Halloween 2011 - From Garage to Party Palace

In the week before Halloween we start to get serious about getting ready for the party. This year I tried something new and decided to host the celebration in our garage. The weather had been pretty "iffy" throughout October and I didn't relish the prospect of having dozens of sugared up children confined to the house if it should happen to rain on the night. Also I had decided to get a bounce house. As the kids get older it becomes a bit more challenging to entertain them - though sometimes as adults I think we over stress about that one and they really would have a ball of a time just being with their friends. Anyway - the only place a commercial bounce house will fit at my house is in the drive way - and that naturally led us to having the party in the garage so all the adults could be up the front of the house keeping an eye on the kids and making sure they were well back from the road etc. etc....

So - the garage had to be emptied (that was kind of cathartic and I so liked it when I got all the "junk" that lived there out of it that I haven't yet put the "junk" back and I'm really reconsidering just how much of it I actually need.) Anything that couldn't be moved had to be incorporated into the party decorations and the whole space had to take on a "spooky but not too scary" vibe.

Here's what I came up with......

The Christmas nutcracker got the mommy treatment.....and windows were covered with spooky curtains

 The bike which hangs upside down from the ceiling scored a skeleton "clown" as a rider with a Gymbo stuffed doll riding shotgun. Liam's little bike and his scooter went on top of the cabinet with a couple of other skeletons in clown outfits riding along....

 Hay bales for seating at the party table. Lots of netting hanging from the ceiling. A few chairs for the adults (and the kids that didn't want to sit on the hay bales - they were a little prickly.) Lots of decals and card board cutouts on the walls - some purple and orange twinkly lights to add some spooky atmosphere. Barrels always can be used as props and a good collection of dangling spiders, rubber mice, and decorated craft pumpkins....

Halloween 2011 - The Indoor Decorations

As the month of October progresses the decorations start to pop up everywhere throughout the house.

The powder room...

The entry foyer...

And all throughout the house.....

Liam loves playing with the decorations. For the entire month he has a whole houseful of special "toys" that are both familiar - because they come out every year - and special - because they only come out once a year. Each year you add a few new items and it doesn't take long before you have quite the collection! And I like it that it puts the focus of the holiday on something other than candy...

Halloween 2011 Outdoor Decorations

 Ok - now I finally have some time on my hands to get back to my daily blog practice I want to catch up on what we've been up to for the last couple of months. Our Big Halloween Bash was great fun - worth all the effort to see the kids having such a fun time. A great party is all in the details - and that means starting well in advance and being prepared to use your creativity to work around limitations in everything else - the budget, the location, the weather, etc. etc.

We start prepping for Halloween with our outdoor decorations - they go up in early October. When the summer flowers in the front garden bed are spent - it lies fallow for a while until it can become a spooky graveyard.

Then Helga - the witch - makes her appearance in our coconut tree...

A couple of unlikely characters take up residence at a cocktail party in the front entryway.

And pumpkins start appearing everywhere....

The emphasis is on fun - and so I try and incorporate the traditional spooky Halloween elements but in ways that elicit smiles from the Kindergarten set. Nothing too ghoulish and lots of touches of humor (look for the spook with the toothbrush!) As I said - it's all about the details and adding an original twist to those details.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Where is the line between not raising your child to be a selfish person and being one yourself?

I think it may be more a tightrope than a line and Liam and I seem to walk it every weekend and fall of it about 3 o’clock on Sunday. It’s our witching hour, the trough of our weekly cycle, our low point.

I know this – I don’t like it and yet somehow I rarely seem to be able to prevent us from ending up there, which just frustrates the hell out of me because I know that it should be the exact opposite. It should be Monday morning you dread, right? Not Sunday afternoon.

For the first eight months of Liam’s life my beautiful niece Dominique lived with us – and so Sunday’s were the kind of day I’ve always believed they should be – fewer responsibilities and more time for fun and relaxation. But when she left and it became just Liam and me on the weekends, the departure of his nanny on Friday afternoon began a 50 to 60 hour stretch when it really was just him and me. I once saw another mother’s Facebook post in which she admitted that she hated the weekends and I felt the kind of horror that you do when someone has given voice to an unspeakable truth. To say that the time you spend alone with your child is not the most precious time of all seems like violating a basic tenet of good mothering. But six years in to my single parent experience I can still say that by the time we are hitting 40+hours of each other’s company – things are getting tense.

