Tag: tweens

Mother’s monkey mind

by Karen, posted in family, Holidays, Midlife Crisis, relationships, tweens

On a recent episode of The Middle, the mom Frankie got it wrong. For mother’s day, she thought she wanted the entire day to herself, free of husband and children, to do whatever she wanted to. This was a classic episode of “be careful what you wish for” because all she managed to do that day was fix things that were broken, defrosting things that were frozen, clean things that were dirty. By the time she finally sat down on the couch with her magazine and her baked goods, the fam came home.  The day was over. Frankie was bereft.

Frankie got it wrong because having the whole day off when you never have the whole day to yourself is just too overwhelming to be fully appreciated without some advance planning. She was not given enough notice and did not give the day enough forethought to do it right. I am completely familiar with this phenomenon. I routinely screw up unscheduled blocks of time that I unexpectedly have to myself because…because there are just so many things that I want to do that I don’t have the time for in everyday, workaday life!


Have the gift of an unscheduled block of time? Enter the monkey mind, and all can be lost in a heartbeat. This monkey mind mayhem can be wreaked on any special day, not just Mother’s Day. Just thinking about all of the things I want to do: read? Write? Knit? Practice a little yoga? Bake a batch of cupcakes/brownies/cookies? Work in the garden? Sometimes it becomes like diagnosing an illness: a ruling out process that takes so long that by the time an activity is decided upon the time you had in which to engage in it has passed (like what happened to Frankie).

The truth is this: when our family members are not with us, we may have a small undercurrent of worry (What are they doing? Are they safe?), or at least of distraction that gets in the way.

In the end, she got it right. She did want her family around, just (barely) within earshot and eyeshot in the next room, working on a puzzle together, getting along with each other. They had strict instructions not to talk to her or try to engage her in any way whatsoever.

She had the best couple of hours ever.

Brave New Girls

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, friends, local fun, no fear, tweens
Cell phones swaying at the talent show

The other night I went to the Talent Show at my daughter’s junior high school. The cost of $5 per person was a bit off-putting at first, but when I learned that all of the money raised was for charity (to help in Japan, Haiti, and here at home), I didn’t mind. They also held a bake sale consisting of actually appetizing-looking edibles which made the $2 per baggie of chocolate chip cookies worth it.

There were many singing acts (encompassing a predominance of Taylor Swift songs), from a capella to karaoke, some singing solo and some (the less confident?) in pairs and groups. All of them were good, and two of them were excellent. Most of the performers were girls, with a few token boys thrown in like afterthoughts.  In addition to singing, other talents showcased were
  1. Hula hooping
  2. Magic tricks
  3. Gymnastics
  4. Flute playing

Initially my daughter was sitting with me but soon enough she was off giggling in the bleachers with her friends (as tweens so often are). While I was waiting for the show to start, I thought back to my own junior high days and they were nothing like what my daughter’s have been like…for which I am endlessly grateful.

These girls were mostly in the twelve to fourteen year old range and they were so talented! The flautist performed an original medley of music she wrote herself, and she played what I knew to be a quite difficult piece beautifully. When I was her age, I played a solo in our band concert: Yellowbird. A medley of original music that she wrote herself? OMG! Saying “times change” is such an understatement in this case I can barely get the words out!  One of the singing acts performed a song in five-part harmony… Hel-lo? Five part harmony? And they nailed it. It was incredible to see all of these tween and barely teen-aged girls trying on all of these different talents on for size, seeing how they fit. How confident they all seemed!

Back when I was in junior high school, the audience was mostly parents and grandparents of the people performing. This audience was made up of parents and grandparents to be sure, but also many of their peers, who came to cheer them on. This was a kind, generous audience that clapped every bit as loudly for the singers who were slightly off-key as the ones who were pitch-perfect. At one point, the audience opened up their cell phones in the darkened room and swayed, holding them over their heads, like we moms and dads used to do back in the day, only with lighters!

