Category Archives: Family

One day soon…

…I will find my way back here. I am slowly coming to grips with the daily ups and downs of life with two, with the complete lack of time to get things done, and with the incredible emotional roller coaster of parenting a 2.5 year old. But I’m finding myself thinking more about what I will do with myself as things start to open up a bit, and looking forward to the end of this tunnel vision period. I know there are a million blogs that talk about how relentless and thankless being a parent is, but I still don’t think I truly got it. Day after day, no breaks, no exceptions, no sick days. I’ve been away 6 nights, I believe, since Tuck was born. I envy B’s business travel. But I wouldn’t trade it, and can’t see another path that would work for me right now. I treasure these amazing kids even when they are bafflingly difficult, and I know how incredibly lucky I am to have the choice to stay home with them.

Ellie is 6.5 months old already. She sent the world a Valentine last week:

Ellie loves everyone. #valentines #baby #sweetness

Currently, though, she is quite under the weather. Ear infection and wheezing; we picked up a loaner nebulizer today to try for a day or two. Sad sweet girl; she’s still been a total trooper, trying her best to smile through it.

Under the weather again. #lifewithkids #winter #cutmeabreak

Tuck, though he has learned new and exciting tantrum techniques in these last couple weeks before he’s officially 2.5, is also delightful. Verbal and hilarious, full of unbelievable statements. (“I’m going to the airport. I’ll be back shortly,” he says, as he carries a silverware caddy and a lunchbox out of his room, while wearing a hard hat. Or, “Hush, I’m on the phone. Hewwo, Onora?”)

Going to the grocery store. #lifewithkids #latergram
(This time he was going grocery shopping.)

Post-dinner cleanup w @archivalclothing. #uncles #lifewithkids

He enjoyed cooking with his uncle Tom this weekend:

Time to eat! @archivalclothing #lifewithkids #uncles #picnic

And we enjoyed a quiet Valentine’s Day picnic by the fire (B took a trip to the unbeatable Formaggio Kitchen for the second year: our favorite new tradition):

Skipped our usual thursday night out in favor of the annual Formaggio Kitchen picnic dinner by the fire. ? ( @mscelfo, you almost lured us in w those pics, despite a no v-day out rule!) #valentines #cheese #charcuterie

And of course, when Tom visits we always eat well:

Really need to find a way to convince @archivalclothing to live with us. Cooked dinner while we got the kids down.  #dinnerathome #latergram

Speaking of Valentine’s Day, Bridge said it best when she tweeted that crafting and cooking with toddlers is not how it looks on the internet. We managed to get through three valentines before Tuck got bored and refused to add any more paint. I completed the rest using art he’d made in his art class. But still: cute.

Joint effort. #valentines #lifewithkids #watercolor

Finally, we are still getting the old CSA! It’s now year-round, though erratic in winter. Check out The Kitchen Garden if you’re in the area and want a CSA. We’ve been pleased with the quality since Stone Soup merged with them last year. And now Clover is adding a pickup on Saturdays in Harvard Sq.! B picked up the vegetables last week and brought home this ludicrous carrot:

Trying to adequately convey the scale of this ridiculous carrot from the CSA. #giantvegetables #csa #nofilter

…hee.

October

Ellie is two months old today! I can’t believe it. I thought the second pregnancy flew, and it turns out that the baby days are flying, too (though as someone said to me the other day, it’s a marathon, but each day is a sprint).

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It hasn’t been easy, adjusting to two kids. I feel like I’m dropping all the balls most of the time, but each time we have a good sleep night (which last night was, after a hideous, horrid miserable weekend including one 11-1:30 a.m. period where E woke up every 3 to 15 minutes) I feel like I might just make it through to the other side. One thing that is making it go faster is keeping up with Tuck, who has classes to go to and friends to play with and doesn’t let me just sit around staring at the baby.

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I found this ominous, especially since T just said “I fix baby Ellie” while brandishing his screwdriver

And now I know what we’re working towards, having done it before. As Ellie starts smiling, I turn and see Tuck making jokes. He is so very, very funny these days, all silly faces and perfect mimicry. “Gee whiz,” he says to himself when something is hard, and “oh, Tuck, silly Tuck” when he’s amusing himself. He’s been pretending to be a doctor and heal his little orange doll’s stomachache (“Make Neddy feel better”), or he puts on his hard hat and gets out tools to work on his “cherry picker” (step stool) with the “jackhammer” (grabber claws).

This sums things up pretty well.

We had a bad scare a week ago–through a variety of misunderstandings Tuck was alone in the room with Ellie on the window ledge/changing station, and he pulled her off, three feet, onto her face. She’s too young for any “is the child acting normally” observations to apply, so we ended up in the pediatric ER until 1:30 a.m. getting Baby’s First Head CT. I was so furious at Tuck; he’d been being pretty aggressive towards Ellie and ignoring anything we said about being gentle or nice to her. But my friends Ann and Greta encouraged me to turn on hardcore positive reinforcement techniques, and a week later they finally seem to be working. Yesterday he played gently with her, tickling her feet while she smiled for a couple minutes.