I know that much of the problem is based in my personality. I’m a loner, who lives mostly in my head and who always has a long list of things on my ‘to do’ list. I push at life – and by the weekend there usually ain’t a whole lot of energy left. Now that I think back to what weekends were like before Liam came along I can see that they were time I gave to myself. More often than not I didn’t engage with the rest of the world and many times I didn’t even venture outside for at least one whole day. It was my time to unplug, to destress, to stop. To recharge.

Happy Halloween

Halloween's not till tomorrow - but already we've had so much fun - and too much candy!!

Next time you throw away a plastic bottle....

Next time you throw away a plastic bottle - pause for a moment and consider if there is something better that can be done with it.....

All I Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten

It's been an age since I posted. This is a busy time of year for me. That means the juggle is even more hectic than usual and you just don't get to do all the things you would like to do.

One of the things that I didn't get to do was attend Liam's kindergarten curriculum night last week. I was sorry to have missed it for a number of reasons. Last year (pre-K 4) I really didn't have any idea what curriculum night was supposed to do and I was very new to the whole issue of how I as a parent am supposed to relate to the school I send my child to. This year I have more complete views on both of those things and I have spent some time educating myself on the whole issue of what should be covered in a core curriculum. There is as little consensus on this as there is on the whole question of what environment children learn best in. If you're interested - I found the book "What Your Kindergartner Needs To Know" by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and John Holdren to be a great resource. It fits with my growing sense of how involved I need to be in Liam's education in order for it to be as fully rounded as I want it to be.

That doesn't mean I'm looking to front up at school and start double guessing the teacher. One of the most interesting aspects of last year was that Liam was put in a class with a teacher that was widely renowned as being God's gift to children - and for several months I didn't like her at all. On one of my first interactions with her I took Liam to class and watched as she told him his "sleep toy" was too big and he should have brought a smaller one that would fit in his cubby. He was so excited to bring that toy because it was a gift from someone special and her tone had his lip trembling and his eyes leaking within seconds. The next week I spent some time talking with the teacher's aide as I dropped Liam off, only to have her interupt and admonish the aide from the back of the room. She was altogether so unfriendly at drop off time that I stopped even trying to interact with her. At that point I thought "well she's certainly something that begins with B but it's not brilliant."

But as the year went on I saw what a wonderful teacher she was and how Liam was blossoming under her instruction and learning about things I never would have expected to see in a pre-K curriculum. Modern art, Greek mythology, French history. I also learned that my one on one interactions with my son are nothing like what a teacher who was 16 5-year olds in a class is dealing with. By most measures Liam is an extremely easy going kid - that's not true of all of them. A key aspect of what kids learn in school is how to operate effectively in group situations. And as a parent I learned that what I initially think of the teacher is far less important than I once thought.

But that doesn't mean the teacher is always right - or that you can abdicate responsibility for your child's education to any teacher or any school and then take the approach of criticizing when it is not what you want. Hence my greater interest in understanding exactly what the class will be covering in the pre-K curriculum. A few weeks back the mother of another child in Liam's class ran into me at a local store and asked what I thought about the educational content of an upcoming field trip. She clearly did not see the value of it and it overlaid a more general lack of comfort with the whole school approach to education. (Liam's school is at the crunchy granola, whole child, non-competitive end of the spectrum.) To be honest I hadn't even thought about the field trip but I am an advocate of the "learning through play" concept and the need for shcool to be fun and engaging for 5 year olds if it is to instill a lifelong love of learning.

And so I was happy when the following paper was included in the packet of information that Liam's teacher sent home because I missed curriculum night. It doesn't cover the content of the year's lessons - but I think it describes the approach pretty effectively. I like the distinction between wisdom and knowledge. Remember - knowledge is recognizing that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Wisdom is knowing you still don't put it in fruit salad.

