hollywood housewife

christmas cards are a major pain. are they worth it?

My Christmas cards are a major pain.  Every year, I swear I'm never going to do them again.  And every year, I decide they're worth doing.  I have three rules that I stick to.  Originally posted in December of 2008.

There are a hundred drudgeries about the holidays that ultimately seem worth it.  Family traditions are kept, childhood memories are made.  But there is one thing, year after year, that I question: Christmas Cards. 

Are they antiquated?  With email and social networking sites making it so easy to view your long-lost-friend's life, there is really no more need to squeal over how big their kids are getting.  And now everyone feels the need to send out so many cards that there are rarely personal holiday letters included.  

I do love receiving Christmas cards, pouring over a person's choice of pictures and paper and simply the satisfaction of opening something that came in the mail.  I like arranging them on the bookshelf, picking my favorite ones, laughing at the originality of some.  I imagine other households doing the same with mine. 

So every year, I just can't let myself skip it.  It's sort of become a game with myself, how I can top last year's card.  I like my Christmas card to be pretty silly, to stand out from the crowd.  I'm thirty one and I still like to rate the level of cringe I can bring to my parents.  I think they pretty much hold their breath for it every year.

I have a few rules that make up a quality card.  I look for them with every one I receive.  Don't worry if you don't happen to follow these.  I'll barely notice.  Really.

1.  There must be a picture, and if you have kids it must not be of only the kids.  More than likely, I don't even know your kids.  I want to see a picture of the whole family.  If you're not pictured, I assume you look radically different from the last time I saw you.  Then I wonder if I look radically different from the last time you saw me, and I get all insecure about it.  Okay, not really, but it irks me to adorn my mantle with pictures of children I don't know.

2.  A pen must have hit the paper at some point, even if it's just an original signature.  Bonus points for a personal message.  Friend for life if you have a Christmas letter inside, typed or not.  I love those.

3.  No address labels.  What a pain I am, right?  But there is such a warm touch to hand-addressed envelopes, and I believe this for whatever you're sending.  Computer labels hardly lets me differentiate it from any of the other mail. 

I guess my argument with myself each December is that my cards are little gifts to our far-flung friends and family.  They're more than an email, and personal in a way a store-bought gift isn't.  Of course, I'm also very much a paper person.

Will you do Christmas cards this year?  Is this a tradition that should fade into the glittery garland? 

people have been raising children since time began...

An email from my mom during an exchange about parenting in regard to my first year reflections as a mother and after she stumbled upon several mommy blogs...

This is all a curiosity to me. People have been raising children since time began, some doing a better job at producing happy, productive children, and some not doing such a great job. Some children succeed despite all odds and some fail even after the best parenting ever.

Regarding the baby time period, some babies are easy and some are hard. Some moms have more of a knack for soothing a child, some don't. I've been surprised, however, to see that there isn't a lot of correlation between the first year and future years. As I've said a thousand times, I had a perfect first baby and a demanding second baby. But that was only for one year. They were both very easy from 12 months forward. You were an easy baby and an easy child.

I didn't think child-rearing was hard. I thought it was all intuitive. I think that comes from growing up in a family, including extended family of aunts and cousins, that loved having children and assumed it was the role of women to raise children and to love doing it. Children were viewed as a blessing and a joy (even when unplanned and causing a huge burden).

I did not question myself, even when Lance was hard. (I would have, however, benefitted from a book on helping a child learn to sleep for Lance. Although I didn't doubt myself during that year, I was totally exhausted all the time. That was surely not good for our family). This is very interesting for me to think about because I was a self-assured person all my life. My mother was not, but she was self-assured when it came to caring for babies (or caring for anyone, for that matter). A close friend and neighbor when Dawn was born was a self-assured woman EXCEPT when it came to mothering. And her child was very hard. He probably would have been hard regardless of her fears, but it was all compounded, making his first year difficult for everyone.

I always thought the key to raising children was to love them a huge amount, see to their basic needs, and then get on with life. Children are amazingly resilient. They are loved and respected and allowed to become independent, but they don’t control the family.

Sometimes I think I'm just exactly like her.  But most of the time I just wish that were so.

my favorite baby products: six months to one year

Welcome to Mommy Mondays, my designated day to spill about all things mom-related.  On other days at HH, you might find beauty tips or house posts or all out randomness, but on Mondays it's all about me and my baby, thirteen-month-old Pigtail.

Do not read anything into the fact that I haven't shared my favorite baby products since Pigtail was four months old.  In case you are concerned, we are still using baby products around here.  Some we like better than others. 

