Tragic Sandwich

Tag: family

  • Birthdays in the Era of Pinterest

    balloons?

    The On Mom has a post about party planning and Pinterest that definitely is worth a read. As for me, I like Pinterest. I think it’s fun, and I use it a fair amount.

    I don’t base my life on it.

    See, my approach to Pinterest is to save and share things I like. I just want to look at them, not transform my existence. But I keep reading about how Pinterest is increasing “mom guilt” as real-world moms feel their efforts don’t measure up to the perfection on Pinterest.

    Sorry, but I think that’s your fault. You shouldn’t be taking pins so personally.

    Even in the real world, I’m apt to scale back from what I see. We’ve been to a number of birthday parties for our neighbors’ children and Baguette’s classmates, and they’ve all been nice. We’ve been to several indoor playgrounds, a backyard pool party, and one bounce house/ball pit/wading pool fiesta.

    My thoughts? The indoor playgrounds are expensive, but really easy. So that’s tempting, because I don’t have to clean the house. The pool party was nice, but we don’t have a pool. And I am not yet ready to rent a bounce house. I’m just not.

    So far, Baguette’s birthday parties have featured family getting together for a cookout followed by cake. We have not invited her friends. Our thought has been that she didn’t understand gifts, and she didn’t know what parties were.

    Well, she does know now–and that’s fine. We’re not trying to keep the concept of parties from her. So when her third birthday rolls around, we’ll plan something more child-focused than the birthday parties we’ve had so far.

    We’ll invite some of her friends, I’ll make a cake (if I have time), and I’m totally open to buying themed plates, napkins, and cups. I’ll even spring for the coordinating banner.

    But why should I worry about whether it matches something on Pinterest? Baguette couldn’t care less, and it’s her party.

    Photo by asleeponasunbeam via Flickr.

  • Date Night?

    Do you go on regular Date Nights? We don’t.

    The last movie Mr. Sandwich and I saw in the theater was True Grit.

    Hey, it could be worse. It could have been the John Wayne version. Now that would have been a long time since Date Night.

    And that was our last movie, not our last evening out. We did go out to dinner for our anniversary in March, and had a wonderful time. That dinner, by the way, was something we’d been talking about doing since Mr. Sandwich’s birthday. In 2010.

    Do I think that parents need to connect with each other in ways that aren’t focused on their children? Yes, absolutely. Do I think that we need to have Date Night to do that? No, not in the slightest.

    When Mr. Sandwich and I started dating, he traveled to meet my parents. (This was our third date. It didn’t indicate anything about our relationship, it’s just how things went.) They showed him around town, and at one point, he said, “I feel bad leaving your parents in the car.” I said, “Oh, don’t worry about them. For them, retirement is one big date.”

    Mr. Sandwich took that to heart. We have what we call “Home Depot dates.” What do we do? We go to Home Depot. To us, spending time together is a date, no matter who else is there, or where we are.

    Our entire relationship was long-distance. What that meant was that when we actually managed to be together, what we wanted to do was be together. One of us would fly across the country. We’d spend the day meeting friends and touring the local area. In the evening, we’d go back to the apartment and eat pizza or Chinese food while watching TV shows we both liked, and talking about them.

    Exciting? Maybe not to some, but it suited us, and it still does.

    We like to go to the movies. We don’t get there as often as we’d like–we missed Bridesmaids and Captain America and The Hunger Games, and it’s looking like we’re going to miss The Avengers, which is really disappointing.

    But at some point, no doubt, Amazon Prime streaming will come to our rescue, and we’ll catch up on what we’ve missed. It won’t be the same as the big screen, but we’ll see them together and talk about them.

    Sounds like the perfect Date Night to me.

  • Traditions: Chinese Food

    Fortune Cookies - version anglaise

    Yesterday was my mom’s birthday. She would have been 75. She should be 75. She should be here to see Baguette grow, and hear stories about what we’re doing, and pay long visits in which we’d spend time cooking together (or, given the way things work right now, she’d cook and I’d keep Baguette out of the kitchen).

    But she’s not. So we made sure to have Chinese food yesterday in her honor.

    Growing up, chow mein was never one of our family’s dishes. But my mom would have been delighted with how absorbed Baguette gets when she eats it. I know I am.

    Photo by maza34, via Flickr.

  • Saturday Night Sofa Bed

    We don’t have a TV in our bedroom. Sometimes, though, we want to watch TV in bed. This is most likely to come up when one of us is sick, but there are occasions when we just like to lounge.

    So we developed a new tradition: Saturday Night Sofa Bed. We pull out the sofa bed, layer it with blankets, and spend the evening reading, watching TV, and sometimes even eating. All four of us (me, Mr. Sandwich, Baguette, and Wicket) fit with plenty of room to spare, and we have a great family evening.