Why I Blog on Ordinary Days

A few days ago after my sister discovered my blog - she asked me why I was blogging. She said she "got" how just the act of writing about my life and my experiences helped me to process them but she was curious as to why I wanted to do it publicly. Part of it is the commitment factor. Even though I am a writer, I have never been able to consistently keep a journal. And yet when I look back at all the photo books I have created - particulalrly the ones I have done since Liam was born - I see how much they provide me with a link to thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be forgotten. Writing does that even better - and blogging is like publishing, which I know how to do and know I will stick with. So that is one reason why I blog.

The other is just that, as I get older, I long for the sense of community that comes from being with people that see the world the way I do and all the joy that comes from building friendships and helping and supporting others through everything that life throws at us. In the course of my day I come across a lot of things that make me laugh, make me cry, make me angry, make me wistful..... and my blog is my way of sharing them in the hope that they bring joy to someone else, or help them cope with something they are finding challenging.

One of my dear friends is a lady I get to see all too little as she lives in New Hampshire and we are both busy working moms so there is never as much time to chat as we would like. But she touches my heart each time we speak - or even email. This week she sent me this. The Gift of Ordinary Days needs no introduction. I loved it. I hope you do too.

LOL - Now That's Funny

The perils of an older generation adapting to new technologies.....

Fun with Flipper

In the last week of the school summer vacation I took Liam on a little mini vacation down in the Florida Keys. We’ve been to Key West a couple of times before but this time we stayed at a resort on Duck Key – which is only about half way down – 10 miles north of Marathon. The main draw card for us was the chance to interact with dolphins – and as you can see from the photos below we got to do just that.

At first they said they only had room for one more in the program on the last day of our trip – so I booked it for Liam, being a little worried that he wouldn’t trot off without me and follow all the instructions properly if I wasn’t there (typical mom huh?!)  I needn’t have worried because he wasn’t the slightest bit perturbed but just after they got started with the “class room” which is the 10 minutes in which they go over the drill of what to do and what not to do – the lady who had checked us in came out to me and said they had room for me if I wanted to do it. I immediately said “Oh no that’s alright my son seems OK” and then I thought “What am I thinking? Why does he get to have all the fun?” and so I scurried in there as fast as my feet would take me. We were just on the dock giving the dolphins and commands (and lots of fish.) They have a swimming interaction program but Liam is too young for that yet.

It was still great. There is something just magical about those creatures. The trainers were giving us lots of practical information about the dolphins – their life span, their size, their speed, what they eat – but my head was filled with tales of mermaids and shipwrecks and every hour I spent in the water as a kid swimming with my feet together pretending to have a tail after watching reruns of “Flipper.”

Liam was suitably impressed – particularly with the fact that a couple of the dolphins had pink tummies. We may be growing out of a few things but we’re still secretly big on pink. He talked about Twister and Sherman for days and can still remember the names of all the other dolphins we saw long after I’ve forgotten them. I have a feeling that those few moments of touching that slippery, smooth skin will stand out in his mind long after everything else in his ten week summer vacation has faded. I can’t wait till he is old enough for us to go swimming with them!

Batten Down the Hatches

Interactive Hurricane History

My thoughts are with all my friends on the East Coast dealing with Irene this weekend. Thankfully the storm is weakening but it remains a threat and they are in for a wet and windy weekend at best. My first experience of a hurricane was Wilma in 2005. She arrived in Florida literally a few days after I did and definitely had me thinking " Good lord - what have I done moving here?" Ulimately my house had little damage - but the neighborhood and town were hit hard and the memories won't soon be forgotten.

If you click on the link above - you get a very cool interactive map from the Wall Street Journal that shows the paths of all the hurricanes in the last six years. Let's hope Irene does nothing to make her more memorable than the countless ones here we barely even know about.

Floating Football

Take a couple of minutes out of your day to watch this youtube video - click on the picture below. It's guaranteed to make you smile and maybe even wipe a tear from the corner of your eye. Perfect antidote to the usual breakfast serving of fear, disgust and depression that comes our way by virtue of the morning news. My friend Jill - who is an inspiration in and of herself - first posted it to her facebook page. Her daughter's first grade teacher had showed it to them in class. We are blessed to have so many wonderful, enthusiastic, creative people who have dedicated themselves to educating our children.

Yet another reason to feel good about your day. Enjoy!