And honestly, how could I stay mad at this face?

Baby James Dean?

Besides, he’s just two. He’s so big that even I sometimes treat him like he’s older, which isn’t fair at all. I had a sad week or two recently when I realized most of his friends have started school this fall, so we’re on our own during times when we used to have consistent playmates. But suddenly I met a bunch of new people–mostly through the awesome block party our neighborhood threw the weekend before last–and it turns out there are lots of new babies and families with kids Tuck’s age within a block or two. It’s nice to expand the circle.

Meanwhile, Ellie, as I said, has started smiling and is suddenly much more interested in the world. She loves to lie on that ledge (now ALWAYS with an adult right next to her, sigh) and stare at our faces or at the windows. And she appears to be deeply in love with the dangling monkey rattle on her bouncy chair. I don’t have nearly as many photos of her because much of the time we look like this:

I could basically pretend I'm still pregnant (w an enormous 12.5 lb baby). #theresababyinthere

She’s so snug, she snoozes through all our morning activities, and I don’t think Tuck even realizes she is there.

It’s fun to see her starting to emerge from that newborn haze, all unfocused eyes and eat-sleep-poop. I think we’re going to like her.

I minute in the life of a baby.

And I can’t wait until both kids are sitting on a blanket with me at the farmer’s market, enjoying a grilled cheese and soaking up the early-fall sun.

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Ellie is up, after a record-breaking 40 minute nap not on me WHILE TUCK IS ASLEEP, miracle of miracles. Off i go!

Next time (which will be sooner): Apartment stuff!

Two

Tuck is two! It’s nearly impossible to remember life before he came along; and as I look at little Ellie it’s even harder to remember that my big boy started off looking like this:

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Two days old

Here he is during Ellie’s newborn shoot (more on that later), just before turning two:
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Anelise Tubinis Photography

Where to start talking about Tuck at Two? He is ridiculously verbal. Everything we say gets repeated, from the mundane (hubcap!) to the hilarious (he now says “silly goose!” when he decides he’s being funny or when one of us makes a mess). He remembers everything we tell him, and refers back to things that happened weeks or even months before (after spending one day with my friend Stephanie‘s son at a beach in SF in May, he said “[Son’s name] trucks beach” nearly every time we mentioned a beach or lake all summer). He knows full well if he’s been or is being bad, and tells us exactly why we’re mad when we ask. (“Daddy angry. Spitting.”) (On that note, his newest trick is to fill his mouth with water and then spit it on the floor OH MY GOD WHY?) He has the sweetest voice.

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At Squam last month

He’s so, so two. Combined with bringing Ellie home, he’s definitely pushing back much more than even a month ago. Lots of sudden melt-downs and seemingly nonsensical resistance. We’re working through it–I’ve been trying to spend as much one-on-one time with him as I can, leaving Ellie with my Due-for-Sainthood Mother-in-Law, and that’s helped a bit. He spends an hour or more in his crib chatting with his stuffed animals before giving in to his naps. He sings. He thinks I know a song for every tool and machine, because I made up front loader and backhoe songs.

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Meeting Ellie in the hospital

His favorite toys are his tools, and he spends hours “fixing” things around the house.

Important work with new tools on new truck! #birthdayboy

He’s very active and strong, and seems pretty agile. At his gym class he keeps up with all the odler kids (he’s as big as they are, for one), and he excels at climbing ladders and balancing on the beam. He’s never happier than when Ben gets to take him to a playground.

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This all seems so…surface-only. I can’t adequately explain who he is except to say that he’s a very special, sweet boy. Every night when we tuck him in before we go to bed, my heart swells when I watch him sleep; that peaceful cherubic face under the golden curls.

"Climb crib!"
Not cherubic.

In the car the other day Ellie was fussing and Tuck was bored, so we asked him to tell her a story. We could just barely hear him “One-upon-a-time there was boy named TUCK.”

I can’t wait to find out what happens to him.

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Anelise Tubinis Photography

Welcome to the world!

We are thrilled to introduce our new addition, Ellie (Elizabeth Christy, named for both grandmothers), who joined us 11 days early at 1:01 a.m. on August 2 (missing my birthday by 1 hour!).

Only prop allowed during newborn pics: My new-antique trencher, a fabulous b-day gift from Christy!
Baby salad

Ben was in NC for a business meeting last Wednesday, and his mom was headed up from Long Island to join us for Tuck’s early birthday party (planned so we could do it before his sister arrived!) and then stay on through Ellie’s birth to help out. She was originally coming on Friday but she had a dream about the baby coming early and made her ferry reservations for Wednesday instead (though she didn’t explain why). Ben and Christy were both due in around 6 p.m. At 4 I started feeling what I was fairly certain were contractions–spaced well apart but enough to make me throw some final items in my half-packed hospital bag. Tuck had gone down very late from his nap, and by the time I woke him up at 5:15 (thinking I really needed to get to Whole Foods and pick up the CSA by 6!) my contractions were about 4 minutes apart. He woke up miserable and then freaked out about the heavy rain that was falling, and I realized driving around and grocery shopping probably weren’t on my agenda, so I called Ben in his taxi and asked him to get the CSA.

