Week in Review…#Sandy

# SANDY

 

Our neighborhood, like so many others has been penetrated in the ugliest and most atrocious of ways by Hurricane Sandy.

 

To say that the water rushed in fast is an understatement. One minute we had a dry house and the next minute, four feet of the sea were rushing down our block.

via

via Hurricane Sandy: When The Waves Came To Brooklyn | Strollerderby.

Toast Tuesday

“Toast Tuesday”

I am going to recommend a blog that I thoroughly enjoy…”MommasGoneCity“by Jessica Shyba. I had the pleasure of meeting Jessica at a conference and she is just as nice in person as she is on her blog.

Jessica shares moments in NYC and in her beloved Bay Area outside of San Francisco that are all about what life is like with 3 young children. In a fresh and honest way, Jessica expresses her joys as  a mom along with her moments of frustration.

Personally, I love her photos, especially the ones of my “home” town New York. She brings me back to a time in my life when I was experiencing similar days with my own children some 30+ years ago.

However, unlike Jessica, for me there was no internet nor digital photography. I would like to think that I would have used social media in the same way as “MommasGoneCity” has, to keep in touch and share my life as a mother with my family when I moved away from them so many years ago.

Jessica, you are one of my favorite bloggers…I look forward to following your blog as it continues to evolve.

🙂

http://www.babble.com/mom/work-family/the-top-50-mom-bloggers-of-2010-2/mommas-gone-city/

Summer, “Slow Down”

Slow Down…It’s Summer

Summer...Gift from the SeaGift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh is one of my favorite books.  I read it for the first time  about 10 years ago and it remains a book that I have gravitated to each and every summer since my first reading of it.

Actually, I discovered Anne Lindberg’s book many years before I actually sat down and read it while on an idyllic summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

Martha’s Vineyard

My hard cover copy is signed by my father who received it through his “Book of the Month” membership in the 1950’s. I remember seeing this book around my house growing up and being pulled by the title to open its pages. But I was actually too young at the time to understand or appreciate what Anne Lindberg was discussing…although I surely could appreciate her love of the sea.

The sea has always made me feel at peace…my earliest experience of the ocean’s ebb and flow was actually at Rockaway Beach in New York. My grandmother’s dear friend, Alice had a bungalow there, where we would visit and soak up the salt air and play in the sand.

Other happy memories of the seashore included many trips to Jones Beach on Long Island.

It was an adventure with my Dad…since my parents were divorced it was my special time with him. He shared with me his life long love affair with the sea which I have inherited and carry with me to this day. He was an avid competitive swimmer. I always admired him from the shoreline as he swam back and forth way beyond the break of the waves. He taught me respect for the water which is ever our friend as long as we revere its strength and power.

July brings the heat of the summer and with that, out comes my copy of Gift from the Sea. Each time I read Anne’s words I find new meanings…in my eyes she speaks to all women. Her book says different things to a woman depending on what is going on in her life at the time.

So, I hope you will relax with me, and open a copy of this book on your Kindle or buy the hard copy and jot little notes on the side of pages that pop for you.

Let me know if you are along for the read and most of all “Enjoy your summer!”

Town Mouse and Country Mouse…Which one are you?

NOTEWORTHY WEDNESDAY!

Recently, one of my tweets, was from a mom of three  who announced that NYC where she lives was in a way calmer than visiting her hometown in Northern California with her three young kids.

Now there were probably more reasons for this statement than I realized but I tried to understand what she meant through my own eyes and my own life experience as a mom and now a grandmother.

I grew up in a city of 300,000 just outside of NYC…sometimes it felt like just an extension of Manhattan and the Bronx… trains, buses, trolleys, subways, we walked to the grocery store or had groceries delivered…we walked to school and church…we walked and played in parks, visited a museum within walking distance of our apartment which also, to our delight, had a planetarium.  Although we had a car…we only had to use it to actually leave the city to visit relatives in the country.

We were apartment dwellers…2 bedrooms with a view of the Hudson River and the Palisade Mountains…we shared bedrooms and had a postage stamp of a kitchen out of which came all our meals…never take-out… there was one tiny bathroom, a living room and dinette.

Life was simple…clutter was a minimum…saving stuff was impossible…closets were shared so we had what we needed but not too much more. Food was bought every day…storage was limited.

After 30 years in New York with a four year college stay in Washington, D.C.…I moved with husband and my own family to the “country”. I had never ever lived in a house…what was a washing machine that was not coin-operated…where was the garbage chute? More importantly, where or where was the handyman when I needed one if not on the other end of the phone or an elevator ride away? Life was SO different…

Life in the suburbs or country with kids entails a myriad of stuff, more than a stroller…which in the city sometimes doubled as a laundry and grocery cart. Now we had cars…with car seats and loads of trunk space to fill with groceries and loads of kitchen space to store all the extras bought at the bountiful super giant food store….we had Walmart and now Costco…oh… but now after many years in the burbs our house now resembles Costco as we have filled every crevice, closet and corner with large sizes of everything.

Yes, I mean everything we could possibly need… only not to be able to find it when we do finally need it.

