If you’re an Ellen, you are firmly in the “Have kids, will travel with a sweet neat vacation package built for 4”. If you’re an Erin, you’ll be strapping kids to the roof of the minivan, begging concierges for freebies and special room rates, and leaving luggage behind. Just kidding about all that, sort of. It’s not quite a Grapes of Wrath Joads-crossing-the-prairie situation, but the struggle is real. And Erin did leave behind luggage. She tells the story in our latest podcast.
While we are definitely gonna spend a decent amount of time talking about family size and how it colors our experience of motherhood, we will also talk a little about the challenges of raising a family with a large carbon footprint, how parenting morphs and changes, and about how every family flies its own flag.
We are having a great conversation over here. Just click the player at the bottom of the post and you can be part of it too!
Confetti Canons, Bratz dolls, and bikinis, oh my! This is not a case of Spring Break gone wrong, but one of a simple question launching a great discussion. Last week, Spring looked like it was actually thinking about showing up this year so we asked a simple question on our Facebook page.
And oh the response we got! It was great, and, better yet, it prompted a discussion not just on our page but between the two of us too.
In this week’s podcast, we take on the burning question of the bikinis but also talk about respectful parenting, moms judging other moms, our confetti canon culture, and arbitrary battle lines. Erin shares a major misstep along the way and a story of one of her friends who got it just right. There’s a lot of good stuff in this one.
Erin: That one put a whole different spin on mean girls. I found the dynamics of group psychology . . .
Ellen: Wait! That’s not what I wanted to talk about! I know you are Queen of the Tangents, but I’m going to borrow your scepter for a moment. I want to talk about an article Megan recommended to me.
Erin:Whoa. Clearly you are excluding me from a group of friends I REALLY want to be a part of. Hook. Me. Up.
Ellen: Well, she recommended it to me and 8,000 of her closest friends on Twitter. I saw her handle in her bio and jumped over to check her out. There I saw a link to this article that has been bouncing around in my head ever since: Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives.
Erin:Those are some interesting points to ponder brought up in that article!
Like: “Are shutterbug parents wiping away their mental databases of experiences with their offspring while bulking up their digital ones?”
Ellen: And this one: “When children grow up reviewing thousands of pictures and hours of video of their young lives, will these images supersede their memories?”
Erin: So many questions, so much to say. This feels like the perfect time for a podcast.
Ellen: True that! Listen to what we have to say and tell us what you think in the comments. My husband and I are going on a trip of a lifetime to Paris with our kids and I’m wondering if I will have enough nerve to limit my shutterbug impulses.
So, what level of shutterbug are you?
Would you be able, or even willing , to limit your picture taking??
Sometimes you have questions. Questions like “why won’t my kid stay in her own bed?” or “why does my three year old ask 500 questions?” or “what would drive Erin to dress like this?”
The answer to all of these questions is that kids are nuts. No, not really, but parenting can make you a little nutty, or, in Erin’s case, just plumb worn out.
In this podcast, we get into some serious truth about parenting and answer the question of why Erin is dressed like that. We also tackle the big question of whether you really need to be loving every minute of it. Even if your kids are your favorite people, they can also be taxing and confounding and exhausting. We talk about some of the highs and lows, and, as a bonus, Ellen gives a little primer on children’s brain development.
Check out our latest conversation and feel free to join in! Just leave your thoughts in the comments!
This podcast could also have been called “The One Where We Saw Glennon from Momastery During a Blizzard.” Seriously, four inches fell in about forty-five minutes. We had to hightail it out of there before we could meet her, but not before we heard her little nugget on emotional pain. In any case, her talk gave us lots to talk about!
Wanna hear about it?
Click the podcast at the bottom of the post to hear what we learned in that terrible snowstorm!
In the podcast, we talk about a bunch of things, including Glennon herself and her blog, the book club Erin joined to get ready for the talk, grief, and how to help friends and family who are in the midst of it.
Here are all the links for your easy reference along with some grief resources you might find helpful.
Jessica Watson writes at Four Plus An Angel, and among writing about other things like parenting and parenting a child with autism, she also writes about her grief after losing her daughter Hadley, a triplet, shortly after her birth. Her post, The Stone, is the one Erin references in the podcast.
Here is the TedTalk that Erin watched at the beginning of her book club. You can see for yourself what a dynamic speaker Glennon is.
And here is Glennon’s book that Erin read in the book club. It was also given to us at the talk.
Ok, we didn’t mention this in the podcast but we probably should have: we have a booklist for grief. Books help us and they might help you or someone you love. Also, Ellen mentioned that her mother died two years ago. She wrote about her loss here and here.
For those of you keeping score at home we are both bursting at the seams with teens and tweens. Please send reinforcements in the form of Diet Coke and chocolate. Scratch that. We’re trying to be healthy. Just send lots of happy thoughts our way.
We jest, but there’s truth here too. These years leading up to and including the teens can be challenging for you, your kids, your sanity, and your bottom line. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a guidebook or ten to help you navigate these unfamiliar and sometimes hostile waters? How about some Sensible Sisters to talk you through it?
