parents

Organizing for Parents

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There are so many items out there for parents to choose from for organizing their nurseries, their cars, their travel, their diaper bags that I don’t know how we get through it with our bank accounts still intact. Some things that I found were new at the time of my first born in 1997 that are now more or less standard on the lists for new parents. For example, we decided to skip the infant car seat/carrier for a convertible car seat that would last throughout our baby’s toddlerhood. What we hadn’t anticipated was that our son would be born small: 3lbs. 11oz. He swam in the convertible car seat. He swam in the infant car seat that we eventually got. “Eventually” being on the way home from the hospital and stopping at a Toys R Us to get him a more appropriately sized (and safer) car seat.

I bought many parenting books. I can’t really recommend any of the new ones as I haven’t used any of them, but the two I found the most invaluable were What to Expect When You’re Expecting and What to Expect The First Year. The toddler one was great for looking up symptoms of things and checking on developmental progression, but any of these should be used in conjunction with your pediatrician who you trust.

For our first we also had a bassinet AND a crib. We set up an entire nursery for him that he never slept in. Partly that was due to his size and need to eat throughout the night. Ultimately, we used our Graco Pack N Play as a crib most of the time. Our other two slept in our room for nearly a year, using a crib or the Pack N Play. As they get older, toddler beds are nice, but unnecessary. We used mattresses on the floor when we had two toddlers simultaneously.

Space is also a consideration. We had three kids in a two-bedroom apartment. I didn’t think much of it. When I was young, my family was comprised of three kids in a two-bedroom apartment. It was tight, and we had a storage facility for seasonal items and things we just couldn’t fit in a garden apartment with no real storage space. The polite description was that it was cozy.

We had a toddler and an infant, so a double stroller (with a car seat) was a must-have.

Some other must-haves:

  1. Sectioned diaper bags as well as a fold-up changing pad that would also function as a holder for a couple of diapers and pack of wipes to “grab & go.” You don’t always need to drag the diaper bag into every place. I also like a diaper bag that has a section just for mom: wallet, keys, sunglasses, cell phone (at a minimum) and then you don’t need to carry a purse. You’re doing enough juggling. My favorite diaper bag was one that attached easily onto the stroller. Easy to get into and it converted into a shoulder or crossbody bag for carrying.
  2. Stroller for expeditions like the mall or playground. If for nothing else, the bottom basket is great for coats, hats, diaper bag or changing pouch. I always bought attachable cup holders for my and my baby’s drinks. Most strollers have these as part of the set-up now.
  3. Snacks. If your toddler is old enough to hold it, a small plastic container works. If you’ll be doling out the snacks onto a tray, a Ziploc bag works just as well. Both can be reused.
  4. Baby Wipes. Buy the biggest pack. It will never be too many.
  5. Bibs. But not the tiny, cutesy ones that match the outfit. They’re almost useless unless you have a very drooly baby. For eating, plastic (to wipe down easily) with a pocket to catch the food. Velcro, not tie or snap.
  6. Highchair is a judgment call. We didn’t have the space for a highchair, but we did buy a portable and adjustable highchair seat. This worked just as well as a full-size highchair and could be put away when not in use. It could also travel with us when we went to Grandma’s house, which was fairly often and to restaurants, which was less so.
  7. Baskets & Open bins for easy clean-up. Store them on the bottom of a bookshelf (although make sure that the bookshelf is secured to the wall or built in) or line up in front of a wall. Even toddlers can help put things away when it’s this simple.
  8. Unless you find that your baby is fussy, you do not need a baby wipe warmer. You do, however, need a diaper pail that will deodorize the contents.
  9. A small dish drain for baby’s bottles, pacifiers, teethers, so you’re not digging through all of last night’s dishes for what you need.
  10. Towel with a hood to wrap baby up after a bath. Dries them and keeps them warm before the jammies go on.

Comments are open for questions and suggestions.

50-30 – The Post Office

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I grew up in the post office. Sort of. Both of my parents worked for the post office, and I’d visit them often from when I was young, in elementary school right up to college and after.

I knew where the employee only door was to visit my mother, and I’d walk on through even though it said, No Admittance, Employees Only. This was also my way of bypassing the line and I would give my mother my mail and she’d dump it into the sorting tray.

I used to send a lot of letters and cards to friends and pen pals. I didn’t realize that stamps had to be paid for; that thyey cost money. My parents never asked me for money for stamps.I thought they were a benefit of working for the post office.

