Finds of the Week:

• Assortment — A new blog I discovered about a family of five living in 665 square feet
• 27 Awesome Vintage Photos of Moms, Mental Floss — Love the pictures of moms and kids from long, long ago.  And, I really want that 1926 stroller/bicycle.
• Dirty Diaper Laundry’s 3rd Annual Flats and Handwashing Challenge May 20-26 — Can you go six days cloth diapering with only flat or prefold diapers and handwashing?  I might be crazy, but I think I am going to do it.
• A Military Parent’s Homecoming Should Not Be a Surprise, XXfactor
• My Medical Choice, NY Times — I’m sure everyone has read this already, but just incase…
• No Big Deal, but This Researcher’s Theory Explains Everything About How Americans Parent, Slate — Wondering what is with our obsession with intelligence and learning?  This article looks at different parenting styles across the globe, all of which our American parenting style is completely different from.
• When The Doctor Says This Won’t Hurt A Bit — And Incredibly, It’s True, WBUR — A look at one Boston doctor who uses alternative methods of calming children in the ER.  All doctors should practice medicine this way.

This Week’s Pins:

If things continue at this pace, something has got to give, and it’s likely to be my work.  I haven’t taken on many new major projects since we moved.  Originally that was only going to be a temporary pause until we were settled in, and then I was going to start back up again.  I wasn’t planning to fill my calendar at the breakneck pace of last fall, but I was hoping to keep adding websites to help Chris and me continue toward our goal of living debt free and buying a house.  Lately, I barely have time for the odds and ends that come from maintaining past clients websites; I can’t imagine starting anything new, so work may have to go.  How exactly do other people do it?  How do other families balance kids and two full time jobs?

I haven’t found a mom’s helper (or whatever you would call it) yet, but we have implemented a system to (hopefully) get Nora to participate more in keeping the house clean and caring for herself.

We ordered a responsibility chart from Melissa and Doug, which I love because it comes with a lot of different responsibility magnets besides just chores.  Every day, Nora is expected to make her bed, get dressed, brush her teeth, not whine, say please and thank you (something that she has a lot of trouble with outside of our family), put her toys away, and not have any potty accidents.  She still gets help with most of these things and she isn’t expected to be “perfect” — her bed can be wrinkly, she might still get a magnet if she whines once or twice during the day, etc.  At the end of the week she doesn’t have to have earned every single magnet to get a reward.  Mainly my goal is to get her started thinking about taking initiative and, as much as I don’t like saying it, to act more like a big girl.  We aren’t expecting her to do things that are beyond her capabilities, but we are asking her to be more consistent about doing the things she is capable of doing but sometimes doesn’t simply because she doesn’t want to.

We aren’t doing allowance, but I have started incentivizing her responsibilities on both a daily and weekly basis.  Her daily reward on days that she does well is 30 minutes of computer time, during which she is allowed to play educational games in PBS Play.  As much as I dislike excessive screen time, I ended up buying a subscription and deciding to use it as her reward for two reasons: it does seem to be legitimately educational and it also helps to fill the time of night that can often be the most challenging when i am parenting alone.  I also like it because I was able to set a timer in the game so it just stops working after 30 minutes — which means we don’t ever have battles over turning it off.

Nora’s weekly reward in an experience of her choosing.  When we first explained the system to her, we had her brainstorm a list of activities that she would like to do if she has a good week.
In case you can’t read that, she said: bowling, movie night (at home), playing together, swimming, picnic, or going to a museum.  So far it seems to be working relatively well.  If you follow me on Facebook, you know that we still have our moments, but I have definitely noticed a change in her attitude and willingness to help the last two weeks.  I’m hopeful that this system will continue to work and Nora will continue to develop into the sweet little helper that she is.  Between this and Zara’s new found love for the sling, hopefully things might start to shape up around here…and maybe some day I’ll be able to go to bed “early” at 11:30 or midnight.

Finds of the Week:

• Elizabeth Smart Says Pro-Abstinence Sex Ed Harms Victims of Rape, Slate’s XXfactor — Exactly what the headline says; she argues that abstinence only education which teaches girls they have more value as virgins can cause them to feel worthless and without value after they are raped
• Go naked: diapers affect infant walking, NYU Research Paper (full text) — I just found this interesting.  Apparently, the reason our babies learn to walk the way they do is because they have diapers on, which adversly impact their ability to walk normally from the go.  (Here is the one downside to cloth — bulky cloth diapers make it harder for them to learn to walk than lighter disposables.)
• Study Finds Adverse Effects of Pitocin in Newborns, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists – Press release on the negative effects that pitocin might have on full-term babies.  All the more reason to wait for baby to decide to come on his/her own
• Surprise, Surprise: Google Made the Sweetest Mother’s Day Ad Ever, Jezebel – It really is sweet…click to watch the video.
• When Big Pharma “Strong” Arms Mothers, We All Lose, The Broad Side — A response to Similac’s new “Strong Moms” marketing campaign
• Why I am Learning to Live Simply, Documenting Delight — One of my favorite bloggers on her commitment to go a year without buying anything new + she has embeded The Story of Stuff video.  Go watch it if you have not yet already!
• Why parents should leave their kids alone, The Guardian – How modern parenting makes kids miserable.

This Week’s Pins

On Nantucket, it’s not uncommon to hear talk of summer widows.  Once, long ago, widows were made by the sea.  They stood on rooftop decks, long skirts blowing in the wind, watching the horizon and waiting.  Waiting for the ships to come home; praying for husband’s work to end safely and soon.  Now, widows are made seasonally, not subject to whales and storms, but the rush of tourists and summer folk who bring just a few good months of work.  With the high cost of living and only five  months out of the year to make it, many Nantucket children spend summers frolicking in the waves while one parent or another works long hours to pay the bills and many Nantucket wives parent for hours on end alone.

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When people hear my husband is a chef, invariably I hear how lucky I am to be married to a man who can cook.  ”Who does all the cooking?” they ask, “You or him?”  I do, I tell them, because a chef is never home at dinner or lunch, and when he is, it hardly seems fair to ask him to pick up a skillet after a long week spent feeding hundreds of people a day.

Chris loves what he does.  He is amazing at what he does — perhaps because he loves it so much — but he picked a career that requires lots of days and nights of work, and not a lot of time off. It’s a career that demands 150% all the time and that rarely exists in part-time, which is a big part of why I no longer work outside of the home.  Mostly, we have adapted to this lifestyle that offers little traditional family time and a lot of schedule adjustment.  Mostly we have figured out how to carve the necessary conversations and desired play out of mornings, mid-week breaks, and late nights.  But there are still times like spring on Nantucket when I feel the pinch of those long hours.  Days like today when Chris left before we woke up and will be home long after we’ve gone to sleep.

Chris’ new restaurant is less than two weeks from opening.  Menus are being finalized and costed, food has been ordered, and training has begun.  Our “vacation” of sorts is over and I’m being reminded of what it means to be a restaurant wife — or should I say, what it means to be a restaurant widow.  The last few weeks have felt a lot like spring on Nantucket; the last few days, when Chris has worked literally 17 hours at a time, have been even worse.  There was a moment today when Nora flat out refused to cooperate despite all my best efforts and the only thing I wanted to do — but couldn’t — was talk parenting strategy to my other half.

Opening a restaurant is hard.
Working a ton of hours is hard.
Parenting alone is hard.

Our laundry has been piled on the couch for days, the bathrooms aren’t too clean, and I’ll admit to having a heavy reliance on grilled cheese as a fast, easy dinner solution.  My patience has been tried and I’ve resorted to my “scary” voice more than once.  Life is definitely less fun when I don’t get a break, but I keep reminding myself to keep looking into the horizon.  Like spring on Nantucket, this too shall pass.  Reinforcements will arrive; things will settle into a rhythm; soon we’ll have Chris back.  And, unlike on seasonal Nantucket, we may never see this level of craziness again.  There are benefits to living in a place no one wants to visit.

I know it’s not Saturday — not even close, actually, since there’s barely any Sunday left to speak of, but there are somethings I have been saving all week to share and I’m going to just pretend I got around to doing this yesterday and share them.  So here we go with some finds of the week:

• Are you qualified?, Simple Homeschool — This is an excellent piece about what makes someone qualified to educate their children despite not having a degree in education.
• Dear Less-Than-Perfect Mom, Huffington Post — “And since no mother is perfect, chances are you are caught in a two billion way tie for Best Mom in the World.”
• How Babies Learn to Be Human, Slate — New Research into babies and how they begin to comprehend intention
• MANA Response to Recent AAP Home Birth Statement: High-quality out-of-hospital newborn and postpartum care is standard for midwives, Science & Sensibility
• Mother and Daughter, July 2008, Literary Mama — love this poem about an adult mother-daughter relationship
  
• Superbugs Invade American Supermarkets, Environmental Working Group – This EWG report focuses on the huge amounts of antibiotic resistant bacteria that is coming into existence thanks to the huge amounts of routine antibiotic use in animals.  Scary stuff.
• Systematic Review of the Efficacy of Herbal Galactogogues, Journal of Human Lactation — all you could ever want to know about using milk to stimulate (or not) milk production.  You may be surprised to know there’s little good evidence that any of the herbs mothers take actually do anything, which is why I never advise a mother to take a supplement to increase milk production.  The best way to make milk is to nurse, nurse, nurse.

Pins of the week:

The trip yielded lots of beautiful scenery, a connection with a cloth diapering mama, and delicious eggs, but no exciting farm discoveries — the only CSA there doesn’t deliver to our town.  There is a Farmer’s Market in town, so I’m hopeful I might find something there, but with no CSA to be found, I’m not going to lie — I’m pretty disappointed in the produce scene up here.

The only alternative I’ve found to grocery store shopping is a co-op called Bountiful Baskets, which exists in many states surrounding Wyoming as well.  The co-op allows anyone (no membership required) to place an order Monday morning and receive a share of produce Saturday morning.  Shares are distributed at different pick up locations around the county, which can sell out quickly.  I’ve learned that if I want to place an order, I have to log onto their website right at 9 am or risk having to drive to another town Saturday morning (or just deciding not to order at all)

The shares are roughly 50% vegetables and 50% fruit; they cost $15 dollars and like a CSA are supposed to feed a family of four for a week.  For an additional $10 fee, baskets can be upgraded to 100% organic, which seems to yield a slightly smaller amount of produce but which is still less expensive than the grocery store.  I have participated twice, once ordering a conventional basket

and once ordering 100% organic.

(Sorry for the color this is a cell phone picture.)

In addition, they have “add-ons” that can also be purchased.  Special theme packs like this Thai pack ($14),
 bread packs ($10 conventional or $12 organic)granola, coconut oil, and bulk size packages of produce, like this 25lb bag of carrots ($10.50).

While the co-op is clearly cheaper than grocery store shopping, I’m on the fence about it because it breaks two of our biggest food rules: don’t buy food out of season and don’t buy food that wasn’t grown in the U.S.

Not only does Bountiful Baskets provide all kinds of out of season produce (tomatoes and cucumbers in April, come on), it also has tons of things that were grown in Mexico and other countries I normally avoid like the plague.  There are certainly instances where I make saving money my number one priority, but when it comes to food I’d much rather support my own country’s economy and (hopefully) farm workers who are not being exploited to bring me my food (I cursed every one of those bananas).  Chris likes the savings of Bountiful Baskets and thinks that ought to be our choice during the non-farmer’s market months, but I just don’t know.  It just might go against my ideals too much to justify the savings.

What do you think?  How do you rank the priority of food cost versus all the other factors that come into play when choosing produce?

A lapse in blogging starts with family.   A welcome visit from one of my brothers and my maternal grandmother,who came bearing gifts and three days of love for our little girls.
Then, when things were settling back into our normal rhythm, this adorable little strawberry followed their departure with a night or two of not sleeping long stretches on her own, instead needing to be cuddled in our bed during hours I might have otherwise been writing.  As much as I love, love, love having a baby in my bed, I’ve also gotten quite used to have a few hours of writing time to myself each night so any shifts in sleep can be a challenge.

Next, when the baby sleep routine returned to “normal,” a new website project consumed my late-night hours; I lost a night trying to catch up on Pinterest and my RSS reader; and finally abandoned all hope of writing with the arrival of a much-missed college friend who was much more fun to hang out with than it would have been to stare at a computer screen’s blue glow.

(Even if that first post-baby outing only lasted 40 minutes and one beer, due to a frantic SOS from Chris.)

As a blogger, I write in the uniquely immediate medium that is online self-publishing.  I have the ability to make my life, thoughts, and experiences globally available within seconds.  When I go days without writing, event after event and story after story keep getting added to my mental list of “blog posts in waiting,” and eventually that list is so long it becomes overwhelming, making it “easier” to put off writing for another day.

In my ideal world, I would write here every day.  I would always have beautiful photography and engaging words to share.  I would find time to post no matter what else was happening, and if I was really on top of things I would actually schedule posts in advance.  Putting that ideal into practice is no easy task, though, and thus I often find myself on the other side of a week with little to show for it.

As a wife, a mother, a freelancer and an individual, I like to think this is a good thing.  It means I am doing what I need to get done, spending time with my kids and husband, and allowing myself breaks rather than spending every possible moment “building my brand” (or something like that).  But as a writer, I know this is a very bad thing.  I know that the most important thing I could be doing for myself and my writing is actually sitting down to write.  Making time to put words on paper, albeit virtual paper, even when I don’t want to, think I can or know what to say.

I once attended a writing workshop and had the opportunity to hear Ron Carlson speak.  The thing he said that most stuck with me is that

[t]he writer is the person who stays in the room.

A writer is a person who doesn’t walk away when words refuse to come or when life beckons from the other side of the door.  Who makes an appointment with his typewriter and keeps it.  Who realizes that there is no such thing as bad writing, even if it is writing that will be scrapped tomorrow.

When I wait days to publish and begin to feel procrastination or doubt creep up on me, this is what I remember.  I can be a mom and blogger, a wife and blogger, a freelancer and blogger.  It’s possible to be all of those things if I put my mind to it, all I have to do is decide that’s what I want to do.  No matter how much I might think it, life doesn’t have to get in the way of writing, if only I’m willing to stay in the room.