Well, we’ve got what you’re looking for! We are not promising that these books will solve all your problems but they are great guideposts to help you through the tween and teen years.
And if you need your middle school advice soundbite-sized, listen to our podcast at the end of this post!
This is a parenting book that frankly anyone who spends any time around any boys age 11 through 18 needs to read. With over 200 interviews with boys and strong research guiding her conclusions, Wiseman draws the adolescent boy in sharp relief and gives us not only a true picture of the more complex lives of boys, but some ways we can help them through the next few years.
Our favorite insight? We do boys a disservice by dismissing their emotional lives as simple when they most assuredly are not. There is even a free e-book for boys themselves to read about what to do in difficult situations.
Wiseman is kind of a superhero. Or a superstar. In any case, she has written a book that can save you and any special boys in your life.
And Wiseman works a similar magic for girls. Erin read this book when she first started teaching middle school and it fundamentally changed the way she looked at girls, their friendships, and their struggles with each other and themselves.
Wiseman offers sage, sound advice for how to guide girls towards treating themselves with dignity and grace and treating each other fairly, but there is so much more than that in this book. Understanding girl power plays, how boys fit into the big picture of girl relationships, and the different roles girls play really helps anyone who knows or loves an adolescent girl guide her to her best, most authentic self. Thanks again to the wonderful and very wise Wiseman.
We often scribble pearls of wisdom from what we’ve been reading. This quote from this book has become Erin’s talisman over the past few years:
“As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children’s. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek…”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys
Michael Gurian shares his larger vision of how culturally we are failing boys by not acknowledging and thus not meeting their biological and spiritual needs. We both love books with a strong scientific bent that are also easy to read. This book meets those criteria and yet exceeds expectations too. It will be a beloved helpmate on the hormone highway you are now traveling.
This is a riveting read. Honestly. Bursting with excellent, updated scientific research about how girls develop, how their brains work, and how this all affects how girls relate to themselves and each other, this is as unputdownable as nonfiction gets. Ditto everything we said about The Wonder of Boys but yet uniquely wonderful in its own way. Magic.
Anyone who has been anywhere near a middle school lunchroom knows that The Drama Years is the perfect title for a book about girls navigating the difficult tween years. This book is one of the best for helping you and your daughter through it.
Haley Kilpatrick is the founder of GirlTalk and she is on a mission to end the drama and change the outcome for our nation’s young women. Sharing her own personal anecdotes from middle school and drawing on conversations with middle school and high school girls about what actually happens and what helps, Haley Kilpatrick has created a book with real insights and a clear path for helping. You will love the real, honest talk and the great, usable advice.
We have already recommended this book so many times that we’re out of digits to tell you all the reasons we love it. But here are five.
First, Michelle Icard establishes herself from the very first page as a woman you can trust and want to share this journey with you. Warm and empathetic, Icard is also funny and real. You’ll wish you could invite her over for tea or, in Erin’s case, Diet Coke.
Second, as the creator of Athena’s Path and Hero’s Pursuit, social skills camps for middle school boy and girls, Icard has tons of real, practical solutions to share for lots of common middle school issues.
Third, we love this book’s central theme of shifting your parenting to the role of assistant manager. It’s such a recognizable, perfect metaphor for how your role needs to change during these years and she explains just how to do this perfectly.
Fourth, one of the best pieces of advice Erin ever received about parenting this age was to remain neutral when receiving information. Icard has given a great name to this strategy, “Botox Brow”, and she weaves in stories, examples, and advice for how to pull off this essential coping skill.
Fifth, Icard likes kids, even middle schoolers. We have that in common. She shifts the paradigm and the assumption that there is something wrong with kids at this age. Kids are just fine, but the way we have been dealing with them at this age has to change. She then goes on to give a ridiculous amount of ways to do help do this.
Honestly, we could go on, but you should just fire up the old credit card and order this one for yourself now.
So there you go: a collection of parenting books to keep you company through the next few years. Short of an endless supply of calorie-free chocolate, it’s the best option.
Of course, another great option is to listen to us talk a little about our experiences with middle schoolers.
While chocolates, hearts, and flowers may be the way to some girls’ hearts, books are definitely the way to ours. If books fill you with a warm, happy feeling too, here are five that you might want to check out, download, or purchase for yourself or your sweetie.
And if you are interested in hearing us talk about one of these in real time, just click the podcast at the bottom of this post!
There is a reason this book made it on to nearly every “Best Of” list last year—it’s quite simply a remarkable gem of a book. With her unique gift for plucking the extraordinary from the every day, Offill doesn’t just offer up moments from a marriage but gives us glimpses of the diamonds hidden in the rough patches as well. Offill’s structuring of the story can be the reader’s hard work. Through her careful curation of snippets from the marriage at the heart of this novel, Offill leaves the reader asking on every page—how do these pieces fit together? what does this mean here?—yet these tenuous but important questions serve the story she is trying to tell. Marriage isn’t a straight narrative so much as a thousand shimmering moments—beautiful, terrible, and strange—and she lays them all out for us in this gripping, lovely book about what it means to take this particular trip.
