From the category archives:
In Chicago Collection Magazine featuring my top kids picks for the holidays!
In Chicago Parent Going Places Magazine talking about the best places to go sledding in the city…
AND
In Chicago Parent Going Places where I found the best toy shops in the city to buy all of these great things!
I’m sorry I’ve been MIA but as you can see I’ve been a bit busy. As have all of you, but you are just a little nicer to your blog than I am to mine.
{ 1 comment }
{ 0 comments }
Hello, my name is Sara and I live in a food bubble.
I have access to and can afford pretty much any kind of food my family or I need. And if for some odd reason I cannot find what I need at the myriad of Whole Foods, Costcos, Jewels, Dominicks, Paulina Meat Market, Speedways, Specialty Grocers that surround me, I can typically pick up the phone and just order it.
The only food desert I have to worry about is when my corner Starbucks runs out of cinnamon scones.
I live in a food bubble.
The reason I’m talking about my food bubble is that recently, I was asked by The Center for Food Integrity to sit on a panel of mom bloggers and speak to an audience of agriculture and food manufacturers. Alongside me were my friends Vanessa, Emily and Michelle. We spoke and answered questions about how, as moms, we use technology, how we choose our food and how we track food issues. For a great wrap-up of the event and questions asked/ discussed, please refer to Vanessa and Emily’s respective posts.
Of all the many opportunities I’ve had as a blogger, this experience rates as one of the most interesting. It’s not often that I’m asked as a blogger to talk about my use of technology or what I think current trends are AND about how I feel about food. Because even though I don’t cook often, I do pay attention to what we eat or don’t eat. Swedish fish aside. We all have our vices.
But see, that’s the point. My vice is Swedish Fish. That’s a luxury to pretty much half the world who starve every day. Even in our own country. Did you know that the hunger level in the United States is at its highest in 15 years?
Swedish fish vs. Starving. Food bubble vs. Food desert.
I sort of wanted to crawl in a hole when one of the audience members, a really nice Midwestern farmer had a question just for me. It must have been sometime after I made the point that the Whole Foods “fishmonger” is my go-to resource for what fish is safe to purchase. Oy. (I was told that Seafood Watch, my what-seafood-is-ok-to-eat Bible is “fringe.” More on safe seafood in another post.)
In any case, he asked me point blank what I would think about his lifestyle of food choices. How where he lives only two cars pass by his house a day and one of them is his wife and one is the mailman. I’m not kidding.
I don’t judge others. I know I’m lucky. I live in a food bubble.
After more rousing discussion and myriad offers for Emily and I to visit pork farms (gotta love the visual of the Jewish girls and hogs), many of the audience members came up to us panelists to thank us for our time and opinions. I now have the contact information for a Fish Ph.d. from Greg at the Indiana Farm Bureau who I can ask all my questions about why I can’t eat tuna every damn day. I met a lovely dairy farmer Shelly, who wants to do an kid exchange – she WANTS her kids to see city food life. I think my son would just about pass out at the opportunity to get on a real tractor. I also met Leah Beyer. Just about the coolest woman married to a farmer that I’ve ever met. Ok, I have no one else to compare her too, but I wish we could have snuck away after the panel to walk the broad paths of the McDonald’s Campus where the panel was held and chit chat about working mom B.S. This woman rocks!
I now have a new appreciation for the food manufacturers who are using technology to make food manufacturing more efficient with technology. Food and tech always have a negative connotation, but not when you think about the fact that this technology helps to FEED THE WORLD.
And suddenly, I was out of my food bubble and into reality. Yes, I’m still going to watch what we eat. But I’m not going to be as cynical about it. I may never purchase a box of chicken nuggets again, but I’m also not going to cry if we don’t drink organic milk all the time. I’m just going to be thankful that we have that choice.
While I’m talking about choices, please use your ability to choose the Make Miracles Grow Foundation project the winner of the Edy’s Communities Take Root program. My friend Emily is in charge of the project on the south side to help eradicate just one of the many Chicagoland food deserts. So help her out.
It feels good to get out of that bubble.
