I have so many things I want to blog about, and like so many of us, I am so bloody busy right now that I can’t find the time to write them out. Then when I do have the time, it’s usually getting late at night and I’m too brain dead to do anything other than roam around Flickr. Have I mentioned that I’m more hooked on Flickr than ever before? It’s true. And I’m doing the 365Days self-portrait challenge again, so it looks like Narcissus is living in my photostream.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll have a moment to write SOMETHING down. In the meantime, I was lucky enough to review two great Cranium games designed for preschoolers, and I wrote about it right over here. If you have younger children, and especially if you have younger children who are jealous of their older siblings who get to play big kid games, you might be interested in checking it out.

Recently, I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at a special (free!) guide from Clorox. It’s the What to Expect Healthy Home Guide, written in collaboration with the author of the What to Expect baby/pregnancy series of books. In the spirit of full disclosure, I never read the books. However, we’ve been plagued with serial colds here lately, so I was eager to read something on a healthy home and the avoidance of germs.

It should be noted, too, that I don’t generally obsess about germs. I wash my hands when I use the bathroom, when I change a diaper, when I clean the litter box, and before and after preparing food. Actually, the dryness of my hands would tell you that I am possibly a little fanatical about hand washing. But that’s basically it. I don’t lie awake in bed fearing invisible germs lurking on every surface, wondering what might be out to get me. But like I said, we’ve all been sick with something for several months now, so I figured a little home audit was a good idea.

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I still hate Winter but sometimes I forget how fun it can be to take a kid to the park in the dead of Winter. Something about snow piled up on the slide is hilarious. Hayley went to see her grandparents on Saturday, so I took Breanna for a walk; she had taken a long nap and I wanted to tire her out so she’d go to bed easily. When I saw the park, I took her in and she was amazed.

Good thing we went, since the temperature then dropped drastically over the last couple of days and there was no way I was going out unless I had to.

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I’ve mentioned before that I love to cook. I still do. However, there’s something to be said sometimes for getting yourself one of those sodium-laden convenience meals with little redeeming value. Some of them taste like the crap they are, but some are quite tasty and they’re great to have in your freezer on those days when you’re tired, or lazy, or just running around too much to start making a decent supper from scratch.

And it’s fine if that’s something you do in between regular cooking.

Yesterday I felt kind of icky. I wasn’t quite sick, and I had had a decent if not wonderful sleep the night before. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so blah. Then I went to take the garbage out. Instead of large garbage bags, we often use the plastic bags from the grocery store. Do you know what was in one of the bags?

An empty box of Jamaican patties that I had been eating for lunch the past few days. An empty box of fish sticks. A bag from french fries. A box of meat pie. Four boxes of those little individual turkey pot pies. A couple of boxes of microwave pasta meals.

O_o

No wonder I felt so crappy. Hello processed food hell! Other than breakfast, everything I had been eating for my meals came out of a box! Granted, we were also having salads and/or vegetables with them, but still!

I was horrified. To be someone who enjoys cooking and loves food, that was way too much convenience. That wasn’t even about convenience any longer, that was just laziness.

Tonight I made up a nice big batch of chili, and let me tell you, my whole body is much happier to have eaten something I actually made, rather than something I dumped into a pan and shoved in the oven for 20 minutes. Tomorrow I’m making up a list of groceries and it will include a whole bunch of non-convenience stuff, let me tell you. I think something vegetarian in the mix would be a good idea too. Maybe some Koshary. A nice Moussaka. Anything as long as it doesn’t come out of a box.

Sheesh.

Do you ever get carried away with the convenience of convenience food?

An interesting post explaining all the trickery that goes into some professional food photography.

Yesterday, after Hayley got home from school and George was home from work, I had to head out to the drugstore. Of course, as soon as I announce I’m going to the store, I get hit with a virtual cacophony of requests. I walked there, wandered through various aisles, picking up what I was there for, and headed for the cash with my purchases as well as things that George and the girls wanted.

When I spread out my things on the counter at the cash register, I looked down and started to giggle. Giggles soon gave way to full-out laughing. The cashier looked at me curiously, clearly wanting to ask what was so funny. I pointed out why I was laughing and she started snickering too. It was funny because even though not everything was for me, I was still a walking stereotype at first glance.

Because there I stood at the cash, a woman with a bag of salty chips, three chocolate bars, a big bag of Skittles candy… and a pack of pads. Talk about your basic PMS survival kit, right? All I needed was a bottle of Midol (and yesterday I probably could have used it) and the stereotype would have been complete.

To be fair to myself, two of the chocolate bars were for the girls, and the Skittles were for George. As for the chips, I don’t need to wait for a specific time in my cycle to eat something salty. But still, it was a good laugh.

It’s almost embarrassing how much I am loving Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I mean, I loved the movies (at least the first two), so I guess it’s not much of a surprise, but I am enjoying it in a way that I haven’t enjoyed a new series in a long time. And since it just started, there should be at least a handful of episodes to keep me going when all my other shows flip back to re-run mode because of the strike.

Please tell me I’m not the only one watching!

I remember when I was a young girl in high school I hated so many things about myself. I hated my thick glasses that made me look like I was wearing Coke bottles on my face. I hated my hair because, although hairdressers loved its thickness, for me it just made it hard to do anything nice with it because at that age I possessed an ineptitude with anything that could be called styling; as a result, I had bushy hair. I didn’t hate my entire body but I wondered why I couldn’t have a little more cleavage, dammit. I was self-conscious about my teeth because my incisors were more prominent than the rest of them (actually, I’m still self-conscious about that).