When our kids were young they slept in our bedroom many nights…I guess it was kind of like co-sleeping, back in the day. They usually made their way to the floor of our room with their pillows and blankets due to bad dreams or thunder storms. We could have saved a lot of money if we had only known that a two bedroom apartment was all we really needed back then.

Of course in the burbs it was impossible to walk anywhere…we drove our girls to school and everywhere else…no public transportation for them even if it was available…not even a school bus. After all no one else walked anywhere.

I think you can get the picture…country mice with a home filled with stuff, who forgot how to walk anywhere, bikes, scooters, and their own cars to drive to school when they got old enough. Suburban spoiled…

Often, I longed for a more simple life…less space to lose stuff … windows that had a cityscape view…people walking, horns honking, public transportation, cabs, little restaurants around the corner, small grocers where I would not be tempted to buy things I did not need and where nothing was so huge I could not carry it home.

For my kids…I longed for them to be able to walk to places like museums, stores, even to school if possible. As young children I would have enjoyed the city parks with them… I longed for Central Park… which was my idea of country in the middle of one of the best cities in the world.

Now, I long for a much smaller park like the one off of Lake Shore Drive a short walk from Water Tower in Chicago and the Oak St. Beach. I long to share my city life love with my granddaughter.

In my own way, I understand what my Twitter mom was tweeting…when she essentially said her NY city life was more calm than her week in the suburbs with her kids.

This City Mouse will hopefully return to city dwelling sooner than later…a little  lot older and wiser than she was when she was last an urbanite with much less stuff than she had as a suburbanite.

In the meantime…these stories come to mind.

via The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In the original tale, a proud town mouse visits a friend or relation in the country. The country mouse offers the city mouse a meal of simple country foods, at which the visitor scoffs and invites the country mouse back to the city for a taste of the “fine life”. But their rich city meal is interrupted by a couple of dogs which force the mice to abandon their feast and scurry to safety. After this, the country mouse decides to return home, preferring security to plenty or, as the 13th-century preacher Odo of Cheriton phrased it, “Id rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by continual fear”.[2]

Beatrix Potter retold the story in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse (1918). In this she inverted the order of the visits, with the country mouse going to the city first, being frightened by a cat and disliking the food. Returning the visit later, the town mouse is frightened of the rain, the lawnmower and the danger of being stepped on by cows. The story concludes with the reflection that tastes differ. A segment from the tale was incorporated into the children’s ballet film The Tales of Beatrix Potter, danced by the Royal Ballet with choreography by Frederick Ashton (1971). The ballet was subsequently performed onstage in 1992 and 2007.

Are you a country or city mouse?

If you have children, where do you want to live and raise them?  Why?

Week in Review for Parenting in the Loop

Links of the week:

http://blogs.babycenter.com/mom_stories/02132012why-the-french-dont-need-parenting-books/

Druckerman can talk all she wants about the Pause, and Le cadre (the frame), and the strict adherence to meal times, but the main difference between French and American mothers is culture.

It’s not that French moms are doing everything right, but that they believe they are.

French parenting

via Why Sleep Matters to Babies and Parents | Science of Mom.

Yes, sleep deprivation is a normal part of parenting. But when babies and parents suffer from chronic sleep deprivation, we need to be seriously concerned. Babies need sleep to support healthy development. Parents need sleep to maintain sanity. Sleep is a universal human need.

via Affluent Foreign-Born Parents in N.Y. Prefer Public Schools – NYTimes.com.

Miriam and Christian Rengier, a German couple moving to New York, visited some private elementary schools in Manhattan last spring in search of a place for their son. They immediately noticed the absence of ethnic diversity, and the chauffeurs ferrying children to the door.

Happy Friday…Have a great weekend!

Toddler Interviews…”Kids Say the Darndest Things”…

Dear Diary:

As I was walking on Park Avenue last month, I noticed a little girl about 3 years old, standing next to her stroller.

She was wearing a lovely outfit, but what got my attention even more were her silver shoes.

I paused to admire her when the baby sitter volunteered, “She has an interview.”

via A Moment With a Mayor, and Other NYTimes.com Reader Tales – NYTimes.com.

I love this little anecdote…toddler interviews…

I laughed when reading this…

What pressures parents living in a city like New York experience when they want to send their child to a private pre-school.

Toddler interviews

How do parents prepare for this…the “right” outfit of course but what else?

What are these interviews like?

If you and your child have been through a school “interview” please share some of your experience. What was it like…how nervous where you?

Thanksgiving…

I miss New York at the holidays.

Thanksgiving brings with it many memories of growing up in New York.

I love  watching the Macy’s Parade…it is a visit to the canyons of New York without the hassle.

I remember my first Thanksgiving Parade…we watched it from my uncle’s office windows…it was amazing to see all those balloons come to life…and float down the NYC streets to Herald Square. It was followed by my grandmother’s wonderful turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

I love this holiday and have much to be thankful for this year as always.

It is now memory making for the little ones…their enthusiasm for family and friends getting together is like none other and so much fun to watch and share in with them.

Turkey and all the trimmings… friends, family, story telling and laughter…I can’t wait.

Have a great day

Happy Thanksgiving!