CurrentMom

My Final Field Trip

Truth Thursday

It’s finally happened. After 11 straight years of having children in elementary school, I believe I have just gone on my final elementary school field trip. Two fifth grade classes, one charter bus, mom and son matching bagged lunches, two power plants and one long day. 

Field trips have been one of the few school projects in which I have enjoyed being involved, and have happily volunteered to participate for many years. Starting with the four-year-olds’ preschool class trip to the National Gallery of Art, through kindergarten walks around the neighborhood, first grade ventures to the library, the second grade journey to the butterfly exhibit, third grade treks to the National Zoo, fabulous days at the great Smithsonian museums and concerts at the Strathmore music hall in fourth grade, and now the famous fifth grade power plant outing, I have enjoyed joining my kids on their learning adventures. 

And now it’s coming to an end. The sixth graders, in their first year of middle school, go on a three-day, Outward Bound type of thing called Outdoor Ed, and yes, they do need parent chaperones to join them, but overnights in rustic cabins and exploring icky things outdoors are where I draw the line with my field trip duties. Plus, the fact is, your kids really don’t want you around anymore when they’re in middle school, and neither do the teachers, really. I’m ok with that.

The Tech Generation is Here

Tech Tuesday

My six-year-old daughter is a zookeeper. She's got all sorts of animals in her zoo, from the standard tigers and bears to the more exotic peppermint striped zebra.

Hers is a Tiny Zoo – one of the many free apps down-loadable on the iPhone.

When I first let her start using our iTouch at the age of four, I felt a little weird. After all, it's not like I had anything like this when I was her age. The most sophisticated pieces of technology in our house back then were the phone and the television and I wasn't allowed to use either of those by myself.

It wasn't a safety issue, either. Fear for her safety if she broke it perhaps, but how could she hurt herself with a slim little device? I felt weird because I, like so many other parents my age, are entering a realm unfamiliar to us: kids with technology.

Quiet Day at Home: Very Rustic Macarons

Meal Monday 

In Paris a few winters ago, my mother introduced us to haute couture macaroons -- or macarons, in French. (These are not Great Aunt Betty's Passover macaroons.) We traversed the City of Light to find the bakeries that have perfected these specialized meringue sandwich cookies, each one more sublime than the next.

Now, the macaroon craze has come to the States. It's actually been here for a while. After all, cupcakes are so 2008. People wait hours in line outside choice bakeries and patisseries to pay $2.75 per cookie. And they are good.  

Reams have been written about this delicacy and its many flavors and hues. For a primer, see the piece on salon.com or this one in the New York Times. For the past few years, I've wanted to make macarons myself, but all the recipes I've seen are incredibly daunting. I will say that in a pinch, Trader Joe's frozen macarons are excellent, though they only come in chocolate and vanilla. 

However, I recently read O Magazine (Oprah.com, December 2011) and came across a recipe for Parisian Macarons by Meg Ray of San Francisco. Her cookbook is Miette, which is the name of her pastry shop. Since we are Jewish, and Christmas always yawns before us as an incredibly blank slate of a day, I decided to tackle the recipe yesterday, 12/25/11. My daughter, who has been exhorting me to make macarons forever, did not even bother to watch, let alone help, but she did taste and was very enthusiastic about the finished product. 

I am dubbing this first batch "rustic" -- euphemism for lumpy and unrefined -- because I really couldn't get the almonds ground finely enough and they are still texturally visible in the finished cookies. In the future, I think I will buy almond flour to use instead of grinding my own, and I will also use frosting or jam as filling. Personally, I find buttercream too rich. I look forward to making these again and varying the fillings and the cookies.  

My Personal December Dilemma

Truth Thursday

December is a hard time of year for a lot of people. It’s an especially hard time of year for me for two reasons. One is because, many years ago, I broke away from the Christmas traditions of my family of origin when I chose to live a Jewish life. 

The other reason is that my mother died seven years ago, after a very brief illness. She died right before Christmas, which, despite the fact that she was Jewish, was her favorite day of the year.

Where do I start the story?

My Jewish mother, who wanted nothing more than to have Christmas, married my non-Jewish father. Bingo! The Jewish orphan girl from the Upper East Side could have a Christmas tree. She wove a wonderful tapestry of Christmas in our house, complete with lights and tinsel and stockings and candles and a glorious tree and Christmas dinner with all our Jewish friends. 

There was always a menorah somewhere to mark Chanukah, although it was a minor piece, and we never knew the prayers or sang Chanukah songs. And there was never a crèche. That would just be going too far. Besides, we were atheists. Christmas was about family and friends and food and presents.

As a young adult, I decided that this wasn’t enough for me, and that I needed to find a community where I could infuse more historic and communal meaning into my celebrations. Bingo! I was already Jewish (because my mother was Jewish) and the Jewish community, along with my husband-to-be, welcomed me with open arms. It has become my home. I went back to my roots, as it were, and it has filled me up with what I had been seeking. The menorah that was in the background in my childhood home has a prominent place in my family's celebrations today.

Resolved: Swearing Off Working Mom Studies for 2012

Work Wednesday

It's the time of the year for the media's annual news roundups, and 2011 will certainly be remembered for its headlines about fascinating, emotional, and world-changing events - from the Arab Spring to the Japanese earthquake/tsunami to the deaths of Steve Jobs and Osama bin Laden and the marriage of Kate and William. (Check out this 60-second video from Reuters or this more in-depth year-end special report from The Altantic for a flavor of this yearly rite.)

Over here at Work Wednesday, though, 2011 will be remembered as the year of the working mom study headlines - and the year I finally succumbed to working mom study fatigue.

Just this month, there have been hundreds of headlines about a study, published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Family Psychology, which found that working moms tend to be healthier and happier than moms who stay at home (at least during their children's infancy and pre-school years).  And hundreds more about another study, published  in the American Sociological Society Review, which concluded that working moms are more stressed out by multitasking than working dads. If you've somehow missed all this, just google "working mom study December 2011" and you'll see what I mean. (Here's a sample.) There are more articles, blogs, opinion pieces, video clips, and radio stories reporting on, analyzing, praising, and criticizing these studies than I can count!

These December studies are just the latest in this year's seemingly endless spate of studies about working moms. To be sure, there's been a raft of reassuring and positive studies about the benefits of working motherhood for women and children's emotional health and development. (I liked them.) But there's also been a big bunch of negative and alarmist ones trumpeting higher risks of obesity, illness, and a host of other dangers for working moms' kids. (I didn't like them so much.) I've blogged about the implications and limitations of some of these studies here, here, and here.  But, although I'll admit to a slight addiction to abstracts, I think I've finally reached working mom study overload. I'm swearing off working mom studies for 2012!