You know how we feel about immunizations. Ellen wrote a great post about herd immunity and its current threat from the anti-vaxxer movement here. But this book doesn’t so much argue for vaccines as wrap itself around the very concept of innoculation itself. Biss’ pace is unhurried as she weaves personal anecdotes in with history, literature, and scientific research. The result is a captivating read on a subject we cannot escape right now. I cannot escape one of her quotes: “We owe each other our bodies.” An unputdownable piece of non-fiction that will keep you thinking long after you have turned the last page.
This book broke my heart a couple of years ago, but it never left me. It’s truly one of my favorites of all time, but it’s not easily summed up or laid out. Krauss, the wife of the literary superstar Jonathan Safran Foer, has a weighty literary talent of her own and she embues all of her gifts on telling this beautiful love story of a boy named Leo who loved a girl named Alma. That she lets this love story travel back and forth in time and be told from many angles is just a gift for the reader. This is a book you will cherish.
For a big, honking tome like this with a beautiful, intricate story to boot, you could totally be spot on in thinking, “Really, Erin? You serious?” Well, those who love the literary heavy hitters are already gonna be on board with this wide open, lyrical book, but even if you are just looking for a great story, trust me when I say that this book is for you. It starts as a father’s love story. Marie-Laure loses her sight at six years old and her father, a talented locksmith in charge of all the locks at the Museum of Natural History, uses his abundant gifts to help her learn to manage her blindness. By the power of Doerr’s narrative gifts, it morphs into something else entirely. There is so much good stuff in these pages and Doerr plays well with every character and theme he introduces. It may not be great literature, but it is a damn fine read and that is enough to keep you warm on a cold winter night.
This is the one book that I am telling everyone to read right now. It’s such a great all-around literary experience from the plot that sucks you in to the characters that pull you through to the questions it keeps asking you. I could go on and on.
In fact, you can hear me (and Ellen) go on and on about this book and other things too in our latest podcast. Just click it below!
Our question this week is how to flip the switch that will change your couch potato cake-gorging ways. We talk about Fitbits, food plans, and Ellen brings some hard core doctor advice.
What can help you flip your switch? Just hit play on the soundbar at the bottom of the post.
Now you were promised the recipe for stuffed pepper soup, but we’re going to give you even more. Here are THREE recipes you can make at the same time. If you’re browning one pound of ground meat, you might as well brown two and have dinner and lunches done for the whole week.
You can follow the links to the fully printable recipes, but here are Ellen’s tips for assembling the soup, Mexican casserole, and Greek beef at the same time.
When making these recipes all at once, Ellen typically uses one pound of extra lean ground beef and one pound of extra lean ground turkey.
She browns the turkey with the onions and peppers for the soup in her soup pot (because it cooks with very little fat draining off). She cooks the beef with the onion and the pepper for the Mexican casserole in a skillet. She drains both separately and removes her quarter cup of ground beef for the Beef with Greek Yogurt Sauce. but then returns half of the turkey to the skillet and half to the soup pot. She does the same for the beef, trying to get more of the peppers back in the soup pot.
She then proceeds with all three recipes. It’s a lot of cooking, but then you have dinners and lunches for days. So worth it.
Now these recipes weren’t the only resources mentioned. Another tool we talked about was this little guide that is so very useful for planning what you are going to eat when you go out:
Now while you can easily get this awesomeness on Amazon for under $9.00, Ellen mentioned another book that is unfortunately out of print: The Skinny: How to Fit Into Your Little Black Dress Forever by Melissa Clark and Robin Aronson. So since you can’t easily buy this for yourself, we’ll share the two philosophies in it that first helped Ellen “flip her switch.”
1. Eat what you want and banish the guilt. If you really want a food, there is a portion and a way to work it into your day.
2. You can indeed eat a few bites of something decadent, like cake, enjoy each bite, and know that there will be bites of cake in your future. You don’t have to consume it all right now.
Keeping these two philosophies in mind are a great way to supplement a diet plan so that you can kick boredom, bingeing, and guilt to the curb . . . along with your fat pants.
By the way, we were raving about the positive reinforcement our Fitbits give us. We both have Zips. You can look at the details and buy one here:
While we are all socked in with frigid weather, it’s the perfect time to talk about one of Ellen’s pet peeves. Honestly, it’s not a rant so much as a discussion about what to do if you are ever in this situation. This one also has Erin’s organizational triumph which is as trivial as it sounds.
by Rosalind Wiseman
by Rosalind Wiseman
by Michael Gurian
by Michael Gurian
by Haley Kilpatrick
by Michelle Icard
by Jenny Offill
by Eula Biss
by Nicole Krauss
by Anthony Doerr
by Emily St. John Martel
