expert advice needed

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Weigh In Wednesday: Take One, Leave One

I find myself in need of advice on little silly things that are nonetheless driving me crazy. In exchange, I thought I’d share a few little tips that have been helping me out lately. 

If you have any hot tips to share, please do so; if you are in need of any advice, ask away. I will chime in if I have something to offer, and I hope your fellow readers will do so as well. 

Tiny Tips That Are Making Life Better

  • Low-Effort Houseplant Watering: I love houseplants – looking at them, owning them, watching for new growth or flowers. And I am also terrible about keeping on top of their watering needs. After several died or nearly died, I finally broke down and bought a pack of plastic watering bulbs so that I could put one in every single plant I own. It’s not foolproof – they do need to be refilled every week or so, depending on the plant. But it is making my plants SO MUCH HAPPIER and my days are no longer punctuated by random stabs of guilt when I realize it’s been several weeks since I last watered my plants.
  • Morning Time (and Madness) Saver: Mornings have always been tough in my household. They continue to be tough, especially since we have added Primping to our daily routine. And also, school starts earlier this year than it ever has before so we need to be out the door fifteen minutes sooner than we did last year. One thing that has made getting out the door slightly better is to keep a hairbrush, hair ties, and a small makeup kit in my car. That way, Carla can do her hair and makeup while I am driving her to school. Secondary tip: One common frustration around here is that no one can ever find a hairbrush when she needs it. I bought a bunch of small hairbrushes so that Carla can keep one in her backpack, one in her sports bag, and one in her locker.

  • Easy Sheet Pan Meal Clean Up: I love sheet pan dinners, and I love using a barrier between the food and my cookie sheets so I don’t have to deep clean the cookie sheets every night. (They don’t fit in the dishwasher.) I own reusable silicone sheets, and use them for certain things, but they are too difficult to clean for me to use them every time I make a sheet pan meal. For the longest time, I’ve been using aluminum foil. But I am continually frustrated by food sticking to the damn foil. I tried parchment paper, but found it super annoying because it’s so insubstantial it doesn’t stay in place and it’s difficult to crease. I’d seen tips before for putting a little sprinkle of water or cooking spray on the cookie sheet to hold the parchment in place, but it doesn’t always work and/or it requires me to wash the cookie sheet, which I was trying to avoid by using parchment in the first place. Then I saw someone on Instagram crumple up the sheet of parchment paper before smoothing it out onto the cookie sheet. GAME CHANGER. 
  • Connection Points When Talking Is Hard: The credit for this genius idea belongs with my friend G. She told me that she and her daughter have a special notebook in which they write each other secret notes. “Secret” in that no one else can read their exchanges. I have tried this technique with Carla, who can be quite reticent about sharing her feelings and talking about her worries. It works so well. She is willing to share all sorts of things in writing that she refuses to discuss out loud. Because of this silly little journal we pass back and forth, I feel much more connected to her and what’s going on in her inner world. It’s not even something we write in regularly. Sometimes we’ll go back and forth for a few days, sometimes the journal will sit untouched for months. But so far it’s been the perfect bridge when I sense she’s something is troubling her but she’s reluctant, for whatever reason, to share it, or just when we haven’t had a chance to chat in a while. Oh look – there’s a whole line of journals specific to this purpose. We just use one of the many old journals I have lying around.
  • Instant Mood Improver: Get a cat. Please note: mood improvement requires close proximity to cat and may disappear once cat is out of sight, which could be quite often, depending on the cat. 

Please Advise: Here’s Where You Tell Me What To Do

  • Do you have any tips for making it simpler to put laundry away? Especially if those tips apply to getting other people in your household to put laundry away? Our current “system” involves me doing laundry, folding or sorting Carla’s clothing, and then asking Carla to put it away. Which results in Carla using my bedroom as a dressing room, because that’s where I fold the laundry. I have started putting the clean/folded laundry in a basket and putting that basket in my bedroom on the landing outside Carla’s room in Carla’s room, but still – the basket remains there, full of clean clothing, growing less folded by the day, until I Make A Fuss. And honestly, the Making A Fuss only results in the laundry ending up on the floor, which makes me incandescent. I have not opened the door to Carla’s closet lately, and do not want to, lest my head implode like a firecracker. I am willing to do Drastic Things. Should I get rid of 75% of her clothing? (I did ask her to go through her wardrobe this summer and remove everything she doesn’t or won’t wear.) Should I buy her another dresser?  The child has AMPLE storage, seriously, so much storage, but what we are doing is clearly not working for her and she doesn’t have any ideas (besides I like having all my clothing in a laundry basket / on my floor) for how to make the situation more user friendly for herself. The only thing I am unwilling to do is put her laundry away myself. She’s twelve. She can put her own laundry away. Oh, okay – there is another thing I am unwilling to do: ignore the mess. I have tried that tack and it is not workable for me or for our family. 
  • What are your favorite low-effort houseplants? Especially if they require low light? As I mentioned above, I LOVE plants and would love more. But a) our house has very little direct light and b) the cat will seriously eat any plant, or at least give it a little taste test, so any plants I buy need to be non-toxic. I have moved all the currently toxic plants I own to out-of-cat-reach spaces, but they aren’t necessarily low-light plants and they aren’t doing very well. For instance, the Christmas cactus and the kalanchoe I owned pre-cat have been relocated to the top of my bookshelves, and they are no longer dying of thirst but they are clearly not loving their lighting conditions. I have also purchased a few plants that require “bright, indirect light,” and even those seem a little light-starved. I think I need plants that thrive in less light. But not no light. All the plants have access to natural light. Just not bright light.