Our very favorites, in no particular order.

Fisher-Price Jumperoo

What the Lamb Swing did for the first six months, the Jumperoo did for the rest of the year.  We could leave Pigtail in the jumperoo for almost an hour and she would stay happy.  So comfy, she'd just bounce herself to sleep.

We had one for our house in LA and one for the lake house, one of the few products we doubled up on.

ABC Floor Mat

Instead of a rug for the playroom, we used the ABC Floor Mat and like that it serves as a floor covering as well as an endless toy for Pigtail to tear apart and put back together again.  And at under $50, it's way more economical than a rug.

Baby Jogger City Mini Stroller

Don't let the name fool you, this stroller isn't necessarily for jogging.  I don't jog.  Obviously. 

When it was time to upgrade Pigtail from her Orbit infant car seat stroller, I wasn't sure exactly what kind of stroller to get.  There were some very cool-looking, expensive strollers that caught my eye and then there were the light, flimsy-yet-less-expensive options.  I went to multiple baby stores (and that, my friends, is the kind of thing I hate) and at my two favorite stores everyone was raving about the City Mini.  After test-driving a few in the store, I was sold on the one-handed way it folds flat and that it's so light.  Since I'm usually manipulating the stroller and the baby by myself, I need something easy.  It's pricey, but we haven't used anything else in months for around-town stroller-ing, and she can use it for quite a while.

A huge con?  (Huge, as in, almost a deal breaker.)  No handle for your purse and no cup-holders.  I solved the purse issue with a Mommy Hook mommy clip, but the cup-holder thing continues to irritate me.  However, the ease of use with this stroller still makes it a favorite for us.

Usborne Touchy Feely Books 

We received these as a gift from The Gorilla's siblings and the "That's not my..." books are far and above Pigtail's pick when we read.  She is especially particular to That's Not My Monster...

I kept thinking that I wasn't reading to Pigtail enough (or, um, at all) and then she picked these out from the shelf on her own and started bringing them to us.  She touches all the pages she's supposed to touch and giggles.  She likes these even better than her soft books. 

Other items that we're partial to:

aden + anais Swaddling Wraps We have used these since the day she was born and thirteen months later we're still using the same ones.  They're for so much more than swaddling and their material makes them easy to stuff in a bag and easy to wash.  These are the perfect gift.

Medela Bottles We have never needed anything else.  

Rody Inflatable Hopping Horse The Gorilla insisted I add this to the list.  I think he likes it as much as Pigtail does!  (Also, it's a great gift idea.)

For your convenience, many of the baby products I've talked about here at HH can be found in one place.  Click here to view or purchase.

What are your favorite child or baby products currently?  Age-range doesn't matter, we're all looking to learn about new things. 

**Amazon Affiliate links included in this post.  This means if you click through to Amazon from HH, any purchase supports this site.

white noise app and other miscellany

Since there were no Friday Links this week due to the family-ness of Thanksgiving, I didn't have my usual outlet for miscellany.  A few thoughts for this final day of the holiday weekend:

**When traveling with a baby, compromises will be made right and left so keep an open mind and a flexible schedule.  After our first night in the east was a sleeping disaster, I took a cue from Lora Lynn and found out there's an app for that!  We tried a couple, but my favorite was the extreme rain on the White Noise app by TM Soft.  This saved our sleeping schedule, and our sanity.  Invest if needed.  I believe it was $1.99. 

**For those of you who put a Foley + Corinna bag on your Christmas wish list after my giveaway, you might want to know that the Disco City bag in limited colors is on sale for $99 until tomorrow.  Note that this is not the same bag as the Mid-City from the giveaway.  It's a bit smaller but still hot.

**And for those of you keeping up with my shellac manicure saga, I'm pleased to report that we're on day SIXTEEN and still going strong.  You can see the new growth (which would be more of a problem if I'd done a darker color) but there isn't a single chip to speak of.  This manicure has lasted through daily life, cross-country travel, and a holiday.  To me, it's well worth the extra money to get the shellac instead of the regular manicure.  I guess I should reserve total judgment until I see how well it comes off. 

Hope you've had some rest, filled your belly, and are ready to conquer December!

PS - we dress for success around here.  Last night's Bedlam game was such a blast to watch.  Boomer Sooner!

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for us the living

I challenge anyone to visit the nation's capital and not feel a sense of reverence.  It's impossible.

Yesterday was bright and clear in Washington D.C. and we bundled up against the cold to show Pigtail the Lincoln Memorial.  We enjoyed the rest of the sites from the warmth of the rental car. 

