Spice of Life

I have a love/hate relationship with modern technology, especially cell phones.  I absolutely love how we can remain connected with friends and family around the world through social media, texting and email.  I appreciate how fast we can be updated about major events, things in the news or when a friend needs help. Playing games like Pokemon Go or Wizards Unite can be fun as well.  What I really hate though is the profound way it disconnects us from social interaction. It’s kind of funny actually...this little thing that connects people from all walks of life, all over the world also carries the power to disconnect. Now that we have a “tween”, I spend a lot of time thinking about and wondering what our kids will be like as teenagers.  I have this picture in my head of them walking around, heads bent, staring at their phones like zombies and it terrifies me.  Then I think about one of the most basic things we learn as parents, our kids want to do wha...

When I was a kid I was always very skinny, so much so that I was even teased for it. I was blessed to be raised by a mother that did not speak badly about her body and was a good example for me. As a teenager and young adult I retained my fast metabolism and although I had dealt with body image issues like any young person it wasn't until after the birth of my second child that I became increasingly self conscious and even ashamed of how I looked. After my first child was born I had diastasis recti (separation of the stomach muscles) and did not seek the help I needed to repair it. It of course did not help that my second child was ten pounds at birth and my stomach had stretched to its limit! Again I didn't do much physical therapy to fix the separation in my stomach so I ended up with a little "pooch", the technical term us Mom's have for post baby stomach. ;) I was aware of the change in my body for sure and it bothered me a little but it wasn’t until so...

In recent years I have come to realize that I have great expectations for dinner time.  When we were in Grand Rapids and I was working I would look forward to coming home and having dinner with my family so if it didn't go the way I wanted it to I would be very disappointed.  Most days I would come home to everyone yelling and/or in very bad moods.  Now that I'm not working outside the home I find I still have pretty high expectations for how dinner time should go.  We have four kids.  The older two are 11 and 8 and sometimes they don't like what I make so they end up making top ramen or a hot dog for themselves.  The next one is 3 and she tends to snack a lot during the day so when she sits down to eat, she's not sitting for long.  She will take a bite, yell about how hot it is, demand you blow on it, get down and run laps for a while and then maybe take another bite.  The youngest is just coming up on two months and around dinner time she is usu...

I have to start by saying that my first three children were born at home, the first in CA and the next two in Seattle, WA.  With Kieren I had help paying for a midwife and with Zoe and Freija, home birth was actually covered by insurance.  Sadly in Michigan that is not the case and since we only had one income at the time (and it was next to nothing), I opted for a hospital birth because it was covered by Medicaid.  At first I was extremely aprehensive, even a little scared because it was not what I was used to or felt comfortable with at all.  I tend to believe that hospitals are for sick people and I have done a lot of reading about the "cascade of interventions" that happen in the hospital setting with birth and my worst fear was that this birth would end in a caeserean.  Let me be clear, I have no judgment towards women who have had medicated births or c-sections, it's just not what I wanted for myself.  I acknowledge that often these things are necessa...