Women's Book Club

I’d like to invite you to join a new book club that I’m putting together.  I’ve read three AMAZING books recently about being a mother, a wife and a women.  I loved them soooo much that I really want to talk about them  and share them with wonderful women just like you.  I’d guess that you are going through all of the same fun stuff in life, such as “Why is being a mom and a wife so hard???” (did I say hard?  I meant to say so wonderful J) 

What: A wonderful new women’s group to review great books

When: Every other Tuesday night at 7pm (starting) January 29, 2013

Where: My office- it will be quiet and kid and husband free

Why: Because being a women is hard, challenging, wonderful, rewarding, and trying all at the same time and I think we need to talk about it J

 

RSVP: hmosgood@gmail.com

The Plan: If you’d like to join the group, we’d love to have you.  Please let me know if you are interested.  I’m going to put together a book schedule/ reading plan (don’t worry, the books are short and easy, but great reads and we’ll divide them up into manageable pieces so we won’t be reading an entire book a month)

Here are the books we’ll be reading:

Be the Mom by Tracey Lanter Eyster 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn

 

 

The Life Ready Woman by Shaunti Feldhahn and Robert Lewis

 

Progressive Dinner Date

One of my big goals for 2012 is to spend more time with husband. When you have three children, two under the age of three it is hard to get time alone. It is so nice to be reminded why you love the person you are with and when you don't get any time alone it can be challenging. When you're married there are so many "business" issues to attend too. The "business" of running a family is a lot of work. I'd like to be able to go on one date (or two if we're lucky) once a month. We are suppose to be rotating the planning of our date nights, I plan one, he plans one. I planned the first date of the New Year. We love to go out to eat, but once that's done then what? So I thought it would be fun to plan a progressive dinner date night. For each location I had a little conversation piece. The first location was Japanese. I loved the ceiling.

We had a great two person Asian Miso Soup. It was full of mushrooms. Very tasty. We'd ordered scallop skewers and I was very much looking forward to them. While we waited for the skewers we had Sapporo Beer which is always good. We were so disappointed when the waiter came to our table about twenty minutes after we'd ordered the skewers and let us know that they were out of scallops. Why we needed that twenty minute waiting period to determine this I'm not sure, but we ended up ordering the chicken. They were okay. They were chicken. I'm not sure how good chicken can get. After that dish we were on to our next stop.

We're fortunate to live near a very cute downtown area. We love to go and explore the downtown. It has grown and changed so much in the past ten years. On one of the side streets there is the cutest little bistro restaurant. It is literally 20' x 30' and seats four or five two person tables. What is most attractive about the restaurant is the ambiance. The dim lighting, the multitude of candles, the jazzy music and the food is excellent. They have an extensive wine list as well. We were able to walk in and grab a seat at their tiny bar. The menus are printed pages that have been glued into the pages of a reading book. Very creative. A little strange at first, but fun. We chose a wine. A nice Tempranillo from Spain.

As we sat within arms reach of the chef we noticed that she was not quit well. As she hacked and hacked our appetites weakened and weakened. I asked husband in a hushed voice if he wanted to eat what she was cooking and we both agreed we'd pass. We were so disappointed, because the food is so good, but not worth getting sick. We drank our wine and enjoyed the atmosphere before ducking out and moving on to the next stop.

So we went from high end trendy bistro to well, a bar. Husband and I have a favorite pub downtown and it is hard to pass up. We decided our main dish for the evening would be loaded nachos. They are wonderful. I opted for a glass of my favorite Zinfandel. It's called Seven Deadly Zins and I love it. About half way through the nachos I really regretted not getting a beer. Really nachos and beer go so well. My head was back in the swanky bistro when I ordered the wine. We enjoyed the nachos and just as the bar started to fill up with college students from the local university we headed to the next stop in our night of restaurant hopping.

