Dear dinnertime cooking: I want to love you again

I’m sharing this post as part of a program with The Mission List. I received a ChopChop cookbook + magazine subscription for culinary inspiration; all opinions are my own.

I believe in family dinners. And I believe in big meals full of healthy foods oozing with flavor. And I really believe in filling little bellies while talking about the day, saying grace, laughing, asking questions and even interviewing each other. Around the table, after the day, in between the rush of the schedules and the hush of a loud-breathing kid, is where the good stuff happens.

But this is also the exact time I've struggled with many evenings for the past six years. I want to put all of these things I believe in into practice most nights. But time and exhaustion and picky eating and single parenting have turned off my love of cooking like a timer. 

My good intentions, all laid out in grocery lists and meal plans and food waiting patiently in the fridge, just get ticking and then DING! - we get home late from Tae Kwon Do or a big project distracted me from turning the crock pot on six hours ago or...or...or. And I hurry to throw together something or grab a salad from the deli or wish I could enjoy pouring more love than guilt into the evening meal. We eat healthy every day, but often in a more rushed, un-fun way than I'd like. 

For the same reasons, adding in homework and phone calls to his dad and stinky-tween baths, I have also faltered at getting my son in the kitchen with me. I believe in kids learning to cook and I love the idea of the two of us making meals together. But other than a batch of brownies or PB&J here and there, I haven't created opportunities to slow down and stir my son into the fold.

It's time for both things to change. I want to love to make dinner again, and I want my son to be more of a part of that, too. 

That's why I got a little giddy when ChopChop Cookbook and the accompanying magazine arrived. ChopChop has a mission that will even get me back at the cutting board -- to inspire and teach kids to cook and eat real food with their families. It's a simple way to reverse the sad trend of childhood obesity and childhood diabetes. No scare tactics, just simple, healthy, affordable recipes to make together. OH! And the photos. ChopChop publications are full of happy kids that look like the children in our home kitchens. I love that part almost as much as the recipes.

I've given ChopChop to E to flip through and he's tagged the pages with meals he's interested in eating. OK, so most of them are desserts and fizzy kid-friendly drinks. But we will start there. 

I think the Not Boyfriend, alas a chef who is wonderfully patient with my lack of cooking mojo, will probably approve that ChopChop was awarded the 2013 Publication of the Year honor by the prestigious James Beard Foundation. That's some serious cred in the chef world. 

And to kick off our new committment to cook well together, we will be joining ChopChop in The Big Picnic tonight, September 22nd! Along with partners like the White House (no biggie), the Big Picnic will be a virtual community event for families to cook and eat together, then share pics of their meals with the hashtag #bigpicnic. All of this is to help prevent childhood obesity, one dinner (or picnic) at a time. 

Want to join in the conversation? Please take part with E and me and you might just win your own ChopChop cookbook or magazine subscription! 

And while you're at it, do share your tips for turning around the dinnertime blahs. I'd love your advice!

What if you really can't sleep with the person you're sleeping with?

I used to think that a night snuggled in the same bed as my kicking, squirming, teeth-gnashing, sweaty,diagonally stretched-out son was an exercise in finding calm in an ocean of comforters and chaos. And then I met the Not Boyfriend.

There are a thousand things I love about this man. How he sleeps is not one of them. He’s not the worst sleeper I’ve co-bedded with — he doesn’t snore (often enough to require nasal strips, weight loss, or a CPAP) and he’s never asked me to squish into a sliver of a single-sized futon with him (ahem, Ex-Husband). He doesn’t breathe on me (much). He doesn’t have night terrors, flail his arms, or call out other women’s names in the night (ever).

He does a lot right when it comes to bedtime, sweetly encouraging me to tuck in earlier and lending me soft, oversized t-shirts to sleep in. He whispers me to sleep in when he gets up and never minds if I linger when he has to race off to the gym or work at dawn.

And it’s not that his kind of slumber requires a pillow tucked between his knees that takes up more square-inchage than his size of the bed allows. Or that he likes the ceiling fan to whir all night long (shudder: see “breathing on me” above) and thinks a bed sheet is just one more hot, unnecessary layer. It’s not the birds outside his window or the construction workers that illegally pound away next door in the early hours or the kid upstairs with the bouncy ball. It’s not his pastry-chef hours or his push to hit CrossFit even before he has to start baking at work.

It’s the bed. And how many times he gets out of it at night. 

My love loves a nice, firm bed. A nice, firm, block of concrete kind of bed. He loves it so much, he invested a big old chunk of change in a fancy mattress that feels like the floor. Without a rug.

My chief co-sleeping complaint is also his. He hates my pillow-top mattress so much that he tosses and turns and cusses and sighs every time he sleeps (or attempts to sleep) in it. I wake up in his bed with throbbing shoulders and aching hips. He wakes up in mine with a furrowed brow of frustration and exhaustion.

