Just Powers

I love the holidays. I love Thanksgiving, I love Christmas, I love New Year’s, I love my birthday and Emma’s birthdays (which are all mixed up in there) and I pretty much love the month of December in it’s entirety.

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I also love when the month is over and January shows up with it’s quiet calm, cold and dreary to be sure, but still and contemplative.

In the beginning of December when the tree goes up and the decorations come out and the cookie recipes are shuffled I can never imagine a time when I will be happy to have the tree gone and the wrapping paper back in its place. And yet, every January I take a deep sigh of relief. I love the celebrations and the time together - and even as we put the decorations away I can’t wait for next year. - but I also love the time I have in January to reflect on what a great time we had during the holidays, what we can do differently next year, and especially how happy and grateful I am to have had another special holiday season with my family and friends.

So, Happy New Year to you all and best wishes for a peaceful and joyous 2012.
xo

In which a horse sees his image for the first time, and a fairy princess tries to decapitate him.

Happy Halloween!!

This week I am in charge of snacks for my daughter’s pre-school class. This means I am responsible for providing healthy, fun, well-rounded snacks for 14 three and four year olds on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Holy Kitchen Nightmares, I haven’t been this stressed out since my family took the class guinea pigs home for the summer in fourth grade.

I know I know, it seems like such a simple task right? Throw some carrots and cheese and pretzels into a basket and you are good to go right? Oh no my friend, it is far more complicated than that. You must have the perfect combination of nutrition and variety with extra points thrown in for creativity.

So here is my snack fantasy: I breeze into school with fruits, vegetables and a protein formed into zoo animal shapes and contained within cages formed from pretzels. The teacher looks at me and says “Wow! I have never seen that before! So creative - and yet nutritious too!” Then later, at the mandatory co-op meeting she brings up MY snack to the other parents as the example of a perfect snack.

When the snack is presented to the kids they all laugh joyously as they pick out their favorite zoo animal and then eat everything because it just tastes so good. They all want to play with Emma after snack, because she is the one who brought in the best snack EVAH.

The other mothers call me or email me that night to tell me that their kids were still talking about the snack when they got home and could they please find out how I managed to get their kids to eat veggies. Oh and also could they please be my best friend.

I am snack genius and pre-school hero.

Here is how it really went down:

On Monday I provided square pretzels, cut up cheese sticks and red seedless grapes. When I was putting them out the teacher said “You know next time you could get the pretzel sticks and then the kids could make little barbells with the grapes!” GREAT Jen, great - snack FAIL. I could just see the teacher making a mental note “No creativity. Lazy mom. Poor Emma.” CRAP.

So I spent the last two nights scouring the internets for some creative snack ideas that would really wow the teacher (oh yes, and provide nutrition to the kids, that too of course). I came up with a few things, but nothing I could do without a trip to the grocery store (and just as an aside, what is the deal with “Ants on a log”? Raisins and peanut butter? How gross is that?). So I opted to make lace cookies with Emma yesterday (from my Grandmother’s recipe, points added for tradition maybe?) Then this morning we made cheese sandwiches and cut them with heart shaped cookie cutters. Then we cut apples horizontally to show the little star in the middle where the seeds live. Fun, right? Healthy, right? Pretty, right?

When I arrived today to set up the snack, the teacher came in and said “Wow, that’s a lot of food.” CRAP. And then came the mental note “Overachiever. Martha-Stewart wanna be. Poor Emma.” I. Cannot. Win. And she didn’t say it, but I could see in her eyes that she didn’t think cookies were a good idea AT ALL. (Even though in the handbook it says we can bring a sweet ONE time during the week - I swear it does.)

I have another shot at snack on Friday, and then again in December, so I guess I might yet figure out how to make the zoo animals etc., but at the moment I think I am just going to throw some carrots and pita chips into the basket and leave a tub of hummus with the teacher. Emma will just have to figure out another way to become the most popular kid in the class, and I will just have to give up on making the teacher like me. Or having friends.

Bethany 2010, originally uploaded by Justpowers.

We got back yesterday from our annual trip to Bethany Beach in Delaware. Can’t wait until next summer so we can go back.

I have been so neglectful of my “monthly updates” for William. I hope that one day he forgives me and reflects on how well-adjusted and healthy he is as a result of his mother’s slacker blogging during his youth.

So I am going to count this as a mini-monthly update for our sweet William.

What he can do:
- Sleep through the night. Most of the time. Except last night of course, but really, most other nights - sleeping much better than his 12 month old self.
- Run. He does this awesomely adorable waddly-running thing where his legs splay out ever so slightly and he giggle because he just knows someone MUST be right behind him.
- Eat with a spoon. Most of the food actually makes it into his mouth. And what doesn’t he allows me to scoop up and put back in his bowl to try again.
- Kiss. He loves to give kisses and hugs. Especially to Emma. He loves that Emma.
- Yell. He has, ahem, found his voice. And it is really loud. Sometimes his yelling is really cute, like when he sees Mike at the end of the day and shouts with joy. And sometimes it is just loud, like when I don’t get the yogurt fast enough.
- Sign. He soaks up sign language super fast these days. He knows and uses the signs for more, please, thank you, bear, plane and shoes.