I periodically stole glances over at my twelve-year-old daughter with her friends, watching the show, cheering and clapping; a shiny happy person among shiny happy people. My heart was full.

So, I’ll close out with a quote from (who else?) Taylor Swift from her song “Mine“, dedicated to my daughter:

“You’re the best thing that’s ever been mine.”

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!

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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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! 🙂

Sunday with tweens

by Karen, posted in family, tweens

I took my daughter to see Rango. Johnny Depp or no Johnny Depp, I couldn’t have cared less about seeing this movie.

I took her because we had nothing better to do. I took her because it was the only kids movie playing. I took her because I couldn’t concentrate on writing anymore and needed a change of scenery.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I liked this movie! It was great! It was funny! My daughter thought that it was too long, but she liked it anyway. Some of the characters were supremely unattractive (a fact with which Izzy agrees), so much so that they were…um, difficult to look at.

That’s really the only fault I can find with the movie.

Maybe we were predisposed to like the movie since we went to the Cupcake Fetish Bakery and loaded up on goodies prior to getting to theater.

I highly recommend doing both. 🙂

Kennebunk Winterfest with tweens

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

The Kennebunk 2011 Winterfest was yesterday in (you guessed it) Kennebunk, Maine. It was great that it wasn’t February 25th, since we got (yet another unwelcome) snowstorm. It was fun, but would have been more so if it had been about 10 degrees warmer (I’m just sayin’).

It kicked off with a pancake breakfast at Duffy’s for $5.99 per person (the money went towards supporting the Winterfest event) which included a drink and 2 enormous pancakes. I didn’t photograph them because they weren’t anything special…they were too big, too thick, too pale, too insubstantial…a disappointment really. When we were leaving I saw some smaller, thinner, better browned pancakes coming out of the kitchen, but it was too late for us. I mentioned to the server that maybe the kid portions should have been one pancake if they were going to make them that ginormous; maybe they listened? It was also a little bit disconcerting that the food arrived so quickly. In one case, I saw people’s pancakes arrive after they had barely sat down and they hadn’t even gotten their drinks. I also felt like they were rushing to get us out, but wasn’t sure why.

Next year, I will go to Perfecto’s Caffe on Main Street in Kennebunk for breakfast instead.

Then next stop was the Kennebunk Town Hall where a craft show was held from 9am-2pm. There was a big crowd here (even Elvis made an appearance!)  Dory’s Dogs was there making Nutella and Banana Crepes to die for. I took a bite and died right there. They were amazing. I couldn’t get a picture because my hands were covered with Nutella…I wasn’t worthy.

The kids had the option of making some glass bead projects, but those were not cheap. The key rings were the least expensive project at $3, then there were earrings, bracelets, and other projects, some costing as much as $15. The two women running the craft were awesome: funny, patient, helpful. The kids loved it.

Next: the scavenger hunt. They were given “clue bags” and had to go around to area businesses to get the different parts of the snowman and then assemble it at the end to get the chance to win a DQ  or a toy store gift certificate (we’re still waiting for the call that we won…). This is where it would have been very helpful if it was a) warmer…it was in the low 20’s) and b) did not span the construction zone at the bridge or c) include the Mail It Unlimited Store that was way out of the way from the general location of all of the other participating stores. There was a shuttle, but there were supposed to be two (if found out later that one broke down). The one that was running was never at a stop when we needed it, and it was so cold that it was better to keep moving.

After some compromising (that involved driving to the last two stops that were past the construction area) we finished the hunt and headed for the Soup Contest. This was awesome. You paid your $3 and then sampled coups from 18 different pots and then voted for your favorite. It was tough; some of them were excellent, but some were decidedly not. After telling them that they should have had separate categories for cream soups and broth soups, I picked the Farmer’s Chicken Soup to win, and Izzy picked the Hot Sour Soup to win. My runner-up was the Roasted Chestnut with Sage and Creme Fraiche. This year, they didn’t disclose which local business made which soups (as they had done last year) so we were voting blind.

