ShareTweet Angelina Jolie revealed yesterday that she had a preventative mastectomy after discovering that she is a carrier of one of the BRCA gene. The news hit close to home. The timing seems relevant so I thought I would share my BRCA story. Bored during a stupefyingly hot summer afternoon, my cousin and I decided… Continue Reading
Category Archives: Family
Food as Medicine: Your Favorite Comfort Food Recipes Needed Stat
ShareTweet When people are sick, my first instinct is to feed them: big bowls of chicken tortellini soup, hot challah from the oven, creamy spaghetti bolognese. Watching my father being fed the same vanilla flavored nutrition liquid through a nasal tube for the last five months has been one of the many painful aspects of… Continue Reading
Life Lessons in the Little League Dug Out
ShareTweet I never gave much thought about the different dynamics of sports until my kids started playing them. I’d played soccer, basketball, and softball, with varying skill, but didn’t realize how different their rhythms were. A missed pass is forgotten quickly during a soccer game but on the baseball field all eyes are on the… Continue Reading
A Poetic Cry for Help Lost in a Sea of Paper
ShareTweet Periodically, my children’s backpacks explode onto the kitchen counter, overflowing with weeks worth of graded homework, unit tests, and all the other paperwork that fills their school lives. It sits on the counter for a few days before I can find a quiet morning to sift through it and find the gems worth saving,… Continue Reading
Caramelized Banana Dutch Babies: One Dish Breakfast Solutions To Feed Big Families
ShareTweet Breakfast for six is a tall order. Bella doesn’t eat fruit. Jack doesn’t like breakfast. Steve likes a toasted bagel with cream cheese, pepper, and ruby red tomato slices. And both Juju and Baby Sophie like a feast of little tastes. Me? I like to sleep in and be woken with a steaming caffe latte and… Continue Reading
Winter Sunshine Therapy
ShareTweet I flew to Toronto again last week to visit my father who is still in the ICU, almost three months since his lung transplant. It’s a long road back, plagued by infections, pneumonia, and set backs. He’s still committed to the fight, but watching him suffer for such a long time, often unable to… Continue Reading
Licking My Wounds
ShareTweet Sometimes the only thing to do is just to go home, call it quits, and lick your wounds. Although I generate some income from my blogging and freelancing, for the most part, I inhabit the warm cocoon of stay at home motherhood. My days are dictated by the rhythm of my children’s lives, jarred… Continue Reading
Chicken Croquettes: Roasted Chicken Leftover Solution
ShareTweet One thousand years ago, back when I was a size 0 and took it for granted, I studied abroad in Barcelona. After a disastrous month with an overprotective old señora, my program transferred me to the home of a very hip young single woman named Maria who was a hairdresser for movie sets. When… Continue Reading
Prayers and Thoughts for a Private Man
ShareTweet What do you do when people ask for prayers? Do you kneel and pray or simply send a quiet plea out to the greater universe? Do you communicate with God in church or out walking in a lonely meadow? No need to share, just please take a moment tonight to do whatever feels right… Continue Reading
Chocolate Pecan Pie and Bidding Long Distance Thanksgiving Blues Goodbye
ShareTweet Since moving away from New Jersey, our Thanksgiving celebrations have involved packing and flying instead of baking and cooking. I miss the days of driving to my mother in law’s house with pecan pie carefully balanced on my lap. Don’t get me wrong, our table is still overflowing with food, and reuniting with everyone… Continue Reading
Meat is Love: Slow Roasting for Perfectly Pink Roast Beef
ShareTweet Meat is love. Back in college, I cooked for one. Broke and a little too obsessed with my weight, I walked to the supermarket and would buy two sea scallops to saute in butter and shallots, served next to a handful of green beans. My roommates thought I was insane, but I felt like… Continue Reading
Beach in the City
ShareTweet Chicago has been home for almost two years, but in many ways we’re still newcomers here. We still rely on the GPS to get around, still hunger for ketchup on our hot dogs, still marvel at the flatness of the landscape. But more than anything, we still hunger for the ocean, unable to get… Continue Reading
Making Family Movie Night Fun for the Whole Family
ShareTweet Long before Steve and I were parents, we were movie lovers. We postponed the Monday blues every Sunday night with a trip to the movie theater. Then we walked home up Broadway, hand in hand, discussing the movie. Work talk was forbidden. Whatever stress was waiting could wait til the morning, after we slipped… Continue Reading
What Will You Serve for the Superbowl?
ShareTweet We are what you might describe as a football-know-nothing family. End zones and touch downs are a mystery to me, but I still enjoy the spectacle of the Superbowl, even without wardrobe malfunctions. Any excuse to make fun food for a party is fine with me! And besides, the Superbowl commercials alone are thoroughly… Continue Reading
Gratefulness Delayed
ShareTweet Some Thanksgivings are better than others. I went to boarding school in New Hampshire for my last few years of high school, far away from my family in France. The Thanksgiving break was too short to fly back to Europe, so I crashed the family celebrations of any friends who would have me. I… Continue Reading
>Little Hands on my Growing Belly
ShareTweet >The last time I was pregnant, Jack and Bella eyed my growing belly with suspicion bordering on terror. They touched it like a ticking time bomb, occasionally asking me whether it would pop open and whether there would be blood when it came time for the baby to come out. As I grew larger,… Continue Reading
Wordful Wednesday: Tell Me Their Stories
ShareTweet “Tell me their stories,” she demanded from the back seat. I peered at her through the rearview mirror, looking at me earnestly in her princess pink booster seat with her halo of uncombed hair and I asked, “whose stories do you want to hear, sweetie?” “Their stories, Mom, the stories of all the dead… Continue Reading
>Crepes for Mardi Gras
ShareTweet > We weren’t very religious growing up, but we never missed an opportunity to celebrate holidays with food. Mardi Gras was always one of my favorite holidays, because we got to have crepes for dinner. My mom would fire up the crepe pan and start flipping. She would flip until we couldn’t eat any… Continue Reading
>From Romance to Family in the Snow
ShareTweet >My husband and I had only been dating a few weeks when we went away skiing together. The tiny rental car propelled us from the muddy snowbanks of the New York highways to the pristine Vermont snowscape sprinkled with picturesque red barns. Somewhere along the way, we became a couple. We love to settle… Continue Reading
>Requiem for Annie’s Ice Cream, our Neighborhood Greasy Spoon
ShareTweet >Yesterday Annie’s Ice Cream Shop closed its doors for the last time. For two days straight, the crowd of kids surrounding the tiny shop had been huge, and the police had been on hand to keep order over the hordes that turned out to say goodbye to the Chung’s, the Korean couple who founded… Continue Reading
>Finally Finding Diversity
ShareTweet >”Hey Look! An Asian person!”We’d only been in Ohio for a few weeks when I realized that choosing the public school with the highest test scores may not result in the best environment for our family. The shocking statement had been uttered by my daughter’s best friend with a completely innocent, delighted smile. She… Continue Reading