    Then, through trial and a lot of error, we realized something else: the sofa bed is pretty much the only place we can get Baguette to nap. Apparently at day care she’s amazing at naps. But what we realized is that there, she doesn’t nap alone. There’s a whole room full of napping toddlers.

    Which is why the sofa bed is now out for the entire weekend. One of us (usually me, but not always) sits next to her and reads or works on the computer, while Wicket perches on a nearby cushion.

    It’s actually kind of awesome.

  • Have a Holly, Jolly, Blurry Christmas

    I’ll probably post again before the weekend, but as we’re midway through our various celebrations, this seems as good a time as any to hurl holiday cheer into the Internet void.

    This past weekend, my side of the family came to town for a visit. We went to Baguette’s day care holiday performance (I am conflicted about the existence of such an event, relieved that once again she was not traumatized, and won over by how cute toddlers are), bought a tiny, tiny tree, and cooked a lot of food. Sunday was our Christmukkah celebration (even though Hanukkah didn’t start until last night), which started off with breakfast (apple bread, scrambled eggs, bacon, turkey sausage) and quickly moved on to opening gifts. After that it was time to make dinner:

    • Roast prime rib
    • Yorkshire pudding
    • Maple-glazed carrots
    • Betty Crocker Potatoes Au Gratin

    That last was a nod to my recovery from surgery; while I have a recipe for potatoes au gratin that I love, it is somewhat labor intensive. So I asked for suggestions, and the boxed solution was brought up as an alternative. Let’s just say I wouldn’t do that again.

    This weekend we’ll have a Pirate Christmas gift exchange with some sort-of-local cousins, and we’ll spend part of Christmas Day with Mr. Sandwich’s side of the family. We’re still figuring out which part, though, so we’re not sure if we can count on eating crepes or tri-tip.

    One of the things we struggle with each year is the deluge of gifts. We are by no means minimalists (which you probably guessed by seeing the random assortment of crap in the background of the blurry photo), but we are finding that our holiday gift-giving style is a bit on the lean side.

    I came from a family of bounteous Christmases. It took me far too long to figure out that when people asked what I got, I shouldn’t name every gift, because no one else was getting that many. There were reasons for why my parents (particularly my mother) went overboard, and I understand them. But as time passes, that is less and less my style.

    Mr. Sandwich’s family gives fewer gifts per person, and I’m finding that to be more comfortable. Sometimes the pile of gifts under the tree can feel like an impending avalanche. And I want Baguette to be aware of what she gets, not just have a vague memory that there was a lot of stuff. At the same time, I know that my family just wants to give gifts, and I’m certainly not going to tell them that their generosity isn’t welcome–because it comes from a really good place, and that’s more important than some arbitrary limit on gifts that makes me feel in control of the day.

    But I do really like this idea, from Frugal Mama–stockings filled with messages rather than gag gifts!

    Oh, and this rings true, from The BadAssMama Chronicles.

  • My Balance: Tragic Sandwich

    Rock-Scale

    I don’t know anyone in this photo; I just liked it!

    I got this idea from a post on Oil and Garlic; she got it from A Cup of Jo. Does that make it a meme? At any rate, here goes:

    1. What’s your work schedule?

    I start work at 8 a.m. (or thereabouts, depending on whether my bus is on time) and leave at 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Mr. Sandwich works 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., so our schedules are a little staggered. We used to commute together, but when my maternity leave ended, we needed to shift it a bit. Each of us comutes by bus, although I sometimes drive to work if I have a late-afternoon doctor’s appointment, or if I miss the bus and my day doesn’t allow for me to be 15 minutes late. Or if I’m super tired and the bus is SRO by the time it gets to my stop.

    My alarm goes off at 5:20, and I get up one snooze-button hit later. I drop Baguette off and drive like a crazy person to get to my bus stop. Mr. Sandwich picks Baguette up, and we all get home a little after 6 p.m. Then we play with her, take her and the dog for a walk, feed her, and bathe her when she needs it. (The order of these events varies depending on the day.) She hates to go to sleep, so there is usually a fairly long wind-down period, with lowered lights and hushed talking and a final bottle. We want her to go to bed between 8 and 8:30, but all too often she isn’t ready until about an hour later. Then we get our things and hers ready for the next day and watch a tiny amount of TV, and get to bed between 10:30 and 11:00–about an hour later than I’d like, but that’s how the time goes.

    2. How do you handle childcare?

    We found a wonderful day care center that is about a two-minute drive from the house. It’s like paying a second mortgage–and I am not exaggerating–but we have so much confidence in them, and Baguette really likes the teachers and her little friends. If she gets sick, one of us stays home with her. Mr. Sandwich’s parents live in town, so sometimes they will come over on the weekend and help us with supervising Baguette and completing tasks around the house.

