Philly Moms

The Summer I Get the Outdoors BACK

A few years after my husband and I got sober (think, oh, 1997 or so) we discovered something: we loved the outdoors. This was quite a surprise, as you can imagine, since we had both spent most of our youth indoors on bar stools. But when we accidentally got tricked into hiking one day (it was very funny; we were both wearing bad shoes and my husband had on his slick hat -- in the woods), we realized we really enjoyed things like nature and plants and trails and stuff.

Over the next couple of years, we became devoted weekend hikers. We'd drive for hours to do a five or six mile hike, pushing ourselves to be challenged by new heights (literally) and coming home exhausted, bug bitten, and sunburned. It was only natural, then, that camping enter the picture. Why drive home from the hikes when you can stay over? Camping was something I was familiar with, having been a girl scout (with an AWESOME scout leader), but my husband had never spent a night outside of a building in his life by, uh, choice. So we saved up, bought all the gear we thought we needed, and set out for our first trip.

It wasn't long before we were really into it, taking two week long trips. We never ventured beyond old-school car camping (meaning we pull up to the camp site and unload right there, and don't carry our gear in), but we usually spent about 45 nights a year or so under the stars every spring, summer, and fall.

The Things I Hate About Parenting

I worked hard to become a mother. Over four years of infertility treatments, the loss of a twin pregnancy at six months, god awful morning sickness, weight gain, and finally a placental abruption and emergency c-section with my daughter. When I finally -- FINALLY -- held her in my arms, it was with intense joy after a hard journey.

While my daughter was a tiny baby, our life was pretty simple and easy. She was a great baby, sleeping well immediately, happy and content. As she got older and more engaged, she was fairly easily amused by a toy or two. Then... well, then, she got older. She began to accumulate lots of stuff. Toys, DVDs, books, books that made NOISE, toys that made even MORE noise. As she became a toddler, the toys started to have parts. When she turned into a preschooler, those toys had parts that were small enough to miss when you are walking across a room, but are still just the right size to stab you in the arch of the foot as you stumble around attempting to offer comfort after a nightmare.

Because I work from home, my daughter watches perhaps slightly more television than other children (hey, I'm not perfect; I take as a win that we choose mostly PBS shows). So my life has become invaded by television shows that offer songs that worm their way into my head in the worst of ways, so as I toss and turn at night, I find myself singing about talking dogs and small rodents rescuing kittens stuck on driftwood and drifting off to sea OH MY GOD. 

Ten Philly Things I Want To Do

I really love Philadelphia. I moved here in 1986 after growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and then spending five long years in the center of Michigan. I think this city has a major self esteem problem, and I wish I could show everyone that lives here how awesome Philadelphia really is.

There are many cool events and activities in Philly that I want to do, but I long for VIP status enough to do them, well, my way. Here's my list of things I wish I was famous or connected enough to get to do.

1. Watch the 4th of July fireworks from the roof of the Art Museum. Seriously, how cool would that be? I know only a privileged few get to do it. I want it to be me. I also would love to watch the New Year's Eve fireworks from front row at Penn's Landing.

2. March in the Mummer's Parade. I know it's a long walk, and it's cold, and everyone is drunk. But damn it, I LOVE THE MUMMERS.

OutFest 2009: Shaping My Daughter's Thoughts About Gender

Lately my daughter, who is slightly over three (but not quite three and a half), has been making all kinds of blanket, wide-reaching statements about all things gender related. "Boys can't wear pink!" "I can't use that nail file, it's for boys!" Oddly enough, she doesn't limit what girls can do as much as she restricts boys. In other words, both she and boys can play with trucks, but boys aren't allowed to wear dresses.

While I acknowledge that much of this is developmental -- kids this age are inclined to put everything, including gender, into nice neat little boxes -- I still want to talk to her about gender stuff, just as much as I want to challenge her on issues of race, size, age, and pretty much anything. Being the good, uber-liberal parent that I am, I figured the best way to address this sort of gender thing is head on -- so on Sunday, October 11th, my daughter and I headed down to the Gayborhood (a term the area wears proudly, not one I've assigned) for the largest celebration of National Coming Out Day in the country (although this year was a bit smaller thanks to the massive march in Washington, DC on the same day), OutFest Philly.

Health Care Reform: My Experience, Why We Need It

My experience growing up without health insurance as a sickly kid, and my family's struggle to pay our monthly health insurance bill.








This is an original post for Philly Moms Blog. Cecily normally keep her liberal commie pinko rantings to herself of publishes them at her own blog, Uppercase Woman.

