Sleeply Sundays

I usually wait until LO falls asleep to write my post for the day..tonight, will I was laying down with her till she fell asleep, I fell asleep also..I just woke up a few minutes ago..I'd have just rolled over and gone to sleep but I said I was going to NaBloPoMo and I'm not ready to give in yet, so I'm going to leave you with this thought to ponder...

Childhood memories and adulthood expectations are often at complete odds with reality.

 

Menu-Planning

So yesterday I talked about how I was a resentful bitch and what I was going to do to help myself..

One of the thing I talked about was making a meal plan for the week..Its a little difficult for me to meal plan because I can't eat meat yet the rest of my family feels very deprived if I completely take meat off the table.  I get around this by trying to make every other meal meatless or a meal that I can extract the meat from..like Tacos or Stir Fry.

Here's my meal's for the week:

Saturday: Smashed Potato Soup (ala @NotSuperJustMom) with skillet corn bread and a garden salad.  (I had to do some recipe modifications, I used veggie broth and veggie cream of mushroom soup and took out the bacon bits.  I also added garlic just because no recipe is complete without it!

Sunday: Chicken & Pressure Cooker Rice with Steamed Broccoli and Sweet Potato Pie (Double rice and chicken for Thursday's meal)

Meatless Monday: Angel Hair Pasta with Citrus Cream Sauce/steamed green beans

Tuesday:  Taco Tuesday with Refried beans

Wednesday:  Three Cheese Skillet Lasagne/garden salad/garlic bread

Thursday:  Stir Fry

Friday:   Potato Pierogi with mushrooms and onions/garden salad.

Potato Pierogi Recipe:

1lb Potato and Cheese Pierogi (I like Mrs. T's...when I visited Canada this summer I made them with the generic SuperValu brand and they were good too!)
Olive Oil
8 ounces of fresh mushrooms sliced (you can mix it up and use a variety like Shitake, Portebellas, and Button)
1 onion chopped
2 tsp crushed garlic
2 TBS Sherry  4 oz shredded Cobly-Jack (or anything you have on hand)
Sour Cream-Optional

Preheat oven to broil.

Put some olive oil in a large saute pan* and heat up to medium-high, saute onion for 2 minutes then add mushrooms and garlic.  Cook until mushroom soften then add sherry and pierogi.  Cook pierogi for about 5 minutes on oneside, then flip over and cook for 5 minutes more.

Take off heat and place in a broil proof dish and cover with cheese.  Broil for 5 minutes or until cheese is melted.

*My saute pan can be placed in the oven so I just top the pierogi with the cheese and just pop it into the oven. 


Good eating everyone..if you want recipes for anything else I'm making this week, leave a comment and I'll post it for you!

Not My Day

 So today started off as a good day, the LO was all smiles this morning and giggles, which I find totally AWESOME!  She took a nap and woke up on the wrong side of it, which made her cranky, which in turn made me cranky..
 

At about 5:00 pm tonight I began to feel resentful...

I resent the fact that I have to bend my life around someone else's inability to care for my LO. 

I resent the fact that I never know what is going to happen from day to day. 

I resent that I have to play nice and I don't want too. 

I resent that fact that I can't do what I want to anymore. 

And I resent that EVERYTHING I do is under a microscope. 

I resent that I have to keep my house spotless.

I resent the fact I have to deal with idiots.

And I also began to feel tired...

Tired of dealing with people who tell me what a good person I am..I don't feel like a good person, I'm just a person doing what needs to be done. Someone has to step up and take care of the LO and if it's me at least I know I have given her a fighting chance.

I'm tired of the looks of sadness when I tell them she's my foster baby.

Tired of washing bottles.

I'm tired of having to visitors to my house..

I'm tired of baby vomit.

I'm tired of listening to a LO scream her head off because she doesn't want to be in that damn car seat any longer, because I have forgotten that I can't do what I want to do anymore and I've kept her out to long...

I AM JUST TIRED...

On my way home while the LO was screaming (it was a 5 mile drive) I was trying to think about what steps I can take to make things easier on myself. So here is my plan..

Tomorrow I'm going to plan out my meals for the week and I'm going to go the grocery store and the dairy..I'm going to try and get the laundry washed and dried.

On Sunday when the LO is being visited by biological grandma, I'm going to try and cook the meals for the week, so all I have to do is reheat them..and I'm going to fold the laundry and change the sheets on the bed.

Blessed Be..and good night

Today I Remember!

We all owe a debt of gratitude to those among us who have served in the military.  I have spent my life surrounded by the military.  I am the daughter of a retired Navy sailor, who is the son of a retired Navy sailor!  I was married to a military member for 13 years.  I have been lucky to spend a lot of time with military members and I know just how dedicated to serving our country and upholding our way of life. 

My grandfather Generose was a first generation American who join the Navy right after World War I as a boatswains mate.  He served 30 years and eventually retired as a Chief Warrant Officer.  He served in the Pacific during World War II as well as being involved with the liberation of the Phillipines. 

Before he passed away I asked him about his service during Pearl Harbor.  He told me that his ship should have been in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked but they hadn't preformed their maneuvers correctly and the Commander made them circle around and do it again, thus delaying their return to port.  My grandfather said that the crews were really pissed off about that until they heard the news later about the attack.  I believe my grandfather served on a ship in the carrier group TF-8 which was a group of ships that the were returning from Wake Island.  He told me he was on the USS California, but he must have mixed them up because the USS California was moored at Battleship Row and was damaged in the attack.

Unfortunately hind sight is 20/20 and I know now that I should have asked him more questions before he passed away.  All of his memories have been lost to me, as my father doesn't remember anything about my grandfathers time in the service.  I have done some research on my grandfather and I came across the National Archives-Military Service Records site and I requested his service records.  Though the records didn't tell me where he served I did end up with a list of all of his awards and they even sent me some of his medals.  Which was sooooo cool. 

