Red Stick Mom

Confession:  I'm a photographer, with very little photos of my own family.  Ya know, kind of like the road construction company with the owner's driveway the worst in town? I am that girl.  Too busy with clients and work to even want to take my camera out with my own family.  The sight of it makes me cringe....it's work to me and who wants to work on their downtime?!  After realizing about a year ago that I'd totally neglected capturing those special moments of my own, the ones that I'd hold closest to my heart I decided that I was going to be proactive.  With a major case of guilt because I had missed out on what seemed like an...

The other day I had a conversation with a friend who had just had a baby two days earlier, and she wanted to know how I had lost all of my baby weight.  She had literally just come home from the hospital and was already allowing herself to feel shameful about her body.  It broke my heart to hear her express her feelings of unworthiness and insecurity, but it brought back the feelings that I experienced shortly after giving birth. Immediately after my second son, Ben, was born, I felt insecure and ashamed of my body and the 70 pounds I had amassed during my pregnancy.  And even though this was not my first child and I knew that it would take a...

I’ve been a mom for roughly eight months. My husband and I are hooked—we love being parents. Sam is awesome. He makes the cutest faces and has found his loud voice and adorably shovels food into his toothless mouth. We quickly acclimated to poop and exhaustion and bath time and breastfeeding and naps. Or no naps. We’d even venture to say that it’s not so hard after all. We’re absolutely in love. But I have a confession. There is one aspect of parenting that I haven’t quite mastered yet.  Other people’s kids--I’m mildly terrified of them. When you have a kid, you also get a load of other people’s kids. Birthday parties. Volunteering for childcare. Play dates. People assume that when you...

We are a TV family.  At one point, I would estimate that I had 30 different shows in my DVR queue.  So you can imagine my husband's shock when I suggested that we call DirecTV to cancel our service.  How would we live without 150 channels? Without live sports? Without at least 10 episodes of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood available at any given time and for any given toddler meltdown? To be honest, I didn't really know the answer to those questions.  All I knew was that the money going toward our cable bill would be very useful elsewhere. When I reached out to my Facebook friends for advice on dropping our television service, I was shocked by how many had...

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m easily influenced by what I see on television.  I see a commercial for fried chicken and I’ll immediately want Popeyes for dinner. However, I’m an adult and also possess the ability, for the most part, to make rational decisions about what I desire versus what I need.  As my kids are getting older and now have more access to television than in past years, I’m beginning to see firsthand the negative effects television has on my kids, mainly advertising. When my kids were younger, they’d tend to watch TV shows on channels like PBS, Sprout & Nick Jr. which had limited, if any commercials. However, now that my oldest has outgrown most of...