Tragic Sandwich

Tag: job

  • Chores

    We’ve added something to our weekends.

    Weekdays are too tight—and too demanding—for me to ask Baguette to do daily chores. But weekends? On weekends we’ve got all day. We can pace ourselves.

    Mind you, this isn’t really systematic at this point. Sometimes I forget to print off the sheet. Sometimes I forget to add a sticker. Sometimes I do the chores myself, because that’s the best way to handle that weekend. Sometimes they don’t get done, for the same reason. It’s a learning process for all of us.

    white hand towels and washcloths in messy stacks, with a list of weekend chores

    I could re-fold these. But I think that will tell her that her work isn’t good enough. And, really, a messy stack of towels isn’t even remotely the biggest problem with our housekeeping. We can refine this over time.

  • Mom-Friendly Meals

    Recently, some of my friends have said, “You really seem to have this meal-planning thing down. What’s your secret?”

    I do not have the meal-planning thing down. My secret is that I have a child who is slightly older than their child.

    I think there are a lot of us in this boat. We think, “That person over there is doing this much better than I am.” And the truth is, they’re just working with different circumstances.

    One of my college friends has a daughter about two months older than Baguette. She also has an older child and a stepchild. And when her daughter was a baby, every night this friend would post on Facebook about some amazing meal she was making her family for dinner.

    Now, I know her. She wasn’t doing this to brag about how much better she was at parenting. She was doing it to show that it could be done–that often when you feel overwhelmed, it’s in your head. She wasn’t boasting, she was demonstrating.

    But what I couldn’t figure out was this: how was she managing it? Like me, she had a full-time job outside of the home. Like me, she had an infant. Unlike me, she had two other children. So how was she pulling off this amazing feat?

    As it turns out, she has a shorter commute. Like, a lot shorter. Mine is an hour each way. Hers is more like 15 minutes.

    See what I mean? Different circumstances.

    And my own circumstances have changed. Looking back, I’m not really sure what I ate when Baguette was a baby. I cooked for her, but I don’t remember what I made for myself. After a while, I found that I could use the crock pot on the weekends to make a big batch of something. That counted as cooking.

    slow cooker
    I no longer use the slow cooker for oatmeal, though.

    More recently, I’ve been able to use the stove a little. Last night I made shrimp with bell peppers and zucchini in Red Thai Curry Sauce, served over quinoa. I’m having leftovers for lunch.

    I have no idea what’s for dinner tonight.

    Again, I think there are a lot of us in this boat. So I’m starting an occasional series called “Mom-Friendly Meals.” I’m going to write about what I cook, how I choose recipes, what tools I use, how I find ingredients, and anything else that comes to mind. You can follow me on Twitter at @tragicsandwich; I’ll be using the hashtag #momfriendlymeals for these posts.

    One thing to keep in mind: These are mom-friendly recipes. At our house, we all eat different things. Baguette is going through a picky stage, and while we’re trying to move her through that, I’m not going to pretend that she ate the Thai curry with me. And Mr. Sandwich has his own palate, and tends to do his own cooking. So our kitchen is very busy, but we’ve finally started eating together as a family.

    Now we just have to clean off the rest of the kitchen table.

  • Apparently I Lack Imagination

    It’s been weeks since I posted. I have photos from our vacation earlier this month. (Didn’t know we went on vacation? Quite possibly that’s because I haven’t posted in weeks.) Well, technically Mr. Sandwich has the photos. I haven’t managed to transfer them from his computer to mine.

    And there have been things I’ve wanted to blog about, but I can’t remember them. Maybe that’s because Baguette has been going through a growth spurt, which means that none of us has been sleeping.

    So I need a writing prompt. Ginger from Ramble Ramble to the rescue!

    She’s been providing a pair of writing prompts for several weeks. And usually I look at them and think, “Oh, I could blog about that.” And then I don’t. But this week’s prompts both appeal to me.

    Prompt 1: In another life, what career/job would you have, and why?

    Prompt 2: Give us your top 10 favorite movies of all time.

    Today I’ll do #1, because, well, it’s the first one.

    When I was a kid, I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to be when I grew up:

    • archaeologist
    • lawyer
    • neurosurgeon (mostly I just said that to get people off my back about career plans)
    • nurse
    • mom
    • brick layer

    The easy answer is that I’d be a writer, and a successful one (hey, it’s my alternate reality I’m imagining). I’d have taken the path I saw for myself in high school, pursued journalism, written some nonfiction under my own name, and written some fiction under a pseudonym. Or I’d have turned to magazines rather than newspapers, and I’d be a freelance writer with the aforementioned nonfiction and fiction.

    But I really didn’t like the person I was when I was a reporter–even a high school reporter–and I have discovered that I don’t really like freelancing. I’m not geared to work for myself; I prefer to work for a company or organization of one sort or another. I like the steady paychecks. I like not having to build a client base or die. I like the health benefits (Seriously, I once had the following internal monologue upon seeing a picture of the mountains in eastern Kazakhstan: I would love to be able to backpack there. I wonder if I could get to that level of backpacking. But I’d wind up with a sinus infection. Where would I get antibiotics? I’m really not Backpacking-in-Kazakhstan Girl.)

    So I’d probably be an editor, quite possibly in magazines. Considering how much I have always loved reading them, I’m not sure why I didn’t pursue this as a career path. After I got my master’s degree, I applied for a kazillion jobs (college admissions counselor, CIA analyst) in a bazillion fields (education, government, publishing, historical research) all around the world (rural Virginia, Philadelphia, the United Arab Emirates). I don’t think a single one of those jobs was at a magazine.

    In this life, I spent 13 years as an in-house and freelance (see? I even tried it) editor. My current job is not editorial, but I’m still asked to do a lot of editing.

    Yes, I know I’m out of control with the parentheses on this post, and my use of italics is erratic at best here, but this is the way my brain is working today. Bear with me.

    So I guess in whatever life I’d have, I’d have something akin to this career.

    Oh, hey, the mom part turned out to be true, too. Nice.

  • Whoops. My bad. Go here.