One of my very favorite memories of this Thanksgiving holiday: watching my husband and my daughter stand and silently read the Gettysburg address on the walls of the memorial, the sun shining behind them.  It took several minutes to swallow the lump in my throat.

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

thankful

For all the wonderful, wonderful things that have happened this year, I am most thankful for these two people.  My people.  My very favorite people.

 

They exist in a vacuum to me.  Everything else is just a bonus.

Thank goodness.

Happy Thanksgiving!

All photos by the talented Jules Bianchi

what if all your holiday meals were on video?

This is a repost from my former blog, originally posted in January 2009.  But this is something that must be shared and shared again.  Meanwhile, I will not be videotaped this year.  Happy Thanksgiving!

My dad has this really quirky ritual.  He sets up the video camera on a tripod and tapes our holiday meals.  Thanksgiving and Christmas.  He pushes the red button as we're starting to set the table, and it doesn't go off until the last dish is cleared.  It is, frankly, bizarre.  Embarrassing, really, to explain this tradition when we have guests for the meal.

His reasoning is that it's interesting to hear "what we're talking about that year," which probably means he has expectations of our intellectual political conversations or current events of the day that will be fun to watch later.  But in reality we end up with some snarky comment about some friend or family member, rendering each tape unwatchable in the future for fear of WHAT WE SAID.

He started this fun game in 1991.  Which, if you do the math, means we have about 36 hours of tape of our family...eating.  Tape that has never been watched by anybody.  Ever. 

In the seventeen years of taping holiday meals, my dad has only changed cameras once.  So the technology required to watch these tapes - if one ever wanted to - has become dated.  Last year he asked me to get them all transferred to DVD.  Just to stay current, I suppose, not because we were going to have a marathon viewing session.  He shipped me a medium-sized box full of dusty Hi-8 tapes.  I had no problem taking them to get transferred until I looked more closely at the tapes and realized that they were in no particular order in the box.  And they weren't labeled.  I couldn't just dump them off to get transferred like that.  They would come back a mess.  In order to figure out what year and meal each tape was, I was going to have to watch every. single. one.  Can you imagine this uphill climb?

So obviously I didn't do it.  I have my own ritual of not doing things I don't want to do.  The box sat in a corner of my bedroom collecting even more dust and just being a general eyesore around my pretty decor.  Periodically The Gorilla would ask what I was going to do with that stuff and I would groan. 

Finally, after 18 months of staring at that box and staring at my Project List, I decided to conquer the one project I dreaded.  My goal was to watch three or so tapes a day until I got through them.  I didn't even need to watch the whole tape - one can figure out fairly quickly by hairstyles, topics of conversation, and who is or is not at the table what year it was.  I figured if I inched through it, eventually I'd be done and wouldn't have to think about it anymore.   

This weekend was rainy in Los Angeles, so I thought it would be a fine time to start this stupid task.  I sat down at 1pm, giving myself two hours to see how far I got.  Seemingly moments later, my time was up.  Turns out my dad taped more than just our family meals.  I kept extending my project time by an hour or just a few more tapes and telling myself I really needed to get out of my sweats and do something else with the day.  But I didn't move from my chair.  At midnight I was finally done.  I had viewed parts of all 49 tapes.  I was exhausted and sad.  And so grateful.

Interspersed with the holiday meals were tapes of me dancing and swimming at summer camp and headed to my junior prom.  I found multiple tapes of my many high school musical performances, tapes I had no idea existed.  It was a mix of wanting to turn them off forever and watching with my jaw open. 

There were tapes of birthday parties and New Year's parties and playing at the lake.

There was endless video of my nieces when they were the only two little ones in our world.  A lot of those came from the years after I moved to California, so not only had I never seen those events, it made me realize how much I was missing.  

There were tapes of both of my sibling's weddings.  

And apparently there was a camera running when I had no idea.  These are the ones that made my heart hurt and forced me to take a Deep Breath Break (translation: pad to the refrigerator for another drink).  I was suddenly watching my biological grandmother, who we met in 1998 and only saw a few times before her death.  Then it was two of the most important days of my life:  my college graduation, where I have never looked happier, and the day I moved to California, where I have never looked more terrified.     

Of course, there was the hours upon hours of holiday meal footage.  Once I determined the year, I didn't sit through the whole thing, but you know...my dad may be on to something here.  In the bits I did watch, some very funny things were said.  Like my sister swearing up and down that she wouldn't ever have a fake Christmas tree (for the record, my sister has had a pre-lit plastic Christmas tree for years and years now).  Some meals featured different significant others than those who became our spouses.  Other meals were notable for who wasn't there - the first Thanksgiving I missed and the holidays when my brother was in Iraq.   

