Maternity 33

week 18: food diversification

When it comes to introducing real foods into a baby’s diet, the French have a neat concept: food diversification. The idea is to widen the child’s sense of taste and texture and introduce them to the fantastic world of foods and flavors.

My daughter is 5 months old and I have started with the first step: introducing broth in her milk. Other than the occasional formula bottle and a little rice cereal that I mix into it she has been mostly breastfed, so I was eager to capture this milestone on video. I also wanted to see if she would enjoy it as much as I thought she would, as she has been oggling the food on our plates for many weeks.

Watch this video, you won’t be disappointed.  

Read on for recipe information

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week 17: op-ed course

As part of my resolution to expand my creative horizons in the first half of the year, I signed up for a workshop to improve my opinion writing skills. I had taken the day-long introduction course several years ago, and had since attempted several times to get published in the Opinion Page of state and national newspapers. I hadn’t had much luck, only managed to publish a letter to the editor in Harpers Magazine last December.

The non-profit organization that runs this course is phenomenal. Started by a woman who noticed that fewer than 10% of opinion pieces are written by women, the founder decided to tour the country teaching able and ambitious girls the tricks of the op-ed trade. Her pupils have had phenomenal success and her course is now taught to hundreds of women every year. Read the website for more information.

The follow-up course was four 2 hour meetings on a Monday night, for four consecutive weeks. On the first night of the course my daughter was one month old. I was very proud of making it out of the house at such an early stage in my baby’s life - though i was probably over-ambitious, as fell ill a few days later.

I wrote an opinion piece and pitched it to three different newspapers (USA Today, SF Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal): all refused it. 

Read on to see what I wrote and contact me if you have any ideas as to where and how I should pitch it!

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week 16: starting a blog

This blog was a by-product of one of my new year’s resolutions for 2010 - to feed my creative instincts. After several bouts of post-delivery illness and a little too many post-partum hormones I felt a little stuck inside my mind and looked for positive ways of shaking myself out of the shell. On days when I was home bound thinking about and writing my blog entry was a real treat. I particularly relish co-writing posts with a friend, so PLEASE, volunteer to write an entry for this blog.

As it turns out, blogs and parenting go hand in hand. It’s particularly true of mothers and blogs, and I suspect it has something to do with the isolation one can experience when interacting with pre-verbal beings all day long! As you know, I’m particularly interested in parents who try hard to combine parenting and career, so here is my pick of blogs in that category.

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week 15: new year’s resolutions

A decade ago, when we were fresh college graduates, my sister said: “the thing about Stanford grads is that nothing is ever good enough for them”. She was referring to youthful conversations about first jobs, graduate schools and dream careers and she observed that my friends had a tendency to describe their current situation as a stepping stone towards a bigger and brighter future. Since then, I have regularly thought about her astute observation and attempted to change my attitude, focusing on the job at hand and enjoying it for what it is: a piece of my life never to be lived again. It’s not easy and I’ve fallen into the stepping stone mentality more than once since then. As one of my graduate school mentors wittily remarked upon hearing me long for the end of my PhD years: “sooner or later it will be over, just like life”.

New year’s resolutions have been my way to focus on what I have today. Every year I choose three areas of change or growth and I pursue them as earnestly as possible for twelve months. I recently realized that this habit is pretty unusual: having talked about it with several people I found that they don’t do this. Yet I’m convinced that it can make one a happier and calmer person. Perhaps the following illustrations will incite you to try…

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week 14: tools of the trade

I live in a city and often visit other cities with my children. I have a few “tools” to ensure practical access to my important belongings, while retaining a modicum of style:

• easy reach sunglasses
• a back pack to keep my hands free
• flat shoes to make sure I can sprint when needed.

As I walked our Parisian neighborhood yesterday I laughed at the fact that I had completely copied my mom on these items.

The apple never falls far from the tree.

week 13: smart selfishness

I am certain you have heard people mention that the trouble with having children late in life is that you are comfortably settled in your adult routine and BANG babies come and shake it all up. Whereas in the good old days…

 I’m not sure what I think about this argument, because someone in her thirties doesn’t seem so old to me, and I can’t imagine that it was much easier to have children in your twenties. In both cases you had plenty of time to develop a sense of self and your own set of needs.  I tend to think that whenever you have children you are somewhat abruptly shaken out of your shell and have to redefine a self that includes devotion to little ones. In my experience, the best way for this is to practice what I call SMART SELFISHNESS.

A smart selfish individual is one who fits his needs into an otherwise busy family and career schedule. By doing so, the individual maintains a healthy sense of self and is thus able to commit to loved ones, and to a job for a lifetime, as opposed to burning out. Unlike a truly selfish person, the smart selfish person fits her needs into strategic openings in the family or professional schedule, generally going with the flow. Here are a few ways I’ve been smart selfish in the past few months.

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week 11: tibetan art of parenting

It’s not unusual to hear gossip that blames one child’s phobias or extreme behavior on his or her parents. This is an unfortunate offshoot of the popularization of Freud’s theories of the subconscious and childhood traumas. As parodied in Woody Allen’s humor, we’ve all heard adults link their emotional setbacks to the ways they were raised. One of my favorite Woody Allen quotes is: “when I was kidnapped, my parents jumped to action. They rented out my room”.

The Tibetan parenting philosophy  is diametrically opposed to the idea that your phobias are linked to poor parenting. Based on belief in reincarnation, Tibetans assume that children chose their parents. This choice is based on the old soul’s karma - an accumulation of good or bad points from behavior in previous lives.  Consequently, parents can’t really alter their children’s fate.

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week 10: becoming your family’s “triage nurse”

Illness is the number one enemy of productivity. It’s hard enough balancing home and work: add one sick person to the equation and it becomes impossible. And while, in your past life, you only had to worry about your own health, you are now vulnerable to the aches and pains of several other people. And toddlers are full of bugs! 

I’ve struggled mightily to limit sickness in my home. We don’t drink from the same cups, nor eat from the same dishes. We wash hands compulsively. I try to avoid public transport at rush hour. The list goes on. Yet, I’ve had no success in staying healthy. Actually, this past winter has been a real ordeal in terms of minor bugs and at times it felt as if we could never leave our home, as one of us was sick. In the darkest moments I envisioned a home-bound life, and seriously wondered how I could ever again become a productive member of society.

There is no magic solution to this problem. However, as I have spent three years building up my medical experience and essentially acting as my family’s triage nurse (the people who sort through minor and major problems when you check in to the hospital), I have come up with two measures that help us get back on our feet as soon as possible and limit the time spent healing.

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