We aren’t sure how he ended up so blonde (hello to the Beach side of the family!!) or so sweet, but we just can’t get enough of him these days. Those blossoming temper tantrums we could do without.

Brownies!!, originally uploaded by Justpowers.

William helped us make brownies today for the first time. Well he helped us lick the bowl anyway. He’s getting to be quite the little person.

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me if I would be interested in performing with her in a staged reading of a play to raise money for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. It has been years (and years and years) since I last performed on stage, but I said yes immediately, excited at the opportunity to help an important cause and get back on stage, not to mention the added bonus of getting out of the house.

So tomorrow night I will be brushing off my acting shoes to perform in a staged reading of “Pirates of the Chemotherapy” with five other local actresses, two of whom are breast cancer survivors themselves and are walking in the Avon walk. It is a play about a breast cancer support group and the issues the women in the group deal with as they struggle with their illness. It is a tough topic and rehearsals have been emotional for me. I turn 40 this year and will be having my first mammogram. Hitting middle age and having young children has made me much more aware of my own mortality and the play raises issues that frankly I would rather not think about.

Don’t get me wrong, despite the topic, the play is actually very funny at times. It would have to be, with a title like “Pirates of the Chemotherapy.”

So if those of you in the DC area are around tomorrow night I would love to see you - here are the details:

STAGED READING OF AWARD-WINNING DRAMATIC COMEDY
“PIRATES OF THE CHEMOTHERAPY� TO BENEFIT THE
WASHINGTON DC MAY 1-2 AVON WALK FOR BREAST CANCER

** SATURDAY, APRIL 24TH **

Doors open 7:30 PM
Staged reading 8:00 PM

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church (www.cedarlane.org)
9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland

Suitable for adults and teens

Admission is FREE, but donations to benefit the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer will be gratefully accepted

This month marks my sixth anniversary as a blogger.

When I started JustPowers it was a blog mostly about politics - my first posts in April 2004 were about a new congressional race in NY 29, the female Chief of the Park Police being mistreated by the Bush administration, and the power of grassroots organizing.

Nowadays, my posts are all mommy all the time. I am still aware of politics and active when I can be, but the things that fill my days are sleep schedules, diapers, discipline and documenting it all for friends, family and the future.

Someday I may get back to politics as my main focus, or maybe my world and my life has changed so much that I will now always be more focused on my family, hard to say really. It will be interesting to see what the next six years bring…

SPRING!!, originally uploaded by Justpowers.

First swing of spring. Thomas bike helmet and all…

I am beginning to despair that my family will ever EVER be healthy again.

Six weeks. We have been sick for six weeks. Back at the end of January it was Emma who struggled with a cold and fluid filled ears. Then Will caught the cold which garnered him a double ear infection. Both went on antibiotics and I breathed a sigh of relief that life would soon be back to normal.

Then we had back to back blizzards. Nothing to do with being sick I know, but still, 10 days of fun but wacky and housebound schedules. Once we dug out it seemed pretty clear that Will hadn’t quite kicked the ear infections, so off to the doctor we went again and brought home a second round of antibiotics.

Then we all got a stomach virus. Emma and I were laid up with it first and Mike followed closely behind. Will was the only one spared, but less than a week later he developed a fever completely out of the blue. Then Mike developed a fever and flu-like symptoms and was flat on his back for three days.

The fever stuck with Will for a few days before the cough and runny nose hit. The lingering fever and hacking cough took us back to the doctor for the third time in a month where we found that Will’s lungs were clear, but his ears were still not. The ears, coupled with how long the fever was lasting, prompted the doctor to give us yet another antibiotic, stronger and longer this time.

Then the annoying cough turned into difficulty breathing and asthma-like symptoms for Will. The doctor put him on oral albuterol to open his lungs. Now, four days later, Will is still coughing and still has a fever, and, of course, now Emma has started coughing.

So off the doctor we went again this morning to figure out why Will has had a fever going on 12 days and still can’t seem to breathe. The doctor gave him a nebulizer treatment in the office to get his breathing back to normal and sent us home with our very own, brand new nebulizer with a fishy face on the mask, hoping that the fever will clear up in the next few days if his lungs will “calm down”. Needless to say, Will was not happy about the nebulizer, but the doctor said Emma’s lungs are clear. At least there’s that.

So the saga continues, but we are all exhausted. Illness brings with it not only discomfort, but crankiness, poor(er) sleeping, the inability to get out of the house, the cancellation of normal activities, and general chaos. Did I mention the inability to get out of the house? It was so much easier to be sick as a single person, or even a childfree married couple. You just turn on the tv for a week, eat saltines at every meal and get better. This “family” illness thing is much much more complicated and exhausting, not to mention there are more of us to share the diseases.

And the irony is that as much as I want things to get back to normal and to be able to leave the house, is it not the leaving of the house that is the problem? The only week this month when none of us were sick was the week we were housebound as a result of the blizzards. If we were total hermits it would be a little tough to pick up the germs in the first place.

I will be glad when winter is over.