It was interesting to watch our appearance change year to year.  It was funny to see both me and my brother in glasses (we both had lasik surgery nine years ago), and I noted that I appeared to wear the exact same outfit to Christmas Eve dinner two years in a row.   

Once they come back on DVD I may - may - watch them completely for little gems I can splice together as a "Best Of" compilation.  But I can't really make fun of dad for his weird tradition anymore.  The holiday meal is, in fact, your Year At A Glance. 

photo by ZaptheDingbat

party trick

Because it's officially the holiday season, which means family and friends and dinner parties and reunions and more family, I thought I'd share a little party trick that I've been employing and that really works. 

I didn't invent this wheel.  I got the idea from Don Miller, but now I can't find the post on his blog.  I wish I could, though, because his descriptions of saying just the wrong thing - out of insecurity or out of that second glass of wine or out of sheer habit - was just how I feel in social situations.  I can be counted on to say at least one thing that is cringe-worthy. 

As I interpreted it, he suggested this: Before the social gathering, articulate out loud exactly what you don't want to say, and then hopefully you'll remember your rule in that crucial moment before it tumbles out of your mouth.

It goes like this:

Just before I head to the party or dinner or gathering, I tell The Gorilla three things that I'm scared I'm going to say or do.  I try to keep the list manageable, between three and five.

I'll use book club as an example, although that's one place where I actually don't censor myself.  But if I were having social anxiety about book club for some reason, I might swear to my husband that I wouldn't

a) Drone on and on about the book I just read that wasn't actually the book club book.

b) Drink more than one mimosa because that makes me a little too uninhibited for brunch-time.

c) Bring up that one time when no one read the book, because it always makes everyone feel guilty and uncomfortable.

It works!  I've tried it several times and can gleefully report that I've opened my mouth to say something that would definitely be a mistake, and the very act of having given myself the rule makes me close it, crisis averted.

I have a sneaking suspicion that some of you might appreciate this little party trick this week.  

photo by Pink Sherbert Photography   

pigtail on set, part II

I couldn't show you some of the pictures of Pigtail on the set of The Gorilla's movie because I didn't want to give anything away. 

But now, since we're celebrating crossing the $150 million mark worldwide, it feels like the time to let out these doozies:

It's a weird world, folks. 

three tips for flying with a baby

Thanksgiving is the busiest air travel week in the nation.  I will not pretend to know what it's like to travel with multiple children or even with children who are older than thirteen months.  But traveling with Pigtail, on that I am an expert.

Since Pigtail was born, I have flown with her twenty-three times.  23.  In 13 months.  This staggers me.  And yet, we've survived.  With very few bad experiences.  That's a testament to Pigtail's demeanor more than it is to my mothering skills, but you don't take two flights a month without a "system."

Now that Pigtail has upgraded to a toddler car seat, we're test-driving a new "system" this week, and I'll let you know how that goes.  But in the meantime, here's a refresher of my current hard and fast rules for traveling with a baby or toddler:

1.)  If at all possible, Purchase a seat for the baby.  I know this isn't in the budget for everyone, but use miles or save up.  This decision will make a difference to your entire trip.  Trust me.

2.)  One carry-on bag only.  Seriously.  The less you have to juggle, the less frazzled you'll be.  It can be a big bag.  Preferably a hands free bag.  A large backpack is ideal, and I am the first to admit that backpacks are not cute.  But they are oh-so-functional for travel, so slap on some extra lipgloss if you're feeling un-cute wearing it.  There is nothing that you need that won't fit into one bag.  I promise that you need WAY less than you think you do, both for yourself and for the baby.  (I write more in-depth about this here.)

3.)  Wear cargo pants.  There is a line in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (which I just finished on Friday) that says, "...Joey struck up a conversation with the mother, Ellen, who was pretty without being attractive and was wearing the stretch cargo pants that a certain kind of mom favored nowadays."  Consider myself that kind of mom.  When traveling alone with the baby, having my phone, ID, and $20 in pockets within immediate reach make the day that much easier. 

There's lots of ways to do the baby-travel thing.  Whatever your way, these three things apply to you.  Do you have a travel tip to add?  Share in the comments!

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This is a summation of my past posts on traveling with an infant.  Read the originals here and here.  In the next few weeks, I'll outline my toddler travel system and tell you exactly what's in my ONE travel bag.  Let me know any infant travel questions you'd like me to answer.

Mondays are the day I've set aside to talk about all things mommy.  Click here for past Mommy Mondays.