Professor Mom

Aliki
Chronicles the life of a mom, teacher, and writer trying to stay sane amid the chaos of daily life.

archives

August 31, 2009
Quick Breads, Quick Snacks
With school back in session for most of us with school age children, this week I will share one of my favorite ways to eat healthy on the go, be it before school, after school or wherever you may be running. Quick breads are aptly named for the amount of work that goes into mixing them together; not so much for the amount of baking time they require. Quick because there is no yeast, and therefore the prepping of the batter or dough for the bread is quite speedy. Yet the baking time for many of these breads hovers around one hour. Word to the wise: bake these the night before you need...
After School Snacks, Healthy Eating, Healthy Snacks, Recipes
August 31, 2009
Forty
I learned this past weekend that despite my pep talks to myself (written and otherwise) I still do not feel particularly good about turning forty. I had a strong urge, all weekend long, to head to some solitary retreat and wrestle, alone, with these turning-forty demons. I'm certain that in some culture, somewhere, turning a landmark birthday involves that type of retreat--maybe to experience some solitary and pivotal rite of passage (through fire? wandering alone in the woods?) after which the person returns to their family, whole and happy again, and ready to seize the new decade by storm...
Birthdays, Family, Growing Up Is Hard to Do
August 28, 2009
Tangible
T. had a fantastic first day of kindergarten. Me? I had a strange first day. I walked around with the distinct feeling I was forgetting something—not a good feeling to have, really, especially when the something you feel like you’re forgetting is your child. But then I’d tell myself, reciting it like something I needed to remember: L. is in school, T. is in school, everything is okay. The night before kindergarten, at dinner, we talked about making T. a photo collage she could keep in her backpack, to look at when she needed. “Isn't that a good idea?” I asked her. She looked at me, then at...
Cooking, Food for Thought, Greece, Kindergarten, Parenting, Recipes
August 27, 2009
'Twas the Night Before Kindergarten
Backpack? Check. First day of kindergarten outfit? Check. New sneakers? Check. First school lunch packed? Check. Bedtime reading to soothe the kindergarten jitters? Check. Quality time spent with tissues after finding old baby pictures like this one? Check. Happy first day of kindergarten, sweet T.!
Children, Kindergarten, Parenting, School Daze
August 26, 2009
Kitchen Tips
So R loved his first day of school, declaring it "fantastic!" when I asked later that night. His teacher, who goes by just "Mrs. B," due to a long and hard-to-pronounce last name, seems wonderful and I chucked when I thought how appropriate since I call my boys "R" and "G" on this blog. So as R is embarking on his elementary school days, I was thinking how you really never are too old to learn something new. Heck, it's what keeps us young, right? Well, to that end, I have a couple of kitchen tricks that were recently shared with me that I wanted to share with you. From my mom, I learned how...
Kitchen Tips
August 26, 2009
Rules of engagement
Last week we were mired in other more pressing concerns, but I kept thinking about some fitting military-type euphemism in keeping with the spirit of Operation Bento Box that would capture the setback the whole plan suffered last week. I couldn't come up with one, though. (The words Retreat! Retreat! Retreat! kept flashing through my mind, however.) Everything was going along fairly predictably. L.'s bento box has been coming home without the doughnut each day. He hasn't been eating anything I put into a second compartment, however, but I expected that to take time. Then, early last week, I...
Children, Eating, Food, Operation Bento Box, Parenting, School Daze
August 25, 2009
The last baton
Back when L. was just a baby, Scott and I coined the word "tag-team parenting"--well, maybe we weren't the first to coin it, but we certainly felt like pioneers in that make-it-up-as-you-go territory. I distinctly remember the first time the phrase popped into my head. I had parked our old Dodge Grand Caravan at the Hardy's parking lot opposite the bus stop where the free university shuttle dropped off and picked up. I was nursing--or trying to nurse--an unhappy L. who was bundled into layers of onesies and a sweater (it was October and COLD). Just as I had finally managed to negotiate the...
Childhood, Children, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Juggling, Kindergarten, Lessons to Live By, Parenting, Work
August 24, 2009
Future Me
Setting: Me at the computer, Sunday afternoon. Scott is gone for the afternoon, taking care of some family business, and the kids are playing "Star Wars" in the family room--building intricate block structures for L.'s Star Wars action figures to inhabit. I'm attempting to seize a sliver of time to get some work done at the computer--desperate to do so because I don't want to spend my Sunday night working. L., who has spent the last twenty minutes delivering a monologue to T. on the ins and outs of the different clone troopers walks into the office. "Hey Mama!" "What?" "Why don't you spend a...
