Food for thought for stay-at-home-moms

I am sort of obsessed with Penelope Trunk's blog. Although we differ greatly in religious/family/sexuality views, everything else seems to express exactly what I was thinking.

I especially love how she defends staying at home with kids from a non-religious, common-sense and statistical point of view. Here are some of my favorite quotes.

From the article "Your family would be better off with a housewife (so would mine)":

"The conclusion, that marriages and families work better with a full-time housewife, is hard to swallow but hard to deny. It’s just that not every woman wants to take care of a family and marriage full time, and even fewer men do. And increasingly few people want to give up almost all child-rearing responsibilities in order to be a single breadwinner. So this is a piece of advice that’s useful to only the small percentage of households in the world. But still, the advice is good.

Many people will say they’d rather face the challenges of a dual-career marriage than the challenge of a stay-at-home-spousedom. Fine. Just know the statistics are not in your favor."

From the article "Get pregnant at 25 if you want a high-powered career":

"...She says, in the article, that she is taking much better care of them when she is not away from them.This shouldn’t be groundbreaking to say. But after twenty years of deafening feminist diatribe it is actually controversial to say that a mom is a better mom if she is home with her kids."

"It’s ridiculous that it’s controversial to say that most women want to parent differently than most men. It’s ridiculous because there is scientific basis for this and a social basis for this and the women who argue against it are always women who do not have school-aged kids and a high powered job."

"Men who have kids are in a great position to climb the ladder. They have wives at home. Women cannot go full speed ahead until the kids are grown up. Slaughter has great evidence for this. But you should be able just to look around and see that this truth. My favorite example: All the male Supreme Court Justices have families. Two of the three women do not. And the one who does, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did not start her career until her kids were grown."

From the article "Get married first, then focus on career":

"At any point when a woman has kids, statistically she will start to earn less money even if she takes no maternity leave whatsoever. There is no evidence to show that it’s easier to take time out of the workforce at a certain point in a career. People just plain don’t know."

"The good news here is that a large body of research shows that you will gain more happiness by being married than by having a good job. Yes, you should not have to choose between a good job and marriage. But this column is not about what is fair or what is just. It is about what is real."

From the article "How to plan a career in our 20s to stay at home with your kids in your 30s":

"Forbes just published a survey that shows that 84% of working women want to stay home with kids . The new job that everyone wants is stay-at-home mom. This makes sense to me. It’s clear that women don’t want to bust through the glass ceiling, or they’d have done it by now. And it’s clear that men are not pulled by kids in nearly the same way women are, because women’s careers tank when they have kids and mens’ careers don’t."

"Women are performing at a higher level at work than men are right now. So, statistically speaking, when you decide to stay home with kids, the people you were better than will start moving ahead of you. It will kill you. Prepare for this. It works best to think of your career as a time in your life. You were a high performer when you did it, but now it’s over. It’s like being the head cheerleader. You were great when you did it, but high school is over and you’re onto the next challenge."

I love that smile...

As NieNie is always talking about, I too like to build up family traditions that bring us together and make us happy. NieNie does things like watch Disney's Legend of Sleepy Hollow and eat pumpkin soup every October 1st with her husband and kids. Or make special birthday pancakes and party hats every time it's someone's birthday.

We are a very "young" family, but I'm always trying to build up traditions of our own. I haven't been successful with family night yet (there will be future attempts!), but my husband and I look forward to our Saturday date night all week. Lately we've just been renting movies at home, but it's still fun.

Making pancakes Sunday morning has also become routine. Not only do we all love eating them, and it's something warm and comforting, but that also means we don't have to buy bread at the bakery on Sundays (and give other people work when it should be their day of rest, too). Last Sunday we started our Sunday "hikes" up again. Even if it's just half an hour, seeing all the green trees and hearing the birds chirp is really, really good for the soul. Having these little moments of pleasure and fun, especially together, helps to endure the harder things we're called to do, and not feel drowned out by all the human misery we are called to shoulder.

That's why we seek love

This is Pioneer Woman's peanut butter cake. It's delicious. I've made it before, but this time it turned out better because I halved the recipe. I just realized that all my cake recipes need to be halved if I want to make them in round cake pans. That way, they don't take as long to bake (just the suggested time on the recipe) and the frosting/cake ratio is better. If making the full amounts in the recipe, then it needs to be in a rectangular cake pan, like Pioneer Woman always suggests.

I made this cake because we finally invited our parish priest over for lunch. I've been meaning to do so ever since we moved here. He is really young and pretty new at this parish priest business, but he does such a good job. Having him over made us realize how hard a parish priest's life is, at least in Portugal. If single people and families have a hard time socializing and building community because of the way society is set up nowadays, diocesan priests even more. Parishioners are very elderly, people don't look for community in their parishes and with their priest, and most people that are practicing Catholics find their community in movements. So running a parish can be lonely and hard. But it's amazing to see people like our priest, who do their daily work very, very well and with little or no recognition.

The Sunday, Sunday, Sunday podcast we listen to every week was especially touching yesterday:

"Why do we love? Because we come from love. Because God, who is love, loves us and that's why we have the desire to love, that's why we search for love, that's why we seek love, that's why if you're not in love you want to be in love. And if you were once in love and you had someone break your heart and you're out of love, now you're a country music artist and that's just how it works."

Selfies and having babies

Even though I tell her not to play with my camera, I almost always have some selfies by Addie on my camera. Sometimes I'm in another room and I hear her say "miii" (smile) or "sohiii" (sorri) and I evaluate if I need the time to finish something I'm doing (she could take selfies for hours...) or if I should just go and take it away.

I feel like I'm living at the high point of my life right now. It's kind of a lot of pressure. Everyone says they miss when their kids were babies, even though it was hard work. Looking back, I realize how much I dreamt about and acted out having babies when I was little. And even in my early twenties, how much I was fascinated by young families and especially young mothers. Maybe life will get better as it progresses, as Jesus promises with the new wine in the Cana wedding, but so far this is my favorite phase.

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

― Emily Dickinson

Nesting, first installment

We have a month and a half to go before baby two is due and the nesting craziness has begun. This is an idea I got from Pinterest... of course... to get the diapers of the bed/floor and out of the plastic bag they come in. It was really easy: I glued a pretty fabric on a sturdy shoe box and made a hole on the back, in the middle and near the top. Then I hung it on the wall with an adhesive plastic hook.

I am happy with the (soon-to-be-two) kids' room, but there are still several more things I want to make and do. I am also super happy about the Ikea bookshelf we added a couple of months ago, which has lots of room for their growing book collection, a book basket which will hopefully rotate liturgical books in the future, and a frame with several pictures of Addie and people she knows. I like keeping toys in the living room and out of bedrooms, as Auntie Leila suggests in The Little Oratory.