live from sublurbia

[think of a something thursday!]

I make forays into super-parental-book-mommy-land, trying to do the connecty-fun activities with my kids that we all can enjoy. Activities that also give them a taste of the lifeskills they’ll need some day. Sewing, cooking, shopping for supermarket deals, snaking a drain, running off fraudulent roof repair men claiming to be inspectors for your insurance company … skills kids of both sexes need in equal measure.

But you’ve also got to know your audience. I watched some of the moms before me go through this - trying to figure out an age-appropriate activity and have it blow up in their faces. Not only skill-level appropriate activities, but time-appropriate activites, too. No one is having fun if Mom or Dad is in the kitchen or doing most of the obvious work.

Heck, it was only last month that I finally learned from a mom friend how to let my kid crack open an egg and enjoy it without getting egg slime everywhere (hold egg in one hand, rap with a spoon held in the other). On a scale of Sandra Lee to Alton Brown , I’m coming up close on a one-man Rachael Ray … but not that close. Continue Reading »

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[Think Of A Something Thursday!]

Towels are generally very useful things. But I come today to sing the praises of one particular 16 x 14 rectangle of terry cloth.

My sister started her family before I and turned me onto the simple bar towel. Catches spills and drips, hangs nicely off of various mom bags - can serve as a very emergency diaper. But as my kids have gotten less messy and my purse and mom bags have evolved, I began leaving them at home.

Bad Idea.

One dark and cranky night, I managed to get the kids in the car out of order, pop the groceries in the trunk, my purse in the front, and get the cart to the cart guy while negotiating the surrounding parking spaces with people who’ve never learned to wait their turn. Meantime, mister can’t-keep-his-hands-off-of-buttons-and-switches has locked the children, keys, and cell phones in, and the mommy out. All for the want of a towel. Fun, no?

That’s how it could have happened.

But how about this?* Continue Reading »

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My eldest doesn’t quite have the full grasp of holidays; I’m not sure I did at his age, either, but it’s fun listening to him work it out.

Today he was wandering through our evening muttering about holidays to himself (we’d just stopped and loaded up on candy for Hallo’ween at Super Target). “Some people celebrate Hanukkah, some people celebrate Christmas.” Trying to figure out what he remembered and was sorting with the information he’s getting at school, I asked him, “What do we celebrate?”

“Birthdays!” he cried. Continue Reading »

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I’ve got the traveling bug. I’ve had it for years, for decades. According to my parents, my first word was related to traveling, I first left home before two years of age, employing rudimentary tools that have me worried about what kind of ideas my kids are going to come up with and use against me.

Packing list for my first plane trip: Crayons, coloring book (Holly Hobby) , snacks. Clothes packed by: Magic Fairy (mom). Plane amenities: playing cards, wings, three choices of meal and two snacks. Huge seats and plenty of wiggle room.

Packing list for my more recent plane trips: Crayons coloring books, flexible toys, books, snacks, stroller, sling, toddler, baby, baby food, juice boxes, milk boxes, cell phone, carseats … And my job is also to be the magic packing Fairy. Oh, and four people in seats designed for three. And doffing shoes at security x4 …

Continue Reading »

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Trying out the “replacement” camera with it’s grinding lens noise and fuzzy pictures … Continue Reading »

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Going on a mini-hiatus this week, sorry. My pocket camera is on its last legs, and I can’t get any decent shots of any of my ideas.

Hope to return next week in better focus, as it were.

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[Think Of A Something Thursday!]

Recycling at home has been a bit hard for me; mostly because I didn’t work at it. And I couldn’t figure out a system that wouldn’t be a pain in the butt. I think the fact that we had so much to recycle had a lot to do with it. Pop cans. Canned food cans. Pizza boxes. Frozen Soylent Orange Cutlet boxes. Price-a-roni boxes. Sugar bomb pop flake containers.

Some day my great grandchildren will curse my name for the number of individual half-liter water bottles I threw away. Or they’ll be feeding it to Mr. Fusion and happy at their landfill discovery of the results of my “It’s not easy enough” attitude. Continue Reading »

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[Think Of A Something Thursday - why not? :)]

Laundry scents make me sneeze. They make a lot of my family sneeze, so I’ve gotten used to scent-free detergents; I don’t like anything that is even lightly scented. But I couldn’t break my addiction to dryer sheets once the scent-free ones came on the market. Fluffy, static-free clothes were what I wanted - even if the chemicals in them wrecked my towels’ absorbency and trapped stains and body odor in the clothes.

As an infomercial and catalog shopping junky, I’d seen laundry balls over the years, which claimed to eliminate the need for laundry soap. The “science” of those I disbelieved, so I took a pass. More recently I saw dryer balls, which reminded me of using tennis balls in the dryer when drying shoes. I bought a couple pair and they worked (and still work) great.

By combining them in the dry cycle with a bit of vinegar in the rinse cycle, I hardly have any static problems. My clothes are soft, the absorbency of my towels is unmarred. [Gosh, do I sound like an infomercial yet?] Absorbency is more important than ever now; I’m washing cloth diapers a couple times a week. Nothing like chemical build up to minimize the usefulness of a good diaper. And irritate tushies.

Too bad dryer balls are made of intensely sucky material: PVC. In use they are non-toxic, or so the claim goes, but what about the manufacture? Pretty toxic. Disposal, too. Guess I shouldn’t have thrown my broken ones away, or even bought these in the first place? Whoops. Continue Reading »

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I never could get the hang of Thursdays… oh, wait. I do okay most days of the week. I work, I write, I get through. I’m always coming up with ideas but rarely implementing them or doing more than a basic implementation. Anyone who has been around me more than a year or two knows of many many things I’ve started and not finished. So I’m trying to finish some things and get other things moving. With Real School for our eldest in progress in our lives, I’d like to work out some kind of way to balance out the change required in our lives, whatever that change may be. Working different hours, trying different ideas.

Thinking of *something*.

Sometimes my ideas come quickly, and just in the nick of time. Public Speaking Class, 7th grade. I chose speechifying as an elective, but I didn’t get along that well with the others in the class; general shyness and the gearing up of puberty for the majority of us. Getting along well with others was not normally much of a big deal, but on this day it was. Each of us needed to give a speech, as usual, but for the first time we needed visuals. Charts, notes - written on one of those ancient things you young whippersnappers might have heard of - poster board. Big, flimsy, twenty cents at the local 60’s era Michael’s equivalent. Continue Reading »

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