Activities with Children, Children, Family, Juggling, Lessons from Little Ones, Parenting, Work
August 21, 2009
Super food
Despite the week it’s been I DID manage, miraculously, to grab a sliver of time (Star Wars: Clone Wars + Aristocats + a rainy afternoon = me time) to try out a new recipe (remember, I cook and clean as therapy). We have good friends coming over on Saturday for a picnic at the pool, and I wanted to preview a quick and nutritious salad using our favorite: the edamame bean. Remember how we discovered the glory of the edamame in the pod? Well, the shelled edamame is a glorious thing, too. A few weeks ago when we went to the end-of-season swim team banquet, on the potluck table, amid piles of...
Children, Food for Thought, Parenting, Recipes, Vegetarian Cooking, Vegetarian Recipes
August 20, 2009
Convergence
This made me smile yesterday: T.'s take on winter science! The hypothesis she was testing? Whether or not frozen rocks would turn to ice. ********* I needed that smile. After a relatively calm, good summer, things have hit the fan, big time. I've been thinking about the word convergence lately--it popped into my head this week, as words tend to do, especially when I'm trying to get a grip on situations in my life, to give them a concrete shape and meaning. The word really came to me while I was standing in the family room, knee-deep in a homework battle with L., who has lately decided to...
Children, Dads, Moms, Parenting, School Daze, Social & Emotional Issues, Special Needs
August 18, 2009
Hooked!
I was getting T. ready for bed the other night when she asked suddenly if I knew what an hypothesis was. "Tell me," I said. She paused for a minute, to recall the information, and said, "it's an idea you can test!" I don't know where she heard that (probably from Sid the Science Kid on her beloved PBS Kids website) but she was right--a hypothesis IS an idea you can test. Even though she had the definition down pat, I was curious if she could apply the concept in real life. I try to encourage both kids to imagine what might happen before they try something out (even "what do YOU think might...
Activities with Children, Children, Early Learning, Parenting, Summer, Summer Science
August 17, 2009
Big
Do you remember wanting desperately to be older? I remember, clearly. I remember being a teenager and just wishing for that next year. When I was really young I seriously believed I would grow the night before my birthday, and wake up looking different--older, taller, stronger. I had some feeling that if I could only turn 14, or 15, or 19, then that would be it, the year Great Things Would Happen. And of course great things always did happen, but I was impatient to grow up, the way young people always are. It's ironic that we always long for birthdays when we're young, and when we get older...
Children, Growing-up Is Hard to Do, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues, T.
August 14, 2009
Summer's last hurrah
Remember our neighbors and the bounty that sometimes comes our way? We got home yesterday and found this little pile on T.'s chair on the front porch. It's been a long, frazzling week--the kind of frazzling you get when you spend five days in a row in meetings and workshops with one foot straddling the back-to-work world, and the other firmly planted in the world of home, then you spend too much time fielding problematic e-mails from your son's school (if our complaint last semester was a lack of communication then, boy, the school is making up for it THIS year) and dashing over there in-...
Children, Cooking, Food for Thought, Parenting, Recipes, Summer, Vegetarian Cooking, Work
August 13, 2009
Knowledge is power
While I was knee-deep in meetings on Tuesday, Scott took T. to see Charlotte's Web at the free family summer film festival (we've been huge fans of these free films--let me tell you). I love E.B. White's book, and I like the film, too. In fact, I still remember reading Charlotte's Web as a child and thinking, for the first time, very hard about this whole meat-eating business. It was, I think, the first book that made me question not just what I ate, but where it came from. And although I tried a vegetarian diet many time, it wasn't until years later, when I was in my twenties, that I...
Children, Early Learning, Food for Thought, Parenting, Vegetarian Children, Vegetarianism
August 12, 2009
Time to pack the doughnuts
You know how there are all these things you once said you'd never do as a parent, yet of course you find yourselves doing them? Things like caving in and buying your daughter a girlie toy, even though you'd always vowed to stand strong against gender-typing; or letting her leave the house in pajamas and Fancy Nancy dress shoes; or packing a doughnut in your son's lunchbox because it's the one and only thing he will eat. Granted, the doughnuts are these: and they are just about the healthiest doughnuts you can find. Each one has, in fact, far less sugar than the Yoplait yogurt I like to eat...
Children, Food for Thought, Operation Bento Box, Parenting, School Daze, Special Needs
August 11, 2009
Then and now
It was HOT yesterday; 101 degrees hot. It was so hot that when I opened up my car door at 2:30 to head home after a long morning of back-to-school meetings and workshops I thought I would spontaneously combust. ********** At one of the breaks during a workshop yesterday I overheard a new colleague talking with her boss. The boss had scheduled a meeting for later that day and the new colleague couldn't make it. She didn't provide a reason, but the boss kept probing. "Is it an appointment? Can you reschedule?" "No," the new employee simply said, her eyes steady, her chin held a little high....