The Suburbs: Not For Me After All

In the early fall of 2004, my husband and I had it all. We lived in the adorable neighborhood of Philadelphia called East Falls, we had great friends a couple doors down, and we were expecting twin boys in the early spring. We started some basic preliminary work on a nursery and got ready to raise an urban family. We loved our neighborhood; we were just a short jaunt into Center City (where I worked) and our drive into town was glorious, along the banks of the Schuylkill River on Kelly Drive. We were happy.

Then, tragedy struck. We lost the pregnancy at about six months in late October, and I nearly died as well. Suddenly, I couldn't bear to look at the room that we planned to make the nursery, so we simply closed that door and ignored it. For months. Then in the spring of 2005, one of our neighbors casually mentioned what the houses on our block were selling for -- roughly three times what we'd paid initially for our house, and the bug to sell and move was planted.

Children of the Recession: Katie Couric Conversation

I was lucky enough to be part of a conference call with Katie Couric discussing the series CBS News is doing about how the recession is affecting America's children. I really commend her dedication to highlighting this issue, as it is near and dear to my heart. Having grown up as a desperately impoverished child myself, I find the stories Katie's been telling chilling -- and familiar.

I was doubly surprised (and perhaps went a bit fan girl for a moment) when Katie decided to address my question, which was about health insurance. My family currently pays $12,000 a year to provide the three of us with medical insurance -- and I actually consider us lucky to be paying so little. In Pennsylvania, our health insurance rates are extremely high, particularly if you are self-employed as both my husband and I are. Before we joined our local Chamber of Commerce (the Delaware County Chamber of Commerce, an awesome group of folks, I have to say) we were actually slated to pay far more (my personal rate went up $150 a month -- over 40% -- simply because I had the audacity to turn 40). Our little family spends over a quarter of our income on health insurance.

The Fallen of Philly's Finest: How Do You Explain Our Dead Police To Your Kids?

Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski.
Police Officer Isabel Nazario.
Sergeant Patrick McDonald.
Sergeant Timothy Simpson.
Police Officer John Pawlowski.

These are the names of the Philadelphia Police that have been killed in the line of duty, either by gunfire or by vehicular assault, just since last May.

It seems like these days you cannot turn on the news or pass a newsstand without seeing the faces of the fallen officers and their grieving families splashed across the front page. Along with Philadelphia's increasing murder rate, these facts have combined to create a sense of danger and fear (and grief) for those of us living in the Philadelphia area.

A few days ago, the news was on in the background as I was getting my daughter dressed. She saw a picture of a fallen police officer come on the screen, and asked, "Who's that?" I told her it was a police officer, and then the news showed the family of the officer, including his children, standing outside a church weeping. "Mommy," said my daughter, "Kids crying. Kids sad!"

Snow Day Silliness

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it mostly only snowed on the mountains with just an occasional dusting in the city itself. You can imagine my shell shock when I moved from there to East Lansing, Michigan, where it not only snowed all the time it also rained all the time (East Lansing was constantly under precipitation of some sort or other). But I learned how to drive while in Michigan, and coping with big snow storms -- driving in it, going to school in it, tramping thought it to get to the store that sold cigarettes to kids (oops--hello!) -- became a way of life.

When I moved to Philadelphia in 1986, I was in for quite a change in perspective about snow. I'd been in Philly for only about four or five months when the city got its first dusting of snow that I'd seen; only a small storm, probably three or four inches or so. Imagine my shock when my phone rang at 7am and it was my boss telling me I didn't need to come in that day.

He canceled WORK. For SNOW.

Sandwich Generation

That's what they call us--those of us that have young children we're still caring for at home, and also forced to help care for parents at the same time. It's a tough juggling act, caring for those at both ends of the spectrum, and I'm not sure we're doing it all that well.

My mother-in-law went on a trip to Alaska the summer before my husband and I got married. Somewhere along the line she picked up something more than a souvenir; she came home with a severe case of viral encephalitis. Because she lived alone, and kept herself quite distant from her son, we didn't hear about her being ill until she landed in the emergency room. The ER tried to send her home, claiming it was just a case of senior dementia, but my husband forced the issue and she got a visit from a neurologist that confirmed something more was going wrong.

It took about six months, but she recovered from this initial illness. What we didn't know then is that the encephalitis appears to have triggered Alzheimer's disease, and within three years, my mother-in-law couldn't be trusted to live alone anymore. She was scammed repeatedly by shady telemarketers, handing out her banking information to anyone that asked, losing thousands of dollars. She left the stove on. She wandered out of the house in the middle of the night.