He showed up right when his mom did, at 6:15 or so, with vegetables in hand, to be greeted by me saying “Hi, I’m in labor.” (I did notice that the kale looked lovely, though.

Long story short, we headed to the hospital not long after, and after an intense (I’ve gone drug-free with both births) but mercifully fairly short labor, Ellie joined us early the next morning. Seven pounds, 5.8 oz., 21 inches long, with dark hair just like Tuck had.

Day 1 in hospital (uploading to Flickr, sorry for bunch of photos.)
The next morning

She is already a week old! A few scenes of our sweet, mellow snoozer (knocking wood all over the place):

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All dressed and ready to head home

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New baby in travel bassinet

Not the intended occupant.
Old baby hamming it up in travel bassinet

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Relax, already!

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My little watermelon girl

Tuck is fascinated by “Baby Ellie” but a little off-kilter, as you can imagine. I’m trying to spend one-on-one time with him whenever I can. Any tips from those of you who had toddlers/preschoolers when you brought home #2?

As summer sweeps by…

Shelling peas! (One of those this-is-what-I-thought-it-would-be-like moments.)
Shelling peas

Here we are, almost at the end of July, and I don’t think I’ve posted one summer meal! We’ve been enjoying the CSA, as always, of course. Tuck has finally gotten on board with corn on the cob, though I haven’t been able to budge his bias against tomatoes yet. We’ve been sticking with the Family Dinner program, though vacations threw things off a bit and my increasing level of exhaustion means that we’ve fallen back on pasta with pesto one too many times already. (Tuck can out-eat us in the tortellini-with-pesto championships.)

Watermelon-lime-mint agua fresca (that color!!) #nofilter #natureispretty
Recommended: Watermelon agua fresca w lime juice and mint. (Blend watermelon in blender. Strain. Add lime juice to taste, squeeze some mint and throw it in the pitcher.)

Another all-local (except feta, olive oil, vinegar) dinner. Summer!
All local!

All-local leftover dinner=panzanella!
All-local leftovers became killer panzanella.

We were lucky enough to spend a long weekend in Maine with some very dear friends earlier in the month, and then a week at our favorite lake in NH with more great friends, and it’s a bit of a let-down to be back in Cambridge and still facing lots of summer. The lakes, though… Oh, summer on lakes:

Sheer joy. #lakelove (I'll try to stop now.)

Not too shabby. #lakelove #nofilter
Maine.

Quiet time. #lakelove
NH

Walking through the woods before dinner.
Happy family walking to dinner through the woods.

Glass. #lakelove #nofilter
Glass.

Tuck is such a *boy* all of a sudden. He had a great time at the lakes, digging in the sand and wading in up to his swimmies. He’s 23 months old, and never stops talking–repeating everything we say with extreme relish and care. As fun as it is, I’m a little heartbroken as he starts saying things correctly instead of using his made up words. He has always called his little orange doll (the beloved Ned; we’re on #4) “Neigh,” but about a month ago moved to “Net,” and now “Netty.” My friend Suzi was “Sitty” and is now…Suzi. I wish I’d shot more video of him talking over the last six months! I need to capture “Itchu” (thank you) before it’s gone. My very favorite thing at the moment is the way he appends “time,” pronounced “Taaahme!” to things. So…”Eating taaaahme!” “Measure taaaahme!” “Screwdriver taaaahme!” Cracks me up every….well, you know.

His current obsession is with our step-stool, which he has decided is a cherry picker (“Chitty Picker Taaaaahme!”). He plays on it every day while I finish my breakfast, and has started concocting complicated schemes where he parks all his trucks on top of it, climbs on with them, and then gestures at them wildly. I’d love to know what he is thinking but he just says “tow truck, dump truck, backhoe, picker.” Sometimes he wears his hardhat for this exercise.

Extremely important pre-nap work.

I’ve also noticed a real shift in his sense of humor over the last month or two. Ages ago he started laughing (or fake laughing) when we said “funny” or “silly,” but now he’ll say “silly,” crack up, and make a funny face or do something goofy. He also runs up to me and makes a crazy face and then starts dying laughing. He has a “silly face,” which he pulls on command or when he’s trying to get out of trouble, and has recently developed some hilarious dance moves (with sound effects) for truly hysterical moods. What a crazy thing, to watch a baby turn into a toddler turn into a boy.

Kind of a terrible idea. #chaos
Thanks for this totally terrible idea, Whole Foods.

He’s also far moodier and more easily heartbroken lately. I know some of it is age, but I wonder if there’s also an element of understanding that things are about to change? We’ve been talking a lot about his baby sister and what it will be like when she arrives. Two weeks till my due date!