In other words, I was a fairly typical teenage girl. Just about the only problem I didn’t have was an eating disorder because I was always thin. But I had all those other things, plus a horrible sense of fashion, an uncertainty about makeup (though that never stopped me from wearing it, which was probably unfortunate, what with all that blue eyeshadow and metallic pink lipstick that was “in” back then), and a burning need – like so many girls that age – to fit in, to cave to peer pressure, to follow all the trends so I could be as “cool” as everyone else.

I know this is one of the things lying ahead of me as the mother of two girls, having two beautiful girls who should have all the self-confidence in the world and who may not, no matter how much we both try to instill it in them. Look at the world around young girls – they see women on TV and in movies who are the size of a toothpick and they talk to magazines about what diet they follow or how many hours they work with a personal trainer. People call Jennifer Love Hewitt, a girl with a very normal and nice body (and awesome rack) fat after seeing her in an unflattering pose in a bikini when she was in a private moment – fat. FAT. If people think she’s fat just because she isn’t a stick figure with a bobble head, what do you suppose young girls think? Every few years, an article is released mentioning that eating disorders are hitting girls younger and younger. It’s disgusting.

And THEN I read this article called Why 10 is too young for your first Brazilian where it mentions that Nair released a special line of hair removal products which is ranged at girls age 10 to 15. Why? Why are girls as young as ten being encouraged to use a chemical to melt the hair off their legs and bikini lines? But that’s not the worst part.

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I don’t know where my blog interest went. Well, actually I sort of know. Whenever I have free time lately, which is usually in the evening after the kids go to bed, I find myself practically living on Flickr, looking at photos taken by people I admire. I find that I have a lot of people that I’ve added to my contacts listing that I don’t even know, just because I love the pictures they take. I poke around and I get inspired, and if they have exif data, sometimes I’ll click through to find out what settings they used. Lately it seems that all I can think about when I don’t have to be thinking about problogging and kids and what to make for supper is photography. I suddenly remembered last night that my father was really into photography for awhile and I guess maybe it’s a genetic bug because I’ve gone from being happy with just snapshots to wanting to do so much more.

Anyway, between my Flickr/photo obsession and two straight months of self-imposed blogging, I just lost it somewhere. I’m still not sure what I want to do. Part of me wants to make some changes to what currently exists here, and part of me wants to back it up, take it down, and start from scratch. New year, new page? Same domain, but just wipe out all these entries and begin again.

In the meantime, I wasn’t sure I was feeling the other design so I went and poked around, lamenting the fact that 95% of the WordPress templates all look more or less the same, another 4% look original because they’re custom designs, and only 1% of the free themes look somewhat unique. Luckily, after some cursing and despair, I found this one and I think I like it. If you’re reading on a Feed Reader, kindly click through and let me know if it looks okay for you.

Right, enough of my own blog, off to take care of the other ones. Let’s see what I end up doing with this space.

I have totally lost my blogging mojo.

I know that a lot of people generally dislike making resolutions for the new year, but I’ve always loved doing that even if I suck at keeping a lot of them.

Last year I only made two. One was to read more because I was appalled at how little I read. I think I failed miserably on that one. I am quite sure that I didn’t read any more books last year than the year before. I just run out of time and steam. By the time I get done with my day, I’m usually too tired to bother. Also, I went through a period of being unable to find anything much that appealed to me. I did re-read several of the Harry Potter books, and of course I read the last one. I know I read a couple of others but I can’t even remember which ones they were. At least I’m ending the year with a bang because I have less than ten pages left in Memoirs of a Geisha which I loved so much that I’m almost sad to be just about done. I’m going to finish it shortly, definitely before the ball drops in New York City. Then I can start the New Year, fresh with a new book. I have Felicia Sullivan’s memoir, The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here which I’m dying to read, and I also really want to get started on Wicked.

So there’s a resolution I need to keep working on. I desperately want to get back to reading more like I used to do. I know plenty of parents who are still voracious bookworms so that’s not really an excuse, not now that I’m well past the newborn days of fog.

My other resolution for 2007 was an all encompassing “make the effort” which I got from a friend, and I think it’s a good one to keep for 2008 as well. It’s a good catch-all. Make the effort with my family, doing more fun activities indoors and out. Make the effort to be more patient (hoo boy). Make the effort to be a better mother, wife, friend, person. Make the effort to continue making our home nicer.

It’s a good resolution.

Tonight, Breanna is still up, though I know she won’t be up until midnight. I’ll probably put her to bed around 9:30 or so, depending on her mood. She always lets me know when she’s tired and she’s amazing about wanting to go to sleep. Meanwhile, for the second year in a row, I’m letting Hayley stay up until midnight as long as she stays reasonably quiet and doesn’t get too cranky and tired. I’m pretty sure that she’ll make it since she’s always been the night owl child.

We have chips and cheesies, and even a frozen pizza, though I highly doubt I’ll bother with cooking it. I have some 7Up as a treat for Hayley (Breanna has to be happy with juice or water, alas) and a bottle of red wine for myself. We’ve gotten champagne before on occasion but I wasn’t that interested in dealing with the crowds at the liquor store just for that. I’d rather have the wine, thanks.

We’re waiting for 10 pm, and then we’ll tune in to see what’s happening with the various new year shows on television, and if there’s no good music we’ll just supply our own. I still like to always watch the ball come down in Times Square so I’ll be sure to tune in for that. Then Hayley will have to be whisked off to bed and I’m sure I won’t be awake much longer than that.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that 2008 brings joy, health, and prosperity to all of us.

See you next year! Har!