  • How do you keep your fingernails tidy? Okay, confession time: I am a nail picker. I will pick at my nails and the skin around my nails, sometimes until my fingers bleed. I think I developed this gruesome habit as an alternative to nail biting (although I still do that at times, too, ugh ugh ugh), and I am ready to stop. But… I don’t know HOW. It’s a nervous habit, for sure, and I don’t think you can help me get over my social anxiety. But part of the reason it’s such an addictive habit is that my cuticles (is that the right term for the skin on the sides of my nails???) are often dry or peeling or otherwise pick-able. Right now, my pinky finger is all painful and inflamed because of this habit and I Don’t Like It. My questions for you are: a) If you or someone you know has gotten over this gross habit, HOW? And/or b) Is there something I should be doing to enhance my overall nail skin / fingernail / cuticle health? I do tend towards dry skin, and use Working Hands cream like it’s my job. But I get overwhelmed by the abundance of cuticle oils and creams and have no idea which ones WORK. Or if buying a “cuticle remover kit” would do anything at all to help me.

I do not want to end this post on weird giant photos of my fingernails, so here’s where I turn things over to you. What hot tips do you have to share today? Or, at least, the little things that are making your day-to-day easier/better/more enjoyable? And in which areas are you in need of advice?

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What to Do with a Weird Space Specifically Designed for Something Else

As I write this, it is approximately 7:15 and I have been awake since 3:27. My kiddo woke me up, and I am always happy to wake up if she needs me, well, not happy, but you know what I mean. But then I couldn’t go back to sleep. I distracted myself from fretting about, well, you know, everything, by focusing on how hot it’s going to get here in the next few days and how I can avoid using my oven. Then, at four-ish, I decided it was time to stop pretending I was going to go back to sleep and I collected the kitten and watched an episode of Psych. Then I fed the kitten and started my tea and opened some of the boxes that arrived yesterday (two of the board games from my gift ideas list, one cat grass kit). Then I had to rescue the kitten from a piece of tape that had, presumably, escaped from one of the boxes and affixed itself cruelly to his undercarriage. Which is when I discovered that he… well, he needed a bath.

So to recap: It is 7:15 and I have been up for nearly four hours and I have already washed and blow-dried a cat.

On the plus side, he is very pleasingly soft and fluffy once he’s all blown-dry.

Anyway, I need your help. 

We have a bar area in the basement, and it’s beautiful. But a) we don’t really have people over to do whatever one does in one’s home bar, and b) I would like to keep the basement as kid-friendly as possible as Carla gets older, so that I feel safe having The Teens over to our house. 

Right now, it’s very much A Bar, with room to display glasses, two wine racks filled with wine bottles, and three cupboards that are supposed to hold a variety of glasses. My husband used to display his collection of European beer glasses on the display shelves, but we relocated those to the cupboards once we got a kitten. 

The wine in the racks is not drinkable. The previous owners left it here, and noted before they did that it was not drinkable; it was purely for aesthetic purposes. Where a person obtains decorative wine bottles – which, to be clear, are full of real if not drinkable wine – I do not know, nor do I understand why anyone might pay for wine they knew they would not drink, but to each his own. My father, who knows wine, tested a couple of bottles just to make sure the previous owners weren’t, like, super wine snobs and the wine was fine if not great, but he agrees that it is not drinkable. This is to say that I feel no qualms about getting rid of the wine, except that it does seem like kind of a colossal waste. (I had the brilliant  insane thought in the middle of the night that perhaps I could donate it to a church that offers communion. I have had communion wine and it is not what I would refer to as drinkable either. But a) that’s probably dumb for a billion reasons and b) even if it isn’t as dumb as I really think it is, I would not know how to go about offering or transferring my bounty to a church anyway.) 