    3. What do you find best about your current set-up?

    It works. I really like her day care, although I wish it weren’t so expensive. I wish my commute were shorter, but I live in the real world of Los Angeles, and that’s how commutes work here.

    4. What advice would you give to other moms about the juggle?

    Establish priorities, and don’t beat yourself up. I had fantasies of cooking meals for the three of us. This could work, because Baguette is a pretty flexible eater. This absolutely does not work, because I just don’t have time. I felt bad about it for far too long, and then I acknowledged that I really can’t do anything but supervise her when I’m with her–she’s just too active. So now I hope to be able to do that in the future. But it’s completely unproductive to feel bad about not doing something that I just can’t do.

    One of my friends has a daughter a couple of months older than Baguette, and she makes amazing meals every night and spends time with her children. I used to wonder how she managed it, and then I mapped the distance between her house and her work. Guess what–she doesn’t have my commute! So she’s got more time to work with. It’s not realistic to compare my life to hers, because they just aren’t the same. That’s true for everyone else, too.

    5. Do you think the juggle is harder for women than for men?

    Yes. Mr. Sandwich is a very hands-on dad, and he’s also done pretty much all of our laundry for much of the past year. But Baguette is a very hands-on baby, and she wants me when I’m home. I feel like I’ve been mommy-tracked at work, and I made every effort that I could think of to avoid that. He’s got his own work issues (don’t we all?), but I haven’t gotten the impression that he’s been daddy-tracked. That can happen, of course, but I think it’s much less common.

    Photo by neurmadic aesthetic, via Flickr.

  • Well, That Was Exhausting

    Yesterday afternoon, J and I drove down to Redondo Beach. The day before a race, we like to do a practice swim and practice bike ride, to get more familiar with the course. I suppose we could do a practice run, too, but that way lies madness.

    So we got to the beach and I decided very quickly that if the surf didn’t go down by morning, I was going to skip the race. It wasn’t stormy, but the water was pretty choppy. I really didn’t think I could cover 1/2 mile under those conditions.

    And I was probably right. The water was much calmer this morning–the waves were breaking fairly close to the beach, with rolling surges beyond that. It turned out, though that the rolling surges were much more rolling than I thought. In spite of the short distances, this was the toughest of the triathlons I’ve done, and that’s all due to the swim. The ocean was cold, murky, and dynamic (and it tasted bad–I don’t know what’s in the water in Redondo Beach, but it can’t be good).

    When I finally emerged from the water, it was with the slowest time I’ve gotten (30 minutes in the water, and my official time will be longer than that)–and a charley horse. My calf muscle loosened up over the bike portion, but then I developed a stitch in my side. Everything evened out a bit during the run (which I walked all of, except for the finish chute), but on the whole I’m amazed that the right half of me was able to finish the race.

    Of course it helped that I had a lot of support. My dad and stepmom and J’s parents came out in the wee hours of the morning to cheer us on, and after he finished his race, J walked the run with me. Interestingly, the run may have been my favorite portion. The company, of course, was excellent, but the course was fun too. It wound through the Redondo Beach pier and by the neighboring lagoon, which has been turned into a saltwater pool with slides.

    After the race, we all adjourned to the Redondo Beach Cafe for brunch. The service was really slow, but everyone seemed happy with their various entrees. I was quite happy with the Kitchen Sink Omelet, which had cheese, avocado, ham, and onions; other dishes at our table included French toast, multigrain pancakes, a tuna melt, a chicken-salad croissant sandwich, and a French dip. The whole wheat orange pancakes and the crepes sounded good, but what I wanted most of all was protein.

    In the end, I finished dead last with a time of 1:52:35–but I finished.

    Not bad for someone who, after waking up this morning, was so tired that she couldn’t focus her eyes.

  • I’d Kick Myself if I Weren’t So Tired

    Yesterday I was tired because of all of the swimming and biking during the day on Monday, followed immediately by the evening at my in-laws. J was setting up their wireless internet so that they can use the laptop with the webcam to talk to their granddaughter, who just turned two. Never mind that my father-in-law refuses to contemplate web commerce in any form (he has J make all of his online purchases, because apparently it’s not so bad if J’s identity is stolen)–the webcam has been identified as the very highest of priorities.

    Today, though, it’s my own fault. I know not to stay up until 11:30 when I have to get up at 6 a.m.–that’s why we have TiVo (well, one of the reasons). And I didn’t even enjoy this latest version of “The Andromeda Strain.”

  • Remembrance of Black Bean Sauce Past

    All of my life, we’ve eaten a lot of Chinese food. When my brother and I were very young, our family didn’t eat out much. One of the few excursions we could afford on a semi-regular basis was dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I think there were two reasons for this. For starters, Chinese food was proportionally cheaper than it is now. And also we would only order three dishes–one for my mother, one for my father, and one for both my brother and me (that one was usually Beef with Oyster Sauce).

