I have written about how much fun we have around here, making the family meal plan. Meal planning is not difficult, but it takes time. Then, after you’ve been doing it for a while it takes even more time because even if you come up with creative names for what you’re making and you’re crazy about the recipes you’re using, the desire to come up with new dinner ideas takes over. If you’re a busy person especially, the idea of spending hours combing through cookbooks or searching the web for who-knows-what can be a little overwhelming. I have a confession. It never occurred to me to regularly follow any food…
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The Post That’s Not About How Time Flies, Even Though It Does
I have written many times about how quickly time flies. That’s not what this post is about, though I can’t write about life’s milestones from my perspective as a forty-something mom of an eighteen-year-old and a nearly-twenty-one-year-old without inadvertently injecting a little bit of that sentiment. I mean, at this very moment in this very house we’re preparing for the fact that the kid in this picture, the one on the right who it seems was just starting preschool yesterday, is graduating from high school this Sunday. This being our second time around the block with this graduation business and his being a different kid, I’m not at all surprised…
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Oops, I Did It Again
I may or may not have had to confess to J that I “tapped” the front of his car today when I was backing down the driveway. Luckily, 1. I only bent his license plate a little bit and 2. He “tapped” my car into something when I was in Costa Rica so he couldn’t really say anything except, “Well, I guess we’re even.” Also, when you do something twice, I’m pretty sure it can be spun into something like, “Oh that? That’s a family tradition!” It sounds better that way. Anyway, I’m just thankful that he wasn’t standing in our front window watching me do it, like his brother…
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Consumed
The last couple of months have flown by. This is probably due to the lethal combination of having a high school senior (just when you want time to slow down, it rudely speeds up), taking a couple of awesome trips (to Costa Rica and most recently to Los Angeles), and working hard on my various projects, especially Chicago’s LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER show. We are suddenly only twelve days away from show day, and I can’t believe it, really. Though we have put so much work into the show this year, as Tracey wrote in a post on her blog a couple of days ago, it has been pure fun.…
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Eating Easter Candy Does Not Equal Celebrating Easter
I’ve had some odd encounters lately, and I thought I’d write a quick post about why that’s been happening as a public service announcement of sorts. Here’s what’s up: 1.My family is Jewish AND 2. We have been seen enjoying Easter-exclusive candies like Reeses Peanut Butter Eggs, Cadbury Cream Eggs (the caramel ones, too), Hershey Eggs, and several others. For years, actually. There seems to be a belief among some out there in society that it’s weird for Jews to eat Easter candy because Jews aren’t supposed to celebrate Easter. We aren’t celebrating Easter. The truth is, we just like the candy. I understand that it was totally natural for…
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I’m Cutting Back On This Particular Tradition.
Passover begins tomorrow evening, and for us that means our traditional seder with friends. I just did the math and figured out that we’ve been sharing the first evening of Passover at this particular house for sixteen years with various combinations of families from our temple Havurah, which was formed for the purpose of spending many of the Jewish holidays together. (Our group of six families was formed when D was in preschool!) There have only been a few Passovers–the earliest ones–on which every family was present at the seder (25 people!), and over the past few years as the kids have grown up and some have taken Spring Break…
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When Television Collides With Real Life
When “That 70’s Show” was on television originally, friends told me it was really good and I sometimes thought, “I should watch that!” but it ended up staying in my peripheral vision and then landed in my rear view mirror when it went off the air after eight seasons, seven years ago. Thanks the miracle of Netflix and our ability to stream television classics, J and I have been watching the show together (in episode order) for the last couple of months. We LOVE it. I really wish I had watched it the first time around because it would have been a really good “water cooler show”, but alas, I…
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It’s Coming Back To Bite Me.
It just occurred to me this morning that all of those times in high school I used the “late to class” slips I took from the guidance counselor’s office–in my junior year when I spent time assisting in that office–and filled out as officially as possible and handed to my Spanish teacher two or three times each week so that I would be excused from the first half of class and easily get away with spending time with Jim during his lunch period, and my teacher didn’t mind because I had an “A” in the class, and she’d say, “No problem, Mercedes”, which is the name I picked for Spanish…
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Pee Pee Chicken
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Sleep Would Be Nice
I don’t sleep much. This may not be a surprise to those of you who know how active I am and how much I get done on any given day. Unfortunately, often on any given night I’m pretty active, too. Even though I always get to sleep easily, I wake up often. Many nights I find myself wide awake at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. (for a while, 3:30 a.m. on the nose was my body clock’s daily wake-up time) When I don’t have these wide-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night episodes, I get, on average, five to six hours of halfway-decent sleep each night. Believe it or not, five hours is really quite enough for…