Daring Young Mom

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I keep another blog on the website of a local newspaper. The paper requires commenters to register with their site in order to leave comments. I haven’t been writing there for long and let’s just say I get very few comments… pretty much zilch.

I was excited to see that I’d gotten a comment on yesterday’s post, a repost from my DYM archives, entitled “Conversating.”

The commenter had this to say:
“conversating” is not a word. perhaps you meant “conversing.”

I retorted wittily:
Perhaps I make up words on my blog at all times.

So, I’ma guessin’ when yer a “citizen journalist” for a major noozlepaper, yer not appost to be amakin’ up yerz own wordslies. I’ll keep that in mind. Strangely, I’m still happy to have received the comment.

Other highlights of my weekend so far:

Heavy Drinking
Since Magoo’s intervention at Miss Karli’s house a couple of weeks ago to confront him about his serious drinking problem, he’s made great strides and has fallen back off the wagon as we’d hoped. He’s back in the sauce, so to speak, guzzling mommy-milk, water, diluted juice and his new favorite — soy milk, or as Laylee calls it — sorry milk.

Dealing
The semi-annual community garage sale was this weekend and I scored a few sweet deals, including several $1 pairs of Stride Rite sneakers for Magoo (I shouldn’t even be typing this. I think the people at Stride Rite are militantly opposed to this kind of podia-pediatric travesty. You must never, never reuse a pair of children’s shoes, lest your child end up with gimpy-malformed-stepatitis.), a VHS copy of Snow White which Laylee has never seen before (Funny, eh? Since she thinks that’s her name and the name of her 16 year-old imaginary sister) and a whole ton of “bestselling” books to trade in for the ones I really want on Frugal Reader. Yippee!

The Undead
The potted plant Dan brought me on my day of sadness, rage and attempted sewing machinicide is still alive and there are even a few baby gerbers popping up for some extra spring sunshine.

A Debt Repaid
Forgiveness and healing can now begin. Today I received, via the United States Postal Service, a long awaited note of apology and a check to repay me for a night out on the town with my friend Ceci 7 years ago. The bitterness was so very very hard for me to bear and I am so glad that she decided to come clean and send me the money she owed me for taking her out to dinner when she drove down from Canada to visit me for the weekend when I was a college student SEVEN YEARS AGO. Are you kidding me? Dude! I bought you a burrito. You drove down from CANADA to see me! I laughed out loud when I read her note of apology. Ceci — if you’re reading this, you make me smile. If you’re not reading this:
ARE.
YOU.
KIDDING.
ME?
(In case you’re wondering, I’m keeping the money. It’s going into my “Send Daring to Blogher Blog-a-thon Fund.” More on the SDBBF to come.)

Square Waffles
Dad and Laylee made dinner tonight and we learned two things:
1. I buy too many Eggos — Laylee is so impressed at the sight of SQUARE waffles.
2. Sugar TASTES JUST LIKE CANDY.

Pinkish
It takes two drops of red food coloring to make bath-time a magical experience.

As many of you know, I am part of a dinner co-op. I love cooking…once a week… and I love free stuff. So when Susan Thacker asked to send me a copy of her cookbook Supper Swapping so that I could review it on my blog, I was excited and a little nervous. I knew it was my bloggeristic duty to give it an honest review, whether I liked the book or not.

The book gives tips and instructions for trading dinners with friends and neighbors, something I could give a testimonial about any day of the week. I’ve been trading dinners for over a year and if I had to go back to cooking every single day, I think I’d have some sort of breakdown. Besides saving us time and money, sharing meals gives our families a real sense of community.

In Supper Swapping, Susan lays out the basics for trading dinners and also includes fun little suggestions to make cooking more enjoyable, like choosing theme music to go with the style of food you’re preparing. She also gives tips on how to save money on your shopping and stock your pantry.

Most of this information was not revolutionary to me at this point in my “supper swapping” career, although I think it would have been helpful back when I was just getting started. I also have to admit that I’m really excited to play music from “La Traviata” next time I make spaghetti and meatballs.

What I love about Supper Swapping is that it’s a little book packed with amazing recipes. Thacker contacted dozens of top-notch chefs and sorted through their best recipes, choosing those that would be easy enough to be reproduced by the masses (read this: daring-young-wanna-be-master-chefs) but still restaurant quality, delicio-so and nutritionally dense. I have made seven of the 100+ recipes from the book, all either for company or for my dinner co-op, and each one was met with overwhelming approval by everyone. This is definitely a book I would choose for my collection.