Anyway, if anyone knows any uses for undrinkable wine, let me know. 

What I really want to know is what else I can use the wine rack/glasses display area FOR. It turns out I am completely unimaginative in this respect. My brain has zero issue coming up with wild and horrifying explanations for whatever made that creaking sound in my living room at 3:45 am. But try to come up with alternative uses for the bar space, and I’ve got nothing.

My husband keeps his Nespresso machine in the bar area. Maybe we could use the wine racks to store mugs? Sleeves of Nespresso pods? (I’m joking about the latter.) Maybe we could remove the wine racks on one side and put in a shelf and an outlet and keep the Nespresso machine there instead of on the bar? 

It seems like “removing the wine racks and replacing them with shelves” might be the best plan, if that’s even possible.

My friend Jen (HI JEN) is expert at hosting The Teens at her house, and I seem to remember that she has a fancy smoothie machine in her basement and maybe a popcorn maker. I wonder if the wine rack spaces are deep enough to hold either or both of those things? Maybe we could put in a microwave? 

The glasses display area also seems like space that could be repurposed. I mean, I like my husband’s beer glasses collection just fine, but it does get dusty and it seems like a bad idea to have a bunch of glasses hanging around out in the open if you plan to have The Teens over. (Also: the kitten.) But what else could possibly go in that space? 

I have googled a bit, trying to find examples of other people who have similarly transformed their bar areas into something less alcohol-focused… but I haven’t really found anything that struck me as useful. 

What would you do with this space? 

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Three Things Thursday

I am wearing my hair curly today. I kind of hate it??? “Well, just don’t wear your hair curly, Suzanne,” you might be saying briskly, with a tiny bemused head tilt and mild furrow of your brow. And sure, that SOUNDS simple, but a) my hair is naturally wavy/curly, so it requires blowdrying to jar it out of its natural state, which is not ideal ever but especially awful during the sweatslick of summer, and b) my Instagram feed is full of people who look amazing with curly hair and one of my closest friends sometimes wears her hair curly and it is fabulous, so it should be possible for me to wear my hair curly without hating it. So far, it is not possible. I got a gift card from Ulta for some holiday or other and used it to buy a bunch of sample sizes of curl enhancing products. While they do seem to enhance the curl, they do not enhance my appearance. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I just don’t have the face for curly hair? I feel like the curls exacerbate the roundness of my face. And somehow my hair has less volume when curly? Also, it’s very unevenly curly, with tighter coils around the left side of my face and looser/more jagged waves around the back. I don’t know. Perhaps I should have spent the 2020 lockdown pursuing the Curly Girl Method or otherwise figuring out how to like my hair this way. But I did not and so I am going around hating it until it’s time to wash my hair and start fresh. 

Nutrition, always a tricky subject, feels like it’s at an all-time low in our house right now. Carla makes her own lunch for camp, and I have to say that I honestly have no idea what’s in it. She wasn’t eating the well-rounded and nutrient dense lunches I packed for her anyway, and at least now I don’t have the double whammy of packing a lunch (ugh) and then seeing it return home after being unrefrigerated all day and having to dump it in the disposal (double ugh). I think sometimes she packs pickles and pepperoni and I close my eyes and concentrate on the fact that one is a vegetable and the other contains some protein.

The way we live our lives is not conducive to a lot of methods that most people seem to use to enforce proper nutrition. (We don’t eat as a family regularly, so I end up making separate meals for Carla which makes life easier in a lot of ways but doesn’t leave a lot of room for modeling the type of eating I want to promote.) But between the possibly garbage lunches Carla is eating and the presence of way too many sweets in her life (she uses her allowance to buy candy and chips at camp and at the library after camp), I feel a little fretful about the future. She’s eleven now, which means that puberty is around the corner, and I think this is a time in her life when she really needs to focusing on eating nutrient dense foods, both for all the growing she is about to do and for establishing good habits as she gets older and takes on increasing responsibility for her own food choices. 