Children, Moms, Motherhood, Parenting, Teaching, Work
August 10, 2009
Testing the waters
What do I, and a community swimming pool, have in common? We both turn 40 this month. Construction on our neighborhood began in 1962, and in 1969 the pool--the hub of all our summer activity, the place where both kids learned to swim, where L.'s self-esteem soared for a brief, and wondrous period, the oasis in the woods we love so much, was opened. It's strange to me to think about that summer, forty years ago; to think that the month I was born, kids were jumping into the water for the first time at a pool in a neighborhood far, far away. This Saturday there was a huge celebration at our...
Birthdays, Moms, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues
August 7, 2009
John Hughes, 1950-2009
I can't ever recall a string of celebrity deaths quite like this one. Yesterday, the celebrated writer and director John Hughes died suddenly of a heart attack at age 59. Even if you haven't seen his movies, you've probably heard of them. Sixteen Candles. Pretty in Pink. The Breakfast Club. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Uncle Buck. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And many more. I was a little young to catch the brunt of Hughes-mania. I came to his films later, in the mid-to-late-90s. As a result, I always wondered a few things about them. For example: If Cameron's problem is that he lets his...
Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, John Hughes, Movies, Pretty in Pink
August 7, 2009
Ready...set...bento!
I came home from an outing with T. on Wednesday to discover our bento boxes had arrived! I'd spent the week before convincing Scott that bento boxes were going to change our lives--or, at least, help us help L. change his school lunch habits (which mainly include sitting in his seat at the cafeteria and leaving his lunchbox unopened on the table in front of him). T. was very excited to get her box. It's pink, of course. She was so excited I had to wash it right away and fix her lunch in it. The only snag is that the bento boxes don't fit into the kids' conventional lunch boxes, so we had...
Baking, Children, Food for Thought, Operation Bento Box, Parenting, School Daze
August 6, 2009
Mind over matter
Ever since L. started kindergarten it's been our quest to get him to reveal some tidbit of information he learned at school. Every now and then he'll surprise us with an interesting fact ("did you know that a light second is 186,000 miles?") and we'll utter an exclamation of amazement and follow-up with our standard "did you learn that at school?" But the answer is always, no. No, he learned it on such-and-such website, or in such-and-such book he read during math class when he was supposed to be learning about long division. Does it matter, really, where he learns his information? Maybe it...
Children, Lessons from Little Ones, Parenting, School Daze, Somebody Pinch Me
August 5, 2009
It's Greek to Me
When we were dating, SPH would cook these amazing meals that opened my eyes to new foods almost every time he started creating in the kitchen. Even as I type this, he is in the kitchen whipping up a filling for some stuffed peppers and tomatoes we will feast on later. The man is a true chef. I still remember the first time he made these green beans for us. While this is hardly a typical summer recipe, since we have more green beans than we know what to do with right now, I whipped up a triple batch of these last week, which served us well for a couple meals. I froze the rest for a future...
Healthy Eating, Locally Grown Produce, Recipes
August 5, 2009
The pods have it
When I was so sick with the stomach bug during our recent beach vacation, the only good thing that came out of it was that I lost two pounds. Coming home from vacation weighing less than when we left was almost enough to make up for eating nothing but saltines for two days--almost, but not quite. I love eating out, and eating out when on vacation is all part of the fun. Even before the actual bug knocked me out, I just didn't have an appetite that whole week. I chalked it up to the smelly house, but I should have known a stomach bug was brewing. On that Friday, our last night at the beach, I...
Children, Cooking, Food for Thought, Holidays, Vegetarianism
August 4, 2009
Labels to live by
Late last week I came across this short film, nominated for "Best Documentary Short" at the 2009 Woods Hole Film Festival, and made by a brother about his own brother, who dealt with undiagnosed Asperger's and accompanying depression for 30 years of his life. I watched the video on the same day I found out about a bullying incident at school with L. and I was in an emotional, Mama Bear state. Somehow the video lifted me up, and depressed me at the same time; but it is amazingly done. Click the link and watch--it's less than 10 minutes, and so worth it. I think the film makes the best argument...
Children, Early Learning, Lessons to Live By, Parenting, Social and Emotional Issues, Special Needs
August 3, 2009
Bag of Tricks: Summer Boredom Busters
It felt like a LONG week last week--and I'm sure it felt even longer to L., and to T., who found herself alone for most of the day with her parents for an entire week. If truth be told, it also felt a little long for me, because while I love spending time with T., there are only so many hours of the day I can devote to playing ponies, or sick fairies, or tea party before I feel like locking myself in the bathroom for five minutes of me time. I feel ungrateful and disingenuous even complaining about this because at the same time I also feel so keenly that other tug--the one I write about so...
Activities for children, Bag of Tricks, Children, Lessons to Live By