Choosy Mothers Choose Takeout

There are reasons why Urban Mommies do not prepare seven-course meals for their families with any degree of regularity.

On Friday, the Metropolitans are having two other families over for New Year's Eve dinner and ancillary festivities. So, since Tuesday afternoon, I have been menu-planning, shopping, and preparing whatever dishes can be prepared ahead of time so that Friday evening itself will unfold as seamlessly as is possible in a world where three couples and three toddlers are scampering about one medium-sized apartment. (Incidentally, the two other families in question are the Divas and the van Wainwrights, so this whole illusion of seamlessness has already been shot to hell for the purpose of entertaining you, our gentle readers.)

Tuesday night, after the Metropolitoddler went to bed, I made hors d'oeuvre #1. Tonight, I made hors d'oeuvre #2. I have a little bone to pick with hors d'oeuvre #2. The recipe, from a highly touted brand-new cookbook, claims that the entire shebang takes 40 minutes: 20 minutes of "active preparation" and 20 minutes of baking. Of the 20 minutes of active prep, 8 of them are supposed to be spent sauteing, leaving me with 12 minutes to chop up (and finely chop, no less) six different ingredients, mix them up with some other (blessedly unchopped) ingredients, and stuff the whole thing into individual mushroom caps.

This 12 minute project took an hour and a half. And I haven't even baked the little buggers yet -- that 20 minutes constitutes part of the seamless Friday evening experience. (Now that I think about it, hors d'oeuvre #1 took twice as long as the recipe indicated, too. Hmph.) Who has time for this on a regular basis??

None of this is to say that I haven't had a pleasant couple of evenings in the kitchen. I happen to enjoy cooking quite a bit. I'm not saying that I should start a new career as chef de cuisine in some four-star Manhattan restaurant or anything, but it's fun to try out new recipes and I find the kitchen a soothing place to spend a few hours now and then. I'm just saying, is all.

My mother, Mrs. Suburban, likes to give me grief every so often about how I have all this fantastic cooking paraphernalia that I got as bridal shower gifts but rarely use. These are some of the occasions during which I inform my mother that she's lost her mind. Come on -- what with the full-time job and the toddler chasing and the attempting to get a little exercise occasionally (and, admittedly, the somewhat excessive amount of TV I watch -- but I TiVo it all, so I watch it in an efficient and commercial-free manner!) and the occasionally trying to spend a little time with Mr. Metropolitan or some of my friends -- what with all that, when exactly am I supposed to find the time to whip up gourmet meals to delight my husband's palate several evenings a week? (In fairness to Mrs. Suburban, she doesn't actually expect me to cook up these fabulous meals for Mr. Metropolitan with any frequency. Except for holiday meals, I don't think she's cooked dinner more than ten times in the last five years. She just likes to tease me about all my cooking equipment. Of which there is quite a lot.)

My mother-in-law, Mrs. Midwest, has her head on straight concerning this topic. She got us a new Foreman Grill (with all the new bells and whistles!) for Chanukah to replace our old outmoded one. I can whip up a tasty dinner of grilled steak/chicken/fish, microwave-steamed asparagus/broccoli/squash, and a salad in ten minutes or less -- that's the everyday cooking of the Urban Mommy! (All ingredients delivered to my door by FreshDirect, naturally.)

Not to mention the genius of Manhattan takeout. We here in the Metropolitan household are devotees of at least 15 different restaurants that are more than happy to deliver dinner to our apartment in half an hour or less: Upscale Chinese, quick Chinese, really quick sushi, somewhat-less-quick-but-higher-quality sushi, non-sushi Japanese, Indian, Upscale Mexican, Burritos (3 different places), Steaks, Middle Eastern, Diner, Upscale Pizza, Quick Pizza, bagels, and a few others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Enough of this blogging nonsense. Who has time for it? I have 76 more hors d'oeuvres to prepare before Friday evening. Bon appetit!

Stiiiiiillllll Pregnant

I figured someone might think my lack of posting was because I had the kid. Nope. I'm here. 11 days to the due date.