In which I go on for ages about a completely new topic

This is totally off-topic from what I normally talk about here, but what the heck. Have you read the (very lengthy) Anne-Marie Slaughter piece in The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can’t Have it All? Really interesting stuff. I chose the opposite track from Dr. Slaughter, I’m more than a decade behind her in parenting and life, and I’ve made choices that all but guarantee that I’ll never be in any seriously powerful career position. But I made those choices in a really informed way, and I’ve been very grateful for the thought I put into it many, many years ago, in addition to the luck/flexibility I’ve ended up having now. (That is to say, my choices do not reflect on yours! Everyone goes about this differently and I respect whatever arrangement you’ve made. Also I know I’m lucky to be able to choose to stay home rather than have a choice made for me for whatever reason.)

From the article:
In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

Before my senior year of college I was very seriously considering law school. I come from a family packed with lawyers of every stripe–judges, ADAs, corporate types–and I’d always really enjoyed talking through their cases, pulling the facts apart, understanding how they argued one side or the other, etc. I’m a logical thinker and in general really felt like the law was the flip side of the coin for me, if I didn’t pursue my by-then-almost-a-decade-old journalism dreams. (What can I say, I latched onto this career very young!) I spent some time that summer shadowing my uncle, then a corporate defense litigator and partner at a big firm in Portland. I spoke with as many of the women in the office as I could, especially the ones who had come from the white-shoe firms in NYC, where I assumed I’d end up, and asked them about work-life balance. I will never forget one of them looking at 20-year-old me and saying “Honestly? There were two female litigating partners in my office. One never had kids, and the other would send out memos when her nanny was on vacation asking things like where to buy kids’ shoes or easter candy.”

The same summer, a friend loaned me Flux, by Peggy Orenstein, and I read it in about two days. The book says a lot of what Dr. Slaughter does, that very few women can actually “have it all,” and no matter which path we choose we tend to end up questioning ourselves.

I went back to school determined to stick with journalism, and I never bothered to take the LSAT. I didn’t want to choose a path where if I eventually wanted to stay home with kids (and if I’m honest, I always assumed I would) it would be at a crucial point in my career where, as one of my uncle’s colleagues said, stepping a toe off the conveyor belt would mean giving up any chance of getting where I wanted to go. I graduated, interned, temped, and eventually worked my way onto the staff at Fortune, and then just when I’d gotten the promotion that meant I could really begin pursuing my own bigger stories, I quit to get married and move to New Hampshire for a year. A year in consulting after we moved to Boston, followed by a couple years of full-time freelance work, and then Tuck came along and here I am. I do a couple freelance pieces for Fortune each year, and I have other projects here and there, but 90% of the time I’m a stay-at-home mom, and I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be doing something else.

That said, I still have moments of real doubt, where I question where I’ve ended up. Did I squander my potential? Where would I be if I’d stayed in NYC (the answer for an awful lot of my colleagues is “laid off,” so…), or even if I’d been more ambitious once I actually got the job? Am I lazy? What will I do for a Second Act when my kids are in school? It’s not like full-time magazine work is thick on the ground in New York these days, much less Boston, and is that what I’d want, and where would I be going back into the hierarchy? One of the things that was hard to take when I was in consulting was starting at the New-College-Grad level despite seven years of work experience, since I was jumping industries. Will I look back when I’m in my late 30s and wish I’d stayed on *some* conveyor belt, or will continuing to write and blog and freelance be enough to keep a toe on?

When I was at Fortune I got into a pitched battle with a very senior (female) writer about CEOs in the Fortune 500. She is of the generation that has fought for every step up the ladder in male-dominated fields, and her career is her life, from what I saw. I was probably about 25 at the time, and I remember she asked me when I thought my generation would get to the 50-50 split in terms of CEO slots. I thought she was joking, but when I realized she was serious I said “That will never happen.” She was FURIOUS, but I stuck to my guns–as I told her, I think my generation is less willing to make the sacrifices her generation did, and in any group of 100 equally-qualified men and women there will never be as many women willing to give up what they would have to give up to be a CEO. I was amused to see Slaughter mention the generation gap in her article:

Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family.”

And yet she closes her intro by saying the best hope for changing our current situation is to have 50-50 representation everywhere from the Senate to the C-Suite. That, I’m afraid, is putting the cart before the horse. People like me won’t choose a path that leads to a position of power when we look to those positions and see nothing but sacrifice. (Side note: The year I argued about women CEOs the Most Powerful Women cover story was about stay-at-home husbands. And when Dr. Slaughter addresses the husband issue, she rightly points out that assuming marriage to a man willing to pull more weight with the kids solves the problem doesn’t address how women vs. men feel about being away from their kids. The section talking about this very sensitive topic is *fascinating.*)

One last thing. I loved this from a Q&A about the story on the NY Times parenting blog:
We need to have managers who will look at someone who’s still in the office at midnight and say, look, you’re not managing your time as well as the person who can do the same amount of work and be out of here by 6:30. Then, things change.

Seriously. I remember one of my editors used to be out of the office by 6:30 or so almost every night, and yet her section was always the first one finished. She managed her writers and her own time exceptionally well; why should she stay until 11? This is why I prefer to bill my freelance work by the project, not by the hour: I work fast and I write fast, and I don’t think I should be penalized for it.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to write about this. Maybe because I think almost everyone I know is struggling with some aspect of it, or has in the past, and we need to be honest about our fears. It’s sensitive stuff, made harder to discuss by the fact that I think everyone tends to get a little defensive and assume they’re being judged, no matter which decision they made. Ugh. If you get a chance to read the article, do. I’m interested to discuss with anyone who is in the mood!

