From our November print issues: Check out our roundup of thought-provoking, laugh-inducing, and, most of all, relatable quotes from a selection of our favorite mom and dad bloggers and groups, including Mamiverse and Adventures in Mommyland.
Priceless: “…how do you put a price on my role as reading buddy, on-call nurse, tickle monster, teacher, family historian, advocate, and safe zone? You can’t.”
—Toni Garcia Carpenter, musing about the money she could be making in her various “job” roles as a stay-at-home-mom (housekeeper, taxi driver, party planner, etc.) in her book Domestic Commando. Check out her website if you want “to take charge of [your] stay-at-home parenting decision”: www.domesticcommando.com
(You’ll laugh in spite of yourself.) There are only two kinds of farts:(1) your own; (2) someone else’s.
—from The Complete Book of Farts by Alec Bromcie (a much-needed pseudonym!), in which he goes on to detail “the church fart,” “the delayed-reaction fart” plus many more (as he notes, for boys a fart is an endless source of entertainment, self-expression, and bonding; for girls, it’s an embarrassing by-product of digestion). Pick up a copy for the men of the house, or go to www.tarcherbooks.net for…farting etiquette tips.
“Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating-roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad-must become popular again, and not just by hipsters in Brooklyn…The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden…”
—Mark Bittman, in a NYT Opinion column in which he encourages both cultural and political action to initiate real changes in the way American families eat (and notes that there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the U.S.); www.nytimes.com/opinion
Newly Single
“Every time Emma asks for her father it sends a shooting pain through my heart. I’m afraid of the questions that will be asked when she’s older. I’m afraid she’s going to wonder why her daddy is not around. I’m afraid she’s going to wonder if he even loves her.
I came across articles ‘Shocking Statistics about Children and Divorce’ and ‘Facts on Fatherless Kids’ and now I feel [beyond awful]. Did I make the right choice?…I know I did what’s best. Our home is no longer broken; I fixed things by leaving. I would rather Emma see her mother happy and someday know what a healthy relationship is like than have to see her mother and father fight all the time for the sake of staying together.”
—Tania Pesce, a Westchester-based, 20-something first-time (and newly single) mom, on her blog Adventures in Mommyland, www.myadventures-in-mommyland.blogspot.com
Latino-Style Parenting
In a recent study, 61% of Latino parents were categorized as “protective” of their children, which meant they scored high on warmth, high on demandingness, and low on giving their kids autonomy.
-from a study in the journal Family Process, as reported on in the blog post “What Are You: Tiger Mom or Padded Parent?” by Elena Cabral, an NYC mom of two who teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, at www.mamiverse.com (check out the site, devoted especially to Latina moms, daughters, and their families, for lots of smart commentary from a wide array of contributors)