I’d leave my mail sticking out of the medicine cabinet mirror in the bathroom at night, and the next morning they’d be gone and on their way to the addressee.

I sat at Gloria’s desk, twirling in her chair, pushing around the cigarette butts in the ashtray with a pencil. I’d use the stampers on blank pieces of routing paper: First Class, Air Mail, Fragile.

On ocassion, I’d sort the mail into the carrier’s trays by zip code.

I would address letters to my grandmother by simply writing Grandma and her address.

I knew the importance of the return address and using a zip code. I rebelled against the zip plus four.

For a long time, I could identify a state by its zip code, and I was one of the only kids in class who knew all the postal abbreviations for all of the states.

Even today, two hundred fifty miles away from those childhood post offices, I still feel at home sending out my letters and packages. I sneak behind the second counter to build my boxes, pack them, address them and tape them closed. This isn’t an official counter where the stamps and money are kept. It is alongside the retail section. It might have had a cash register a long time ago for just the retail items, but it’s just a great space to pack up and get my Christmas presents ready for mailing. I do get asked a lot of questions, though because everyone thinks I work there. I can almost always answer the questions, which makes me feel good too.

As a kid, I knew not to put any mail in the blue neighborhood boxes. I still don’t although the problems that happened in the 70s don’t really happen too much anymore – fireworks in July, eggs at Halloween.I do hand my already stamped mail to the clerk about ninety-nine percent of the time.

Fragile, liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous? My clerk knows I know it, and he has to say it anyway, so I just smile and wait patiently to answer him. Usually it’s the first three, especially around the holiday season.

I automatically hand over my credit card, knowing the clerk needs it for the credit transaction.

I’ve asked for tape and markers and staplers.

I almost always use priority mail. I remember when priority mail was guaranteed like express mail is.

The price of stamps almost always goes up right after Mother’s Day, at least it did two or three times in a row.

I remember when computers came into the station, and at my parents’ first station together, we could walk to the pizza place and back. Joe’s Pizza.

As an adult they kind of frown on you spinning the chairs around, but there was not a chair that I didn’t spin when I was a kid.

Half a Century and A World Ago

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Today would have been my parents’ 50th anniversary. They were married on February 5th, 1965.

My mother is in the center, wearing the pink suit with my father to her left. Deanne and Gerald.

Just to her right is my grandmother, Sadie and over her shoulder is my grandfather, Richard or Mo as he was known (short for Moshe), her parents. Going out right and left from her are my father’s parents, Stanley (who was from Canada) and Celia (whose brother I’m named for), and the short woman closest in the picture, I believe is my great-grandmother, Bubbi.

In this picture her hair looks reddish, ginger, but I honestly have no idea what her actual hair color was. I think it was brown, but I never saw it. Growing up she dyed it (what we thought of as crazy colors, but nowhere near the “crazy” of today, and she wore wigs. Wigs and headbands; they were a very popular accessory in the 70s. I know that a lot of her friends did the same with their hair.

This is one of two or three pictures that I have from their wedding day. They were married in Laurelton, NY at the Jewish Center and the reception was at my grandmother’s house. I don’t remember that chandelier, but we were at that house every weekend (and the other half of the weekend was spent at my other grandparents, my father’s parents.

Visiting my grandparents seems like yesterday; it’s hard to believe that this photograph is fifty years old.

We lead a very different life now. Our kids see their paternal grandmother once or twice a year instead of the once or twice a week that we saw ours. There were family gatherings with more extended family than my kids can imagine. We had “cousins” and I still have no idea how we’re “related”. Cousins of cousins, aunt’s siblings’ kids’ kids. We went to dinners and birthdays.Next week, we are traveling a couple of hours for my cousin’s daughter’s sweet 16, and for a few hours it will feel like thirty years ago despite the missing faces.

I am Facebook friends with my Dad’s best man’s wife.

My Mom’s favorite aunt and uncle are in their nineties, long retired to Florida, and married over seventy years.

Just last year, we celebrated my Dad’s brother’s 70th birthday. In fact, he turned 71 two days ago.

My parents would have been 77 and 72 on their next birthdays.

These are one of those bittersweet days, remembering the joy and the fun and the sadness that they aren’t here to celebrate this momentous milestone.