I really wanted cheesecake. I'd planned to go to a California Fusion restaurant for dessert, but by the time dessert rolled around it was about 10:30pm and the restaurants were all closed. So we opted for a new local quirky cafe. This is by far the best downtown coffee house, if you could call it that. It is the only establishment that serves coffee, beer, wine and food. The owners filled the cafe with images of authors, play writes and the like. They purchased all the furniture second hand and the ceiling is covered with lamps hung upside down. That night they had a band and the bulk of the crowd was perched in front of the music. We slipped in and grabbed a table and a couple cups of coffee. For some reason I ordered a cappuccino. I never order cappuccino I order lattes. I guess I'd had one too many glasses of wine. It was tasty and the leaf pattern was wonderful.

When the coffee and conversation were consumded we headed back to the car and back to the real life of too many kids and too may cries.

We had a really fun evening. If you are looking for a good date night try it. I got the idea from a book. It recommended that you take your spouse on a fast food progressive dinner. That sounded fun, but I thought we'd prefer restaurant dining to fast food.

It was a great date.

I Love Paper Towels

I had a friend recently tell me that she was going to go paperless at her house (with the exception of toilet paper I'm guess. Oh, heavens I hope so!). And I thought I should do that too. According to the web average American households use about 226 pounds of paper a month! Yikes, so we should go paperless, right... well I tried for an afternoon. I really did, and then I realized that a friend of mine had borrowed all of my cloth napkins for her paper free wedding and I hadn't gotten any of them back. So for that afternoon we used rags.

Husband likes to make fun of my rag box. I wash, dry and fold my rags. Doesn't everyone? Apparently not Husband. He thinks that your rags should reside in a fowl box in the garage and they should never be washed. I should also mention that he thinks you should put the entire, in tacked holey t-shirt in the rag box. Wrong. How in the world can you use an entire t-shirt to clean with, or use as a napkin for that matter?

Our paper towel free afternoon consisted of the use of my entire rag box and then I thought I'm over this. Where are the paper towels? My sister doesn't buy paper towels. She hasn't ever, with any regularity. Think about how many trees she's saved. Hundreds, thousands...but we are tree killers. I just can't break up with my paper towels. They are wonderful. They hang on the wall between my cabinets so accessible and absorbent. When we have a spill, which happens daily, well really many times a day the paper towels are right there. Ready and willing to clean up any mess no mater how big. For some reason I don't think my 3 year should still drink from a sippy cup. She's three. She can hold a normal cup and she can drink from a normal cup. She just has a hard time doing them at the same time. Sooner or later one wins out and most of the time it is the hold that gives out. Thus spill after, spill after spill. Hey, she's learn. How else do you learn?

You know that the paper towel is clean so you don't have to worry about the cross contamination of those killer raw chicken juices. The best part? You can throw them away when you're done. When you have something that is absolutely awful that you have to clean up you can throw the whole mess away. When making a sandwich you can use the paper towel has a prep station and then use it as a sandwich holder and saves dirtying any dishes. I love paper towels. I can do without napkins (because you can just use a paper towel). I can do without paper plates (because you can just use a paper towel- most of the time). I can do without paper cups because who wants to use them anyways, but I can't do without paper towels.

About six months ago a Target opened about twenty minutes from my house. The other day I went and bought the biggest package of paper towels that I've ever purchased. It was only $5.99 for six rolls. And the paper towels are strong and absorbent! Yeah! Do you have any idea how long six rolls of paper towels will last? About six weeks. I'm so happy. I am sad that we are using so much paper, and that we are causing so many trees to be cut down. I want to be strong, I want to be paperless. Why am I so weak? Why can't I do without my paper towels? Why oh why? Perhaps I should make a deal with God. As soon as my kids are out of the house I'll stop using paper towels. Will that make it any better?...I know, maybe we should plant a tree of two a year to compensate. I think I have a healthy addiction to paper towels it just feels right.

