Tag: mothers

The Chicken Whisperer

by Karen, posted in family, raising chickens
Anthony with new chick

This morning, as I was rushing around the coop, trying to let the chickens out in their run, feed them, and give them a treat before I left for work, one of the smaller ones slipped past me and got out into the garage. I wasn’t too concerned at first, hoping that she would hear the feed rattling around in the plastic scoop and just come right back in.

She didn’t.

I finished feeding the others, then I approached her but she started a combination run-fly thing and headed to the area of the garage with nooks and crannies…into which she could fit but I could not.

Let the stress begin! The closer I got to her, the closer she got to wedging herself into a small space. If chickens had thumbs, she would have been using it to thumb her beak at me. I backed off.

Happy that I had my cell phone in my pocket, I called the house phone and asked my son to help.

He walked into the garage a few minutes later where I was still standing, rooted to the spot, afraid to take my eyes off the little offender in case she hid somewhere while I wasn’t looking. I explained the situation to him, and as I did, he just walked over to her, scooped her up, and was stroking her back while I just stood there with my mouth open.

He had done in one second what I had been trying to do for five minutes, but every time I “invaded her personal (chicken-al?) space”, she moved further away from me.

I’ve decided not to take it personally. I think she let him catch her because she bonded with him a couple of days after her birth. He was the one who picked her up out of the cardboard box upon her arrival from the post office, offered her a drink, and started her on her life’s path while I stood nearby, taking pictures of it all, as moms so often do.

She has now rejoined the flock. But I’m gonna be keeping my eye on her….

What I didn’t do today

by Karen, posted in books, writing

These are all of the things I didn’t do today on my day off from nursing, wife-ing, and  mothering.

  1. Read. Well, okay I did read a little, but only the local newspaper, briefly, while I was eating my minestrone soup, with a cup of coffee and a gingerbread muffin chaser.
  2. Knit. I have a hat that’s 3/4 of the way finished, calling to me from the jumble of bags in the Sterlite storage bucket in the entry.
  3. Visit the ocean. I didn’t go. I wanted to go, but every time the thought presented itself, I had to push it away, and concentrate on what I was doing.
  4. Bake. I have a perfectly good recipe for whoopie pies right there on my kitchen island; I can see it from where I’m sitting. “No! Focus! You can bake later!!”
  5. Shop. I have a (large) pile of newspaper clippings, coupons, flyers, and circulars for amazing, limited time only sales on the presents that I need for upcoming birthdays, not to mention Christmas. 

What did I do instead? I wrote 2,243 more words of my book.

(Okay, full disclosure: I didn’t have the day off from houseworking. Does anyone, ever? I did four loads of wash, made butternut squash soup and baked a loaf of bread to go with it, took care of the chickens, and boiled potatoes for home fries).

My book in progress!

Last year, I read about National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano) coming up in November, and thought, What a great idea! Maybe I’ll do that! Of course, I did not. Instead, I thought, next year…I’ll do it next year. Well, next year is now this year.

Oh-oh. Time to walk the talk. If I was going to do this, I needed a plan. NaNoWriMo waits for no woman. The premise is that you write a 50,000 word book during the month of November, beginning at 12:00AM November 1 and ending at 12 midnight on November 30. Somewhere in the world, the writing powers that be decided that 50,000 is the minimum number of words in a book for it to be considered a novel.

I figured out that if I wrote at least 2.000 words every day, I would finish my novel by month’s end (or at least 50,000 words of it). November would come and go either way. Last November came and went and I had no book to show for it.

This year will be different.

As of right this minute, I have written 42,139 words of my 50,000. I can see the finish line.

Since I’ve hit my 2,000 words for today already, hmmmm…maybe I’ll do a little shopping after all… 🙂

Buon Natale

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, italian, local fun, tweens
Izzy at Buon Natale

I took my daughter to Buon Natale, the Italian Christmas bazaar at St. Peter’s Church on Federal St. in Portland. This was something my Italian grandmother always took me to when I was growing  up, and it remains a happy childhood memory for me to this day. I wanted to share this with my daughter.

It was at the same site as the Italian Feast was in the summer. It was held inside the church, which usually would be a good thing, since November in Portland is often a cruel month.

Not today though; it was 64 degrees when we arrived about 12 noon. It easily could have been held outdoors. Inside, we were greeted by a nice lady that said, “Did you park in the Rite Aid parking lot? They’ll tow you if you did!” We assured her that we had not, and thanked her for her concern.

There was a “garage sale” room, with tables set up that had been well picked over by the time we arrived. The doors opened at 8am, so it was well more than half over. We browsed a bit in the craft show section, but then we got down to the real business of visiting any Italian venue: the food.

