My 4-year-old wants to be a unicorn for Halloween, which is tomorrow. Last night, I finally pulled out a hand-me-down bunny costume and thought about how I’d magically turn it into a unicorn, when it occurred to me to have her try it on first. You know, to see if it fit. Though, honestly, if it didn’t, I had no backup plan. While I will be the first to cop to my planning-obsessive nature, I also have to admit that I have a tendency to put things off until the last minute. It’s not just that I work well on deadline; it’s because I am the Queen of Procrastination. Read the rest of this entry »

I live in New England, where blue-blooded Yankees can be found shoveling snow in short sleeves (with a down vest on, you know, for warmth) and neighbors place bets on who can resist firing up the furnace the longest.

I am not that hardy. But with home-heating costs past “high” and approaching “WTF” levels, I’m doing my lower heating costs this winter. And you can, too. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just come back from a too-quick trip to my parents’ house, where we celebrated a slew of birthdays — my youngest niece turned 1, my daughter turned 4, and my son is about to turn 2. There was plenty of cake, though all of the kids mostly feasted on icing and then worked the resulting sugar high off by going ballistic in the bounce house, and the grownups cast their diets to the wind and indulged.

We were also indulging in something else, something that only people with far-flung families can truly understand: A chance to reconnect with the people closest to us. Read the rest of this entry »

I was on Facebook the other night, scanning through my friends’ status updates. I’ve declared my love of Facebook here before — sometimes, it’s the easiest way for me to reconnect with friends and extended family, and reading the Twitter-like mini-posts and shared news (or non-news) articles makes me feel a little more in-touch with the far-flung people in my life.

I generally try to keep Facebook for my friends and family and use LinkedIn for professional networking but, just as in real life, those two worlds collide from time to time. Read the rest of this entry »

Rice is a staple in our household, because it’s easy to make, versatile, and gluten-free — all important qualities when you’re juggling work and kids with food allergies. We usually make enough for two meals at once. And sometimes — like last week — my husband will make enough rice for two meals at once, not knowing that I had already done the same thing a day or two earlier, which I did not remembering that he had done the same thing before that. So we end up with way too much leftover cooked rice in the fridge.

Here are some of the things we do with it: Read the rest of this entry »

I was watching my kids interact today, and it occurred to me that they’re like a bunch of magnets, shaken up in one of those cups you use in Vegas to roll the dice and spilled out onto the table. Sometimes, they’re all glommed together, five wildly different kids at five wildly different ages, somehow forming a cohesive unit. Other times, it’s as if they’re all negatively charged, scattering throughout the house, caroming against and away from one another.

Call me idealistic, but I’m pretty sure the latter happens because of their ages and developmental stages — we’ve got a teenager, a pre-teen, a tween, a preschooler, and a toddler right now — and not because only two of them were born to me. Read the rest of this entry »

Our toddler has been clingy lately, at school and at home, and though I chalked it up to his being 23 months old, I did wonder whether there was something else going on. One of his teachers left his school recently, an it ocurred to me that I haven’t seen several of his classmates in a while.

I was still thinking about it as I walked him into his classroom, where he promptly attached himself to my leg — very unusual for my outgoing little man. When one of his little friends came up to greet him, my boy, still wrapped around my knees, held out one pudgy arm, keeping his friend at arms length. When the friend tried again, my boy pushed him away. “No! No hug!” he said, loudly.

Embarassed, I stooped down to tell him that we don’t push our friends, and then turned to the other little boy to say that my guy just wasn’t ready for hugs yet; in true toddler style, the friend didn’t seem to mind, thank goodness. A few minutes later, their teacher told me that particular friend was leaving at the end of the week. “Home day care,” she said. “It’s cheaper.” Apparently, a few other kids in the class have gone that route as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Need to get the kids out the door in a flash? Studies show that kids do better in school if they’ve had a good breakfast (and, of course, the same goes for grownups and work), but you don’t have to waste money on protein shakes, fast-food egg sandwiches, or sugar-filled cereal bars, and you don’t have to prep things way in advance, either. Here are five nutritious breakfasts that you can whip together in five minutes or less:

1.) Eggs in a hole: Butter a slice of whole-wheat bread, and then cut a hole the diameter of a juice glass out of the center. Place the bread, butter side down, in a hot frying pan. Crack an egg into the hole (prick the yolk with a fork to break it so it will cook more quickly). Let egg set, then flip bread and add the piece you cut out to the pan.

2.) Awesome oatmeal: Who likes plain oatmeal? Not my kids. Not me, either. Keep these two blends on hand for doctoring up the dish. Fruit blend: Diced dried apples, apricots, peaches, raisins, and mango. Spice blend: Brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a dash of cloves. Add a few generous spoonfuls on top, and tell the kids it tastes like cookies — because it does.

3.) Fruit salad: The Wiggles were right — yummy, yummy. Add a slice or two of whole-wheat toast smeared with a little peanut butter for a protein boost.

4.) Smoothies: Yogurt + whatever fresh or frozen fruit you have on hand = breakfast. Take it up a level with a few drops of food coloring… kids may scoff at a regular banana-strawberry smoothie, but an electric green one will disappear quickly.

5.) French toast: Believe it or not, this is actually really, really quick to make on the fly. Whisk together two eggs, 1/3 cup of milk, a dash of sugar, a few drops of vanilla, and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Dip slightly stale bread in, letting each piece soak for a mere two seconds per side; fry it up in a barely greased pan. This amount of batter will be good for about five slices of bread — wrap leftovers individually and refrigerate or freeze for days when you don’t even have five minutes to make breakfast.

This has nothing to do with working, and everything to do with being a parent.

The little kids and I had an excellent weekend. We went to karate class, ran errands, and picked apples. We went on a hay ride and chose pumpkins right from the pumpkin patch and ran ourselves ragged at a really cool playground. We played Chutes and Ladders five times, folded laundry, re-folded laundry after it was used as a landing platform for a bed-jumping contest, and drank warm apple cider with cinnamon sticks for straws.

And now, just a few hours later, my nearly 4-year-old is in the hospital with an IV full of antibiotics, and I don’t know what’s wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though I love to cook, there are definitely days when I feel all cooked out — when the very thought of planning and thawing and cooking makes me not want to eat for a week. Makes me look at my kids and ask, “Didn’t I feed you earlier? What do you mean you want dinner now?”

We deal with some food allergies at our house, so stopping off and picking up a pizza or fast-food isn’t an option. But roasting an extra chicken and stashing it, in advance, in pieces, in the freezer, is. If you’re more gastrointestinally normal than we are, you can pick up a supermarket-roasted chicken on your way home instead. Either way, once you have that bird in hand, you have plenty of options. Here are five things you can do with leftover roasted chicken. Read the rest of this entry »