by Sarah Powers on May 9, 2013
This post is by Sarah Powers, Happiest Home contributor and Managing Editor, and blogger at Powers of Mine.
Photo: Anna Hollister Photography
To my first-time pregnant friend,
You’ve been on my mind lately – a couple of you, actually – dearest longtime friends of mine, about to become moms for the first time. I sent one of you a box of old maternity clothes, the few surviving pieces in good shape after my own three pregnancies in five years. To the other I sent a few books (at your request). Toward you both I find my thoughts wandering daily.
With a three-month-old of my own, I am partly of the world into which you are about to enter; but mine is a third and final babe, riding in a car seat that held her brother and sister before her, pushed in a stroller that is not only no longer fashionable but also probably no longer on the market. I am experienced, yes; but I’m out of touch, too, with the trends of new motherhood.
I want to say the right things to you, offer words that mean something and aren’t just clichés (though, as you’ll find, so many of the clichés are true). I want to be helpful. I want to make it wonderful for you, this thing that is about to happen. I want to save you from some of the parts that aren’t wonderful, and from the disappointment that comes when you realize that some of it sucks, sometimes. [click to continue…]
by Meagan Francis on May 7, 2013
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and whether you want to pick something up for a special mom in your life or are hoping to drop some subtle hints to the gift-givers in your home, we thought a short list of last-minute gift ideas might come very much in handy. Go ahead: print this out and leave it lying around if you want!
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by Meagan Francis on May 6, 2013
I see it every day.
“Dear mom whose rambunctious son knocked down my toddler at library storytime…”
“Dear dad who didn’t notice your daughter climbing out of the shopping cart…”
“Dear mother who was on her iPhone at the playground…”
Vague, one-liner complaints aimed at random strangers have become a staple of status updates, tweets and blog posts, a way to vent frustration while also – let’s admit it – feeling a wee bit superior to other moms and dads at times.
True, you don’t have to look far to find examples of bad, sometimes dangerously bad, parenting. Sometimes another person’s actions inconvenience us, or may even hurt us or our children. So what’s wrong with venting?
I’m guilty of my own vent-y one-liner rants about random people such as the woman who sent me the bad PR pitch and the UPS guy who didn’t knock before leaving the “not at home” slip stuck to my door. And maybe, once in a while, a clueless parent who inconvenienced me.
I never gave it much thought until recently, after reading a “Dear moms who: ____” post that left me squirming in my seat and fighting off the urge to defend myself for having once done something similar. I knew the post wasn’t about me, specifically, and yet…it could have been. [click to continue…]
by Guest Blogger on May 3, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
I am a planner. It’s a control thing. I think deep down I’ve always known that control is an illusion, but that didn’t stop me from pursuing it or from trying to plan as much as possible, even in the face of uncertainty.
Motherhood is a prime example of something I’ve been planning for as long as I can remember. I’ve always loved babies, and as a child my plan was to get married in my twenties, have four babies, and stay home with them. It didn’t work out that way, but I continued to deny my subconscious suspicion that the terms “family” and “planning” might just be polar opposites.
Undeterred, I came up with Plan B. [click to continue…]
by Kristen on May 1, 2013
This post is by Kristen Levithan, Happiest Home contributor and blogger at Motherese. You can read previous historical motherhood posts by clicking here.
Photo: Caitlinator, via Flickr Creative Commons
Would you be surprised to learn that Mother’s Day was created by a woman who was never a mother herself? I know I was. In fact it was a daughter, Anna Jarvis, who was so proud of her own mother’s life and work that she lobbied to create a national holiday honoring all mothers and the work done by women’s organizations. [click to continue…]
by Meagan Francis on April 30, 2013
I’m working with Minute Maid® Pure Squeezed on a series of posts about nurturing ourselves and our families. Click here to see more of the discussion.
During Spring Break a few weeks back, my seven-year-old son Owen seemed to become a little needier than usual.
A buzzing-with-energy dynamo even in his most relaxed moments, Owen isn’t great at filling long, open days. He gets bored easily, even (especially?) on the days I green-light nonstop video-game marathons. He jumps and wiggles and gets in my face. A lot. And his need to move, think, and DO becomes multiplied during school breaks, when routines and distractions and go-go-go goes out the window.
I try to burn off some of that energy by giving him jobs that get him out of the house (“Bring in the recycling bins! Take the puppy outside…again!”) but after a while it’s clear: what he really wants is my attention, and a lot of it.
