CurrentMom

And You Expected Logic? How Children's Brains Actually Work

Family Friday

Want to watch something hilarious?  Observe an intelligent, educated, and highly successful professional – one with no children, no younger siblings, and no child-care experience of any kind – interact with a bunch of little kids.  You're in for a treat.

My family and I recently visited an old friend (I'll call him 'Ron'), an erudite thirty-something professor who fits the above profile.  During our visit, we toured a cemetery brimming with nineteenth-century history; among others, it contains the tomb of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson.  Ron had been concerned that a cemetery might frighten our children (ages 8, 5, and 2), but he needn't have worried.

Upon entering, Ron cleared his throat, cracked his knuckles, and began his lecture.

 "So kids, do you know about the Civil War?"

"Nooo," said my five-year-old daughter, adding "Look!  Squirrels!"  She then darted off to collect nuts, spending the rest of the time placing tiny acorn piles in front of all the child graves she spotted.

Slightly rattled by this non sequitur, Ron started again, fumbling to find the place he had left off.  He didn't get very far before he had to stop once more, interrupting himself with a cry of "Oh no, Danny, don’t do that!"  We turned and saw our two-year-old gleefully beating one of the tombstones with a stick.

Technology-Enabled Oversharing? Nah.

Vacation photo by Lyn Millett via Flickr

Technology Thursday

Who cares about your vacation photos? This is the question Danah Boyd explores in a recent post on "obsessively recording and sharing our vacations." She was at BlogHer '09 (along with some of my esteemed colleagues from CurrentMom) and the topic of addiction came up. Boyd used that discussion to riff on the challenge of technology-free vacations and what it means that we are creating a culture of people who are obsessively documenting and sharing their experiences before they've even finished having them. Technology, in the form of gadgets, connectivity, and social networking has made such documentation and sharing easier than it has ever been before.

So, What Exactly Does Mommy Do All Day At Work? (Not Another Sarah Palin Piece)

Work Wednesday

It was almost too much to resist. Sarah Palin's rambling resignation and Twitter farewell last weekend seemed to call for one more comment. I thought I'd do just one last Palin piece. 

But I'm not gonna do it. No way! I'm not going to waste precious time and resources,CurrentMom.com readers! Instead, I'll fight the urge. For your future! And mine.

Seriously, there have been more than enough articles, interviews, and opinion pieces - not to mention comedic send-ups (check out Conan O'Brien's latest) - about Alaska's now-former governor and her speeches. (Vanity Fair's "red pencil" parody, though, was ink well-spilled.)

So, at the 11th hour, with no subject in my sights, I'm doing what all moms do every day: I'm making it up as I go along. 

I did have lots of ambitious ideas, which I won't share with you now. None of them panned out, but I may revisit them someday. (Someday when I don't lose my son's shoes, leave my daughter's swimsuit at home, and twice lose my work ID.)

The one thought that survived this evening is the observation that I've never written about work itself for CurrentMom's "Work Wednesday" feature. Work. The nitty-gritty details of what I do, how I do it, what all those meetings are really about, and so on.

Armchair Travel! A Game the Whole Family Can Play

Travel Tuesday

Daughter and I have just arrived home from spending the evening with Coco avec Chanel (the movie). Apart from wanting to further appreciate the creator of the House of Chanel, we felt we needed a good dose of Armchair Travel. We had been reminiscing over our latest adventure (in which Paris featured) that had ended in May of this year, and we were getting rather sad about it slowly slipping down the time line of travels past. We had already spent a couple of previous afternoons with Amelie and in the Moulin Rouge but to no avail. We needed a big screen escape route that would enable us to get lost for a couple of hours, and think of something else far far away.

Apart from looking back through the holiday snaps, movies can be good for that, as can books. The beauty of the movie of course is that all members of the family can join in at the same time, which then sets the scene to facilitate some ongoing verbal dreaming. We usually start that conversation off with something like, "if you had a magic wand, and you could go anywhere in the world, where would that be today, and why?" Interesting conversations always arise from that question.

The other Armchair Travel activity we do is to stick pins into our wall-mounted world map. Updating it by sticking the coloured pins into the places where we've been, and into the places on the wish list helps keep us somewhat focused on what our next itinerary may include. It's about keeping "your eyes on the prize" as Violet Beauregarde says in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It certainly goes some way in helping us get over the post-adventure blues.

Happy Travels!
The entrepreneurial mother™

Best Veggie Burger Recipe: A New American Classic

Meal Monday

You may have noticed that there are a lot of really bad veggie burgers in the world. The frozen ones from the grocery store generally taste and feel like a cross between cardboard and sawdust, and the amount of sodium they contain is enough to raise a dead person's blood pressure. On the rare occasion that a homemade veggie burger is available at a restaurant, it tends to be only somewhat better. Most of the ones I've encountered have been bland, mushy and generally uninspired. If you ever have the good fortune to eat at Rosetta's Kitchen in Asheville, N.C. you will encounter a notable exception to this observation. I also had a freshly made burger from Whole Foods recently that was pretty darn tasty.

Generally, though, this is a distressing situation for those of us who don't eat the meat burger or would sometimes just rather not. The importance of adding a delicious vegetarian hamburger alternative to the American diet was made more salient this month when the American Dietetic Association (ADA) released a position paper giving props to the vegetarian diet.