Mom & Dad's wedding reception - 1965

This second picture is the walk back from the wedding to my grandmother’s house for the reception. It looks like my Aunt Shirley and Uncle Carl leading the way with Bubbi and my parents, newly married pulling up the rear.

I can’t get over the hats, the cars and the eyeglasses.

It all makes me smile

.Mom & Dad's wedding Mom & Dad - my wedding - 1994This third photo is from my wedding in 1994.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad.

Always together and missed everyday.

Spiritual Changes

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“Few of us look as good as we once did. It is a fact of life, the price of getting old. We have our bumps and bruises, cuts and scrapes. Life damages us all. Even our spiritual life may not be what it once was.”
-Traveling Light by Father Thomas Connery

My spiritual life was never what it is now.

I’ve always had a strong sense of G-d, but also a terrified sense of what’s next? I was always concerned with what happens when we die. I’m still concerned, but it consumes me less. As a child, I hated going to funerals, although the one time I was given a choice on the matter, I opted to go because I was close to the woman.

Since joining the Church, I’ve attended at least six funerals in the last three months. I knew none of the deceased. I found something uplifting with the funeral message that life isn’t ended, but changed. Honestly, I’m not sure I believe it – it’s a lot like grasping at straws for me – I want it so very badly, but I still have the question in the back of my mind.
In my spiritual life, I never fit. When I did attend a religious school and temple, I disliked it in the extreme. It was too formal. Odd I know coming from someone who spends three to four mornings every week in an extremely formal ritual of Mass.

But all of the Hebrew schools I found didn’t explain anything to me. I felt unwelcome. We were either too religious or not religious enough.

We followed the rites with our children, and that was more than that it was required. I could feel the thousands of years of tradition and it felt wonderful. Even my son in the pain from his bris, I felt the connection to a place thousands of years old, thousands of miles away in the desert. It was a bit overwhelming and I remember it distinctly to this day.

There was a scene in Supernatural recently, where the character of Dean says, “Dayenu”. I’m not sure what he meant by that – it was one of those things that I let go because I just didn’t know, but I remember a song Dayenu from our Passover Seders about goats. I might be remembering it wrong. I really enjoyed those Seders. I still have my torn, scribbled on paper copy of the one we got from shul, and that was the best school I could have gone to. We learned Yiddish and the Bible stories and the traditions like reading a Haggadah for Passover and lighting Chanukah candles and watching those cheap wax candles melt so quickly, more quickly than they should have, and learning why you don’t light a Yartzeit candle until your parents die because it’s not right to do it before.

My Dad also taught me that you don’t put hats on the bed, you don’t give out more information than is asked for, you give more than you get, you don’t take gas money if you’re going in the same direction, and if someone needs a helping hand, you don’t ask why, you reach out your hand. He did these things quietly.

My mother was equally generous with her time and her money and her love, but she did it much more noisily. She didn’t expect a thank you, but it would be nice. Her family always came first. She didn’t have medical treatments because that would mean time off from work and time off from work would mean less money for the family’s needs. How in the world does a $48,000 house cost $275,000 and it’s still not enough.

My parents were smart and funny, well, my father was hilarious. He loved his kids and his grandkids more. My mother did also.

I miss them.

And in this journey through Catholicism, they’re the only ones I worry about. How would they feel? For one thing, they wouldn’t want me to be miserable hiding my feelings, hiding my faith. They wouldn’t want me suicidal. They would want me to do whatever I felt was right to take care of my kids and myself.

From the moment I walked into the church, I was welcomed, and not just welcomed, but I felt welcome. I was allowed to ask any question, even irreverent, even to the priest himself.

I really do feel as though I belong.

It’s funny, growing up and well into adulthood, I was very uncomfortable seeing crosses with Christ depicted on them. It was torture. Why is it everywhere? It wasn’t until I started attending church and when I stopped avoiding looking at the large cross which is always positioned over the Father’s shoulder when he reads the Gospel. I started really looking and feeling the empathy FROM it, not my feeling sorry towards it for His torture and murder, but the amount of comfort coming from it amazed and overwhelmed me. There was light filtering in through the skylight and the lingering smell of strong incense and the most amazing feeling of arms wrapped around me, and I knew then; it was months ago, but I knew then: I was falling and

He caught me, and he hasn’t let go, and I won’t let go either.

I understand now; just a little bit, but I do understand.