Tag: family

Fun with tweens on the weekend

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

My tween daughter invited a friend to spend the day, and as the 7 hours loomed ominously unfilled ahead of us, I wondered:  What the heck should we do?  

First, I decided to do something for me: I had a 20% coupon to Kennebooks in Kennebunk so that was our first stop. A quick check of the local paper told me that they were having an Open House that started at 10:30am, so it was just me and my tween for this. When we arrived, there was a kids “author event” so we headed down for that, but it turned out to be for littler kids, so we did some browsing for an hour. I bought a book for a friend for Christmas.

Sigh. I love to be with the books. But I digress…

Next, we picked up the friend and headed for the library. They browsed the shelves, and checked out some books, and then harassed me until I gave up and said, “Okay, yes! I’m ready to leave too!”.  While we were there, we found a new cookbook called Betty Crocker’s Just the two of us, and they spied a recipe while flipping through it that they wanted to make. Since we had all of the ingredients already, I agreed.

Lunch was next, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I took the easy way out: McDonald’s was right nearby, and since it was almost 1pm and they were “starving”, we headed there next. In my defense, we haven’t eaten McD’s food in months, so here’s hoping that it didn’t do us too much damage. We drove through and brought it home to eat it (their choice).

Then we made the Double Chocolate Snack Cake.

Izzy and Ivy, the bakers

They did a great job! I helped a little but they were really in charge of the recipe (I was in charge of the oven) and it turned out really great. We ate most of it fairly quickly.

After that, they hula hooped and played on the swing in the yard, fed bread to the chickens, and played a few hands of cards: Uno, War.

Then, they actually read the books that they checked out of the library for a little while.
I had to run to Hannaford’s and they were thrilled to come with me. They got free cookies at the bakery, and free samples of cheese and turkey at the deli. They even watched the cart full of groceries after I realized that the most important thing that I went there to buy, I had forgotten, so I had to go back and get it and run through the cashier’s line again. (Hey, at least I remembered before I got back home; I figured that I was ahead of the game!)

When we got back, I made them spaghetti for supper, and after we finished eating they had another little bit of time to play.

They watched a little TV: one episode of iCarly, and one episode of Drake and Josh. Then they played some songs on the electric keyboard for a while.

When it was time for her friend to go home, they had even picked up after themselves!

It was a great day; I even was able to get my 2,000 words written in between everything else. Life is good!

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Conscious eating, Part 3

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, fitness, restaurants

So, now that more weeks have passed and I have totally not given the Women, Food, and God  (by Geneen Roth) approach a passing thought until today, I decided to recommit to some of the strategies I have learned along the weight loss way.

  1. Drink 16 oz of water before every meal. This can be excessive, and at times make you feel like tossing your cookies before you even get to eat them, so modify accordingly. If you can only choke down a half a cup, go for it! It’s better than nothing. The theory is that it will make you feel fuller sooner, thereby displacing some of the food that you presumably would have consumed if not for the presence of the water in your gut. Seems like it’s worth a shot.
  2. Green tea. I am down to only a cup per day, two at most. Green tea is tricky because it has caffeine, and blood thinning properties (just to mention, there are other side effects as well)… it may interact with aspirin, the NSAIDs, coumadin, and so forth. . . but just in case it does contribute to weight loss, a little may be better than none.
  3. Throw out the first bite of your cookie/cupcake/whoopie pie/muffin/miscellaneous baked good of your choice. This is from One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer. I’m definitely still trying to work up the courage to try this one.
  4. Check online before you go out to eat to scope out the menu; get tips from WebMD or Weight Watchers on healthy (or at least less bad) choices.
  5. Oh, yeah: that smaller plate thing. Ever hear the saying that “work expands to fill the allotted time”? Well, I think that this rule applies to food too: the amount of food you (think it’s reasonable to) consume will expand to fill the allotted plate/bowl size.

Question to ponder: Does doing the Happy Dance (a la Snoopy) burn off the equivalent of whoopie pie that I just ate?

The rule of tree…I mean three

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

So, although I’d been complaining in an earlier post about the homework my daughter’s teachers had been assigning to the parents…I mean, the kids… I have to revisit my resentment some in light of the unexpected gifts that one of these assignments has had for us.

