Posts Categorized: Rituals

Girl Crazy

As far as omens go, it doesn’t get much worse than this. On a Wednesday evening a couple weeks ago, at about 7:30 pm, I proposed something radical: how about we eat on the couch tonight, while watching… Game One of the American League Division Series! This was greeted with surprising enthusiasm. Abby and Phoebe marched over with their plates… Read more »

Guaranteed Crowdpleaser (For the Under-10 Set)

It’s a miracle if I bake something from scratch even once during the course of my child’s birthweek. And if I’m going to do it, it’s going to be Rosa’s Mud Cake for the actual birthday party. But for the classroom party? No chance. A few years ago I debuted this Dunkin Donut Cake at school and was actually embarrassed… Read more »

On Anniversaries

I’ve been thinking a lot about anniversaries this week. Exactly a year ago today I retired from full-time working-mom life. (Doesn’t that sound so much more empowering than…”Exactly a year ago I was let go” or “Exactly a year ago Cookie folded.”) The staff drowned its sorrows at Scratcher in the East Village, which just so happens to be the bar… Read more »

The Accidental Keepsake

Last week I forced myself to put together an iPhoto album from my massive file of summer vacation pictures. I try to do this once a season and enlist the girls help with caption-writing — the final product could rival a John Irving novel for how many exclamation points they make me use — and usually this is all I need… Read more »

Command Central

The first week of school was a little out of control. That weird bubble in the kitchen ceiling finally turned into full-blown leak. After five years of having not a single mechanical issue with the Mini, the brake pads decided to give way on the way to drop-off. Iris, our usually bordering-on-bonkers Boston Terrier, was slinking around lethargically for days… Read more »

Dinner in the Morning

I mentioned my dinner-in-the-morning strategy last spring when I asked you to marinate drumsticks in buttermilk before heading off for the day. (Meanwhile, if Abby had her druthers, she would subsist on that buttermilk “fried” chicken and that buttermilk “fried” chicken alone for the rest of her life.) The strange science behind the idea is this: If you take one… Read more »

Meat Camp

Guest Post by Matthew Hranek, photographer; creator, The William Brown Project This summer, my wife and I didn’t enroll my daughter 7-year-old daughter Clara in any kind of traditional camp. We were traveling a lot and there were only a few weeks where we’d have to fill large blocks of time. Plus, Clara’s usually pretty good about entertaining herself —… Read more »

Every Day Should Be Like This

7:30 Kids watch Fantastic Mr. Fox; parents take turns running on the beach. 10:00 Pool: Work on touching the bottom of the 9-foot deep end with hands, holding underwater handstands for at least 5 seconds, and tightening up jack-knives off the diving board. 1:00 Lunch. Tomato Sandwiches. Leftover Shrimp & Grits. 1:30 Quiet Time: Dad reads Freedom, Phoebe reads Utterly Me:… Read more »

The 1080

I’ve made it clear how much I love my 6:00 cocktail. But since most of you have only known me for six months or so, I’m not sure I’ve made it clear enough how much I love my summer vacation cocktail. It’s been tempting to relax the 6:00 rule on the Dark & Stormy since I’ve been relaxing the rules… Read more »

Outsourcing the Family Recipe

Guest Post By Claudia Heilter, former news producer, mother of Arlo, 6 and Lois, 4. I’ve been wracking my brains on ways to pass along my Hungarian roots to my children. I speak the language but found it a bit too tricky to teach them. My husband doesn’t speak it and my parents live 2,000 miles away in Western Canada. It only… Read more »

Early Bird Special

Guest Post By Yolanda Edwards, Travels with Clara One of our favorite restaurants in NYC is Prune, but the problem is that it’s everyone else’s favorite too. Dinner and brunch are impossible–there’s always a wait, and sometimes even a line down the block. The other night, though, we happened upon a clever idea completely by accident. It was 5pm, we… Read more »

My Digital Diet

When we renovated our kitchen a few years ago I was so psyched to build in my “Command Central,” a desk with a bulletin board to keep track of schedules, birthday parties, class lists, and emergency numbers. And of course, the crown jewel of Command Central would be my MacBook laptop — right there at my fingertips whenever I needed… Read more »

The Blame Game

Dear Andy, You know how grateful I am for all you do for the family. How grateful I am for your mastery of the grill, for your patience and stamina at playtime (how did I miss both of those qualities on Parenting Skills Hand-out Day?), for your unfailingly impeccable musical taste. (I fully recognize that if it weren’t for you,… Read more »

The Family Part of Family Dinner

The whole concept of family dinner, if you think about it, is pretty elemental: you gather around a table in the waning hours, you and yours, and eat some grub, converse about your day and, if you’re lucky, life its ownself. But sometimes — or, most of the time — our dinners can resemble not so much a family of… Read more »

Let’s Have Coffee is the New Girls Night Out

When I first became a mother, there was a lot riding on a cup of coffee. As my husband once said of new parenthood, “We no longer get tired. We are tired.” For that first year, I was exhausted all the time. I was breastfeeding two or three times through the night, had little time to exercise (always key for keeping… Read more »

Sorry, I Have to Catch My Train

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said this in the past eight years. The words probably give my coworkers the chills (or a clinical case of the eye-rolls) because unless the story I was working on was going to the printer or the magazine I was working for was breaking a big story, like, for instance, how to… Read more »

Crafts: Mom’s Dirty Secret

I hope you are thinking what I am usually thinking when I see kids playing with toys handcrafted by their mom: What a good mother…I hate her guts. But here’s the thing about crafts in my house. I like doing art projects with the kids — and because I’m working part-time now I can do more of them than I used… Read more »