And when we’re not snoozing in each other’s beds, we’re in and out of them like two full-term pregnant ladies (neither of us is a pregnant lady). At home alone, I will force myself back to sleep if I wake up to nature’s call. But the Not Boyfriend, who has complex explanations courtesy Ayurvedic practitioners about the whys and hows of the liver detoxing by the body’s clock at 4 a.m., wakes up several times a night, which wakes me up, which makes me sympathy pee whether or not I have to or want to.

To be fair, he’s not thrilled by my sleep walking, he’s confused by my sleep talking and he wakes up when I  am “purring,” what he sweetly refers to it when I’m deeply asleep on my back.

With all that tossing and turning, aches and pains, peeing and cussing, we’ve still somehow made it through many nights together, still happy to see the person on the other side of the uncomfortable bed in the morning. When we were long-distance, it didn’t matter so much (not lots of sleeping on those 48-hour whirlwinds). And even though we’ve been living in the same city for almost a year, our sleepovers are still usually only two (three, max) nights a week.  We’ve put up with the bad bed situation — maybe out of love and necessity, but definitely because we’ve both assumed it’d be temporary.

But what if it’s not temporary? What if the Not Boyfriend are always struggling to get a good night’s sleep together?

I’ve wondered this in the last month or so, since we’ve made a concerted effort to spend more nights in each other’s beds as we prepare to live together full-time. He’s gone out of his way, reprioritized his own tasks and to-dos, driving to my house every night for days. While it’s been nice to not pack an overnight bag, to wake up to my own routine and coffee maker and closet, to keep my son on his schedule, the sleeping has not gotten any easier.

Last night, I asked him for a break. I needed a night of solo sleep to recuperate from all efforts to be closer. I was desperate for one sleep sesh uninterrupted by a knee-pillow or ceiling fan or heavy sighs or potty breaks. I wanted time in the center of my own soft mattress, piled high with three comforters in the late-summer heat, with the banging around of my own irritating neighbors and ignoring my own pleading bladder.

I needed a break from worrying about how I can adore someone so much and still (jokingly?) wish that the Lucy-Desi method of separate beds was still in romantic fashion. I needed eight (OK, seven….possibly, six) hours to let go of what it means that I want the man in my bed to learn to love the (soft) bed as much as he loves me.

We laugh that, in a home of our own, we’ll fashion a bed frame big enough to fit both of our awful mattresses, never daring to cross the line once we say our goodnights. Or that we will scrimp and save for a Sleep Number or some-such that allows us to have control of what lays beneath us as much as who.

For now, we’re stuck like Goldilocks midway through the story. Too soft, too firm, too hot, too cold, waiting (with bags under our eyes) for the just-right.

What’s your advice? Did you ever resolve your issues sleeping with the person you’re sleeping with?

This post originally appeared on Babble.com here. 

Moving on, moving in: House vs. neighborhood

When the Not Boyfriend and I decided that it is (almost) time to take our relationship further and that we’d like to move in together (eventually), the first thing we did is list out all the things we’d hope to find in a home for the three of us — the minimalist bachelor guy, the clutter magnet-shoe hoarder lady and my son, collector of buckets and buckets and bins of small plastic thingies. Because we want to stay together once we share an address, we decided space was most important. I added a yard, he hoped for a dining room big enough to hold a large table and many friends on Sunday nights.

Then I did something really radical when it comes to hunting for somewhat-reasonable, pretty spacious, earth-accessible real estate: I decided it needed to be close to my son’s school. Preferably, walkable.

That shrunk our hunt for a new home down to about six to eight city blocks. That inflated our monthly rent or mortgage budget by a thousand dollars. That has made our real estate agents nuts and Craigslist our nemesis. 

We’ve considered buying, but are now opting to rent, and in the process, have seen dozens and dozens of apartments, condos, duplex-down units, houses, places with “vintage charm” and those with high-end, super-new finishes. We’ve walked through homes that have not been worked on since the mid-60s and had to put our imaginations to work in units that were stripped down to the studs (but ready to rent tomorrow!). We’ve considered smaller places that would require us to rent a storage unit and larger places with full basements for stress-free storage. We’ve seen a house with a library, a penthouse with a private roof deck, and a middle-floor unit with an elevator that opened right into the living room, like something out of Silver Spoons.

We’ve also high-tailed it out of a home where doors were mysteriously locked and which housed a huge bucket of wild-bird seed blocked the front door. There have been places that were mehhh, a few that have been ohhh, and one that smelled a lot like R. Kelly’s sheets might smell like.

During this exhaustive search, we keep ending up standing in the middle of the perfect (PERFECT!) place for the three of us that stands in the center of a neighborhood that’s too far or too iffy, or holding applications for homes that are OK (just OK) exactly on the block where we want to be.

Forget the rent-or-buy back-and-forth. More than the yard or the office or the storage or the budget, we’ve debated: House vs. Neighborhood.

Here, the crowd-sourced responses to the age-old real-estate debate on where to move. Where do you stand on the right place vs. the right place?