My various friends with due dates near mine, however, have all become parents in 2004. The friend due Jan 2 with kid #2 I always assumed would go before me, and she did. The friend due a week after me had her daughter on Christmas. And the sister of a friend who was due on the same day as me experienced some health problems and was induced early, and mother and daughter are doing fine. All three had girls, so maybe my son just has a thing for older women and wanted to make sure they arrived before he did....

So at this point, I'm feeling really large. Everyone at the office wants to know what I'm still doing here, and I keep asking where else I should be! I feel fine, I'm getting stuff done at the office, and I'll feel better if I wrap up lots of loose ends before this kid arrives. The only real issue is the inability to get close to my desk, which makes typing uncomfortable.

All is ready at home - the to-do lists are finished, the baby's room is ready for an occupant (except for the furniture), and we've packed our bags.

The best news of all is that the mad itching, which seems to have been a common pregnancy ailment called PUPPP (said as "Pupps") has almost completely cleared up. The belly is now simply dry again, and the arms are no longer ragingly red and painful. I'm back to simply moisturizing, and it isn't keeping me up at night. The last two nights, I've actually gotten some decent sleep. (Not uninterrupted, just decent.) Whew.

Wishing all of our readers (I know you're out there!) a very happy New Year!

Happy Holidays from the Urban Mommies!

It probably would have been helpful to post holiday wishes sometime before the various winter holidays, but as a bunch of busy urban mommies, who has the time to think of these things and act on them in a timely fashion??

In any event, we wish all of our readers a most happy and fulfilling 2005.

Post Mortem

A couple of months ago, I wrote my inaugural Urban Mommies post, in which I alluded to my dissatisfaction with my current employment situation.

Over the course of this year, it became clear to me that my particular foray into the world of balancing full-time working with full-time mommying wasn't working. Which was a bummer of a realization, since I had honestly believed it could work back in my naive days as a new mother returning to work from maternity leave.

It didn't work for a number of reasons, some of which are my employer's fault and some of which are not.

It didn't work because I joined a new business (at my employer's behest) partway through the year -- a group in which (1) I didn't really know anyone, (2) everyone worked very long hours and lots of weekends, and (3) we had clients whose needs often dictated the schedule. Of these three factors, #1 was the most critical to the ultimate outcome. For my type of "special" hours arrangement to be successful, my colleagues had to be comfortable with it. And for them to be comfortable with it, they had to understand that my early departures didn't make me an unmotivated slacker -- it made me someone who worked somewhat different hours than they did and in a different setting (my living room) during the evenings.

When I left for maternity leave, I left a group of people who knew me, knew my work, and knew that I would always get the work done. When I came back from leave and subsequently moved into a new business, I joined a group of people who didn't know me, didn't know my work, and didn't realize that a general lack of availability for 6:30 or 7 pm conference calls wasn't an ominous sign of slackerdom. That, combined with the fact that my new role was substantially different from my old role and required a fair amount of getting up to speed before I really felt comfortable with what I was doing, pretty much doomed me.

So what could I have done differently? I suppose I could have fought the move. I could have asked to stay where I was, to keep doing a job that I already knew how to do. But I don’t think that would have been the right decision, and I honestly don’t think it would have made a difference. The opportunity to join the new group was a good one – it was an excellent chance to learn a new skill set and to get involved in a high-growth/high-profitability area of the company. What’s more, even the people in my old group didn’t know me that well, because so many people had quit both shortly before and during my maternity leave. So the group I returned to was a dramatically different one, and one in which people might have had the same complaint about my schedule. On the margins, they might have cut me a little more slack, but it wasn’t like I would have been working with people who’d known me for years and would give me the benefit of the doubt.

Alternatively, I could have made the decision to increase my face time for the first few months until I was so good at my new job that I could then reinstitute my leave-a-bit-early-hang-out-with-kid-until-bedtime-then-continue-working-from-home policy. This could have worked, but only under one condition. I’ll admit that I was not – and am not – willing to have my daughter’s weekday parental contact consist solely of the hour or so in the morning between when she gets up and her nanny arrives. So for me to have worked later at night, Mr. Metropolitan would’ve had to get home by 6:30 or so most nights to hang out with the Metropolitoddler until her bedtime.