But I don’t know what to DO. Hire a nutritionist is a possibility, I suppose, and Stephany’s experience has been positive enough that this has potential. But I am wary of the expense and worried about how hard it will be to find a nutritionist whose philosophies about body size and food morality jive with my own. (Also – and this is silly but it IS coloring my thoughts about nutritionists – a friend of mine hired a family nutritionist and her main suggestion seemed to be about making all sorts of “balls” with protein powder and dates and stuff, and I just cannot get behind a ball-centric food solution. This may sound 100% bonkers, but it is nonetheless true: I do not like foods shaped into balls, and I am not going to eat them.) (Cake pops: no. Meatballs: hard pass. Falafel: no thanks. Protein balls: no way.) I have tried making and eating multiple ball-foods, and I can say with confidence they are a no from me dawg. Beyond hiring a nutritionist, what to do? Oh, and I guess I should say that my word alone holds no water with my child. (For proof: We talked to a health professional, who by the way was not being consulted about food/nutrition and who has no expertise in food/nutrition, who told Carla humans should not drink milk outside of infancy, and she instantly grabbed onto this statement as The One Irrefutable Truth despite all the dozens of very reasonable, science-backed arguments my husband and I made to the contrary.) (And listen: I can, in some ways, understand that argument! I can! People can and do live their whole lives without milk! And yet, “you shouldn’t drink milk” is not a good suggestion to make to A CHILD whose parents struggle to get her to take in enough protein or calcium when milk is a perfectly good, legitimate source of both of those things. Also! I do not force my child to drink milk! I simply put it in smoothies, on the rare occasions she allows me to coax her to drink one!)  

Most of that previous paragraph was a parenthetical, and honestly sounds a little crazycakes, so I am going to start fresh. So, options: 1. Nutritionist. 2. Books??? I listened to a pretty decent book called The XX Brain by Dr Lisa Mosconi recently. It’s about how the female brain ages and steps we can take to nourish and protect our brains against cognitive decline. A large portion of the book is devoted to the importance of nutrition, and I found it pretty persuasive. However, the book is not something that would resonate with Carla. Maybe I could try Mosconi’s previous book, Brain Food? Carla and I could possibly listen to it together in the car. It would be better, of course, if there were books about the importance of nutrition that were targeted to her age group. This book seems to have a lot of information, and might be easy to pick up and leaf through… but even in the online sample, it struck me as having an anti-fat bias. A book about intuitive eating but geared toward teens might have potential… This one sounds like it offers a good mix of practical tips and evidence based suggestions, although I would want to read the chapters about “healthy weight” before I shared it with Carla.

Option 3. Podcasts??? Are there nutrition podcasts that would be appropriate for tweens? I almost never listen to podcasts, so I have no idea where to even BEGIN, and when I google there are ten million options which is overwhelming. Ideally, I would want a podcast I could listen to WITH Carla. Like I said, she’s much more likely to take advice from someone who is not me. Plus, I would really love advice about nutrition for kids her age or older. My experience with a lot of “kid-based” nutrition resources (like Instagram) is that they are directed at parents of very young children. I love the Kids Eat in Color account and have gleaned some good ideas from it, but I feel like I should have started following it ten years ago. Not a whole lot of it is applicable to an eleven-year-old, you know? As long as I’m making a podcast wishlist, I also want one that isn’t focused on weight gain/loss or being fat. There are plenty of OTHER valid reasons to eat a well-balanced diet, and that’s the message I want to get across to Carla at this very vulnerable stage in her life.

I want someone to tell me what to DO. Someone who understands that it’s not as simple as “just don’t have those things in the house,” because I don’t want to make “those foods” more tantalizing by being forbidden, and because I do think eating is MORE than just nourishing our bodies. Someone who gets kids who are picky. Someone who knows what to do when a kid is fine just not eating if the food on offer is unpalatable to her. Someone who believes in health at every size and who isn’t going to suggest cutting out an entire macronutrient. Someone who has better arguments against candy and chips than “they will make you fat.” Someone who also believes that candy and chips do have a role – if a far, far less frequent one – in a well-rounded diet.

I want to be clear that things aren’t DIRE, or anything. I think Carla eats a decent mix of fruits and veggies and fats and proteins and carbs. Her doctor has never expressed concern with how she is growing. I just wish I could get her to eat a wider variety of things, and that she would be open to eating a wider variety more often, and that I could get her to be less reliant on/interested in snack/junk foods. I just feel like we’re at an inflection point and I want to help her figure out how to eat in a way that is both nourishing and satisfying. Probably I will just keep flailing along as best I can, punctuated by moments of throwing my hands in the air with the impossibility of it all.

Yesterday, I forgot my address. I am putting this in print both because it was hideously embarrassing to the point that I keep going over it and over it in my mind, and committing things to print often allows my brain to stop dwelling on them; and because I want to have a record of it just in case this is the beginning of a steep slide into dementia. This happened during my writing group session. One of the members asked for my address and I could not remember it. At all. I mean, I knew the street name, at least. But I could not think of the street number. Our other member had to look it up in her phone for me. It was so awful! How do you forget your own address?!?!?! Is this a perimenopause thing? Is this a side effect of my ongoing lack of solid sleep? Is there something else at play? Or is it just a memory blip on the wide spectrum of “normal”? I don’t know, but it was alarming. 

What are you thinking about today? Have you ever had such an upsetting memory lapse?