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While I was busy predicting the outcomes of hockey games, teasing my younger brother and worrying about the competence of my mom’s obstetrician, Dan had weightier matters on his mind, like food, kick soccer and how glue works.

Dan shared this with me after we were married and I found it so hilarious that I had him read it to me in the hospital when I was giving birth to Laylee. Here is a small sampling from his elementary school journal:

September 14, 1988
Today I had a pretty good day today. At recess I played kick soccer. My team won. Yesterday i[n] the lunchroom some girls partly unscrewed it so if someone used it, it would spill. Then a kid from another lunch table came and took the ketchup to use it. He came back with ketchup all over his hand!

September 15, 1988
Today, I had a pretty good day. We played kick soccer again and Tony argued with everything…We had spaghetti for lunch today.

September 23, 1988
Today we changed the day around. Math was first… Today at lunch we had coco milk rolls, fruit and some kind of pasta thing with lettuce. We played kick soccer again today. Last night we made bread and peach pie filling. It was good!

September 27, 1988
Today everything went pretty normal. Today we had burritos for lunch.

October 4, 1988
Today we had chicken nuggets for lunch… Kickball was boring at lunch.

November 8, 1988
Last night I figured out why things stick (I think). First of all why does wood fibers or anything for that matter? Of course we all know that it’s all the atomic energy acting upon themselves and others. They (atoms) also work with magnetic forces. Now, I think glue works because it is neutral or else it’s energy can adapt so that it sticks to other particles. So that’s all about particles and whatnot. By the way, we moved our desks into twos. I think Bush will win.

“Today was a pretty good day today” is now a common phrase around our house. I think we should also end all conversations with the phrase, “So that’s all about particles and whatnot.” Yes, I would have married him just for the journals. Do you know how much it hurts to laugh when you’re having a major contraction? Yeah, me too.

I keep getting spam email that says they have “just the thing to make your girl happy. I almost want to click on the link. Maybe they have a good deal on My Little Ponies or Popsicles or people who push swings REALLY HIGH.

Another thing that makes my girl Laylee happy is a good birthday celebration. She throws several a week for various friends, real and imaginary. Every day used to be Ducky’s birthday but now the celebrations are spread between Laylee, Babs, “The Other Snow White,” and any of her other favorite friends. Somehow, it never gets to be my birthday. Hmmm… I may have to look into this. Perhaps the Daring Family has also stumbled upon the elixir of life and ageless beauty. I will keep you informed.

Besides me, it seems that nearly everyone has a birthday sometime or other. What are your great suggests for birthday celebrations? These can be kids’ birthday parties or you can branch out to include us older folks.

This Tip Tuesday was inspired by Lei and Mir. Lei posted about a great party a while back and Mir got me thinking about alternative birthday ideas. I love her perspective and the thoughtful way she teaches her children about charity and service, even on a day that’s traditionally all about the birth-ed one.

For the most part, I am a huge fan of a home party with a theme. One I’m thinking of doing comes from my Post Partum Dr who, when we got sick of talking about my brain chemistry, gave me some advice about child rearing. He’s a big proponent of make believe and allowing children to have a magical childhood where they are encouraged to believe in things that they can’t see that just might be true.

He told me about a fairy birthday party he had for his tween daughter. (No, as far as I know they didn’t eat any beef at the party, but I do want to point out that I am now listed as the 2nd result on google when you search for the words “beef” and “tweens.” My wildest dreams are coming true through this very blog.) They went out into the forest and found sticks and twigs to make tiny fairy houses in the woods. They told fairy stories from American folklore and even the most cynical in the bunch left with a spark of magic in their imaginations. I love that idea.

Another great idea that seems even greater now that I have kids is to send your mother a gift on your birthday. She’s the one who really deserves it.

Now you go.

Until recently, Magoo has woken up every night of his life at least once to nurse. Sheesh! What a BABY! When I couldn’t nurse him for a few days, we decided that Dan should be the one to get up with him in the night and offer a bottle.

The first night Dan was supposed to get up with him, Magoo slept 13 hours through the night with nary a peep. He has not woken up since. Well, that didn’t sound right. He wakes up every morning. He just doesn’t wake up in the night anymore.