My grandfather was dedicated to servicing his country and protecting the freedoms of US Citizens and I'm proud to be his granddaughter.

Not Quite Wordless Wednesday

Today I drove up to Escanaba to give a seminar to a clinic.  On the way home I stopped off to have coffee with one of my new twitter friends Jen of Making A Home and Family and her LO.  I had a great time and it was nice to chat in person.  After I left, I got lost (not unusual) and while I was getting myself discombobulated I came across this sign painted on a house.

Now this next picture is what happens when you say your going to do something but then don't..ie say your going to clean the kitchen after I worked all day, took care of the LO, and then cooked dinner..You get a picture of yourself in a silly position.  I came out and there he was! I guess being 42 and having a baby can make you really, really tired!

4 Questions

Every morning when I get up I have a four things I do to make my day go better..I take my vitamins, I brush my teeth, put on my makeup, and ask myself four questions.

This has been my morning ritual for years but lately I've had to modify my morning ritual to include bottle washing..those darn things don't wash themselves.  Because I've had to add bottle washing as well as caring for LO to my rituals, sometimes other things slip..I forget to put on my makeup or take my vitamins, I've even forgotten to brush my teeth but I always remember to ask my four questions..They are what keeps me grounded!

They are simple questions but they have a power of their own.  I have them written on a post-it note and stuck to my bathroom mirror.
 

Question 1.  Who do I love?
Question 2.  Who loves me?
Question 3.  What am I proud of?
Question 4.  What do I wish to accomplish today?

I also have them written in my calendar and in my household planner.  I have them stuck in other places so that when I forget who I am, or where I am going,  I can stop and ask the questions again to help me get back on track.

There have been days in my life when I struggle to remember who loves me.  Or I can't find a thing to be proud of, but I never move on to the next question until I have an answer..Someone always loves you and there is always something to be proud of in you life.  As for accomplishments..sometimes just asking the four questions is accomplishment enough. 

Today when I asked the questions these were my replies:

Question 1.  Who do I love?
I love my son and my LO.

Question 2.  Who loves me?
My son and my parents.

Question 3.  What am I proud of?
I'm proud of the way I am raising my children and that I have blogged for 8 days in a row.

Question 4.  What do I wish to accomplish today?
Getting that rack set done in Milwaukee and getting home at a decent time so I can write my 9th post.  

We all have our own rituals, those things that we do rote, so our day runs smooth.  What are some of your morning rituals?  And what would be your answers to the four questions? 

Day 8 of NaBloPoMo

Its already 8 days into November and I have yet to figure out if I should be writing these posts the night before and schedule them to post the next day. If I should get up early and write them in the morning (this is a virtual impossibility as mornings and I are like oil and water, we do not mix well!) or if I just keep doing what I'm doing at sit down to write them after the LO is down for the night. The problem with writing them at night is I'm tired and have no motivation to write something original..

That being said I'm going to write about something that has come up today..
Veronica at CrunchyVTMommy and over at Raising My Boychick everyone was talking about Erica Jongs article Mothering Madness in the Saturday issue of the Wall Street Journal.  Both blogs had great takes on Attachment Parenting and how motherhood isn't a prison.

I'd like to talk about her third paragraph which starts out like this:

We also assume that "mother" and "father" are exclusive terms, though in other cultures, these terms are applied to a variety of aunts, uncles and other adults. Kinship is not exclusively biological, after all, and you need a brood to raise a brood.

She is correct, it doesn't take blood to raise a family.  Look at all the people who become foster parents and adoptive parents.  We take on children that are not biologically ours and try to raise them to the best of our ability.  But adoptive/foster parents sometimes face an uphill battle because the children they choose to raise can already have issues making proper attachments, making it more important that these mothers focus on attachment and not "handing" them off to others to help raise. 

Her next few sentences are this..

Cooperative child-rearing is obviously convenient, but some anthropologists believe that it also serves another more important function: Multiple caregivers enhance the cognitive skills of babies and young children. Any family in which there are parents, grandparents, nannies and other concerned adults understands how readily children adapt to different caregivers. Surely this prepares them better for life than stressed-out biological parents alone.

This statement perplexes me "how readily children adapt to different caregivers." Yes, children do well with multiple care givers but studies show that home care is preferable to day care.  A child being in daycare lends to an parent to being more of an attachment parent at night and on weekends.  How else do you reconnected with them?  My LO is taken from me twice a week for three hours with people that she doesn't really know to see a mentally ill mother that doesn't know how to attach to her child.  It takes hours sometimes to get my disorganized LO back to her secure self.  Why would I damage her "self" by handing her off to anyone if I didn't have too?  

When I was a babe back in the early 70's my mother was encouraged to bottle feed, to let me cry myself to sleep, and to not pick me up all the time.  And even now as an adult, I can tell my mom that is not how I want to raise my child she will argue with me.  She'll tell me how it didn't do me any harm..So how do I know that when I leave my child with her that she is following my wishes?  That I want her picked up him instant he cries, that I want her to lay down with him until he falls asleep, that I want her to wear him as much as possible.  I don't and neither do other parents who choose to follow the Attachment Parenting path.  Please note..I'm not dissing my mom, I love my mom tremendously and without her I wouldn't be who I am today, but I recognize her limits

And her final sentence of the paragraph

Some of these stressed-out parents have come to loathe Dr. Sears and his wife and consider them condescending colonialists in love with noble savagery.

I have found that the parents who are "stressed-out" tend to be the ones that can't see the long term results of the two to three years of stress..Yes it was hard to breast feed my son until he was 2, but now at 16, I smile everyday because I know that my attachment parenting made him the fine young man he is today!