Status report: 3 weeks of Family Dinner

So here we are, a few weeks in to our new system. Overall, I’d say I’m about 1000% less stressed by feeding Tuck than I was before. I’m much less concerned about buying special foods or worrying what he’ll eat if we go out, and I’ve enjoyed the new rhythm of our evenings, with Tuck’s bedtime meaning we’re done for the night, not just starting our own dinner, cleanup, etc. Ben makes it home most nights, though we’re still working on the timing and order of operations. Tonight I’m going to try bath first and dinner at 7ish, instead of dinner earlier and bath after.

First night of family dinner
First night of Family Dinner! Very focused.

The first meal I cooked was one of the most successful. I made simple chicken cutlets (pounded chicken breast, dunked in beaten egg, dredged in Italian-style bread crumbs, pan-fried) and served pasta with pesto and a salad. After refusing to touch any kind of meat, including chicken strips, for months, Tuck ate the chicken up and demolished the pasta.

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Frittata, yum!

The most fun we’ve had has been with fruit, since he is obsessed with it and will eat as much as we’ll give him. We even played with chopsticks last week, inspired by a current favorite book, the adorable Spoon. (Little Spoon is jealous of his friends knife, fork and chopsticks until his mom points out that he gets to do fun things like dive into ice cream and stir hot cups of tea. So cute.)

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Ok, so his technique isn’t 100%, but he got them to work!

I’m grateful that we’re heading into summer and berry season, since I don’t love buying a bunch of stuff trucked in from who-knows-where. Still, his joy over a bowl of blackberries is hard to deny!

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We were traveling this weekend, for a wedding, and I was thrilled by how he ate. Breakfast was best, just because there were a lot of non-kid’s-menu options. (Other meals ended up involving a lot of chicken fingers and pasta.) One morning he ate pancakes, eggs, bacon, some of Ben’s cereal, several bowls of strawberries, and some pineapple! At home he’s now routinely eating his big bowl of yogurt and an english muffin or piece of toast with peanut butter.

I know there haven’t been any good photos or recipes lately–that’s up next! I’ve been relying heavily on my phone, and Instagram, but pictures I take of dinners end up being pretty unappealing. Here’s my peace offering: Since June is acting like March (and it was 90 degrees in March, so….who knows), I made a slow cooker stew for dinner last night. Tuck rejected it and ate a bit of bread for dinner, but Ben and I were deeeeelighted. I hate sweet potatoes but didn’t mind them here. If you’re the person who sent me this recipe, which I had pasted into a note page on my phone for the last 6 months, please speak up so I can give you credit!

Below is a direct quote from whoever sent me this. I did brown the beef, but thanks to a genius-time-saver-brainwave, I just browned the 2 big sides of the hunk of chuck instead of chopping it up before browning. Then I cut it into pieces, each with two browned sides, and added it to the slow cooker. The addition of tomatoes totally makes this. My usual Guinness stew uses only the beer and last batch it turned out bitter (burned flour, I think, actually). This had great flavor and was, of course, even better today. Super-quick prep, too.

“Also — in other news — easiest beef stew crockpot recipe ever:

1 can of Guinness
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped
1 onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, pressed (or less, if you don’t love garlic as much as I do)
2 bay leaves
1 pound (+) of stew beef (not too lean, or it’ll be tough) [Note from Kate: I used 1.5 lbs of chuck and I wouldn’t have wanted much less meat in the mix]

Sizes and amounts can change, depending on your tastes. Throw it all in the crockpot and cook it for 2 or 3 hours on high, or 5 or 6 on low. Technically, you’re supposed to brown the meat before you stew it, but I didn’t bother with this recipe, and it was delicious anyway.”

First real summer CSA pick-up this week! I signed up for a fruit share and they’re promising strawberries AND rhubarb; such riches. I plan to make this ridiculously appealing cake from Smitten Kitchen, but let’s be honest, I’m awfully lazy about baking. We’ll see.

On Snacks

We don’t, much. Snacks, I’ve found, are a major reason Tuck, at least, didn’t try things at meals. We were always strict about snacks–he had one at 10 and one after nap (usually 3:30); they were limited in size, and he never had a snack cup or anything that allowed him to determine when he’d eat. No eating in the car, or anywhere but at the table when we were at home. Out and about things flexed a bit. Usually the morning snack was in a park, but if we happened to be at Target I might let him munch on his crackers out of his snack bag to keep himself occupied. Still, he was getting pretty demanding, and was never satisfied once he’d finished what I offered. It was a lot of carb-heavy Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies or stoned wheat thins, raisins, etc., since he wouldn’t eat cheese in non-shredded form.
But I was struck by the passages about snacks in “French Kids Eat Everything.” The author is much more reliant on snacks than we ever were–her kids always eat in the car, at stores, and any time she needs them quiet. But her quest to break the habit made me think a lot about the whole “shut them up with food” concept that we are all so used to. After all, don’t most of us snack in the car occasionally? Most Americans probably eat at least one MEAL in the car every day! Is it really so bad?