But as I indicated in another post about a month ago, my husband’s work schedule has been insane for – well, a long time. And truthfully, it wouldn’t have been any fairer to him to only be able to work from 9-6 at a job that demands long hours, late nights, and lots of weekend time than it was for me to work from 9-5:30 every day while he was traveling. I know that if he’d had the choice, Mr. Metropolitan would have been more than willing to do it for a few months to make my job work out, but we really didn’t have any choice.

So the only way to prove my mettle to my new colleagues would have been to increase my nanny’s hours significantly so that both my husband and I could stay at work until later at night. Not acceptable. At no point during this entire work debacle have I ever once questioned my conviction that as a general matter, my daughter should see at least one parent in the morning and at least one parent during the evening.

Could I have worked even harder during the hours I was at work to transform myself into a Tasmanian Devil of efficiency – so impressively intense and efficient in the workplace that my absence for a couple of hours would have never have been questioned? This is a tough one. The answer is maybe. I will confess that I have never been the kind of person who puts her nose to the grindstone when she gets to work and doesn’t remove it until it’s time to go home. I am, however, the kind of person who always gets her work done correctly and on time. When mania is required to meet a goal, I can marshal an impressive amount of it, but when a more casual attitude will get the work done in a timely fashion, I am more than happy to get a cup of coffee or kibbitz at the proverbial water cooler or chitchat over email. That’s just me, and there’s probably nothing much to be done about it.

But here’s an interesting fact. Not everyone I work with has issues with my schedule. The people who don’t have a problem with it generally fall into two categories: (1) people who worked with me before my maternity leave (a dwindling bunch, to be sure) and (2) women. What do you make of that? It’s interesting, is it not, that women – married or single, mommies or not – were totally cool with the fact that if you want to have an evening call with me, it has to be after 8 pm.

And this is the part that in some ways bothers me most, because I can’t figure out a way in which it could have been avoided. The ultimate problems I have encountered stem from a workplace culture in which one’s heart and soul are supposed to belong to The Job 24/7. That culture came into existence at a time when men worked and women stayed home with the kids. And it’s not limited to my employer – it applies to most high-powered jobs with most high-powered companies and firms.

But that culture is not compatible with a world in which women work at jobs that are equally as high-octane as those of their husbands. The solution should not have to be that one or both parents must exit the race. The solution should be that everyone recognizes the value of spending a couple hours with their kids and that everyone who wants to can take the time to do that and that everyone should be cool with that, recognizing that the work will get done two hours later than it otherwise would have but it will still get done. Because that’s a culture that makes sense. Women – not all women, but a lot of women – seem to understand that. Men – not all men, but a lot of men – do not.

I can assess my particular situation with a fair amount of detachment these days, having had a few months to make my peace with it. But the broader issue continues to trouble me, because I’m not convinced that I’ll be able to overcome it even in a new workplace, even with Mr. Metropolitan picking up evenings for me until I’m settled in, even in a smaller environment where everyone has vowed that they understand the constraints of my schedule and that they’re totally fine with it. I’m just not sure that I won’t be writing another one of these posts in another year. I do, however, plan to use whatever lessons I've learned from this whole experience to try my best to make the balancing act work.

TMI - Sorry

Is there any remedy for ragingly itchy stretch marks? I don't care if the product minimizes their appearance, I just care that it will stop me from waking up several times a night due to having scratched my belly bloody. Currently I am Lubriderming 8-10 times a day, which has a temporary soothing effect, but no lasting one. Cocoa butter made it worse, and I'm not permitted to use hydrocortisone, as the steroids in it can apparently thin out my skin, making the problem worse.

Unfortunately, this problem seems to be spreading - my skin is drier (and thus painfully itchier) than it's ever been, despite regular moisturizing, sleeping with a humidifier, and drinking more water than I ever have. And I'm developing a weird rash on my inner forearms - at least I'm allowed to put hydrocortizone on that, which seems to be helping.

Any help would be appreciated. Sorry for having grossed you out, if I have. But I'm losing my mind here. This has been a remarkably easy pregnancy, but the itching is making me absolutely crazy.

All Snot, All the Time

I read somewhere at one point that the average baby gets eight colds before he or she turns two. My kid hit eight colds somewhere around the one year mark, and the snot just keeps on coming.