    Later, it turned out that we just liked Chinese food, although the restaurant name wasn’t supposed to be that all-encompassing. In my mother’s opinion, a restaurant that didn’t specify its region wasn’t going to be any good. It wasn’t enough to advertise “Chinese food,” it had to specify Szechwan, Hunan, Cantonese, etc. We liked them all, so a specific region wasn’t the deciding factor. She felt that if the restaurant didn’t have a predominant regional identification, the owners and/or cooks didn’t know enough about the food they were making. Interestingly, many of our favorite restaurants did not meet this standard.

    In Rockville, Maryland, the Far East Restaurant was our establishment of choice. Although the naming principle doesn’t seem to have held here, we always noticed that the Chinese patrons got porcelain teapots, while the European-descended patrons got plain metal teapots. These days that policy has changed, and there is equality of teapots at the Far East.

    We moved to San Antonio, where we found the Wah Kee Seafood Restaurant. After several years in San Antonio, a multiplex movie theater opened near us, and the Wah Kee opened up in the adjacent shopping center. Another favorite was the Chinatown Cafe, which we liked so much that in 2004 J and I had our wedding rehearsal dinner there.

    I found good Chinese food right away when I moved to New Jersey (good Mexican food proved more elusive). Unfortunately, several months later the restaurant burned to the ground. While that was definitely a loss, I can recommend Lotus Cafe in Hackensack and Taipei Noodle House in Teaneck.

    There is a surprising lack of good Chinese food on the Westside of Los Angeles. About the best you can do is Hop Li. It’s pretty good, but not what it could be. No doubt this is largely because the center of Chinese restaurants in the area is in the San Gabriel Valley, but it’s still surprising that so densely populated an area can’t do better. When my grandparents lived in Monterey Park, my favorite restaurant was the Dragon Regency, where one night the chef made me a special dish of lemon cod fillets. I never ordered anything else, and eventually they put it on the menu. My grandparents and I were such loyal patrons that not only did they make me special dishes, they also gave me impromptu birthday celebrations, complete with bean cakes and gifts. Prior to our wedding, J and I went to Engaged Encounter (we will never get that weekend back), and I suggested that we have dinner at the Dragon Regency on our way to the seminary. I was devastated to find that the restaurant had closed, and I have yet to find anyone who can make that perfect lemon cod. Not even the excellent NBC Seafood, where we had dinner with two of J’s friends last year, can manage that particular dish.

    So Chinese food has always played an important role in my family’s meals, although these days I haven’t got the slightest interest in Beef with Oyster Sauce. Chinese food was my brother’s comfort food when he was home sick from school, and I love it so much that one year I gave it up for Lent. And it’s one of the ways that my brother and I choose to honor my mother on her birthday. The two of them both loved Peking Duck, so that’s one of the dishes he’s sure to order. I don’t order any particular dish–but aside from the Dragon Regency’s lemon cod, I’ve never had one.

    Tonight J and I had dinner at Yang Chow, in L.A.’s Chinatown. We found it a couple of years ago with my brother and his girlfriend (now his wife), and it seemed like the right place to celebrate my mother’s birthday this year. That was a good choice, as was the Beef with Black Bean Sauce that the chef made on request (oddly, the menu does include black bean sauce–but only on squid).

    I just wish she’d been there to join us.

  • Yep, It’s a Cold

    I’m glad that I bought a really comfortable couch when I moved to New Jersey, and that I brought it with me to California when J and I got married, because I’ve spent a lot of time on it over the past two days. Both days I went to work in the morning, and then came home. Yesterday I spent all afternoon on the couch with a book, and I don’t think today shows signs of being any different.

    Sadly, my weekend isn’t going to be a chance to recover. Tomorrow I have a fundraising benefit for my alumni club, and I can’t skip it because I’m the president. That ought to teach me to agree to run for office. After that we’re getting together for my sister-in-law’s birthday dinner. She and my brother are in town, and we’ll be joining them and her dad and stepmom. All of this is good, of course, but I wish I felt healthier so that I could enjoy it more! Plus I’m not entirely sure why people would want to be around me in the condition I’m in. Blech.

    By the way, if anyone is looking for the old blogs (Cake Batter and the previous incarnation of Tragic Sandwich), they’re still out there. But rather than reconceive them, I decided to start fresh. But “Tragic Sandwich”? That’s a keeper regardless of blog hosting site.

    Update 2021: Someone newer to the name is using TS on Blogger, where I originally began, and at this point no one is using Cake Batter there–but who knows? There’s no connection, though, so I’ve removed those links.