New blog

Just as I have many journals with only a few pages written, I seem to have caught the virtual "starting over" blog bug.

Follow our latest adventures over at Camp Geshmack.

Is Social Media Boxing Us In?

After reading the great article, Top 5 Reasons To Tweet, a few discussions about this with my husband, and months to mull this over without a chance to sit down and write (thanks, baby girl!), I'm left with a question.

How does today's 20-something market himself in a world that (in my opinion) hasn't caught up?  Social media marketing repeatedly requires someone to sum himself up in a one-liner.  Which, for my grandfather, for instance, would have been easy.  Expert maritime lawyer.  Done.  But today, we're not so willing to sum ourselves up--most people I know are more interested in developing a variety of often totally unrelated interests.

Take, for instance, my friend Faryn's Twitter profile (she's funny for money, so this has to be): "One ninth of the sketch comedy group Harvard Sailing Team. One half of the baking co. Fanny & Jane. One third of a casting team. So-so at fractions."


My point exactly.

So how would I sum myself up?

I could go from my professional side and pick: elementary school teacher or website producer.
I could go from the family side and write about being a wife and/or young mother.
I could go from the spiritual side and brand myself based on my interest in Torah learning and Jewish philosophy.

I doubt anyone is looking to find a tweeter with that particular combination, but I'm loathe to drop any one of them.  I'd like to develop each into an expertise over time, and while I don't need to tweet about the progress Adina is or isn't making with her crawling, I do think that being a work-at-home mom involves its own challenges, and Twitter is a great place to get support and ideas.  Obviously continuing to work on the internet and hopefully becoming more of an expert in website development and design lends itself well to Twitter.  And if, though this is far-fetched, I ever get my act together to start putting together regular classes or blogs on Jewish thought, that is something I would certainly want to share.

Does/did anyone else have this issue?

Breaking News: Baby Sucks Thumb!

3 months. Enjoy!

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The song I sang throughout my pregnancy...

Don't know much about you 
Don't know who you are 
We've been doing fine without you 
But, we could only go so far 
Don't know why you chose us 
Were you watching from above 
Is there someone there that knows us 
Said we'd give you all our love 


Will you laugh just like your mother 
Will you sigh like your old man 
Will some things skip a generation 
Like I've heard they often can 
Are you a poet or a dancer 
A devil or a clown 
Or a strange new combination of 
The things we've handed down 


I wonder who you'll look like 
Will your hair fall down and curl 
Will you be a mama's boy 
Or daddy's little girl 
Will you be a sad reminder 
Of what's been lost along the way 
Maybe you can help me find her 
In the things you do and say 

And these things that we have given you 
They are not so easily found 
But you can thank us later 
For the things we've handed down 


You may not always be so grateful 
For the way that you were made 
Some feature of your father's 
That you'd gladly sell or trade 
And one day you may look at us 
And say that you were cursed 
But over time that line has been 
Extremely well rehearsed 
By our fathers, and their fathers 
In some old and distant town 
From places no one here remembers 
Come the things we've handed down 

Day 1 of Urban Organics

Its kindof like a CSA.

Tonight's dinner:
Green chard sauteed in evoo, garlic and onion YUM!
Huge red leaf lettuce and spinach salad with lots of toppings and my first crack at my own italian dressing.
Veggie chips- carrots yams and potatoes baked with salt pepper and paprika.
Whole wheat couscous with green olives and cranberries.

Still loooots of veggies to go before next week! More veggie chips and soup and maybe smoothies on the menu....

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What's Adina like?

Who knows how much of this will be accurate down the line, but we think we see some definite character traits.

First of all, she is, bli eyin hara (literally: "without the evil eye), a very easy baby.  She is often described as "gentle," which is the meaning of her name, Adina.  (Actually, after seeing this strong correlation, Noach/Omri and I are determined to start naming our children by easy-going character traits.)

I guess all babies seem funny, but I have to say it.  Each morning I wake up next to her (I rarely have the energy to get her back into her cradle after nursing at night) and watch her sleep.  When she wakes up, if I'm still there, she looks at me and is soon smiling as if we share the most fabulous secret in the world.  It's such an adult expression that I forget she's a baby for a while.  She loves cooing at people and stuffed animals.  Sometimes she'll lie in my bed as I'm getting ready in the morning and just coo at the room.

This morning, after getting up for a few minutes, I was crawling (sick) back into bed and found her sleeping on her back with her arms completely spread open.  At not even three months, she's managed to take up my. entire. spot. on the bed.

Oh... and sometimes she smiles like she's laughing at me.  I wouldn't be surprised.  

New pictures and videos on our Picasa album.

soccerdeentz

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adinavid

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TV free.. again?

Two great discoveries of the day:  One, the FlyLady chat where, I kid you not, we cheered each other on all day.  Every time I sat down and could have gotten distracted by the computer, I pulled up that tab and within a minute or two I was sent off to do another "mission."

My second great discovery was that I can create a smart playlist on iTunes that plays unheard podcasts.  This will be much-used.  I re-subscribed to a bunch of NPR stations.  I un-subscribed to all the teacher stations.  I stayed subscribed to FlyLady.  Groupie, I know.

And the failed TV-free home experiment from ages back is a bit back up and running.  We now have "weekly goals" in the house (I'm super excited about this).  Now when Shabbos comes along, we can see how we did on one specific thing over the last week.  One week is just long enough to see what life is like with your goal being implemented, and short enough to stick with it.  Well, we agreed to do a shared goal: no TV (well, Hulu) or movies.  Man, this one is HARD.  But we're almost to Shabbos and I have to admit, I got a LOT more done, did much more reading than I usually do (which still isn't enough but I only have so much down time), and we got to bed much earlier than we otherwise would have.  So TV free is awesome.  But I am looking forward to catching up on the Shonda Rhimes trifecta.

Vacation!

Our plans for next year are very up-in-the-air at the moment.  One thing that is up in the air is whether or not I will be able to be teaching next year.

So every day off now is like a trial day.  Can I do this?  Be home with the baby all day?

One concern was whether I would be productive.  I learned today to be more specific with my concerns.  Oh, I was productive.  Six or seven freshly made challot (challah loaves), heaps of chocolate chip cookies, cranberry and cranberry/blueberry scones.  Dinner just about on the table, hubs about to walk in the door... this was a full day of work, easily.  (Add in taking care of The Deentz and leaving the house tidy after all that baking!)

The problem is, this isn't the kind of productive I meant when I created that concern.

I meant, can I run the house, get good bonding time in with the baby (being a work-from-home-mom hardly pays if you're just shoving a toy in front of the baby and working the whole time) and DO MY JOB from home?

I hope today isn't cause for concern.

I have plenty to be doing and lots of exciting articles going up (stay tuned!).  But I just couldn't get myself to stay here in front of the computer.  The only argument in my defense is that this chair is AWFUL.  I literally start to ache within a minute of sitting down.  Maybe it's time to cash in the massage hubs bought me for last Rosh Chodesh........

So there's my conundrum of the day.  I've learned how to get off my tush and get to work... but how to stop getting to the wrong kind of work and refocus?