thoughts and stories from a twenty-first century homemaker
I know this subject is so last year, but I’m just so excited about it anyway, and the end of last year was full of, you know, having a baby, so, a few weeks late, here we go!
Back in 2020 I read a whole seven books, the last two of them during December, because I was so mortified by my only having finished five so far when December arrived. I had set a goal for myself at the beginning of the year to read 12 books. One per month, on average. Should be totally doable, right?
Well….
Oh, 2021. So different from 2020. And still so different from everything before 2020.
See what I’ve been up to all year, in baking, books, and life events….
This Thanksgiving felt a bit like deja vu. Five years ago, I was 8.5 months pregnant on Thanksgiving. Same thing last week. Although that first time I wasn’t hosting the meal/party, and I only had one other kid underfoot while making the few items I was in charge of. This year, I did 100% of the grocery shopping, made the pie crusts, baked one of the pies, and then tag-teamed with my husband for most of the additional prep, so that Thursday could be relatively relaxed: whip up toppings, set grill and oven temperatures, cook. But still….8.5 months pregnant means I was only able to enjoy a tablespoon of each dish on the table before I got full. Don’t worry though, I had a whole piece of pie a couple hours later.
Anyway, with this new baby’s birth fast-approaching, I feel it’s time to tell the last remaining so-far-untold birth story—that of the child who was due in early-to-mid-December last time—Luke’s.
It was a Friday morning….
“It’s Fall!” they say.
My favorite bloggers are sending out their new fall baking recipes: apple cinnamon and pumpkin everything. The local grocery stores have had giant bins of pumpkins lining the front sidewalk for at least a month. Pinterest and new memes are featuring flannel again. Not to mention a certain flavor at a certain coffee chain that’s already sold out in some places(???)! (But also can we be thankful that said coffee chain is open. This post is brought to you mostly by sitting in a coffee shop “dining area.” Unfortunately it’s the chain one, because my current city lacks ANY local options.)
Meanwhile….
Potty training is a touchy subject. Parents who have chosen to wait longer before beginning to potty train their kids can go straight into defense mode when the subject comes up. Parents who have had raging success with potty training before age 2 can dismiss the real struggle that some kids and parents have. Let me be clear upfront: When to Potty Train Your Kid is not an issue of morality. If you’ve picked a different timeline than I have, I’m not judging you.
My goal in writing this is just to share my story. This is Potty Training 3.0. It looks a lot different from the 1.0 and 2.0 versions.
Feel free to use my story as a point of reference for the beginning of your own Potty Training Story, take comfort in commiserating with me on it, or simply roll your eyes at me for writing sooo manyyyy wordssss about tiny people’s #1 and #2. Reader’s choice….
My oldest is six-and-a-half now. 😱 She’s tall and skinny, but still has baby-face cheeks. That one runs in the family. 🤷♀️ For lack of more exciting content, and because it seemed unfair that Cecily’s is posted here but not the other kids’, I thought I’d share her birth story with you this month as she enters first grade. 😭 (Luke’s to come….someday.)
*Usual warning about details about body parts and functions. Keep reading at your own risk.*
I was 41 weeks pregnant. I went to my routine—at that point semi-weekly—appointment with my OB. Everything was fine. She said….
I’m terrible at sleeping. This is a new development in my life since becoming a mom. In college, I would consistently fall asleep within 10 minutes of closing my eyes at bedtime, and I could go right back to sleep after getting up to pee in the middle of the night (it was only once a night back then). It confounded my roommates that I could fall asleep for a quick power nap just about anywhere that I had been studying, if a sleepy spell came over me. Even then, I suppose, I wasn’t good at going to *take* a nap….
If you’re tired of hearing me talk about vegetables….I apologize. The kids are occupied with some painters tape and the paper plates they finger-painted a few days ago, creating an “art museum” on the playroom walls, right now, and dinner is already prepped, so I have a few minutes to actually write, and what I’m thinking about is broccoli. Because the dinner I just finished the prep work for is called Lemon Broccoli Pasta Skillet, and it has a pound and a half of broccoli in it. And without fail, when I chop up broccoli, The Broccoli Song gets stuck in my head:….
…and more thoughts about salad and food.
I had never heard of arugula before I went on a pilgrimage to Rome at the end of my freshman year of college.
Back up. I didn’t really eat salad at all until my freshman year of college. In my opinion, this was one of those cases where peer pressure was healthy. “Huh, all these people like salad. I should start eating it, too, I guess.” Growing up….
Or, How to say good-bye to some of your kids’ toys so that you can reclaim your sanity as well as “the playroom” or whatever area the toys are rearing their unmanageably numerous heads in your home.
I breathe a contented little sigh of “things are as they should be” when I arrive at the top of my stairs and gaze out at a vast expanse of carpet in all directions uninterrupted by toys and other “things that don’t belong here.” I wish I could say that this is what greets me at the top of the stairs every time, every day, but let’s be honest:….