My husband and I are both big foodies. We try to make a variety of different foods at home and now that our kids are well passed the toddler stages, we usually include them in meal planning. When we travel, what we can eat plays a big role in deciding where we go and we make a point to not eat at restaurants that we have at home. Here are my 10 signs that your kid might be a foodie.
*I wrote this post in the summer of 2013 when I was in the thick of trying to get pregnant with my youngest son and we were approaching the 2-year mark. I was processing my feelings and writing them for a parenting blog I ran at the time. Since that blog no longer exists, I wanted to save many posts I’d written because writing them back then served as great therapy for me. This is one of them.
A couple of months after my son turned two, I was ready to get back on the baby-making train. We got pregnant with TJ very easily, so I had faith that it would happen for us again within a few months. Little did I know that the universe had other plans for us.
I’m the oldest of four kids, all born about two years apart. Sure, we had our fights when we were young; sharing bedrooms will do that to any siblings. But we were all pretty close and I think we had a pretty rad childhood.
Cut to now, we’re all in our late 20s and 30s and living pretty far apart from each other, yet we are emotionally closer than we have ever been. We constantly support each other the best we can, given our distance.
Even before my son was born, I wanted my kids to be around the same age gap as I am to my siblings. The quantity of children was undecided but I knew I wanted them to be two to three years apart. I felt that the closeness I share with my siblings was due in part to our closeness in age.
Do siblings who are further apart in age still have fantastic relationships? Sure! I just use my own childhood as reference.
We’ve been trying for almost two years to conceive a sibling for TJ. The age gap that I thought I wanted, that I thought was perfect, is now gone. If I were to get pregnant right now, my kids would be more than four years apart. And I have no idea how much bigger that gap is going to get…. whether we conceive a child of our own or look to adoption.
More than 4 years apart and they likely won’t be in high school at the same time, looking out for each other like I did with my brother. They may not like the same generation of kids’ toys and music. Heck, I don’t even know if I will be able to use the same car seats before they expire.
A few months ago, I literally had to mourn the childhood I thought my son was going to have with any siblings… hoping it would be just like mine. I know it’s a silly notion, but the pain I felt was real.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but I was really down about it for a while. One could argue that I have no right to feel so down about my “unexplained infertility” since I have been able to have one amazing little boy when so many women are still struggling to have their first child.
To some extent, that’s true. I feel incredibly blessed to have my son.
But you know what? I’m not done yet. My family isn’t done yet. I know it’s selfish, but I want to experience pregnancy again (even the crappy parts). I want to experience childbirth again. I even want to go through the newborn phase again, no matter how much I will think back to this very moment and say, “what was I thinking?”
As time heals everything, the pain of not having my children when I wanted has lessened. As TJ grows more independent and communicates more effectively, I am seeing more and more how he is going to make an amazing big brother some day. I hope he will be able to cope with the big change that comes when a new baby joins a family; a change that probably would have been much harder on him when he was just two or even three.
Does my heart ache when TJ asks me for a baby brother or baby sister? Hell yes. I still fight back tears when he tells me, “Mommy, try harder.”
But I feel more and more at ease with the fact that the universe will choose the right time, not me.
Our friend Jaxon had an assignment in his class where he asked friends and family to send postcards and notes claiming they met the Gingerbread Man on their road trips and travels. I leveled up on our adventures and had a TON of fun in Photoshop adding the Gingerbread Man to some photos and sending fun messages to Jaxon’s kindergarten class.
I had the privilege of attending a retreat in 2019 hosted by Shanti Hodges and Mirna Valerio and it was transformative. I had spent almost all of my 30s juggling a long commute, being pregnant, and taking care of babies that I completely neglected my own physical, mental, and emotional health. The year I turned 40, I vowed to make my own health a higher priority and saving up money to attend this retreat was part of that.
Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate! This is not a holiday we typically do anything for; feeling that’s it’s mostly driven by retail companies. That being said, creating fun valentines for school parties has become something I do look forward to each year.
This year my oldest son proclaimed “we don’t do valentines in middle school.” I rolled my eyes at him, but whatever.
At least my second grader still does valentines! We opted to go with non-food valentines again this year right when Sticker Mule was having a great sale on 3x3 inch holographic stickers. So he and I worked on a quick and fun design and I got them ordered. Have I mentioned that he loves bacon?
Next up was some kind of card to put the stickers on to give out at his party. We needed something for folks to know who these were from. I created a 4x5 inch card so I could print four on a page. I added a bacon border that matched the sticker and added his name. I had them printed and trimmed at my local Office Depot and they were ready within an hour.
I LOVE how these turned out! Here’s a breakdown of the pricing:
50 vinyl, holographic stickers, roughly 3x3 inch - on sale - $31.10 (incl tax, shipping was free)
12 pages printed on card stock (4 cards per page) and trimmed - $11.84
double-sided tape (we already had some)
Total: $42.94
That came out to $.89 cents per valentine for 48 valentines. There are only 25 kids in my son’s class, but he will also give one to his teacher, the class aides, specials teachers (music, PE, art, Spanish, etc), and the two administrative assistants. The minimum order for the deal on Sticker Mule was 50 stickers, so even if he only gave them out in his class, we’ll have leftover stickers to share with friends or I can list them in my sticker store for a few bucks.
Overall, this wasn’t crazy expensive and I love coming up with a fun way to do non-food, non-candy, allergen-free valentines.
A while back my friend, Brandi reached out to me about creating a new logo for the elementary school where she’s a teacher. It just so happens to be the same elementary school where both she and I were students back in the 1980s. The school district made some big changes last year, and one of them included a new name for our old school and I was asked to help them with a new logo.
It has been such fun to be part of the process to rebrand MY elementary school.
They had students submit hand-drawn concepts for the logo and the school committee (made up of teachers and the principal) chose one as a conceptual starting-off point for me. That drawing involved a howling coyote with beams of light in a circle around it. The landscape I created in the background is a portion of Coyote Hills Regional Park that the school is named after. I grew up hiking in those hills and going there on field trips!
It was a fun process taking that student’s artwork and turning it into a professional logo and I’m really happy with the final concept. I sent them multiple versions of this logo in one color, two colors, and three colors. That way they have multiple options in the event they want to print on t-shirts or make stickers.
Thanks so much for this fun opportunity!!