At Last - A Shirt That Fits...

There seems to be this underlying assumption that it is a wonderful thing to be ...err... well endowed. I think this one falls into the "grass is always greener" category. If you haven't been able to go without a bra since before you were a teenager, the rationale for thinking this can be kind of lost on you as it definitely has some drawbacks. Skimpy summer tops with shoe string straps - not for you. Tight fitting t-shirts - don't bother doing your make up 'cause no one will be looking at your face. Boob tubes - dream on. Even with a strapless bra you'll look like you swallowed a sausage sideways.

Seriously - for all the social admiration that supposedly goes with being a member of the over-the-shoulder-boulder club the fashion industry does a lousy job of catering to the curvy figure, particularly in the realm of business appropriate clothing. Victoria's secret seems to be that she has channeled her inner porn star so well she's made a career of it and she doesn't have much left to say to those of us with more mundane jobs.

Actaully it's not lingerie that I find the most challenging - it's blouses. Shirts. Any top with a button front. There are just precious few that fit well, don't gape and yet don't have to be so big that you feel like you stole it from your man's closet. And so I was delighted to find that someone who had expereinced similar challenges all her life actually went and did something about it. She used her tailoring background to found CarissaRose (www.carissarose.com) - a website that sells ladies shirts (and a couple of dresses) tailored to the top-heavy. I can attest to how well the shirts fit and it's true what they say - it really does make you look slimmer to wear clothes tailored to your shape.

Carrying Work Papers With Style

I'm always on the lookout for hand bags that can (sort of, kind of, maybe) do double duty as brief cases so I don't have to carry two bags with me. I picked this one up online at the Steinmart website. Cheap as chips but it has a cute vintage vibe going with lace panels that makes it a bit friendlier than your typical document tote. And it is perfectly sized for carting the inevtiable wad of papers/books/magazines that I need and comes with all the right pockets for keys, wallet, glasses, iphone, blackberry... when did I become such a gadget gal?

A Fact of Life

Farewell MOPS



All grown up and heading out the door to Kindergarten

It’s a big day in our household – it’s Liam’s first day of kindergarten. We did “meet the teacher” for an hour yesterday morning and all went well. He is actually going back to the same school where he went for pre-K last year and so not only is the school familiar, his old classroom (and beloved teacher) is right next door and many of the same kids from last year are in his class. But some of his best friends are not – and he knew that – and he admitted to feeling “funny in my tummy about kindergarten” on the drive to the campus. Happily that had changed to “I’m so excited” by the time we left and he liked his new teacher (she has long hair – in Liam’s eyes that confers god-like status J.) It’s going to be a great year.

And it’s the end of an era. As the mom of a kindergartner – I’m no longer a member of the MOPS sorority – Mothers of Pre-Schoolers. I feel like I’m coming out of a siege. Being a MOPS has been the most satisfying, delightful, joyful time of my life – but it has also been five and a half long years of juggle, juggle, juggle when what you are trying to hold up with one hand is a baby so you’re pretty damn sure you don’t want to drop it! In the other hand you have your only visible means of financial support – your job – which also in my case happens to be a career that I have dedicated myself to and nurtured for 22 years (really, it was that long?) prior to being a mother. So you’re not too keen to see that lying in shards on the floor either. “No problem” you tell yourself as your gird your loins (after labor you actually know what your loins are!) and get ready for the fray – “millions of women do this, I can too.” Five and a half years in, you are like millions of women – you are doing it, but you never quite stop wondering – how?

Fact is you just don’t do anything as well as you would like to on an ongoing basis – and you learn to accept that cause if you don’t you are a crazy, stressed out, constantly cranky working mom that nobody – including you – wants to be with. You learn to laugh at yourself a lot more. Really – it’s funny rather than mortifying when you realize that you: are wearing your underwear inside out, wore a racer-back bra under a dress with a deep-V back to a business meeting, ran out of gas because you forgot to fuel the car, forgot to pack your toiletry bag for a business trip, turned up with a present for a girl instead of a boy to one of the endless pre-school birthday parties that you get invited to because who knew that Trace was also a boy’s name, missed crazy sock day at preschool (yet again) because you lost the preschool monthly calendar (yet again), left your kid’s lunch box sitting on the dining room table, only realized you had left your wallet at home after the check-out girl had rung up that huge trolley of groceries, etc. etc. etc.

