Bright Light Mama

Stop Waiting, Mama. “Your Turn” is Today.

One of the hardest things about being a mom is feeling like I have to wait.

Wait until the baby is in her highchair to load the dishwasher. (She likes to steal the dirty silverware.) Wait until the kids are sleeping to work on my blog.

Wait until my husband is home to be able to grocery shop without three small-but-heavy little people attached to the cart.

Wait until he’s settled in his career/the kids are all in school/there’s enough money in the bank to pursue a little job of my own.

But there are some things we wait for for different reasons. We wait to try something new because we’re scared. Because what if we fail? Because haven’t we given all we have away already?

We wait to learn how to swim, paint, write a book, run a race, climb a mountain, open a shop, because it feels too big, it will take too long, and we don’t know where to start.

But do you really want to wait, mama?

Do you want to wait for “your turn”?

And if you just keep waiting, how will you know when “your turn” is?

[Read more…]

Things I Learned in June

1. NYC is fab, but doesn’t smell good in the summer.

Probably not news to those of you who’ve been, but I haven’t visited Manhattan in 10 years, so when I met my mama for a short trip earlier this month, I re-learned the scent of hot garbage sitting on street corners. Luckily it has, like, a hundred thousand wonderful things to recommend it, so we didn’t really care. 🙂

Side note: If you’re planning a visit to NYC, I recommend a cupcake at 2 Little Red Hens Bakery, eating a hotdog at dusk in Times Square for awesome people watching, burgers at Shake Shack, Ellis Island, and visiting the Egyptian wing at the Met. 🙂 And on that note…

2. There’s graffiti from 1892 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One of my favorite things about New York is the massive, sunlit room at the Met that houses a small (relative term!) Egyptian temple. It’s fantastic.

Apparently tourists have always loved it (even when it lived in its former Egyptian habitat) because, carved into the stone of the temple, we found tons of examples of 19th century graffiti. Just guys names with the year 1892 beside them. In this gorgeous temple!

Bet these guys didn’t know their names would be preserved in a museum. Can you imagine someone reading your initials in the dried cement of a sidewalk 100 years after you wrote it? [Read more…]

June Book Report

My reading has been a little scattered the last few months. I hit a little snag of disappointing fic/lit stories and it kind of jolted me off the fiction train for a bit. (It’s always a little disorienting to me when that happens, because up until about age 24 I hadn’t read more than a handful of non-fiction books by choice.) But I was very happy with the non-fic books I picked up this month, so (sigh!) it’s a happy ending after all! [Read more…]

Building a Daily Rhythm with Small Kids

How to make a realistic daily schedule with little kids!

I think it is pretty safe to say that getting a kid to put his shoes on is one of the universal struggles of parenthood.

I’m not talking about learning to put shoes on. No. It makes sense that learning how to wrangle your tiny foot into a tiny shoe for the first time might be challenging.

I’m not even talking about getting those shoes on the right feet. They don’t have to be on the right feet. I pick my battles.

I am talking about getting him through the simple act of putting two shoes on his feet. Just putting his shoes on so we can leave. To go anywhere. Even to places he likes.

There are a myriad of reasons why getting my four-year-old to put his shoes on might be an ordeal, including but not limited to:

he doesn’t want to,
he doesn’t like those shoes today (just today),
he doesn’t want to wear socks,
he does want to wear socks but not those socks,
he doesn’t want to stop playing Legos,
there is a fly somewhere in the room,
his sister is looking at him in what he deems to be a “mean” way,
he wants a kiss first,
now he wants another kiss,
he needs to sing a song,
he needs a snack, and/or
he needs to show me something he forgot he needed to show me until this exact moment.

So what I’m wondering is, if getting my child to put on a pair of shoes is an ordeal of such epic proportions, how on earth do I expect to convince him that 9:30 on-the-dot is time for chores, 9:45 exactly will be snack time, and 10:05 we will play blocks together? [Read more…]

Stop Waiting, Mama. “Your Turn” is Today.

Things I Learned in June

1. NYC is fab, but doesn’t smell good in the summer.

2. There’s graffiti from 1892 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

June Book Report

Building a Daily Rhythm with Small Kids

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