So during that week, Owen and I spent more time. We played Monopoly (two-person Monopoly with a seven-year-old who doesn’t like to spend any of his colorful fake money? It’s just about as long a process as you’d imagine.) We drew together. We cooked together. He told me stories -lots of long, convoluted stories – centering around Pokemon, playground spats and hero quests. [click to continue…]
by Meagan Francis on April 29, 2013
Recently a reader, Julie, sent me the following question:
My question is about how in the world you manage your time to post to several blogs/monitor all the comments/write for other blogs/write books/and everything else, including cooking/raising 5 children. Needless to say I’m impressed and would love to know your secret.
I have a personal blog (just for family/journaling mostly) so I know how time consuming it is (the photos especially!). I have half started another blog, but frankly am not good at finding the time to work on it. And I only have 2 kids!
Please enlighten me to your tricks of the trade!
I get some variation on the “how do you do it all?” question pretty often, as I’m guessing many moms do. And while I hate to answer this so predictably, the first answer to the question is, “I don’t!”
However, I know I do have a lot going on, and it probably does seem impossibly overwhelming to contemplate from the outside…when you don’t see the full picture. Julie asked about time-management tips, of which I have quite a few. But first I want to address the circumstances of my life that make some of what I do possible: [click to continue…]
by Meagan Francis on April 27, 2013
Jennifer Margulis is a good friend of mine.
We first became acquainted about ten years ago, as part of an email list for writer moms started by Katie Granju. We’ve roomed together at conferences, email frequently and talk on the phone (more frequently when neither of us is under some crazy deadline) and meet up when she visits family in Chicago. A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting her mother (a renowned scientist) and strolling her baby Leone around Manhattan while Jennifer accepted an award at the American Society of Journalists and Authors conference.
My general rule – for obvious reasons – is that I don’t attempt to write critical reviews of my friends’ books. If I love the book and I love the author, I will gladly feature the book to help spread the word, but that’s not the same as reviewing it. Jennifer and I have a long history, so that rule was definitely top of mind when Jennifer’s publisher sent me a copy of her new book, The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line.
But when I read the book I knew I couldn’t simply give it a cheery “thumbs up!” here. The Business of Baby – and its subject matter – deserved and required a weightier, more critical analysis than that.
I wasn’t sure how to handle the conflict at first, and I fumbled a little along the way, initially trying to pass off the job to a neutral third party, our book reviewer Devon. (You can read her take on The Business of Baby on her blog, The Paperhouse.)
In the end, though, I decided that I had to break my self-imposed rule this one time. You all deserve to know how I feel about the book, and what’s more, I think the possibilities for conversation surrounding it are really valuable.
So what did I think of The Business of Baby?
Well…it’s complicated.
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by Guest Blogger on April 26, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
It was shortly after my birthday when my boyfriend popped the question. It wasn’t a marriage proposal, but a baby one. He was twenty five and wanted to be a young dad and at twenty years old, I wanted nothing more than to be a mom. We didn’t tell anyone what we were planning. Our friends and parents already thought we were a crazy impetuous duo, having moved in together after just six months of young love, but hey, we’d known each other for two years!
It was ten long months later that I finally registered a positive on the stick. In that time I had become slightly, um, obsessive. I read everything I could get my hands on relating to conception and pregnancy and in my crazed state, I seemed to have lost my ability to count properly. Thankfully, once I figured out my actual ovulation dates, we were golden.
Throughout my pregnancy I continued to read, and form opinions. Opinions on the best prenatal care, the most natural way to give birth, how my baby would eat and sleep. As my belly got bigger, my social life shrank. I still had movie nights with friends, and I’d attend the odd concert, but their lives of partying and serial beaus seemed farther and farther away from my own in a committed relationship, contemplating my future as a mother.
Then, our beautiful baby boy arrived, and the friends? They disappeared. [click to continue…]
by Sarah Powers on April 24, 2013
This post is by Sarah Powers, Happiest Home contributor and Managing Editor, and blogger at Powers of Mine.
A year or so ago, I started saving glass jars. Inspired by the seemingly overnight rise in trendiness of the Mason jar, and coupled with a sort of obsessive satisfaction I get out of not wasting things, my little collection of old salsa, pasta sauce, olive and jam jars grew steadily.
The problem was, I had no idea what to actually DO with the jars. I turned to Pinterest and created a board called Inexplicable Jar Obsession, which I filled with amazing ideas – like twine-wrapped jars filled with floating candles and ombre tinted mason jars – only to realize when my pinning high wore off that I was never in a million years actually going to do those things.
(By the way, if you are the type to do these things with jars, more power to ‘ya. To paraphrase Meagan in her post about baking from scratch, I don’t do it, but I think it’s awesome if you do.)
It has taken a while, but I’ve gradually found very practical – and DO-able, for me – uses for repurposed glass jars in my home.
Here are 5 ideas for reusing glass jars that don’t require a glue gun, raffia, chalkboard paint, or a crafty bone in your body: [click to continue…]
