Professor Mom

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

archives

January 31, 2011
Stretch
It was a fabulous, beautiful spring-like weekend here in North Carolina--with temps reaching 60 degrees on Saturday! And on Sunday we almost topped out at 70...If you're still digging out from the latest snow storm, don't read this, because it might make you feel grouchy. Even if I sometimes lament the absence of a real winter around here, I'm always grateful for those gift-like days we get in the middle of winter, when the world around us yawns, stretches its arms a bit, and gives us this glimpse of spring to come. I was itching to be outside all day Saturday, but it was hard to...
Baking, Children, Cooking, Family, Parenthood, Parenting, Recipes, Social & Emotional Issues
January 28, 2011
Warm the soul
While most everyone else is digging out from the last winter storm, we're just plain cold here in North Carolina--not a flake in sight. I'm kind of over all the this snow business, anyway, although I would like one more snow storm, preferably some time in early February, right around when we're feeling really tired and dragged out, and craving a little excitement in our lives. All this cold weather has resulted in a flurry of baking and cooking this week. I've made two batches of those mini doughnuts (I snuck in a handful of hemp seeds into the second batch and L., who didn...
Baking, Cooking, Food for Thought, Recipes, Vegetarianism
January 27, 2011
Utopia
I got a reminder e-mail yesterday about sending a brief blurb on my "achievements and accomplishments" to my boss, so the information could be disseminated out (if the achievements are notable enough, I presume) at the next faculty meeting. We get the call to do this about once or twice an academic year. Some years I feel like I've got a good collection of acceptable achievements to send out: there was the year I got an essay published in this book, for instance, and the years I attended conferences and even presented work, and the spring I participated in a reading from my...
Children, Juggling, Life, Motherhood, Parenting, Work, Writing
January 26, 2011
And this
If you're a parent (or even if you are not) you more than likely have been following the runaway-train chain of reactions to the publication in the Wall Street Journal of that excerpt from Amy Chua's book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I'm not going to even try and write up a response to Chua's piece, since so many others have already done a much better job at that then I could have, but it has been fascinating to me to read through all the responses and reactions, all the while taking my own temperature as I gauge my responses to Chua's essay,...
Children, Family, Motherhood, Mothering, Parenting, School Daze, Social & Emotional Issues, Teaching, Writing
January 25, 2011
Asymmetry
The other night I had a good talk with L., about things that have been going on at school lately. We talked about middle school, and about how good it can be to think of next year as a clean slate--a chance to meet new kids, to have a fresh start; so that even if it seems a scary transition, it could be a great and exciting one, too. He talked about "fixing the things" in himself that were preventing people from liking him, and it was at that point my heart broke more for him, as it does every time my kids feel inadequate, or "unliked" or alone. We talked about...
Books, Children, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Motherhood, Mothers, Parenting, Reading
January 24, 2011
The bluebird
On Sunday I awoke briefly at some point and heard an owl in the trees--nearby, I think. Then I fell back asleep. But I dreamed that our pool was open for one day only, and that we had one glorious day to enjoy it before it closed up again until May. It seemed fitting, then, that when I did wake up for the day (at 9:20!)  and headed downstairs with T., we saw the backyard filled with robins! There were probably some 20-30 of them, and they were dropping from the sky, and swooping up again, flitting around the trees, like dozens and dozens of leaves grabbed by the wind and tossed around. I...
Activities for children, Arts & Crafts, Children, Family Activities, Nature, Parenting, Snapshots
January 21, 2011
Time to bake the doughnuts
Months ago, when I was happily clicking through vegan recipes and websites, I came across this recipe on Vegan YumYum for mini doughnuts. I didn't own a mini doughnut pan, though, and as it turns out, these are incredibly hard to find. Then I got busy with Christmas, and baking Christmas cookies, and I forgot about the doughnuts until a family friend gave me an Amazon gift card. The best thing about an Amazon gift card, is you can use to to buy things you wouldn't normally buy, like this cupcake decorating kit (which didn't arrive in time for T.'s party) or this...