I honestly think it is. I’m working a lot with Tuck on being patient, and I think the French idea of hunger not being a bad thing (as in, feeling hungry when you sit down for a meal) is one that we as a society need to embrace.

I’m a hypocrite, by the way, because one of the only things that controls various pregnancy symptoms for me is to snack several times a day to keep my blood sugar very level. Ahem.

Since we started the new approach to food, the morning snack has disappeared about half the time. Depending on what we’re doing and whether I think he needs it, he sometimes has a little cheese or shares a cookie with me. In the afternoon, he generally has a decent snack after nap, but if he sleeps later than normal and it’s getting too close to dinner, we skip it. I’ve noticed that even after just a couple weeks the demands for snack (“Sack? Sack? SACK?”) at specific times or in certain places have diminished. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they are unpredictable now!

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Skipping snack at the playground today–he didn’t even freak out when everyone around him whipped out fruit pouches and crackers!

(Another element is that he’s been eating breakfasts that would, in Ben’s words, choke a horse, so I’m not concerned that he’s starving two hours later. One morning this weekend he ate his usual big bowl of plain yogurt with applesauce and fortified infant oatmeal, a huge slice of bread with peanut butter, cereal with banana, blackberries, and half a leftover blueberry pancake (large) from lunch out the day before. He may be five feet tall by July.)

I’m just over 29 weeks along now, and looking down the tunnel at the next couple months. Over the long weekend we made a list of 45 things to get done before Tuck’s early birthday party at the beginning of August, and then we proceeded to check 16 of them off. It was thrilling: Tasks included “scrub front porch,” “swap out board and picture books” and “hang art in guest room,” but man, is it satisfying to get stuff done. I planted things in the pots on our patio, at long last, so it looks less like an abandoned lot:

I planted things!

And we ended with a fun afternoon playing in the driveway with the water table, hose, and, eventually, a long-overdue scrubbing of the car. Tuck was extremely helpful (and figured out how to use the hose nozzle VERY quickly, much to my (damp) surprise).

Early work-training.

Happy summer! More to come soon on what we’ve been eating over the past week.

Feeding a toddler: I refuse to be beaten

Occupation 3: Fireman!
How can this face be such a troublemaker?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should be doing with this blog. (Obviously more than nothing, which has been the status for far too long.) Honestly, this pregnancy has been much harder than the first–chasing a very active toddler is incredibly draining, and I’ve been much sicker than I was the first time around. Still, right now I am feeling positive and excited about food, namely food for Tuck. Bear with me while I explain:

As I mentioned in my last post (ahem), months ago, I got fed up with catering to Tuck’s increasing pickiness, and started doing a bit of research. I quickly got to Ellyn Satter, whose dense-but-seminal “Child of Mine” is a classic “good sense” approach to feeding children of all ages. She basically says that parents are responsible for what, when, and where children eat, and the child is responsible for how much (or whether) they eat. Full stop. Family meals, one set of options, control of snacks, no catering, bribing, food as an emotional reward or punishment, etc., also play into it, but all of that fits into those zones of responsibility. According to Satter, if a child refuses what you give them (as long as it’s a reasonable selection; ie. things they can physically eat), they’ll be hungry enough to eat the next meal. No jumping up four times to make a new meal or present a quesadilla because the mac and cheese didn’t pass muster. She recommends having bread and milk on the table at every meal, and otherwise letting the child eat whatever the family is eating.

The prettiest greens, from our CSA
Greens from our spring CSA

Now. Obviously family meals are a wonderful thing, something we’d all love to do, but modern life dictates that timing can be a bit tricky. So for a couple months I got stricter with sticking to one set of offerings at each meal (he even went to bed without dinner a couple times), but since I was still cooking a meal for Tuck separate from our own dinner, we kept falling back on quesadillas, grilled cheese, or bread with hummus, always with some vegetables offered first but never with much success. He wouldn’t eat pasta. No rice. NO BREAD, except sometimes toast. He stopped eating meat at around 14 months (maybe earlier?), so his protein came from hummus, peanut butter and cheese, and his iron came from the fortified oatmeal we stir into his breakfast yogurt with applesauce.

Occupation 2: Competitive pie-eater (the layered bibs were his idea)
He does like pie.

After a few spurts of obsession with fruit, he wouldn’t even eat that, aside from applesauce or Plum Organics packets. I hated that his diet was comprised of carbs, cheese and snacks like raisins and Annie’s Cheddar bunnies. This was not what I envisioned; I’d always sworn to myself that I wouldn’t fall into the trap and allow my child to live on “kid” food.

Before our recent trip to the West Coast (about which, much more in a minute) I read that “Bringing up Bébé,” and then “French Kids Eat Everything.” I much preferred the latter, which is basically a memoir version of Satter’s wisdom (though she’s only mentioned by name once) with a few variations to fit French society (only an afternoon snack, kids *are* required to taste things, though not to finish them). It reminded me of how much I wanted to beat this thing, and the approach of our trip, combined with the increasingly obvious need to push Tuck’s bedtime a bit later, made me think it might be time to start sitting down together at the table.

Well.

We started in San Francisco for four nights, where we rented an apartment and Tuck ate hummus. But he did grab a few mandarin oranges in the grocery store, and try to eat them whole.

SF at sunset #nofilter
View from the roof of our friends’ building. I mean, honestly.

We went on to Carmel for a couple nights. Tuck ate grilled cheese (made with gruyère, on one occasion) and french fries. He refused plain pizza. I knew better than to try buttered pasta.

Carmel
Carmel

Enjoying the view. (oh dear.)
Distracted by the view (um) at dinner in Carmel.

Then we landed in Eugene for six nights with my parents. My mom and I had been discussing this for ages, and she was strongly in favor of a shock-therapy approach, letting the sudden influx of new foods and timing be part of being at Nama and Poppa’s house. I mostly cut his morning snack, so he was hungry for lunch. The afternoon snack was small but a real treat, like toast with the all-natural version of nutella. Every night we all sat down at 6:30 and ate appetizers–crudités, cheese and crackers, olives–while Tuck ate dinner. On night two he wanted the goat cheese, and then decimated it.

Goat cheese
Goat cheese is an excellent facial toner, you know. (I don’t know that. I made that up.)

On night three he grabbed for the carrot sticks and gnawed on them a bit before using them to scoop up more goat cheese. He picked out and tried a bell pepper, though he didn’t like it. One night I gave him some pieces of mandarin and he mushed them around for a while; the next night he ate the whole thing so fast I couldn’t get the peel off quickly enough. He wanted apples, and ate them. He ate almost an entire mango over two days. He ate gruyère, manchego and cheddar in slices and chunks (he’d previously refused any cheese that wasn’t grated, of all things).

Perhaps my favorite photo ever

He ate THAI FOOD.

Thai food

Here’s my theory (I always have theories):

Around 12-18 months, babies develop “neophobia,” or fear of the new. I think it’s probably a leftover self-preservation instinct from our hunter-gatherer days. They’re old enough to get around by themselves, which means that in the bush they’d have had the opportunity to pick berries or find mushrooms or whatever. The babies most successful at not being poisoned would probably stop eating anything they hadn’t eaten before, until they were old enough to do a bit more research (neophobia is usually gone by age 3, though of course by that point many children have been taught that being “picky” means “being catered to” and stick with the refusal to try). But what if the baby watches a trusted adult eat something? They might wait until they’ve seen it a few times, but then maybe it will seem like a safe idea to give it a little try–at least a poke or prod or lick. And after a few cautious attempts, that food will be added to the no-longer-new list and get into the regular rotation. [Note: I can’t wait to read my friend Stephanie’s book about REAL picky eaters (my brother was the pickiest ever until he was a teen, despite NO catering at all in our house), due out this July. Pre-order Suffering Succotash (hee!) now!]

Satter says it takes up to 20 exposures to a food for a child to accept it. She says to just keep putting it out, not forcing them to try, just letting them see it. As far as I can tell she’s right. We got home on Saturday morning, and he’s been eating everything from peaches to fig-almond cake with stinky cheese on the sample tray at Whole Foods. After never once getting him to eat eggs, he’s now a fan of “pancakes” made from leftover rice or pasta (it’s a frittata, honestly) and beaten egg. We haven’t figured this out completely, but I feel like his mind is open now, and he’s ready to try. It makes me excited to cook and share meals with him, and to have Ben at the table with him as well.

I just can’t believe it could work so quickly! Fingers crossed that we don’t backslide.

Spring treat share from the farm!!

So I hope to start recording our family meals here. Not every meal, but the ones I’m happy with. I already find myself thinking about dinner differently, knowing I need to try to get it on the table at 6:30 instead of after Tuck is in bed. And maybe we will find that it’s not feasible, that Ben can’t be home, that the compromise of vegetables and cheese while he eats is what we can handle right now. That was enough to make him fascinated by radishes while we were in Oregon! It’s fun to go grocery shopping and choose lots of different fruits for him to try for dessert (he fell in love with blackberries last night, but refused to taste raspberries). Our last Spring Treat CSA share is this week, and the weekly shares start the first week of June–I can’t wait to take Tuck to help pick out the vegetables. The new baby is due in early August, and hopefully by the time she comes along to rock the boat, we’ll have a decent routine figured out.

Will you come along for the ride? Do you have any questions? I feel like I poured out a lot there, and I’m not sure if it makes any sense!

Tuck’s food glossary, partial, May 2012:
Apple – Appoo
Pineapple – Appoo
Cheese – Chees
Grilled cheese – Chees
Pancake – Cake
Peach – Peachy
Blueberry – Blueboo
Milk – Mack
Crackers – Crackah
Pizza – Pizzie
Pasta – Pahttie
Yogurt – Yogi
Applesauce – Sauce
Water – Wahttie
Strawberries – Stawboo

By the way, food isn’t the only thing we’re up to! Look who was a cool customer helping assemble our new patio table after we got back this weekend:

Very, very helpful.

