying is true: When one door closes, another door opens.

Spring chicks update, week 5: Teens in transition

by Karen, posted in chicks, family, friends, raising chickens, tweens

The peeps have graduated!!!  They are “teenagers” now…each week in a chicken’s life roughly corresponding to 3 to 4 years in an adult’s life (in my non-expert opinion).

They are big enough to move to the transitional coop where they can see the big chickens and the big chickens can see them. This gives both populations a chance to get used to being together while allowing the teenagers to get a little bigger, enabling them to hold their own when they are assimilated into the larger population in the main coop.

We usually start this transitioning when the chicks get to be about 5-6 weeks old, but how big they’ve gotten, how strong they seem, how (awful) the weather is…all these things are considered when we are timing the move.

They are currently eating up a storm. Bright and active, they are still somewhat skittish as they adjust to their new digs. My son commented that he thought that his batch of chicks was friendlier overall than prior ones; they tolerated our picking them up without much fuss. This comes in handy when friends come to visit and want to hold a chick.

We have about 19 teenagers at the moment (well, 20 counting my son, who will not be one for much longer either, come to think of it), and as they get older we are learning that the breeds may turn out not to be what we ordered. Determining the sex of a chick is not an exact science, and some vendors are better at it than others. The White Leghorns  (might be White Rocks) and the Light Orpingtons (might be Buff Orpingtons) are in question at the moment, but as is true with most things, time will tell.

They should be off the heat lamp by next week. For now, they are adjusting well to their Brave New World.

🙂

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Post Easter Post

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

Easter is one of my favorite holidays, having somehow escaped the drama and bad memories with which  many of the other major holidays are fraught  for me.

Although the bunny is now known to be Mom and Dad by both kids, we continue the traditions that we started when they were little. We fill a basket (or receptacle of some sort) for each  one and have an egg hunt. In the leaner years we used chocolate pirate coins to fill the plastic eggs for the hunt, otherwise we filled them with cash.

In the baskets? Candy, of course, gum, Tic Tacs, beef jerky (for the boy), lip gloss (for the girl), gift cards…things like that. What was not in the baskets? The dreaded plastic Easter grass, banned after the year that Dad was still finding it in various household crevices in December. 🙂

We were lucky to have a nice day weather-wise: sunny and in the low 70’s. The day before and after Easter it snowed! We had dinner with family, got to visit Dad at work and bring him some dinner, and still got home early enough for a normal bedtime for the tween (it was, after all, a “school night”).

Hope you all had a nice day too!

Write it down, make it happen

by Karen, posted in books, Date night, family, fitness, health, Life in the cube, Midlife Crisis, no fear, Someone's gotta say it, tweens, writing, yoga

Okay, it’s a book (not mine!) title. It occurred to me to apply the philosophy of: “If you build it, they will come” espoused by James Earl Jones and put into force by Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams movie which coincidently (?!) contained a female lead character named “Karen” (not sure how she spelled it!) played by Amy Madigan.

I decided to build my perfect work day.

  1. Get up–not too early.
  2. Get some exercise. I like Stephen King’s idea from his book On Writing where he would take writing breaks and jump on the treadmill that was next to his writing desk (if memory serves). A little bit of yoga couldn’t hurt…
  3. Get some coffee–oh wait! That should be first!
  4. Get some breakfast (ABO…or “Anything But Oatmeal” :)).
  5. Write until noonish.
  6. Get some lunch.
  7. Check email, blogs, FB (you know, all the usual time-sucking suspects) etc.
  8. Read until 4pm. This is when I get to make a small dent in my pile of books, magazines that I am dying to read but have no time to.
  9. Get some more exercise…go for a walk? At the beach! Look for sea glass, sand dollars, unusual rocks and shells. Sigh. Life is Good.
  10. Watch DVD’s or preferred TV series of the moment (The Good Wife, Survivor, Breaking Bad) with my husband.

What does a perfect day for you look like? Quick! Go right it down; then maybe you can figure out a way to make it happen! 🙂

Famous (Dave’s) Birthday Girl

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, friends, local fun, tweens
The birthday girl!

I always wonder how best to celebrate my kids’ birthdays. Every year there is some sort of friends’ party and then a family celebration to cap things off on the actual day of birth.

This year, my daughter turned twelve: the last bastion of childhood, the threshold of teenhood.
The friends’ party was at Get Fired Up in Sanford with cupcakes from the Cupcake Fetish Bakery, also in Sanford. Both were big hits with the kids.

The family celebration was trickier this year. My son was working on her actual birthday, but for once my husband and I were both not working. Even though it was a school night, we decided to take her out for supper and let her choose the restaurant. Last year she enjoyed celebrating my birthday at Famous Dave’s in Scarborough that she said, “I want to come here for my birthday too!” and eleven months later, we did.

We had a coupon from the restaurant (Join the Pig Club and you can get one for your birthday too!) for a free appetizer; we tried the new Loaded BBQ Chips. For dinner we chose the Tuesday night special: $6 off the massive Feast for Two… which fed 3 of us with three boxes of leftovers that fed 3 of us the next night too.

I mentioned to the server Seth that it was my daughter’s birthday and at the end of the meal, a chorus of “Happy Birthday!”‘s from the out-of-sight kitchen preceded him carrying over to us a heated brownie with fudge sauce and whipped cream sporting an impressive flaming candle and 3 spoons. (NOTE: she was warned not to try to blow it out, but to let it fizz out on its own if she wanted to keep her eyebrows, which she did; a decision we fully endorsed).