Overall, it was a great day: good food (except for the pancakes), good exercise to work it off, good fun with tweens.

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What this woman got: Valentine edition, part 3

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

First order of business: skip the gym.

White chocolate chip, chocolate chip, and craisin cookies for bake off

My husband and I had planned to celebrate the day during the child-free hours we had, from 7am until about 3:30pm (the school day). There was a medical appointment (mine) at 10:30am, but that was quick and we didn’t let it mess up our day.

Which was good, because there were other things ready and waiting to do that.  My daughter’s school is having a bake- off today and we thought that the cookies she was entering had to be there by 2pm Tuesday. Wrong. She called me at 9am to say the cookies actually had to be there by 2pm Monday, the day before.

Valentine’s Day. The day of our date. So, I scrambled to get the dough made before my appointment, then rushed home to bake them after my appointment. Got them to school at 1pm, ahead of the deadline, but that left us only a little part of the day to celebrate.

We had lunch a quick lunch at Jake’s Seafood on route one, then headed to the Harbor Candy store where (surprise!) they did NOT have any chocolate dipped strawberries, which was my purpose for going there. I was on a mission! That was the thing that I wanted. 😦 Plus, it was a little disconcerting to see that they had more Easter candy for sale than Valentine’s Day candy. Huh? When is Easter, anyway? (Hel-lo? It’s more than two months from now!)

Dark chocolate dipped strawberry from VFM

I always get a dark chocolate covered cherry and eat it at the counter when I go to Harbor Candy, but today was an exception. I was too annoyed. We left without buying anything, and we went into the Village Food Market in Ogunquit (just a few doors down) and (hurray!) they had a whole tray of them! Something finally went our way. They were even dipped in dark chocolate, my favorite, but  Bill? not so much. I swear I’m going to convert him to the dark side, but my efforts thus far (with the dark side of candy, at least :)) have met with failure.

Next, to Ogunquit Beach to look at the ocean. Can you believe that it was 51 degrees at 2pm on Monday?? That was the best gift of all, dont’ you think?

Then we were headed home with about an hour left before the tween got off the bus from school when (surprise again!) she sent me a text saying that the after school activity was canceled and she was on her way home.

I mean, are you kidding me?

After homework, supper, laundry, and tween bedtime we  got into bed to watch our Netflix movie: Glee: Season one: Disc one. Well, I laughed, I cried, yada yada. But hey, really, what better way to end your Valentine’s Day than a little Glee in bed? Ha!

Today was  a day where not much went according to plan, so not the best Valentine’s Day ever, but that’s okay, because I have the best Valentine ever: my husband!

P.S. It’s day 5 but my bouquet is still looking great!

Celebrating with the kids: Valentine edition, part 2

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, local fun, tweens
My Valentine's Day bouquet

My Valentine’s Day started off great with a bouquet of flowers, with yellow (my favorite) being the dominant color. from my husband. I received them on Thursday night, since he would be at work for the next several days. I love flowers and was completely surprised (and thrilled!) with my gift.

I got to take my tween daughter Izzy out for lunch to celebrate our Valentine’s Day in advance. We went to one of “our places”, the Weathervane in Sanford and ordered way too much (fried)  food, as we almost always do.  After that, we continued up Route 109 to the Cupcake Fetish Bakery where we got dessert for ourselves, and we also picked up a little something  for my son and his girlfriend (Chocolate Dream with vanilla buttercream frosting for Anthony, Strawberry Nirvana for Lauren). The baker made little cupcake bites up (see slideshow below) for free samples in honor of Valentine’s Day and they rocked!

We came home and Iz worked on  her valentines to bring to school for her friends tomorrow, an eleventh hour decision. “This will be the last year, Mom,” she said. I recall her making the same statement to me just about a year ago…

Hmmm…we’re sitting here eating cupcakes for supper…it’s starting to feel sort of like Valentine’s Week (is that wrong?)… 🙂

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