2012 Goals

My goals for the year are similar to what they have been for the last couple of years:
Pay off debt, spend more time with husband, kids and Christ. However, this year is going to be the year (I can feel it) that I'm going to loose weight. I'm so ready to be thin. I'm not over weight much now. I'm at the top of my normal weight range for my height. However, I want to be thin. I've never really been thin and I want to be while I can still wear short skirts and look youngish. I started my 1200 calorie a day diet on Monday and I was at 159lbs. When I weighed myself yesterday, Wednesday I was at 153lbs. WOW. Who knew that eating very little everyday would make you loose weight? I also drank about 60oz of water a day and have been doing spin daily. The question is how long can I keep this up. When I'm at work not eating really isn't that hard, I'm working, but when I'm at home trying to relax with the kids it is a bit harder. Couldn't everyone use a nice cup of creamy coffee and a donut or two everyday? Add a few chocolately treats, a couple of glasses of wine and a few sliced of smoked Gouda and you have a perfect day and a fat ass and a stomach that sticks out further than your boobs.

I have a four month old baby so I'm allowed a little extra fat around the middle. Before I got pregnant though I had a couple of bad experiences. What exactly do you say when someone says, I didn't know you were pregnant again and you aren't!!! The best response is to run straight home, burn the clothing you are wearing because certainly it is your outfit and NOT your body showing off your ever so roundness round the middle. Hide in your room with a bottle of wine and the next day you'll feel good as new.

So really my goal for this year is to not have people think I'm pregnant when I'm not. I can do that, right? How hard could eating very little really be?

Here's to eating light and drinking water! What a party :)

Successes in 2011

As the year draws to an end I always like to review my accomplishments for the year. It is so important to think back on your successes. So frequently we (or at least I) think about what to do different, better, what I didn’t accomplish and don’t think about all of the things that we did do. So here’s my list:

#1 on my list. Give birth to a beautiful baby boy. Most of my year was spent being pregnant and preparing to add to our family. The pregnancy and birth went well and now we have a wonderful baby boy.

#2 Decrease the debt in our company by about 30K

#3 Parent my older son and daughter well. Okay, so who knows if you are doing a good job, but to my knowledge my 15 year old son hasn’t taken any drugs, had sex with anyone or cut class and he did get almost a 4.0 in his first semester of high school. My 3 year old daughter on the other had has been more of a challenge. When the baby arrived a devil child inhabited her body and she hasn’t been the same since. Each day she recovers slightly and we are hoping for a full recovery at some point before she turns 18, but before the baby came she was a perfect angel (most of the time).

Next up: my goals for 2012. Stay tuned…

My Favorite Decoration

This is my favorite new addition to the Christmas decoration line up for the year. I like this because it is beautiful and timeless. I also love it because it is in the hallway of our new addition. I love that I have a square window. Who doesn't want a beautiful square window. I decided not to put in window coverings on this window because through it there is an ocean view. I can see the sun setting at the end of the day (which comes a lot quicker with daylight savings time). I can also see the moon setting in the early morning when I get up to go to the bathroom. There is nothing more beautiful than the full moon glowingly setting on the Pacific. I love it.

Christmas Expectations

Expectation: A memorable family Christmas holiday that conveys the “reason” for the season to my children while being the most enjoyable experience of the year.

The Four Dreadful Days of Christmas:

