Canada Moms Blog

Why I Blog

Tap tap tap. Is this thing on? Hi. World. Canada. Universe. Mythical Creatures. Random person. Neighbour. Rival. Mom. Friend. Enemy.

If I left anyone out, I'm sorry -- I'll make sure they include you in the press release....

WHY?

Why do I BLOG? Or, how 'bout we phrase it in my favourite way (I get this all the time): "I could NEVER blog, Haley. How do you DO it? Doesn't it make you uncomfortable that the whole world knows what you're thinking and what's going on in your life?"

Here's another favourite of mine: "My husband would NEVER let me blog. What does yours think of it?"

Or how 'bout this one: "What you wrote today, like, about eating disorders? That was, like, really intense. I could NEVER. Eek."

The Big Binge Begins

Yes, it's here! It's the time of year when I ditch the portion-controlling and carb-watching, and once again, with great joy and abandon, allow myself to eat. And eat.  And eat and eat and eat. 

For a whole 3 months.

This Big Binge usually starts on Thanksgiving weekend in early October.  I make a stuffed bird and a brown-sugar/pineapple/7Up-glazed ham.  The menu also usually includes corn, steamed vegetables, and baked potato with a huge dollop of sour cream.  Of course, it's not Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie... with whipped cream on top!

Stepping up to help out

My daughter attends an elementary school that offers a breakfast program.  Or rather, it's supposed to offer a breakfast program, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  The school is one of many across the province of Quebec that is a part of the Quebec Breakfast Club.  Every morning schools participating in the program offer up hearty breakfasts including scrambled eggs, bagels with cream cheese, waffles, pancakes, yogurt, fresh fruit, etc.  Um, not all at once, it's not a buffet. Still, from one day to the next, they rotate a menu and fill up little bellies before the first bell rings.

Last year my daughter signed up and really enjoyed it.  For her it's not a necessity, rather it's a convenience.  She doesn't enjoy eating right away when she wakes up so it's a bit of a battle to get her to eat her breakfast before getting dressed for school.  When she was a part of the breakfast club she would actually be hungry by the time she sat down to eat and our mornings, while not exactly peaceful were at least not quite as full of nagging.

The thing is, though, there are a startling number of kids in my community who actually do need the program.  It costs $12 per term or $48 per year and if a family can't quite swing that, there are ways to get some help with the payment.  The kids then get a good, solid meal to start off their day five days a week (except for Ped days/holidays of course).  For some of these kids, it's the only way they get any breakfast at all.  If not for the program, they would start their day off hungry, with nothing in their stomach to help them focus on learning.

Riding in Cars

I've been thinking a lot about cars lately.

Now, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm blessed with one of those minds that can't tell cars apart (It was....white? With a....butt?) so to have me recognize a car on the road is no mean feat. 

(This is also part of the reason all the neighbors think I'm super-friendly. I wave at all the cars that pass.)

I'm not really going to go into how I can be counted upon to get into the wrong car at the grocery - who knew there were so many small red cars? Not me, obviously....

Or how I once followed who I thought was my husband home from the grocery only to have this very puzzled man pull to the stop at the head of his driveway.....My husband was following me. It all got sorted out. Whew.

Maybe it would be more correct to say I've been remembering cars that I've ridden in.

My grandmother took me on a trip across the country when I was fourteen. I still remember the smell of the leather interior and her Giorgio and how the flatlands of Kansas seemed to go on forever.  I curled up on the floor of the front, a sheet or something over myself to try and be in the shade, and dreamt of riding bareback through fields of grain. I woke running with sweat. When we stopped, we drank ginger-ale and I ate kiwi for the first time. I was just starting to come out of my shell then, discovering that maybe I didn't have to be shy all the time and I liked different things than everyone else.

A Woman's Nation?

Cross posted from our sister blog, DC Metro Moms Blog.

Maria Shriver, the Center for American Progress and NBC have been having a party, of sorts, with the launch and roll-out of The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything. The gist of the report is this -- now that women officially make up half of the American work force, that's bound to help things change for us in terms of work/life balance, equal pay and how we as families negotiate family and work obligations.

The report contends that things are getting easier for women because more men are willing to chip in with the housework and husbands are increasingly viewing their wives differently because of their bread-winning obligations.

We should have more power because our numbers in the workforce are rising and we're the ones who make 80% of the big ticket money decisions in our homes.  But does all that translate into real change in the workplace? 

Continue reading at DC Metro Moms Blog.

Cutting the Apron Strings

Earlier this year, I wrote about the next stage of motherhood, the one that I could never see because I was too deep in diapers and potty training and temper tantrums.  At that time I was a bit anxious about the transition.  Those days of anxious anticipation have now passed.  My boys are now both in school.  Dare I say I have adjusted to this new stage?

Isn’t that always the way with motherhood?  It’s really a series of stages, each one presenting its own set of challenges.  Some challenges we know are coming (potty training, everyone’s favourite), and many surprise us out of nowhere (picky eater times two).   All give us ample opportunity to worry, fret, plan, revise plan (anyone have a plan F?) and then we come out the other side with a big sigh of relief (not there on the picky eater thing though, seriously, plan F, anyone?), a few thousand more grey hairs and some sense of pride that we made it through another battle.

