It has been woefully long since my last post. I left full-time employment on June 30 and you'd think that would leave me with much leisure time for things like blogging, but we went on vacation for ten days and since then I have been in turbo-nesting mode. My husband oscillates between amusement at my third-trimester behavior and mild panic that all this frenzied laundering of baby clothes and re-organizing of closets means our second child is making its debut any minute. Cliches aside, I am quite enjoying having two days a week to putter at will before the baby is born, and I am dipping ... [READ MORE]
Life Can Be So Sweet…
June 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment
It hasn't been the easiest of stretches, these past six months. Factors both inside and outside of my control have conspired to put me in one of those forests-versus-trees mindsets: you know the kind, where the daily details can start to overwhelm, and you lose perspective. When difficulty finding a parking space drives you to tears, something is out of whack. (Or maybe you're pregnant. Or a little of both.) Call it mental spring (summer?) cleaning, but I am resolved to turn this trend around and, as luck would have it, a few changes are afoot which are helping me along. 1) I am going ... [READ MORE]
Gun-Shy
June 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment
My mother's group message board has been lighting up lately with requests for baby food inspiration. It's been a reminder that I'm in kind of a rut. I'm not going to be too hard on myself -- what I call "a rut" is really "the total lack of downtime afforded to two working parents whose child has abandoned his nap" -- but the long and the short of it is this: I am sick of the sight/taste/prospect of my own cooking. I make the same damn things every week and it's boooor-ing. My CSA box is the only thing keeping our kitchen remotely interesting these days. (Along with the odd pregnancy ... [READ MORE]
Memorial Day 2011: The Menu
June 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment
We spent Memorial Day with my husband's best childhood buddies and their (lucky for me!) amazing wives. We have been taking variations of this same trip -- to one friend's house near South Lake Tahoe -- for over a decade, but the dynamics have shifted considerably as we have gotten older, gotten hitched, gotten pregnant. What was once a party house full of dudes and the occasional girlfriend is now a (mostly) civilized portrait of four couples, a dog, an infant, and a Cars-obsessed toddler (that would be mine). Where we once trucked down to the lake at 2am, Coors Lights in hand, for "polar ... [READ MORE]
Keepin’ up with the Joneses
May 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment
To listen to our breakfast-table conversations lately, the most anticipated event of the summer in our household is NOT the arrival of our second child. No, the most anticipated event of the summer is the release of Disney/Pixar's Cars 2 on June 24th. Actually, for me personally, the most anticipated event of the YEAR is the release of Cars II on DVD sometime in the Fall, so that I can finally halt the endless loop of the original Cars film -- and, when enough TV is enough, the Cars motion picture soundtrack, or even just Babyman's running narration of the entire Cars plotline -- in our ... [READ MORE]
The Apartment of Homeland Security
May 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment
The Big Boy Bed has prompted us to consider the possibility of Babyman exiting the apartment in the night. I know from experience that his first (and probably only) stop is actually our bedroom, but I live in fear of waking up in the morning to find that, outside of the comfortable cage-like confines of his crib, he has decided to go somewhere...else. Despite the fact that there are 15 stories of apartment building for Babyman to navigate (by way of an elevator in which he can only reach the buttons for floors B through 4), followed by a vast lobby, I am convinced that he *could* find ... [READ MORE]
Cookbook Love
May 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Is it ironic that the mark of a really wonderful, well-loved cookbook, is when you don't open it anymore? My first real cookbook was Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef. It was a first-apartment gift from a friend of my mother's who was living in London when rakish Jamie had just burst onto the BBC scene back in 2000. The spine of the book is so faded you can't read it anymore in a line-up of cookbooks. I have not made every recipe in there, but I have probably made most of them with varying degrees of success, and what I have learned in the intervening decade is that most of the Naked Chef is ... [READ MORE]