They had a similar menu to what was offered at the feast in the summer. Ziti with meatballs, meatball subs, Sicilian style pizza, eggplant parmigiana sub, and pasta fagioli were the main entrees. After much discussion (and viewing of what other people were ordering) we settled on the pasta fagioli to split.

For three bucks, we got a bowl big enough to fill us both up for lunch. It was the best pasta fagioli ever. 🙂

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For dessert? What else would these two Italian girls get?  Tiramisu, of course! We split that as well, but afterward, we second guessed that choice. “We should have both got one!” my girl pointed out. Note to self for next time: to each her own tiramisu. 🙂

Secretariat

by Karen, posted in family, local fun, movies, tweens

I took my daughter to see this movie with a bit of trepidation.

Secretariat

First of all, it is 2 hours and 3 minutes long, a very long time for a tween to sit still and remain engaged, especially in the uncomfy old theater seats.

Second, although it is a Disney movie, it isn’t a kids’ movie per se, so this is the first sort of adult drama that I’d taken her to see.

Why was I willing to take the risk? Well, it’s about horses, and my daughter loves horses, so that made it seem like more of a calculated risk.  After purchasing the requisite order of nachos that my daughter needs to maximize her movie-watching experience, we entered the theater and settled in.

Fortunately, the movie was great. It already had the presence of Diane Lane going for it, but all of the other actors were also well cast. Like a good book, it pulled us in right from the first moments of the film and kept our interest until the end.

If only they had given out little plastic horsies as favors; then our day would have been complete. 🙂

Midlife crisis, part one: losing my mind

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

I was standing in the kitchen talking to my husband last week, and he told me he was irritated because of something I’d told him earlier in the week that turned out not to be true. 

What was it? I sure don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. He remembered the (alleged) conversation in great detail. As I stood there listening to him recount what I said, I thought, “One of us must be crazy (and it’s not me)”!

I am quite sure that this conversation never happened. He is quite sure that it did. So, we sensibly backed off and let it go, nervous about where this particular road might take us, should we choose to pursue it.

Then today, I got to the parking garage at work and started to gather up my multitude of bags: bag with paperwork and reading material, check. Oversized insulated bag with my breakfast, lunch, and dinner, check. Pocketbook….pocketbook…with calendar, money, scissors, teabags, special cloth to clean eyeglasses, other miscellaneous detritus…NOT HERE!

I think back, retrace my morning steps. I am sure I carried my pocketbook and old navy plastic bag (with extra miscellaneous stuff) to the car this morning, as I stepped over my tween daughter who was sitting on the floor (in full tween drama mode) blocking my exit to flee the house.

Breathe. Breathe.

I call my husband, to share the insanity. I tell him that I can’t find my pocketbook. He says, “It’s right here, hanging on the back of the kitchen chair…next to an Old Navy bag”.

HOW could this be true? Yet I was faced with the undisputable evidence that what I thought I did this morning in no way resembled what I actually did do.

Plus, now I’m worried that my husband was indeed right in the first example above, and I was wrong. Oh-oh.

At this point, instead of “I told you so!”  he then said, kindly: “Why don’t you sit in your car and meditate for  a few minutes?” I did have time to do this now, since I’d come to Portland early to shop at the farmers market, but my farmers market money was home in my pocketbook.

Breathe. So Hum. Contemplate being unconscious in my own life.

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. 🙂

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. 🙂

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?

Signs (from the dead relatives)

by Karen, posted in family, good grief, tweens

Ever wrestle with a decision, wondering what is the right thing to do in any situation? Sometimes when that happens to me, I’ll think, “What would my mother or father do?” or “What would Nana think about this?”.

Well, the other day I was going back on forth about something, then made my decision and spent hours second- guessing myself. After a while, I thought, “I did what my mother would have done”; what she did in fact do many times during my life. I also thought of how generous and giving my grandmother was (both of them, actually, but on this day I was thinking of my dad’s mother) to me whenever I needed it, throughout my life, when I deserved it, and (often) when I didn’t.

Then I tried to stop thinking about it. A moment later, I got an email that included a recipe for my favorite soup that my grandmother used to make for me (escarole soup with little meatballs)…Nana giving her approval?  A bit later on, I opened up the American Profile magazine that came with the Portland Press Herald that day and there (0n page 12) was an article entitled “Pride for Popeye“…here’s where I admit that my father used to call me that as a nickname when I was in kindergarten. Now I’m thinking, “Two signs! This is clearly Dad saying, ‘Good job!'”

And then, that night I dreamed about my mother. She was in my house, visiting. I kept thinking, “I didn’t know my mother was going to be home today!”…

I had to laugh to myself when I woke up. The dead relatives showed up big time to show their support for me yesterday and I’m so happy that they did.