Only two notes: they were out of corn on the cob (for which we could substitute another side order from the menu), which was a total bummer, and the brownie sundae would have been vastly improved by the addition of some vanilla ice cream. I’m just sayin’. The service was great. The food was great. The atmosphere was great. We were so full we could barely move to get to the car and we’d eaten less than half of the food presented to us…and we had an ice cream birthday cake waiting for us at home in the freezer.

Oy!

I may want to return here for my birthday again this year too (you know, if I’m not still full!).

🙂

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Peeps update: week 2

by Karen, posted in chicks, family, raising chickens

So, week two with the peeps and life is good. Losses have been  minimal (despite the frigid temperatures after the balmy ones and a malfunctioning heat lamp). In about 5 months, our egg production should be through the roof. We’re gathering about 30 (or more!) eggs per day now and the peeps are eating and drinking twice as much.

We got about a dozen chicks from Tractor Supply Company, half Comets and half Barred Rocks. A few days later we got about 2 dozen more from Longhorn. This second batch was a mix of White Leghorns, Gold and Silver Lace Wyandottes, Rhode Island Reds, and a couple of Buff Brahmas (with the feathered feet!). The majority of these breeds are brown egg layers. We’ll get the white and the blue/green egg layers in June~none were available in February.

In June we will also have a first. Our first Italian chickens! My husband’s nod to my love of All Things Italian: Anconas. I can’t wait! I wonder if Ancona eggs will make better frittatas? 🙂

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The Hayloft

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, quest for the best, restaurants
Fishermans Platter for 2

We recently returned to the Hayloft Restaurant in Moody, Maine after a 10 year (give or take) break. We used to frequent this restaurant with the kids but after getting a bad salad (not to be confused with the “big salad” of Seinfeld’s world), we stopped going.

Every summer when my son was small he would participate in their coloring contest and every summer he won. They would mail out a coupon for a free appetizer that we would look forward to using on our next visit.

Until we got the bad salad.

I recently saw a coupon on Groupon.com for the Hayloft, so after consulting my husband (and after learning that they were under new management), I bought it. We arrived, coupon in hand, expectations set reasonably at moderate level, on a Friday night. There were not many cars in the parking lot, but in fairness, we had received almost a foot of snow earlier in the day so people may have just been staying put.

We ordered the special: Fisherman’s Platter for two, which was plenty for the two of us and our daughter to split when combined with appetizers. Speaking of appetizers, we ordered the Buffalo Tenders and the Potato Skins with cheese and bacon.

Rolls were brought out for us after our order was taken. They were hot and crusty with soft interiors, and the three of us agreed that they were excellent.

The tenders did not come with celery, which would have been welcome (as well as a little less breading), but did come with blue cheese dressing. They were good and spicy. The potato skins were cut smaller than I usually see, but I liked them much better this way (they weren’t so overwhelming) and were delicious. The main course consisted of fried whole clams, large scallops, shrimp, and a good-sized piece of haddock, French fries, and about four onion rings. This was great; usually onion ring orders are much too excessive for anyone to actually appreciate them. Four large hand cut onion rings were perfect.

Verdict: the Fisherman’s Platter wasn’t quite as hot as it should have been, but was still good. Both appetizers were served piping hot, which made me wonder if the former was ready first and waiting for the latter. The real surprise was the cole slaw, which our waitress told us was made fresh daily. It was excellent.

Just a note on the soda: it had a nice, clean taste. You know how sometimes you order a Diet Coke and it has a metallic taste? You will not find that here.

For dessert we were persuaded to try the homemade (from a family recipe) hot apple crisp a la mode, which was also very good. We took  home a chocolate whoopie pie, made by Laura’s Pastry, for the road. We’ve had these before and know how good they are!

Our waitress, Rose, delivered the best service that we’ve had in any restaurant in some time. She is the reason that (although the food was good) that we will be returning to the Hayloft again soon.

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules

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

Have you noticed that there has been a span of several weeks with no G-rated (or PG, for that matter) choices for movies? After a long hiatus, enter (finally!) something that my daughter and I both wanted to see: the Wimpy Kid sequel, based on the book by Jeff Kinney, which I thought I’d bought Izzy for Christmas and I also thought she’d read.

Wrong. And wrong.

I took her anyway to see  Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules this past Sunday at Wells Five Star Cinema. This is the movie where Greg (the aforementioned Wimpy Kid) and his older brother Rodrick (read: torturer) work on their relationship to try to make it civil. This is also the movie where Rodrick (much to my surprise) becomes a human. Briefly.

The potty humor for the kids (and–dare I say it?– the men) abounds, but, thankfully, it had more than that to offer. Rachel Harris plays Mom, and many of us (moms) will relate to her asking her kids the quintessential Mom question:  “Can’t we all just get along?”  The answer is: well, yes…eventually. Probably. Not!

This story is about the brothers’ struggle to coexist, but is also about the Mom’s efforts to guide and support them. With Dad in the background making faces.

For food: we had nachos, popcorn, and M+M’s (her) and Peanut M+M’s (mom) from the gumball-type vending machines they have at that theater. If you’re short the approximately $15 needed to purchase a snack or two at the concessions counter, these coin-op machines can be really a good bet. Of course, you only get about 8 Peanut M+M’s for your quarter, but that’s about all a serving size amounts to anyway (about 1/4 cup), so it’s good for your wallet and for your efforts to keep your current size pants fitting you this week!

YAY! 🙂