Ok, that’s still kind of food-related. More house stuff to come, though. The curtains have been made, the new doors are in, and I just need a curtain rod installed in the dining room!

Decorating: The Dining Room

Tuck’s nursery was the first time I ever decorated a room from the floor up, with nothing existing to go off of. Since we moved, I’ve had another opportunity to give it a try: The dining room. We sold our old table and chairs to the tenants in our apartment, since they fit perfectly there and were way too small for the new room. We also left the bookcases in place, since they were practically customized to fill that wall. The rug ended up in Tuck’s room, Ben’s desk went into our bedroom, and the piano is in the living room. Thus, an empty box when we arrived here.

The dining room is part of the modern section of the apartment, renovated beyond period recognition back in 1978 during the condo conversion. It is blessed with very tall ceilings aside from a soffit at one end (which is still at about 7.5 feet), two large windows on one wall, massive sliding glass doors on another, and the pass-through to the kitchen on a third. The fourth wall has a wide opening leading to the hall and the entryway.

Before we moved in, we ordered a new table, french farm-style, from Restoration Hardware. I agonized over the cracks that seemed like crumb magnets, but it didn’t occur to me that the dusty grey finish (no wax, varnish, etc.) would be literally impossible to clean with anything but a dry cloth, and would suck up unsightly water marks like a sponge. A patina is terrific, but this was just going to look terrible. I have embarked on a quest to seal up the top a bit, starting with Danish Oil and probably finishing with some sort of wax, per my brother’s instructions. The color and grain are much more pronounced now, but I still really like the look, and I’m relieved to be working towards some protection. We bought simple ladder-back black chairs and felt seat cushions from Ikea to fill in until we find the perfect chairs.

We use the back doors as our main entryway (they will likely be replaced with French doors in the near future, since the existing ones are old, hard to close, and are destroying the wall every time they have to be slammed), so I got a shoe-storage bench to keep the shoe pile under control. Very pleased with it, it’s the Eureka Storage Bench from World Market and is solid wood, came quickly, and was easy to assemble.

On the other side of the doors is a narrow space where I slotted in a skinny bookcase from the clearance section at Ballard Designs (sold out now). Again, solid wood, very easy to assemble, and it was about $10 more than a Billy from Ikea. That holds most of my cookbooks and some of my food books.

Finally, we needed something to hold our china and some serving pieces. We never had a hutch or buffet since the butler’s pantry in the old house held *everything*. After much deliberation and a lot of shopping around, I stumbled across a Curtis Furniture on Etsy, which does custom work in Nebraska. They had a cherry console, very rustic, that appealed to me, and I worked with Jonathan to design the perfect buffet for our one blank wall. I wanted it to be 50″ (standard sizes seem to be 40″ or 60″) so we could slot in an extra chair and Tuck’s Tripp Trapp high chair on either side.

I can’t even, you guys. I first contacted him on February 11, and then we went back and forth until I finally committed and ordered on the 16th. He emailed me progress shots as they worked on it, and the buffet left the workshop March 2. I got it in a GIANT CRATE (see below) on the 7th. It is gorgeous, if hard to photograph–tons of characters, really great knots (two knotholes, which serve to open the doors; they have slow-close hinges so they don’t slam shut), perfect color, beautifully crafted and very sturdy…I couldn’t be happier. It was a bit more than the pressboard junk from Crate and Barrel, but WAY less than the solid wood stuff, and worth every penny.

Anyway, contact Jonathan! Tell him I sent you!

The custom buffet came and I'm in love.

So the final piece (besides hanging art and that clock–I have a Stendig calendar coming for over the buffet!!) is to curtain those huge doors. I got a plain wrought-iron rod, and I’m just trying to figure out the curtains themselves. They will be about 96″ long, and 120″ wide. I got a bunch of fabric swatches:

Exciting! Fabric samples for dining room curtains.

Which I narrowed down to two (I LOVE the multi-colored zigzag but I think it’s better for pillows):

If I get the grey, the texture will actually be the slubby material of the yellow. I love the yellow and I’m obsessed with yellow, always, but I wonder if it will be too much or too limiting? The grey is probably more sophisticated but I just can’t decide. Any opinions?

One other project that we put off for ages but I finally just got done last week: Getting most of the family photos that lined our 18-foot hall in the old place hung in the upstairs hall. We used picture rail before, so all the hanging wires were for that, and the whole thing was a giant pain. But now it’s done and Tuck can say hi to everyone again!

Before:
Upstairs hall, before

After:
Upstairs hall, after

And in conclusion, Tuck is hilarious and so cute. He’s chatting constantly with varying degrees of clarity, continues to be obsessed with digging, continues to be very stubborn about food (I’m working very hard on sticking to Ellyn Satter’s PHENOMENAL advice from Child of Mine) and is loving this incredibly lovely weather.

OH! And!

It’s a girl!