If you’d like to learn more about her book, you can check it out on the Supper Swapping website. Recipes we loved and will make again include:

-Creole Sauce served over rice (from Charleston Restaurant, named by Zagat as 2003’s most popular Baltimore restaurant)
-California Spinach Salad with homemade Vinaigrette Dressing
-Corn and Black Bean Salsa (delicious and healthful, more like a salad than a salsa)
-Chicken Enchiladas (the best recipe for these I’ve found)
-Chicken or Salmon with Buttery Cilantro Ginger Sauce (We’ve tried both and people have begged for the recipe.)
-Amazing Chocolate Pudding (heaven in a glass cup)

*************************

Now a few notes on how my dinner co-op works:

-Four families are members of the group, each with 1 or 2 children.
-We consider 3 adult-sized servings of a main course to be a complete dinner.
-Each family makes their own vegetables, desserts, and sides (unless the sides are semi-mandatory. Ex. We would never just bring over 3 pieces of meat or fish. A side dish is required for things like pot roast, BBQ chicken or grilled salmon.)
-Each family has 4 square pyrex pans with rubber lids and 4 large disposable tupperwares. This way, we never worry about who has which dishes. They just rotate through the group.
-Mondays through Thursdays are our cooking days. Since our children are small, we often have leftovers for lunch the next day and often for Friday night dinner as well.
-We each have a set dinner night so I can plan to always have Wednesday as my cooking day.
-Everyone sends 6 meal choices at the beginning of a cycle and I work them into a 6-week calendar so we all know what meal is coming each day and can plan vegetables to go along with it.
-On my day to cook, I have to have the food ready and delivered with re-heating instructions by 5:00pm. On my nights off, the food magically appears on my doorstep.
-You are not required to be home for the drop-off but can leave a milk-box or cooler out for the food to be kept in until you get home.
-This is one of the best time and money saving decisions I’ve ever made for my family.
-We eat better every night because the person cooking has to do it so rarely that they make something really special when it’s their night to cook.

Well, good luck and happy Supper Swapping. I hope you’ll join us.

Am I the only person who thinks it’s hilarious that the white 2-3 year old soccer team in my neighborhood just named themselves “The Black Panthers”?

Every time I think about it, I can’t help laughing.

They like panthers… and they like black… and power.

The title of this post is inspired by my second favorite website marketing beef to tweens as a hot commodity (I used to link to it here but it looks like the domain has been purchased by some nasty site so this post is a little out of date.). Okay, it’s really my first favorite website hawking beef to tweens. Okay, I think it’s the only one. But that doesn’t matter. All I’m hoping for with this intro is to become the number one google search result for “beef and tweens.” That would be really… something.

Today I want to say “it’s cool to be real.” It’s okay to experience “negative” emotions, to feel hurt, betrayed, alone, abandoned, afraid or even angry. I hear so many women (myself included) expressing raw, heartfelt emotions and then apologizing for them or brushing them aside as a product of weakness, hormones, or some flaw of personality.

As a new mom, I became friends with an amazing girl. She is beautiful, kind, loving, positive and strong. We had children close in age and got together quite often for playdates, even when our first-borns were too young to drool in unison, let alone play together. During these times we would talk about our lives, share pleasant stories about mutual acquaintances and talk about how wonderful and glorious motherhood was.

After countless visits with this friend, there remained a wall between us that I felt could not be penetrated. I enjoyed our excursions together and came to the conclusion that for some inexplicable reason, we would never be truly close. Then one day, she confided in me that the past several months had been extremely hard for her. Although our children were almost a year old, her daughter was still rarely sleeping for more than 2 hours at a time without waking up. She was worn out and fed up and very cautiously expressed her feelings of frustration.

I was stunned and felt suddenly closer to her than I had ever felt. I finally saw past her perfect veneer to someone with doubts, fears and frustrations.

She quickly apologized for speaking negatively of her child. She thought it was inappropriate to express those feelings out loud, while I was thinking how refreshing it was to know that I wasn’t the only one who was struggling. I now see that conversation as a turning point in our friendship, a moment that has allowed us to grow closer and form a more solid connection.

I have friends who have been betrayed but apologize for feelings of resentment, friends who have suffered real loss but apologize for feelings of sadness, friends who have been marginalized or berated by someone they trusted but apologize for feeling angry or confused.

I’m not advocating wallowing in pools of self-pity or refusing to take control of your life. What I’m suggesting is that it’s okay to just feel and be, to linger for a moment and experience emotions that are real and poignant before we pshaw them away, fix our mascara and put on our “happy face.”

Repressing feelings, discrediting them or imagining them into oblivion to avoid the appearance of weakness does nothing but magnify the emotions and cause problems down the line.

I learned early on in my mothering that I did not want to marginalize my children’s feelings. I would catch myself saying, “You’re not sad!” when I felt that Laylee was crying “for no reason.” It took a while to realize that if she’s feeling it, it’s a real emotion, whether I can personally identify with it or not. Some of the things her little heart breaks over seem downright silly to me, but if I tell her she has no right to be sad or afraid, will she feel that she can confide in me as she grows up to be one of those beef-eating, junior-high-struggling tweens?

Answer=No

Our relationships grow stronger when we allow each other to see inside our quiet hurts and to “bear one another’s burdens that they may be light.” It’s cool to be real, and hey — beef has a lot of protein and whatnot.