November 9, 2009

Only the Best

Here we are in the second week of November and already the holidays seem imminent. My mom was in town over the weekend, affording SPH and I the luxury of doing some shopping—by ourselves. And good thing too, as every which way you turn there is some sort of item luring kids’ attention and seemingly begging, “put me on your Christmas list!”

August 26, 2009

Rules of engagement

Last week we were mired in other more pressing concerns, but I kept thinking about some fitting military-type euphemism in keeping with the spirit of Operation Bento Box that would capture the setback the whole plan suffered last week.

I couldn't come up with one, though. (The words Retreat! Retreat! Retreat! kept flashing through my mind, however.)

July 30, 2009

Operation Bento Box

Sometimes I think I should just quit my job and devote myself full-time to the effort of getting L. to eat. It really IS almost a full-time, high-stress job. We cycle through periods where we just deal, because there are other more pressing things going on; other times, like at the beginning of the school year, we go into panic mode, and scramble to implement reward systems and gimmicks--all of which usually end up not working, or fail too soon.
July 28, 2009

Manna from neighbors

On Saturday we returned home from an afternoon out and about and found a huge bag of corn waiting by our front door. Although there was no name attached, we knew the corn had come from our neighbors diagonal to us. We've also, in the past, been the lucky recipients of vine-ripened tomatoes, knobbly homegrown cucumbers, and the odd green pepper or two.

July 22, 2009

Wrapped Up

While I know intellectually that my boys are growing every day, there are infrequent moments that seem to age them instantly. These random growth milestones aren't in the new parent parenting books. While the books discuss at great length about verbal development, they seldom pinpoint when you might get your first sassy, "okkkk mom!" Or while the experts can give you guidelines for physical development, they cannot tell you how cool it is when your child tackles *that one* piece of playground equipment they have always been too afraid to climb.

February 20, 2009

TGIF

We made it to the end of the week--all of us (yes, even you). It was one of those weeks that drags on and on and on Groundhog Day-style, and by the time we hit Wednesday, I honestly felt it should have been Wednesday two weeks from that day, the week seemed so long.
February 17, 2009

A family’s food for a week

Have you ever thought about how much food your family consumes in a week? How about how much money you spend on that week’s worth of food? I recently came across this photo essay from Time on what families around the world eat. The families are photographed with their weekly consumption of food neatly arranged around them.
February 2, 2009

A feast for the family

While most of the country yesterday was cooking up pots of Super Bowl chili, melting pounds of cheese for nachos, and downing seven-layer dip and other traditional football-watching foods, we used Family Cook Night to produce a massive Chinese feast in honor of the Chinese New Year.

August 22, 2008

This one goes out to the ones we love...

Last weekend, when we were at our friendly local Asian market to stock up on supplies for Family Cook Night, we noticed a large, prominent display at the front of the store, with a little crowd of people gathered around it. When I took a closer look, I saw that the shelves were loaded with beautifully decorated tins. Customers were scrutinizing the tins--picking them up, examining them, and then carefully choosing the design they liked best. I watched while an elderly Asian couple chose a red tin with gold lettering, and a young woman picked a black and red one.
August 8, 2008

Resolutions aren't just for the New Year...and tell me about your crock pot!

This summer I made two new resolutions. Resolution #1 is to give up drinking coffee, and Resolution #2 is to embark on meal planning for the week, rather than rely on our fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants approach. I only managed to come around to actually doing Resolution #1 about two weeks ago. I've given up coffee before, of course, in the months leading up to our trying to conceive both kids. This time around, I'm making the switch because I ended up drinking way too much caffeine last semester and, as a result, I think it made me jittery and less patient than I usually am.
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