Baking, Children, Food for Thought, Parenting, Vegan Recipes, Vegetarian Recipes
January 20, 2011
Bag of Tricks: Staying Sane Through the Middle School Decision
If Tuesday was through-and-through a dog-poopy sort of day (literally and figuratively), Wednesday redeemed itself. It had been shaping up to be pretty bad, since it was a day promising two meetings, with the afternoon one involving the monthly juggling I find so exhausting: picking up the kids early, dropping them off at Scott's office, and then racing back to my campus to sit in a late afternoon meeting when all I want to do is be home. But the meeting got cancelled! When I got the e-mail about this I felt a surge of disproportionate happiness. I know most of us are happy to find a...
Bag of Tricks, Children, Family, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Parenting, School Daze, Special Needs, Stress
January 19, 2011
Symbols
I typed up a whole post yesterday during my morning office hour, then got up abruptly to help a student, returned to my desk and found the page completely cleared. Blank. I couldn't bring the text back with the magical CPR keystrokes that usually work, and so I sat for a few minutes with that numb-but-angry-smoke-is-coming-out-of-my-ears feeling you get when you've lost the entirety of something you just finished working on and your heart is raging against the injustice of it all. It was kind of symbolic, really, because the post had been about how this week in my classes we're...
Children, Juggling, Life in General, Motherhood, Parenting
January 18, 2011
Snapshot
We had a lot of fallout this year, dealing with the aftermath of T.'s birthday on Thursday, her party on Saturday, and a special play-date we had at our house on Sunday with T.'s BFF from her preschool days who hadn't made it to the party on Saturday. T. herself dealt with the anticlimax of it all well on Monday, but Sunday and Monday L. was a mess. He was ugly and vicious with his words. At ten, he's moved beyond lashing out physically as much but boy, can he produce some words. Nothing went right. He didn't want to leave the house to do anything. Did I mention he was...
Children, Motherhood, Parenting, Snapshots, Social & Emotional Issues, Special Needs
January 17, 2011
Puppy party (and post-party EXHALE)
T.'s Puppy Party was a success! I think it has to go down as one of the most fun parties we've ever planned together, and it was pretty stress-free and smooth on party day as well. As with all parties, some of the preparations weren't without hitches. The recipe I used for the dog-themed cookies T. and I made for her class on Wednesday just wouldn't work for me on the morning of her party. I mixed TWO batches of the dough and each time it came out too "buttery" and I couldn't cut out the cookies. As it turned out, I think the problem was that the recipe called...
Baking, Birthdays, Children, Parenting, Recipes
January 14, 2011
Puppy love
It's Friday. That should say it all, right there--it's the end of a cold, snowy, busy week. And on Saturday T. is having her 7th birthday party--a puppy party, this year. When she first declared this the theme for the party I asked her, a little worriedly, "you don't mean a puppy party with REAL puppies, do you?" As it turned out, she didn't. She wants to do a pretend puppy adoption, with stuffed puppies for all the kids, and bone-shaped cookies, and a pawprint-shaped birthday cake and lots of puppy love flowing everywhere. You all probably know by now that I...
Baking, Birthdays, Children, Parenting, Parties, Party Planning
January 13, 2011
Seven
Scott and I have been undertaking a massive and daunting project: slowly transferring all our photos from our old Dell computer onto CDs and then, from there uploading them onto a photo hosting site. We’ve been at this for some time now, since neither one of us has 8 hours/day to devote to sifting through old photos. I tell Scott that if we can just wait some 30 years or so on this it would make a fantastic retirement project. The whole process is taking longer than it should, too, because I can’t work with the old photos without stopping to spend lots of time overcome with...
Birthdays, Children, Motherhood, Parenting, T.