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper: A Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Club

For many of us, we find ourselves in the middle position, taking care of our kids and taking care of our aging parents. What happens when the unthinkable, and inevitable, happens - when one of our parents die? And what happens if your own life is pretty messed up when that happens? For October's Silicon Valley Moms Group bloggers' monthly book club, we are reading and discussing a book that chronicles a slightly dysfunctional family as they spend time together following their father's death. 

Join in as Silicon Valley Moms Group bloggers discuss book  This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper.

• New York City Moms Blog's Helen P leads us off
• Chefdruck from Chefdruck Musings relates "Mom called. The dog died."
• Gayle from Everyday I Write the Book reviews This is Where I Leave You
• Sophia from Moody Mommy thinks about brother estrangement
• Julie from Just Precious asks what else is there to do with 168 hours?
• Wife and Mommy from Wife and Mommy imagines A WHOLE WEEK with her ENTIRE family
• Alma from Marketing Mommy is brought back in time with the line "Dad's dead"
• Heidi from Coast 2 Coast Mom thinks about how not having children changes everything
• Amy from Le ShallowGal relates some shivas she sat and one she didn't
• Melanie from Tales from the Crib makes a confession
• Cindy from We All Fall Down says this is where I take you to the movies
• Jessica from It's My Life puts the functional in dysfunctional
• Nicole from Not Just a Working Mom puts the fun in dysfunctional
• Ana from Finding BonggaMom is thinking about babies
  
• Fabulous Miss S from Fabulous Miss S thinks her husband could relate to Barry and his BlackBerry
  

More posts will be put up throughout the day on our writer's personal sites, so be sure to check back to follow along.

New York City Moms Blog is hosting the book club discussion this month. Please go here to leave a comment and join in the discussion.

Read about the book This is Where I Leave You here.

Past Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Clubs have included:

• Do One Nice Thing by Debbie Tenzer
• Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D.
• What Happened to the Girl I Married? by Michael Miller
• Testimony by Anita Shreve
• Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs
• Much to Your Chagrin by Suzanne Guilette
  
• It Started with Pop-Tarts by Lori Hanson
• Who By Fire by Diana Spechler
• The White Trash Moms Handbook by Michelle Lamar
• Writing Motherhood by Lisa Garrigues
• The Vaccine Book by Dr. Robert W. Sears
• The Other Mother by Gwendolen Gross

If you are an author or a publisher and have a book that you would like to submit for consideration for a future Silicon Valley Moms Group book club, please contact us at info (at) svmoms dot com.

The Tongs of Optimism

 
Each generation has its social mottos:

Make Do And Mend

Keep Calm And Carry On

Spend Spend Spend

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

This generation of children is well-versed in the virtues of reduce, reuse and recycle. They have to be. They will carry the burden of our industrial successes and commercial excesses. 

I worry it is an unmanageable burden. I believe in the wisdom of the 3 R’s even as I fear their implementation is inadequate to the task at hand and greater than our individual efforts can affect.

Nevertheless I diligently put out my blue box of recyclables, storing, saving, rinsing and recycling my way out of the funk can descend when thoughts of the vanishing salmon and dying bears intrude on my efforts.

It is not only the salmon that spur me on; it is the belief that we have an obligation to set a tone of optimism and solution-based thinking for our children. How else will they get on with the work that needs so desperately to be done?

In that spirit – ok, maybe not quite that spirit, maybe in the spirit of desperate hopefulness, combined with a momentary lapse in judgment – I became the Recycling Mom at my daughter’s elementary school. A public school, which was constantly inserting the phrase social responsibility into their every message, they had no recycling program for the juice boxes that came to the school in over 400 lunch kits every day. On one of those days I stood in the playground surrounded by discarded tetra packs and I was overwhelmed: all that litter was going straight into the garbage, into the landfill, and eventually back into the drinking water, the soil, the air…

Hello: My name is ___?

I have been given a label maker to review on my own site.   It is a cool little thing.  But it got me thinking.

Labels.  The internet is FULL of them.  When blogging, we categorize  things. We tag  them.  We give our posts a label.   An identity that means more than the titles themselves.

And yes, we do this all for very techie, SEOey reasons.  It tells the cyber world were to put that story.  What to call it, so the right kind of person, a person who want to read that type of story can find it.

The labels in cyberspace affiliate us with other posts, and other people out there.  They join us together.  Little clubs clustered around labels.

The parental genre online is full of labels and categories.

Talk Snacky to Me

When I got pregnant with my daughter, I vowed that I’d make all of her baby food. I bought recipe books, a blender and a festive apron, and once she was old enough, I set about the kitchen making homemade applesauce and butternut squash. I was excited about making homemade baby food, and determined, too – I was going to rock this new young mother thing, and I was going to rock it GOOD.

But my darling little girl – the apple of my eye – wanted nothing to do with my homemade baby food. She spit it all over me, as though it was the worst thing she’d ever tasted, and I wiped my dignity my futile efforts off of my flushed cheeks and spooned her some Heinz Starter Peas, which, naturally, she gobbled up in no time flat.

And that’s the way it’s been with her – over the years she’s become quite a picky eater, one who, nine times out of ten, would rather eat processed foods, stuff from the freezer or out of a can, than something homemade. Like her father before her, my daughter’s idea of a fabulous meal would probably be heavy on the carbs – battered, deep-fried carbs, wrapped in more carbs – with a side of trans fats and a smattering of starch for good measure.