Day One: My parents have invited us to their home for dinner and to go downtown and look at the massive display of beautiful Christmas lights. Husband and daughter have both had the stomach flu just a few days prior. Lovely, just lovely. Who doesn’t want a touch of the stomach flu with Christmas? So after husband and I engage in quite a bit of low key bickering we decide to go to my parent’s house for the festive occasion of clam chowder and Christmas light viewing. There is a bit of animosity from husband, why he asks do we need to go to your parent’s house on Friday when we are going to see them on Sunday. Because I explain, my mom really wants us to come over and she really wants to take the kids downtown to see the lights (my mom has just recovered for a massive battle with ovarian cancer and so my mom gets whatever she wants. In my book she’ll get whatever she wants for the rest of her life, from me anyways). I must explain that my mom and dad don’t live close to us; they don’t live close to anything. They live about 45 minutes from our house and 15 minutes from their local downtown Christmas light show. The evening is a very nice night with all of the usual suspects, we rush to get there and we’re an hour early (oops), my daughter only wants to eat candy for dinner, and husband asks if we are ready to go home about every fifteen minutes (this may be a bit of an exaggeration but it sure feels like every fifteen minutes). When we arrive downtown to view the lights we decide that it is best for husband to stay in the car with our three month old. As I’m leaving the car to walk my daughter around the downtown area to view the lights husband says, don’t be gone too long. Well isn’t that just great. I do realize that he is tried and not feeling 100% but that kind of stuff sets me on edge. I don’t want to be gone to long and bug him, but I also want to enjoy the lights. After all that is the main reason for the evening. We leave about half an hour later. Husband doesn’t mind how long we were gone, so I’m good and he’s good and we’re all good. When we arrive home I wrap gifts for about three hours which is good, I don’t want to stay up too late on Christmas Eve and be tired on Christmas morning. I wrap all my gifts and hit the sheets a not to unhappy girl.

Day Two- Christmas Eve: We don’t have plans for Christmas Eve, or at least husband doesn’t have plans. I have plans, as he says I always have a plan and if that plan doesn’t work out then I have a backup plan. I have a plan. My plan is to clean the house, prepare the food for Christmas day, a breakfast egg bake prepped and ready to go into the oven, a butternut squash lasagna, and a pumpkin cheesecake. Nex my plan is to have a nice early Christmas Eve dinner, go to a Christmas Eve church service with our friends, after which we’d all go out to dessert and partake in a gift exchange. I tell husband that we are going to do the gift exchange, but I don’t tell him about the church service. He isn’t a fan of church and I am, so we like to fight about it, not a lot but more than I’d like. So I come up with a plan, I tell my friend to text husband and invite him to the church service. I think hey, if she invites him then he’ll say yes, if I invite him he’ll so no. No harm no foul, right? Well, he doesn’t see it that way. He says that my friend and I are in cahoots and that we are trying to manipulate him into going to the church service, which we most certainly are. I, however, wouldn’t admit that if my life depended on it. So after an afternoon of tension and a bit of squabbling we head to church. In order to make it to the church service in time, we must wake our happily sleeping, not entirely well daughter; upon waking she beings to cry, and cry and cry. She does that sometimes, cries and cries and cries. So much fun. We wolf down our dinner in a recorded 5.5 minutes and rush to the church service. As we walk up the stairs to the church we are encountered with a hoard of people. Who knew that Christmas Eve church service was so popular? The church seats about 300 and there are about 400 people there, so it is packed. I think oh great, we aren’t even going to get to sit, this is NOT going to go over well with husband. Fortunately we are given folding chairs to sit on in the back of the church. The service is lovely, everything that I’d hoped it would be and certainly a highlight to my Christmas weekend. We leave the service and decide to go to Starbucks for a dessert and some coffee. We order and are seated with little fan fair and I’m thinking to myself, see this is just how I imagined it, and then it goes downhill quick. My daughter decides that she doesn’t want to share the toys that my friend has so graciously brought for her daughter to play with. So I say if you don’t stop we are going home. I don’t want to go home, but hey if she’s going to act like a brat than we are out of there. She continues to be a general nuisance so I scoop her up and take her outside. And then she loses it, I mean really loses it. She is screaming at the top of her lungs. The entire coffee shop is looking at us as well as the hoard of people in the downtown corridor. So I motion to my husband it is time to go. He acts like he doesn’t understand what I’m saying (which he later admits was meant to just annoy me- lovely). He comes out with our infant and tells me to get control of her. I tell him I’m doing the best I can and that he should take her. She at this point is in full flip out mode. Not just screaming, but flailing her arms and legs and attempting to take us down. Husband grabs her and we proceed to the car. When we get to the car, husband places her ever so gently in her car seat, okay so maybe it wasn’t the most gentle of moments, but come on really, he then tells her that she is being so bad that Santa will not be bringing her any gifts tomorrow morning. Alright supermom where are you? These are the moments that I most enjoy, trying to calm down husband and daughter. So I say, well I don’t know about that. I think that maybe Santa will come. For God sakes, I just spent three hours wrapping gifts the night before and I most certainly am not going to unwrap and return all of those gifts. Besides even when you want to ring her neck she is still the cutest child I’ve ever laid eyes upon that is if you aren’t counting my other two children. Once home, children nestled all snug in their beds I turn to my to do list. I haven’t yet prepared the food for Christmas day. So I begin to prepare. I prepare and prepare and prepare until it is midnight and I’m all prepared, so much for getting to bed at a reasonable hour. We set out the presents, fill the stockings and head to bed.

