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You Are NOT Your Job!
This article is not about parenting or anything related to parenting, per se. I suppose I’m breaking the rules of the website but I had a thought I’ve been chewing around lately and wanted to record for posterity. And it is MY website so I’ll say what I want to say. LOL. This is my sad little version of creative freedom… The old trope goes: “Study hard, kids, so you don’t grow up to be a bus driver!” … (The other old trope goes: “Don’t live in a van down by the river!” Although living in a van is considered cool now.) Well, I worked at a bus yard five…
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Never a Kodak Moment… What baby milestones REALLY look like (PLUS: Fan Mail Bag!)
Praise Buddha! I finally ponied up the money to get my laptop fixed. Which means I can once again engage in my illustrious side hustles, AND I can flesh out a couple of these long-teased blog topics. Amazingly, Google Analytics tells me that I received many new viewers during my lengthy sabbatical. But based on the emails I’ve read, I fear it may be more quantity than quality. …Fan Mail Time! Here’s an email from one of my esteemed fans. DavidG666@outlook.com (very professional outlook name) writes: “RelationshipsdatingInside the harmful world of ‘Sugar Daddy’ internet dating sites”mister father” paid dating sites might appear like sexy chinese women a fun way to…
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Blogging… Like Opening Up Yet Another Taco Stand in Mexico
Way back in 2001, I was sitting in a college lecture when my professor proclaimed grimly to the class that journalism was experiencing its death knell. With tenure-backed boldness, he warned us all to pick a different major since print media was about to go the way of the dodo. In subsequent years, his prediction proved fairly accurate. While newspapers remain an important part of American life, companies have been hit hard as more and more Americans are consuming their news digitally. Since 2009, many major metropolitan news dailies have been either shut down or forced to make drastic reductions to stay afloat. Instead, people are going online to get…
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Back in the Day! …Health Myths your Mama Believed
I was thinking recently, when my daughter got sick, about how incredibly lucky we are to have a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips. By jumping online, we can seek out a multitude of credible sources and access creative home remedies for everything that ails us. With the power of the internet, we can nip symptoms in the bud long before we have to take our kids in to the doctor. Compare this to what our moms did when we got sick in those “primitive” pre-Google days. They referenced the trusty, dusty old family tome: The Mayo Clinic Book. Tucked in the family bookshelf next to the Encyclopedia Britannica set,…
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Super Parent LIFE HACKS!
As an avid Redditor, one of my favorite threads on the site is r/lifehacks. Yes, most of the life hacks are kind of lame, but sifting through the thread is like shopping at the Goodwill. You’ve got to sort through a lot of crap to find the treasure, and it’s truly golden when you’ve found an excellent life hack that’s perfectly tailored to you. A hack that you can apply to increase your efficiency, save time and money, or simply up the whimsy level in your daily life. As parents, we can especially benefit from the use of life hacks, and this article from Bored Panda compiles some of the…
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Don’t be a WORRY WART… Restructure your Thinking and FREE Your Head
For those of us moms who share parenting duties with the ex, there comes a time when we have to ask ourselves: “Is this a CPS-level offense or just dad establishing himself as the fun parent?” For me, that time came when my daughter was about ten months old, her father had her for the weekend and I gave them a call to see how everything was going. I asked him what they’d had for lunch, and he answered “blue cheese stuffed steak,” before hanging up on me. My daughter had eight teeth at the time. I called my mom in a state of anxiety and consternation —because moms are…
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Kids’ Food Allergies are Skyrocketing. BUT WHY?
My child’s father and I engage in frequent spirited debates. Some might call them squabbles. Or something midway between debates and squabbles… Can I coin the new term “squabate?” Our most recent squabate sprang forth from an article that I read in the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently, a woman let her four-year-old eat a peanut butter sandwich in the front seat of a Target shopping cart, leading to an all-out mommy war in the comments section of a New York parenting blog. The majority of moms were chastising this woman for her insensitivity toward other children with nut allergies who might have used that cart after her. They claimed that…
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The DARE Program Still Exists?! …Talking to our Kids about Addiction
I was at Pete’s party in the summer of my sophomore year in high school. He was real cool because he hailed from Canada which, to us at that time, was a very exotic place. The moment that DARE had warned me about occured not in a shady back-alley shortcut on my way home from school, but amongst friends at an innocuous backyard get together. Somebody passed the joint to me. I don’t remember who, but I think it was that drummer Chris. It’s always the drummer, isn’t it? Instantly my mind jumped back to the DARE indoctrination that I had experienced four years prior. I pictured myself taking one…
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Which Little Critter to Get for Your Child?…My Definitive Pet Rankings!