On the one hand, it makes me think that he must really like me and only wants to get up if he thinks I’ll be there for some cuddlin’. On the other hand, I wonder if I’m raising a little chauvinist who thinks men should not be troubled with unmanly things such as child-care and feeding.

Further evidence of this theory is found here. When Dan tries to feed him, he falls instantly into a narcoleptic state.

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I let Chris in on my little secret for getting your baby to drop the late night feeding and it appears to have worked for her too. I’m thinking of conducting a seminar or writing a book on the subject.

********

After reading this, Dan informed me that Magoo HAS woken up a few times in the night since Daddy took over the graveyard shift. How was I supposed to know? I was asleep.

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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.

So our family is growing. Now that the supply of Cadbury mini-eggs has been exhausted, we should be shrinking back down to our normal sizes in a couple of weeks. But we’re not talking about the size of individual family members today and no, I’m not pregnant Mom. I promise never to announce an impending grandchild via my blog.

We have two wonderful kids and although we’re not sure how far down this road of parentude we’re gonna travel, or at what speed, we know that there are more children in our future. When we got married, people were constantly asking us how many kids we wanted to have. Dan and I started to routinely answer, “Fourteen,” just to shut them up. We really do love kids though and want to have “as many as we can handle.”

Originally I think that meant, “as many as we can afford,” but now it’s come to mean so much more. How many kids can we care for emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally? We’re not sure. Somewhere between 3 and 100. After Laylee, the number was closer to 100. After Magoo and the trauma my body experienced, that number began to dip.

One of my readers, who doesn’t have a blog, is having her second child and lives in a 2-bedroom home. She asked me for tips on logistics for raising multiple children at the same time. She specifically wanted to know what to do for sleeping arrangements.

My tips for raising several children at the same time (2 counts as several, right? And let’s not forget the millions of tiny children within my ovaries that make their presence known monthly.) are these:

-Try to use the right name with the right kid. I’ve heard that it helps them feel loved or something. If you can’t do this, at least try to use a name appropriate for their gender. If you can’t remember that much, all children can be called “little dude” in a pinch.

-On a more serious note, I will address the sleep issue. I would suggest having the baby bunk in with Mom and Dad (in a separate bed or cradle if you’re a non-co-sleeper like myself) for the first several months until Little Dude Senior is old enough to sleep in a “big-boy bed.” Then put the two kids in the same room but put down the one who has the hardest time falling asleep first.

Someone who has actually done this and made it work, please help me out here.

What other tips do you have for big families, meaning families with more than one child? How do you work meal times, chores, the morning rush, driving them around, homework, etc? Do you have any tips for us new moms?

If you’re a newbie like me and a know-it-all who thinks they’ve got it all figured out, we’d love to hear your theories too. We may laugh at your glib inexperienced neonate hypotheses but at least we’ll be entertained, and isn’t that what this blog is all about — learning, sharing and opening ourselves to ridicule in a public forum? That’s why I come here every day.

Well, not much to say here. Easter was far less bitter than the days leading up to it. This is remarkable since I decided to take a second whack at creating a lovely gown for myself which also ended up in miserable failure. Dan says Laylee will love using it as a dress-up dress, so some good came out of it. I ended up wearing a skirt I made last summer and the world is still spinning.

Laylee’s dress turned out cute, as dresses sewn for adorable children often do. The bunny-man was good to us, bringing me a book of Shel Silverstein poems which Laylee has claimed as her own.

“You hafta SHARE! Please.”

The church service was beautiful, the beauty exaggerated by the fact that I was sitting on the stand with the choir and actually had the chance to pay attention for once…and the fact that it was not my three-year-old who pulled the fire alarm during the choir’s stirring rendition of the closing song, “I Know that My Redeemer Lives.” It was much more exciting with the strobe lights and sirens.

We all love the song so much that we just kept singing away while the congregation mumbled nervously, trying to decide whether it would be rude to flee the building when the choir wouldn’t shut the heck up.

When we found out who the culprit was, I was not surprised. That’s just the kind of thing you’d expect from a child raised by parents who grew up in a nudist colony. *wink*

In other news, the weird things meme is circulating again and although I have been tagged before, I have to mention my recent tag by Peter, a man who’s blog, like his business is called The Tutu Boutique and who listed crying during reality TV shows as one of his weird qualities. Dude. His blog is pink. He sells tutus and princess things. Check him out. He cracks me up.