July 2009

Staycation or Vacation?

by MomGrind

california-beach

The concept of staycation – staying home and relaxing instead of going on an expensive, stressful vacation, makes more sense than ever during a global recession.

We still want to break away from our routine and recharge, but most of us are looking for frugal vacations rather than costly ones.

Staycations are easy and inexpensive. Vacations, on the other hand, tend to be complicated and costly. They often involve a lot of advance planning and many expenses, such as air travel, hotel, and car rental.

When it comes to air travel, it’s not just the expense I object to. I don’t know about you, but I hate to fly. I always hated flying. Being locked up in a small, pressurized cabin with no hopes of getting out until the plane lands has always made me more than a little nervous.

The added security measures and the gradual deterioration in customer service over the past decade are making the entire experience even worse. Of course, flying is also extremely unhealthy.

If it were up to me, I would never fly again.

Obviously, I sometimes have to fly. But when it comes to planning a vacation, in recent years the desire to avoid flights has certainly had an impact on my travel plans. Even if in our case, a staycation is not necessarily about actually staying home, I much prefer going someplace close to home over picking a far away destination that would force me to fly.

Recently, my husband and I spent a lovely long weekend staycationing in Half Moon Bay and in Carmel, California. Both locations are a mere 2-3 hours drive from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Instead of the elaborate vacations of years past (such as our visit to Barcelona and to Mercat de la Boqueria), which involved several flights and hotels, we picked a nearby destination that enabled us to really take it easy.

We spent one night in Half Moon Bay, where we enjoyed a gourmet dinner, followed by a lovely breakfast and a stroll along the beach the next morning. Yes, the Northern California beach is cold – you definitely need a jacket there, even in July:

half-moon-bay

 

But it’s also pristine and magnificent:

north-california-beach

 

After breakfast, we drove along the beautiful, picturesque California Highway 1 to the Carmel area. On our way, we stopped at Ano Nuevo State Park. Hiking in the fresh air was pleasant, and watching the local elephant seals pick a fight with each other was hilarious:

elephant-seals

 

Taking in the views from the gorgeous highway was one of this road trip’s main attractions. We saw several historic bridges that were built during the Great Depression. The magnificent Bixby Bridge was one of them:

bixby-bridge

We did indulge in fine dining – this is important to us. But we completely avoided shopping, which we hate (you just add more clutter to your house when you buy stuff. I hate clutter.)

By the end of the weekend, we were happy, relaxed, and ready to face the new week.

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Air travel is usually pricey and stressful. A staycation is the perfect solution for me.

Happily Ever After

by MomGrind

bride“And they lived happily ever after.”

Oh, PLEASE.

We all know better than that.

50% of American marriages end in divorce. But even the marriages that do survive are not always happy. Marriages, just like life, have stages. They change and develop and present us with many different challenges, year after year.

Marriages CAN be very happy and fulfilling, of course, and they often add a lot of joy and contentment to our lives. But it’s important to realize that when you get married, you don’t enter a constant state of bliss. A lot of work is needed to maintain a good marriage, and there are going to be bumps along the way, even in the happiest of marriages.

I’ve been married for 16 years now. I’ve been a mother for the past nine years. I’ve been blessed with a good, stable marriage. I love my husband. Ours is the kind of love that keeps growing and deepening over the years. But by now I know better than to think that a good marriage “just happens,” or that being a wife and a mother is “easy.”

Nava Atlas knows it too. Happily married and the mother of two kids, she too has been blessed with a good relationship, yet she’s smart enough to realize she can’t take any of it for granted. Nava is also bold enough to admit out loud that marriage is sometimes challenging, and motherhood is often exhausting.

modern-wife3In her book, Secret Recipes for the Modern Wife, Nava takes a funny, realistic look at marriage and its different stages. Her “recipes” are not real recipes – they are a clever, witty way to describe marriage and motherhood. I can’t think of any woman who will not identify with this book. It perfectly describes what each and every one of us is going through.

I was 22 when I got married. Reading through the book’s first few recipes, which call for ingredients such as “sugarcoated wedding fantasies,” “6 cups of novelty” and a “small dollop of reality,” I smiled. This is exactly how marriage starts for most of us.

One of my favorite “recipes” is the “What a Turkey Noodle Soup” recipe, that captures what happens to many women, who are perfectly fine with eating yogurt for dinner, yet find themselves in charge of cooking elaborate dinners once they are married. Can you say “resentment?”

Another favorite: “Gender Role Casserole,” that illustrates the transition of most of us – regardless of how career-oriented or ambitious we are – into the role of motherhood. Our careers almost always get pushed to the back burner while we focus on motherhood, at least for a few years.

Other young-mother-recipes address the common issues of motherly guilt, and of putting everyone’s needs before ours.