For the first three or four years you often wonder how it is that every other mom seems to be doing it better. By the fifth year you hopefully have at least one or two mom friends (the fact that sometimes becoming a mom requires a whole changing of the guard in your own friends will be the subject of a post all of its own.) Those precious mom friends will admit that their life seems perfect just by virtue of smoke and mirrors and that they too spend a lot of time wondering how everyone else is doing it with what seems like less effort and less chaos. It makes you feel better – though I’m not sure why. It doesn’t reduce any of the challenges in your life – but it does help you feel as though you are not constantly failing the grade. And the one piece of advice that these women all share is that “it does get easier as your kids get older.”

And so it does. As I prepare to go and wake Liam and do my impression of Nemo the fish jumping all over his father shouting “First day of school, first day of school” I know that I can: go and take a shower without having to wheel his high chair into the bathroom so I can keep my eye on him; walk the dogs with him walking beside me instead of having to deal with a stroller at the same time; feed the dogs without worrying that he’ll crawl over and eat the dog food; tell him to go and put on the clothes that are laid out on his bed and by the time I have repeated myself five times he may have actually done it; and sit patiently in the front seat of the car while he struggles (but ultimately succeeds) to put on the seat belt around his booster seat by himself.

But best of all I can still pretend to be the tickle monster when I wake him up, cuddle him while he has his morning milk, and kiss him at least half a dozen times before I say goodbye to him for the day. There are some things about being a MOPS that I never want to give up.

In the beginning.....

Growing....

...growing.....Photo credit: LifeXpressions

....growing....Photo credit: LifeXpressions

Art and Attitudes - Pre-K Style

There is a wonderful art association in our town that holds art camps all throughout the summer, which Liam just loves. Week-long camps that are divided into half day sessions – they are perfect for the attention span of 4- and 5-year olds. And they teach them to make some really cute stuff. Lots and lots of really cute stuff! The only downside – if you could even call it that – to this is that they bring home that really cut stuff by the trunk load and by the end of the summer your house ends up looking like the behind the scenes shot of a disorganized pre-school.

Liam, naturally, is very attached to all of his wonderful creations and wants to keep them and – much as I love a pristine home – consigning them straight to the dust bin seems too hard-hearted even for me. So they hang around for a while – just long enough for the attachment to fade just a touch – and then we effect a compromise. Liam gets to pick the three pieces he really can’t bear to part with and all the rest get digitized (I scan or photograph them) and then they are given a fond farewell.

The photos make their way into his annual Shutterfly album and last year we had so much we even published a special Shutterfly book – Liam’s Art Alphabet. We assigned one letter of the alphabet to each art work and plugged the holes (we did have to get a bit creative with naming some of the objects – how many things actually start with ‘X’) until we had all 26 letters covered. Liam took the book to his first show and tell for pre-K very proudly. It’s a great idea all round. We get to keep an accurate memory of all his wonderful youthful creative in a form that Mommy can neatly put on the bookshelf -  (which is much more to her liking than constantly trying to work out how to dust a paper machier fish!)

Arm Candy

Last season I bought this beautiful bag from Brahmin. It never fails to elicit compliments whenever I carry it. There's a wide choice of similarly gorgeous pieces of arm candy in this season's collection. Yum!

Runway vs. Runaway

“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

The quotation above from the English artist and designer William Morris is more than a century out of date and was written about decorating houses, not choosing clothes, but I find it to be equally applicable - particularly in this age of celebrity designers. I have a love/hate relationship with the world of fashion. On the one hand I love the ongoing process of developing my own style and choosing just the right pieces to bring a look together and the whole fashion industry is an integral part of that. But at its core I believe it is an industry that’s misogynistic – less about helping women be comfortable in their own skin than in pushing them to purchase the latest designer-labeled “it” item in the belief that it will confer a sense of panache that they are currently lacking. It’s less a celebration of women than a manipulation of them.