When I was a child, I wanted nothing more in the world than a dog. Before every big gift-worthy occasion or holiday, I ceaselessly begged my parents. Birthdays, Christmastime, good report cards, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day… you name it! I made highly sophisticated presentations complete with graphs and charts, outlining the case and expertly arguing my side like a junior attorney. And I never let up on the dream. In response and over time, my parents bought every form of “alternative” pet in an effort to appease me. I had fish, hamsters, a rabbit, a turtle, birds… Eventually, they buckled a little and allowed me to get a cat. Thus, Arthur…
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Don’t Believe your Next Door App… The World is LESS Dangerous TODAY than EVER Before
When we become moms, we tend to worry more about the dangers of the world and how this might affect our children. We pay more attention to all the bad news and convince ourselves that our society is scarier than ever… And now there’s a handy app to provide real-time confirmation bias! In this article, Joel Stein of The LA Times shares his thoughts on Next Door, and it’s ability to turn people into a bunch of nosy, paranoid Gladys Kravitz’s. If you haven’t already heard of Next Door, it’s an app that serves as a virtual bulletin board and neighborhood watch that’s specific to its user’s geographical area. You…
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The SCIENCE Behind *Annoying* Baby Talk Singsong Voices!
At least once a night, after my daughter has gone to sleep, one of her talking toys comes to life on its own and pipes up with some stupid phrase from the bottom of the toy basket. It’s pretty creepy but I’ve grown accustomed to it, and I’m sure there’s a reasonable, non-ghost explanation as to what hairpin triggers these toys to go off. Last night, I heard her anthropomorphic picnic basket cut my peace and quiet to tell me “an ORANGE is orange!” Well no kidding. It wasn’t the stupidly obvious statement that bugged me, but the way that he (or she?) said it. In that singsong, saccharin fake…
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“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” Helen Keller
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The Rent Is Too F*#%ing High! Housing Rights & Options
As a California native who could never quite convince herself to leave this great state, I’ve grown accustomed over the years to insane rental costs and the fine art of the Craigslist search for that apartment needle in the haystack. But in the past couple years, it’s gotten out of control. In fact, my current city of Sacramento had the largest rental rate increase in the nation for 2017 with an increase of 11% since 2016, prompting talks of rent control and other city-wide limits. People are flocking here from the Bay Area and driving up the cost of housing, but it’s not just a California/Silicon Valley problem. The recent housing…
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Mother’s Day: A Surprising History
I’m sad to report that as with many holidays, the origin story of Mother’s Day is a dark one… And the nineteenth century was twisted times, y’all! Celebrations of motherhood can actually be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who honored their mother goddesses with festivals, and an early form of Mother’s Day known as “Mothering Sunday” was celebrated as a major tradition in the UK and Europe before fading in popularity. However, the modern version of Mother’s Day that we all participate in can be attributed to Anna Jarvis, daughter of Anne Reeves Jarvis. Anne Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia was quite the woman. She helped start “Mother’s…
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Toys, Toys, Toys! What do the Experts Say?
As Toys R Us is on the verge of closing all locations following Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Geoffrey the Giraffe is served his generous severance package after more than fifty years of unwavering company loyalty, I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of toys. On the one hand, I’m deeply grieved by the end of an era in which toys held their own special space in the retail realm. When toys were not just five aisles of cheap plastic crap in a big box store of sixty. An afterthought at Walmart or Target because your kid was being particularly well-behaved on the monthly stock-up trip. Or something you order…
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“Pull the Car Over, Ma!”…Sensible Drive Thru Options
WARNING! The fast food industry is a glaringly obvious sign of the fast approaching, American-led apocalypse. Its offerings are a direct cause of massively increased rates of high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, childhood obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, acne, restless leg syndrome and every other medical malady known to man. It’s a lazy person’s go-to choice in a country rapidly approaching widespread drooling Idiocracy. Its marketing targets and preys on poor people, who are surely incapable of thinking for themselves. Fast food restaurants infest our suburban landscapes. They are greasy pockmarks from sea to shining sea, and export the disease to all other parts of the world, destroying entire cultures and…
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Filing for Custody in California: Time to Pay Uncle Sam…
(Note: This article pertains mostly to single mamas who were unmarried at the time that their children were born, and the custody challenges they may face as a result. Divorce-related custody issues are a whole other beast, for which my knowledge is extremely limited at this point. If you’re a divorced single mama, I would be curious to hear about the personal challenges you’ve experienced and your ideas on how we can make improvements to the system. Please feel free to drop a line in the comments.) I made a rather general resolution as we rang in 2018, to complete that big transition from “surviving” to “thriving.” This would be…
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Daily Single Mama Gambles
…All the decisions we make on our own! Before I wrote this article, I was faced with a gamble. I was supposed to write an entirely different article, but my computer decided to turn against me and unleash an unholy virus. I then had a decision: whether to fix this old and not so trusty laptop, or save my money for a pursuit that would be more promising than the vague notion that there are people out there who will actually read what I have to contribute to this unending internet expanse. As single mothers, we often have to take daily gambles. We have to make decisions, big and small,…
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What does it REALLY Cost to Raise Them?
We’ve all heard the nightmarish inflated statistics. A recycled version of the same old clickbait that comes out each year: “It costs $500,000 to raise a child from birth to eighteen years of age, not including college expenses!” They’ll put you in the poorhouse before they’re even walking, they all say… It’s enough to send us single mamas running for the hills! Well, it’s not quite that terrifying, but according to the most recent report by the United States Department of Agriculture (latest released January 2017), it costs a middle class family in the United States an average of $233,610 to raise a child who was born in 2015…
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“My mother was the single most important influence in my life. I saw her struggles as a single mom. She taught me the values of hard work and responsibility, but also of compassion and empathy – being able to look at the world through somebody else’s eye and stand in their shoes.” -Barack Obama