The (dreaded) Tree Project is the assignment to which I am referring (any mother who has had a child attending our local junior high school in the past 20 years or so will be familiar with this). After I heard some of the other moms talking about their efforts to help, like: “I spent 2 1/2 hours one Saturday afternoon driving my daughter around to get leaves!” for example (after I’d walked my daughter around the school yard for 15 minutes, got a mosquito bite, and called it a day), I was shamed off the bench and into the woods to help find leaves.

Toward this end, I asked a couple of work colleagues if they had any interesting trees in their yards that they’d be willing to ravage for leaves, nuts (extra credit!), bark, (same!), berries (same!)…you get the idea.

Well. They sure did.

  1. My friend Jody produced Pin Cherry leaves and then took a chance and loaned us a treasured little book, Advice from a Tree by Ilan Shamir. Last weekend we read this book together on the couch (with the TV off!), and talked about what it meant to “Be content with your natural beauty” and to “Let your limbs sway and dance in the breezes“…oh yes, and to “Drink plenty of water“…even trees know this!
  2. My friend Sheri produced a Beech Tree leaf with the coveted beechnut to go along with it. She also sent Izzy and me a copy of the tree poem, which I am planning to read with her this weekend.
  3. My friend Doreen brought leaves from a Quaking Aspen tree.  Izzy now has all of her pages filled in her Leaf Project book, which was her goal. The gathering is done!

So, these are the tree gifts: a book, a poem…and remembering what a great gift good friends are. 🙂

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. 🙂

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. 🙂

New Arrivals

by Karen, posted in raising chickens

The new peeps were born last Wednesday and scheduled to arrive on Thursday, Friday the latest, through the mail. We did order from a new vendor, one we hadn’t ordered from in the past. We chose them this time because they allowed us

New arrivals

to buy 20 at a time instead of 25. They were cheap; like, half the price of the other vendors. It was also closer; they would ship from Pennsylvania, not Iowa or Texas. This had to be easier on peeps-in-transit, we reasoned.

So, as we’ve done at least a half a dozen times before, we placed our order, confident that they would arrive as scheduled. So confident, that when they did not come on Thursday, my husband went to the post office on Friday morning to get the package.

When they said they didn’t have a package for us, he listened carefully for the tell-tale “peep peep peep”, but heard nothing.

This was not good. Little peeps theoretically can live for up to 72 hours (key words here are “up to”), but they certainly also might not.

On Saturday, at 6:39am, the call came. The chicks had arrived! The news was promising: the package was “peeping”. I went to pick it up, dreading what we might find when we opened it. Both kids and I held our breath…

Well, the good news was this: all 21 chicks were living and peeping. All took a drink when coaxed. All found the food.

The bad news is this: with in 2 days, we had 6 dead bodies.  We’d never lost more than 1 0r 2 chicks right away like that. It was kind of awful. Every time one of us went out to check on them, there would be another little casualty. 😦

There are 15 chicks left, and all seem to be doing well. Hopefully the worst is past.

Needless to say, we will likely not be ordering from them again.

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Magical thinking (or: the 80/20 rule revisited)

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, fitness, health, restaurants

This summer, for the first time since losing weight, I put some back on. In reviewing my behavior over the past 3 months, I realized what happened: I reversed the 80/20 rule of maintenance. Instead of staying on track with eating 80% of the time so that the other 20% I could eat whatever I wanted, I ate whatever I wanted 80% of the time, using magical thinking to hope that staying on track 20% of the time would balance the wild abandon of the other 80%. I did the same thing with exercising (ugh!).

Coffee gelato

What happened? Well, for one thing, I guess I got smug. For a while, it actually didn’t matter that I did that; my body compensated for the excess until it just couldn’t anymore. Also, I got lazy about portion sizes and, in many instances, doubled what I knew was the amount that I should have been having. What can I say? So much (goooooood food); so little time.

Plus, hello?  Tiramisu, gelato, sweet potato fries every week? Cinnamon buns and (just today, as I recall :)) blueberry muffins as big as your head? How did I think that would turn out?

Okay, time to put the 80/20 back in the 80/20 rule; time to lose the magical thinking. Goodbye maintenance; hello active losing: points counting, writing everything down, exercise of some sort 6 days a week for 30 minutes instead of 3…um, or 1.

It ain’t gonna be easy.

The foods of the summer of 2010 will not be soon forgotten. Here’s a (small) sample:

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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.