{ 6 comments }
I love having a garbage disposal. Much like my vacuum, my garbage disposal sucks down the garbage off my table and floor like a wondrous beast. I love it when the scraps and shards of meals, snacks, drinks and pretty much anything else food related goes down into that black hole of plumbing. I love that I can make the smell of onion go away with lemon down the disposal with just one click of the switch.
But, unlike my vacuum, my garbage disposal broke last week. It started with visions of creating a perfect family dinner. Flank steak, baked potatoes and yellow cake for the little guys. Nothing fancy, but as you know if you read my blog more than one time I RARELY COOK. So this was a big deal because my husband actually likes flank steak.
Then, the phone rang, I broke a glass across the counter top and I ruined the steak. The only one who ate it was the baby who will eat anything, including shoelaces. Disgruntled and annoyed, I put the disposal to the test by shoving $20 worth of organic beef down its plastic belly. And then this happened:
The disposal, my best friend other than my vacuum in waste and dirt disposal completely fell off the sink. As water poured down the hole in my cabinetry, I thought, well this about sums it up.
My recent vacation was the best of the best. A week of sunny, fresh-air bliss with my entire family. Last week was, well, reality. Kind of like the waste down my sink – wet, cold (that’s Chicago in March for you), and jammed up with errands, work and real-world commitments.
I didn’t quite fall of the sink amidst the chaos of getting our routine back together, but still, a week later, I feel like bolts aren’t tightened as much as they could be yet. Good thing they are on all secure on the garbage disposal. Because I can live with being a little behind on the daily grind, but I really can’t live without the grind of that beautiful machine under the sink.
{ 3 comments }
In case you missed it on my twitter/ Facebook feeds, here’s my latest story in this edition of Chicago Parent Going Places magazine on the best cupcake shops in the city (+ one in Evanston) for kiddos.
And, yes, I’m back from my trip, but I’m slammed, so until I dig out of a mountain of email, all you’ll get is this filler post stuff. And it’s not even good cream cheese sugar frosting kind. For that, I apologize.
{ 0 comments }
What I really enjoy about the articles I’ve written for Chicago Parent is that for everything I write, I learn something. This Fall, my story about parents who are “hands-off” versus “helicopter” was published and I cannot stop thinking about what I learned from the experts I interviewed. (It’s a theme, I guess.)
So last weekend, I coordinated a panel discussion with those experts for the Neighborhood Parents Network to discuss the topic in person. I’ll admit, the panel was as much for me as it was for those in attendance. I don’t measure my parenting style or information on what others are doing as much as what I believe is right and a little of what the experts believe. I have to think if you’ve made a profession of studying and analyzing children then you probably know what you’re talking about most of the time.
If I use those unscientific means to measure how I rank on the unscientific parental neuroses scale, I find that I end up in the hands-off camp more often than not. It really surprised me, as I’m a pretty neurotic person at the core. But here are some examples where I think I err on the hands-off side.
For instance, I don’t care that my eldest son still writes many of his letters or his name backwards more often than not. He’s not reading much, and that’s okay. He’ll read one of these days.
He’s not much of an artist, either. Most of his school projects that come home are masses of scribbles. Fine with me. He doesn’t love art and I’m not going to push it. I rarely make myself heard in his classroom. I figure, if he’s done something really terrible, I’ll hear about it soon enough. And I do.
He doesn’t want to play soccer this spring. That’s ok, he’s already signed up for t-ball, which he loves. The one non-negotiable is swim class — swimming is a life skill and I feel it’s important he knows how to swim. He actually does like to swim, so that helps.
If he doesn’t want to play a game at a birthday party, I’m fine with that, as long as he behaves alright. I suggest he eat at least one vegetable a day, but he can choose what it is. I have stopped caring about what he wears to school, as long as it’s clean. If he’s comfortable then we are all happier.
I’m not saying my style is right for everybody, but it works for us. Here are some takeaways the experts on the panel, Dan Gill, Sheryl Stoller and Karen Jacobson gave about parenting. (I’m sorry I cannot attribute exact quotes to each person, but they all agreed on each others’ perspectives.) I’d love to know where you guys all fall on my unscientific spectrum.
Key notes:
{ 0 comments }