Fast forward a few years. Many of us find ourselves exhausted, completely overwhelmed, and often full of resentment. Recipes such as “Completely Fried Wife with Toast of Total Exhaustion” and “Bland, Boring Bean Pots” illustrate these issues beautifully.

I pretty much skipped the third part of the book, “Recipes for Disaster,” which address betrayal, divorce and rebuilding your life. Yes, I refuse to acknowledge this could ever happen to me. But of course, it could.

The book’s final recipe, “Happily Ever After Ambrosia,” sounds a lot like my mom, who has been happily married for forty years now. The recipe calls for “The stuff that makes marriage most delectable” and suggests ingredients such as “Affection and mutual respect,” “Security and support,” “Children who turn out well,” and “Lasting love and happiness.”

Clearly, Nava Atlas is a cautious optimist rather than a bitter pessimist. She believes that marriage CAN lead to happiness. She just refuses to sugarcoat the reality of the many challenges we must face along the way.

I loved reading Secret Recipes for the Modern Wife. I highly recommend it. It is not just fun reading for every married woman – it is also a great gift to give to a friend, to your mom, or to a colleague. It is absolutely the perfect bridal shower gift.

Do you believe in marriage?

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This article, “Happily Ever After,” is a paid review of the book “Secret Recipes for the Modern wife” by Nava Atlas. In the photo: Happy on my wedding day, 16 years ago.

Low Rise Jeans: Hate Them? Love Them?

by MomGrind

Low rise jeans have been all the rage during the past few years. Thankfully, the trend seems to be cooling off.

While a moderate low rise is fine, the fashion trend of wearing tight, extremely low-slung jeans, has been subjecting innocent citizens to the following unfortunate looks for too many years now:

1. Visible Butt Cracks

butt-crackPhoto credit: tandabat42

butt-crackPhoto credit: Malingering

2. Thong Underwear Peeking

whale-tailPhoto credit: Malingering

3. Giant male underwear peeking

low-rise-jeansPhoto credit: lobstar

4. Muffin Tops

muffin-topPhoto credit: Malingering

5. Hairy Bellies, EWWW

hairy-bellyPhoto credit: Malingering

I do own several pairs of moderately low rise jeans. I wear them with a belt, so as not to subject others to things they really shouldn’t be subjected to:

vered-deleeuw

Recently, however, I bought a pair of higher-rise jeans, and I must say low-rise jeans do have one big advantage over higher-rise jeans: they don’t put pressure on your tummy after you’ve eaten!

I went to the movies with my higher-rise jeans, and after eating a bag of popcorn (the bag marked as “Small” but that’s small in American standards, which is really quite large), I felt really uncomfortable! I’ve been wearing lower-rise jeans for so long that I forgot how it feels to wear pants that actually cover most of your tummy.

So there. Low rise jeans are not all bad.

Still, I’m grateful that the extremely low-cut version seems to be a thing of the past now. We can all sigh a collective sigh of relief. On to the next stupid fashion trend.

Retouching As An Act Of Kindness

by MomGrind

Retouching has come under serious scrutiny lately. Advances in digital photography have made it so easy to manipulate photographs that cover models and celebrities appearing in magazines don’t even look like themselves anymore. In many cases, they don’t even look human.

retouching-1Photo credit: dl Q Retouch

Critics are saying that even if most of us are aware that the photos are manipulated, we don’t realize how extreme the manipulation is, and so the “perfect” ideal that those photos create is damaging to women and creates body image issues, because it sets impossible beauty standards.

Whether the backlash against extreme retouching in magazines is justified or not, my real-life friend Jan Miller argues in this post that gentle photo retouching of our loved ones can actually be an act of kindness.

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I rarely retouch individuals in photographs, but I do have a few exceptions.

One major exception is mothers! I have retouched images of my mother and of my mother-in-law without telling them about it.

Recently, I retouched this picture of my mother-in-law and her husband:

original-photo1
Original Photo

retouched-photo1
Retouched Photo

This photo was taken after a short walk on a hot day. I had not planned on retouching the photo before I sent it to my mother-in-law, but I could not stop myself.

What would it hurt to fix her hair, straighten her necklace, fix her makeup, lose a few wrinkles and pounds—she was thinner a few months earlier!

Also, why not have her husband sit up a little straighter? He would have, if he had not just walked five blocks.

Oh dear, before I knew it, I had made quite a few changes. What can I say? My policy on mother photographs is “Don’t ask, don’t tell!”

This was the last picture that we took of my mother in law and her husband, who died shortly after the picture was taken. There was no chance of getting a more “flattering photo.” Because all the changes were subtle, no one in the family realized that anything was altered. They just looked a little more “rested!”

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What do you think? Is retouching OK under these circumstances? Would you have done the same? And, if subtle retouching of family photos is OK, is it OK to retouch fashion and celebrity photos too, as long as the retouching is not extreme?