Day Three- Christmas Day: We are given the gift of a late morning start and that certainly is one of the highlights of the day. My daughter wakes me at about 7:50am with a small, “mommy I have to go to the bathroom.” I get up and take her to the bathroom where she proceeds to empty the contents of her entire body into the toilet, poor thing. She doesn’t seem too bothered by it though and we head to the tree to see what Santa has brought. Santa brought her a tricycle. The tricycle isn’t wrapped, but for some reason she doesn’t see it. We look at all the gifts and talk about everything until I literally have to point the bike out to her. She is excited about it once she sees it and that has some blessing. We have a nice morning, open gifts, cook and eat the egg bake that was prepared the night prior, we take a walk and ride the new tricycle and somehow manage to get out of the house only thirty minutes late to Christmas dinner with my family.
When my brother-in-law opens the door to my sister’s house I can tell that something is wrong. The house is in shambles and no one is to be seen. I’m then informed that my sister has the stomach flu. Oh no, we gave her the stomach flu. Just what everyone wants to get for Christmas, the stomach flu. And that is that. Christmas will not be standing around talking lightly while sipping champagne and nibbling on hors d'oeuvres. Okay let’s be honest it was never going to be like that at least not since we had children. With six children between our families Christmas was going to be chaotic, but if my sister were well at least there would be those moments of blissful peace and champagne and hors d’oeuvre nibbling and that organization that my sister, despite her special needs son always brings to a gathering that she’s hosting. I felt terrible. We’d ruined her Christmas. She was confined to the couch for the rest of the night. And we were left to make the most of the night. We did have a nice dinner and opened some great gifts. And then we left, but not without first taking several trips to the car and filling our small vehicle to the gills. Christmas day was over.

Day Four- The Extended Family Gathering: Every year since I’ve been a child we’ve gotten together with my Aunts and Uncles for a Christmas celebration. This year it was to take place on the day after Christmas and we were all to bring a pot of soup. That is our tradition a soup Christmas. As a soup lover I’ve always enjoyed this. Husband and my brother-in-law are not all that fond of soup Christmas. Husband asked me at his first soup Christmas gathering what we were having for dinner; that was after we’d eaten dinner, the soup dinner. Why must you have a big piece of meat to call a meal dinner? That I will never know. I wanted to go to soup Christmas. I’m the one who initiated the gathering (after the real adults were taking way too long to plan something). I wanted to go, but alas who wants the stomach flu for Christmas? Not me. Not anyone. So here I sit on the fourth day of Christmas typing away on my computer at home while the rest of my extended family, with the exception of my sister and her family celebrate soup Christmas without us… pity me, pity me.
Christmas is over. The gifts have been bought and opened. The cookies have been baked and it turns out not passed out this year for fear of spreading Montezuma’s revenge. The church services have been attended and our Christmas tree, in true tradition is dryer than the floor of Death Valley. Christmas cards were sent and received. Holiday cheer was shared and now it is over. It is never what I want it to be. It is never enough. Not big enough, not fast enough, not long enough, not happy enough, not fun enough, not enough. I guess nothing on this earth is. God is all that is enough. So next year, I’m going to focus on that. Okay, so that isn’t entirely true, I’m going to try and remember the reason for the season, Christ’s birth and I hope that we don’t have the stomach flu. Please, oh, please let us use more hand sanitizer next year.