That doesn’t mean I don’t “indulge” it just means I do so in the complete knowledge that the motivation behind all the magazines, catalogs, blogs, books, TV shows, stores etc. is to get me to buy – and hopefully buy the item with the highest mark-up, not the one that is necessarily suited to me, my lifestyle and what I already have in my closet. I’ve found that as you get older it’s easier to ignore all the noise. It really is true that you can become more comfortable with yourself and realize that there is less to what people look like than society would have you believe. It’s not that you don’t care what you look like – you just don’t believe that the latest runway trend that looks kind of weird on the pasty-skinned anorexic model in the magazine shoot is going to look anything but ridiculous on you. Even if it is the latest designer look.

There is no shortage of beautiful clothing and accessories that help a woman put together her statement of “this is who I am today” and look fabulous without shouting from the roof tops which brand she is wearing. The celebrity trend with designer clothes and accessories has become so ubiquitous that for some people it’s all about the logo, not the item. That’s not style – that’s advertising. And you’re paying them to do it! Think about it……

Is This What They Mean....

When they say the housing market has turned upside down....

Of course in some places it's not completely upside down - just a little bent out of shape

Postcards From The Edge …. Of The World

We just got back from a Disney cruise. It was our second and it won’t be our last. As someone who always loved to travel I used to look at people who went on cruises with a befuddled lack of understanding. In fact I even recall saying (rather pompously I’m sure) that being on a cruise ship must be kind of like getting stuck in a crowded cheap hotel. Then I had Liam. Travelling with the pre-school set is just a whole other experience and in my book cruising stacks up very favorably against all the other options. No trying to keep a 5 year old quiet and still for hours in a plane or a car. No having to deal with luggage with only one hand because you need the other one in contact with the child at all times. Just 24/7 kid-friendly food and entertainment and the knowledge that no matter what your child does some kid has been sure to have done it there before so you don’t have to die a thousand deaths of guilt and embarrassment. Everyone on this trip “gets it” when it comes to kids which just lowers the stress factor enormously. The fact that Disney Cruise Line actually also does a great job of making sure there is a good range of adult food and entertainment is just a bonus as far as I’m concerned.

Liam and Goofy - Not quite captain material

We sailed to the Bahamas and a hot topic of conversation on the journey to Port Canaveral to board the Dream was who would be “driving” the ship. Liam considered all the Disney characters finding reasons why or why not they would make a good captain. When he came to Goofy he got rejected because he was too… well….goofy. Liam was convinced he would drive us over the waterfall. This concern was repeated numerous times and it wasn’t until the third day of our trip that I worked out what he meant. We were looking out at the horizon as the ship left the dock and we could see another cruise ship that had been docked next to us and had left about half an hour earlier. It was sailing toward the horizon. “Look  Mom” Liam cried. “They’re going to go over the waterfall.”
Sometimes we forget that the world looks different through the eyes of a child…..

Good Things Come In Small Packages

In today’s super-security conscious world flying has become a choice of carting checked baggage with you even for an overnight business trip (and paying for the privilege of checking it now on most US airlines) or looking less than your most polished self at your destination because you couldn’t fit all your essentials in to one little plastic “baggie” in your carry on.

There’s a few things that help. Pre-moistened facial wipes are a great alternative to liquid make-up remover and cleansers and don’t have to be put with your liquids and a lot of products are now available in those cute little travel sizes. Checkout the website 3floz.com for some fun (but not cheap) kits to try or search “travel size” on Sephora to see if your favorite products come in travel packaging. (The roll on perfume pens you can get here are a god send.)

But for the product you already have and just want to take with you in a small bottle get yourself a couple of GoToobs by Humangear. Someone who travels really put some design thought into these cute squishy little numbers. They have a wide neck – so it’s easy to get the product in, a flip lid that doesn’t leak in your bag, come in a range of colors and have a window on the neck to make sure you don’t use your shampoo to clean your face, have a suction cup so you can stick them to the shower wall for easy use and best of all – they are squishy, so you can easily get the product out right down to the very last drop.

No well stock plastic baggie should be without them!

Humangear GoToob 1.25 Ounce Travel Bottle,Lime Green,Small (1.25 oz)

Humangear GoToob 3 Ounce (3 pack) Travel Bottle, Clear/Blue/Green, Large (3 oz)