For the most part, it seems to bother me more than it does her. I just don't love the notion that snot is dripping all over her toys, clothes, furniture, and family. Call me crazy, but . . . ! I quiver in my boots to think of all the additional snot that I'll get to experience when/if the metropolitoddler heads off to preschool next year.

Other than purelling every square inch of my daughter's body every ten minutes or putting her into a bubble and never letting her encounter another human being, is there anything to be done to prevent some of these colds?

Prepping for Post-Partum Paranoia

OK, OK, so I'm a professional worrier. Quite good at it, too. Amusingly enough, one of my greatest fears is that having a kid will push me entirely over the edge into outright paranoia - I'm clearly going to be one of those parents who has the pediatrician on speed dial on every phone I have, and uses it until told that the doctor wants to refer me to a new peditrician so she can get some rest. Thank goodness for the tempering influence of Mr. Banana, or I'm pretty sure I'd get carted off to the loony bin pretty quick.

In any case, yesterday I got a little practice in this paranoia business. On Monday night, I noticed that Baby Banana wasn't moving around like he usually does. Generally, dinner makes him very active, and Monday night, nothing. So I had some dessert, which usually makes him move around enough to keep me awake, and was rewarded with only a few small movements. Those reassured me that it was likely temporary, and I figured I'd reassess in the morning. When breakfast yielded no movements, I called my doc. I was fully expecting to hear that this happens occasionally, and that I should monitor the movements all day and call the next day if no improvement. Instead, I got told to come straight to Labor and Delivery. Let's just say I did not enjoy the drive to the hospital.

Long story short, all is well. Baby Banana's heart beat is strong, he is moving up a storm, and I'm even having contractions. I just couldn't feel any of it. There seems to be no particular explanation, except that he likely is running out of room in there and the movements will now feel less like kicks and more like rolls. Sure enough, last night after dinner he rolled around a bunch, and this morning (as I type) he's doing it again. Whole lot of hoo-ha over nothing.

I do have to say that as panic situations go, this was one of the better ones I've had. Everything turned out fine and I got to listen to Baby Banana's heartbeat for over an hour while the monitored us. There are worse ways to pass the time. And I would much rather that I'm miserable from being panicky while he's fine than that I'm fine and he's not.

I suppose I've now learned that I can stay relatively calm in a perceived crisis regarding my baby, and was pleased to find that no one at triage pooh-poohed me for my nervousness. So maybe I'll get through the first few months of this kid's life without calling the pediatrician every twenty minutes.

Small Talk

I've noticed since I've been back from maternity leave (about a year now) that whenever I run into someone in the office who I haven't seen for a while, they always ask how my daughter's doing. Not "so, you busy these days?" or "what have you been working on?", which I seem to recall were the types of questions I was asked back before I was pregnant. (When I was visibly pregnant, of course everyone asked me how I was feeling/doing, but that's par for the course when you've got a beach ball sticking out of your tummy, n'est ce pas?)

I'm obviously happy to talk about the Metropolitoddler as a general matter of public policy, but I do wonder whether I've been pigeonholed as The Mommy rather than as The Colleague.

I can't imagine that guys are asked about their kids all the time the way I'm asked about mine. I don't ask guys -- or women -- in the office how their kids are doing, with the exception of a couple of people who had or whose wives had babies right around the same time I did. I find it a little weird that people who I wouldn't characterize as anything more than acquaintances go right to the personal question rather than sticking with more work-specific chitchat.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this? Do all women find themselves being asked about their children while the men are greeted with a more professional array of small talk options --or am I the sole Mama Madonna of Wall Street? Or does everyone get asked about their kids as a friendly gesture and I'm just being hypersensitive given my level of, well, hypersensitivity where my workplace is concerned?

(It bothers me to a certain extent that I, who have never ever ever been concerned with gender issues in the workplace, am now turning into the type of person I formerly rolled my eyes at. But that's a topic for another post.)

Drowning in Subscription Cards

Anyone want to suggest a good parenting magazine I should subscribe to? There's a dozen or more at my doc's office and I can't tell which one will be helpful to me once I actually have this kid... Or do I not need/want this at all?