January 12, 2011
Housebound
We all got the gift of a snow day yesterday--well, ice day, technically. On and off all day long Monday I watched the weather radar online, waiting and waiting for the predicted big storm to start. The kids' schools let out 2 1/2 hours early, and when I got home at 2:30 they were hyped up in a frenzy or anticipation. When would the snow start? How much would we get?  L. kept racing to the front porch to scan the skies, T. kept asking me if I knew the exact time the first snowflake would fall By bedtime, though, NOTHING had happened. I was pretty grouchy. My college has a reputation...
Arts & Crafts, Children, Family Activities, Parenting
January 11, 2011
It's a fish eat fish world
We've been having lots of fish drama at our house lately. We have two fish tanks--a large 55 gallon one, and a smaller, 30 gallon tank. Both tanks house African Cichlids, the type found in Lake Malawi, the southernmost lake in the Great Rift Valley of Eastern Africa. I won't go into lots of detail here about the different types of Cichlids out there, but when we embarked down this road we did lots and lots of research on the different types of African Cichlids, and decided on the particular collection we have now. We had to order our stock from some place in Utah three years ago and...
Children, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues
January 10, 2011
Winter feast
It's been cold here this weekend, and snowy and icy, too, which is fine by me. I think I can stand one more snow storm, or "snow event" as they call it around here, and then I'll be about ready for winter to be done, and for spring to begin to move in, slowly but surely. I never paid as much attention to the seasons as I do now that I'm a parent. In fact, I remember the first fall that L. was old enough to experience, when he was about 14 o 15 months old, and I held him in my arms in front of a window and told him the story of how to leaves change colors and fall to the...
Baking, Cooking, Friends, Neighbors, Parenting, Vegetarian Recipes
January 7, 2011
Other
Classes started back for me on Wednesday. It hasn't been the smoothest transition in the world for me: changes at work, stress over changes at my husband's college, the usual bumps in-the-road surrounding the children's transitions back into school, have made this week seem particularly long and jarring. For me, going back sometimes is like jumping into icy water, after getting all nice and warm in the sun. Scott goes back next week, which has left him some time (time I'm jealous of) to better prepare for classes, and pop into both kids' schools for lunch. Yesterday I...
Children, Culture, Food, Parenting, School Daze, Vegetarian Eating, Vegetarianism
January 6, 2011
Morning mess
The New Year is barely a week old and we're already finding one of our family resolutions hard to put into action: the resoution to get a better handle on the morning routine so we can get L. ready and out of the house in time for school. Right before we left for Christmas break we got a stern letter from the county school system pointing out how many tardy mornings L.'s accumulated followed by an annoyingly worded admonishment citing how too many late arrivals could negatively impact a child's ability to learn. I balled up the letter and threw it into the trash. It's not...
Children, Juggling, Parenting, Routine, Schedules, School Daze
January 4, 2011
The next big thing
Yesterday I dutifully got up when my alarm rang (I didn't even hit the snooze button once), showered, got dressed, and headed downstairs to tackle making T.'s school lunch. At the bottom of the stairs I paused, and peeked into the dining room. I sighed heavily to myself when I saw the bare spot in the corner, where the tree had stood for so many weeks. I sighed so much inside that I did something impulsive: I opened up the Rubbermaid bin (still out by the door waiting for Scott to take down into the crawl space) and I pulled out the little artificial tree we used to have in our New...
Children, Family, Holidays, Parenting, Traditions
January 3, 2011
Resolution
Happy 2011! 2010 wasn't the best year ever; it was difficult, but it wasn't terrible. We all stayed healthy, and employed, and were surrounded by love and family and good friends. We didn't lose anyone we love, and even if times were, for a little while this past fall, dark and uncertain and painful, we made it through to another year, stronger and wiser. On New Year's Day we did a Skype call with my family and, since my mom's computer is in the bedroom where L. always sleeps when we visit, we had a perfect view of that square of bed across which, only days ago...
Children, Family, Memories, Parenthood, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues