Reid Me

This is a topic very close to my heart.  Race is such a touchy subject.  I know race is a social construct and I know that it was all a sham.  I believe such a thing as white privilege exists and I believe that we are all "created" equally - however you believe we were created. Recently, there was an article published in Psychology Today online called, "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive?" For one, that question in and of itself is racially inclined.  I stumbled upon a blog post from Sam Sommers, PhD in response to the article.  You can read it here. The article has since been removed from Psychology Today's site and Change.org has already created a petition to get PT to respond to the outrage from posting the article.  Now, I agree it may not have been in the best interest of the people at PT to allow such an article to be posted, but without having read the article, I can't really speak to it's content.  The whole idea of Race in Americ

So, I've never been the kind of person that thinks about what to have for dinner AHEAD of time.  My husband used to ask me all the time, "What should we have for dinner tonight?"  I'd think to myself, 'We just had breakfast!'...but this is the way my husband was raised: dinners were pretty regular for him growing up.   For me, not so much.   I went out to eat a lot with my family, particularly after my mom went back to school for her Master's degree when I was seven .  Life was about convenience and what was easy.  I remember a lot of Arby's and Piccolos, this Italian/Mexican restaurant down the street.  My dad wasn't much of a cook, so we ate a lot of rice and beans, microwave meals (once we finally bought a microwave from a yard sale down the street) and lentil pilaf. courtesy of dummies.com I can't even recall a time when I cooked a full meal when I lived on my own after high school, while I was going to the state college in Denver. 

Ah, the pictures in the cookbooks can be so deceiving and they really truly are either "staged" or photo shopped...I swear.  My cooking never turns out like the pictures.  Most of my dishes come out looking like limp versions of the photos.  However, I am getting better at the whole presentation thing. Here is the photo from the cookbook:     Here is my finished product:   So, lighting aside, and minus the fancy-schmancy plates, they look pretty similar.  Tasted pretty darn good too.  I am no gourmand and I don't have any technique but I can say that I'm trying to make more tasty meals that my kids will eat.  I am not Martha Stewart or even Rachel Ray...just a mom with a mission - to make sure my kids grow up healthy, eating right and getting the best variety of foods possible.  We are capable of making our children well-rounded eaters and lovers of all kinds of food.  "Food explorers" is what my mom always called us.  We tried everything.  I'm prou

I must admit, I've always loved food.  Eating food is and has been one of my favorite pastimes.  Now, cooking the food, not so much.  Which is why the running joke is "That's why I married a chef!"  I have always been a better baker than a cook.  I make a mean spaghetti and meatballs and I've gotten quite good at making quiche; but still, my abilities as a honest-to-goodness cook are lacking. No wheat, oats, barley, gluten or rye! To make matters more interesting, I am gluten-intolerant.  I was born this way, as was my brother.  It wasn't until after my brother was born and had a more severe reaction that my mother realized I had the same intolerance.  For quite some time in my adolescence I was able to tolerate some gluten and didn't follow a gluten-free diet at all.  Needless to say, I probably should have.  After my son was born I had the hardest time with my gut.  I had to call in sick to work because I was in so much pain.  My brother suggested

I think I always wanted to be a mother, even before I knew what it meant (or took, for that matter) to be a mom.  When my parents used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, "A mommy!"  I thought being a mom was the coolest thing in the world.  My mom used to tease me and say that she learned things in "Mom School."  I believed this so wholeheartedly that I even told friends I was going to Mom School for college.  I was in elementary school, so who could blame me for believing that there truly was a Mom School. The moment a child is born, the mother is also born.  She never existed before.  The woman existed, but the mother, never.  A mother is something absolutely new.  ~Rajneesh I don't think that I ever was really prepared for what motherhood truly encompassed.  You fear more, you worry, you love harder, you think of things you never would have considered before.  It's an amazing thing, being a mom.  We have this great responsibility

So after much mulling over, I've decided to start blogging.  Not because I've deemed myself all important, I just have some important things to say . I'm a wife and a mom , I write grants for a small non-profit in DC that helps low-income families become more self-sufficient.  I am also gluten-intolerant, which makes cooking meals in my house a bit more tricky and interesting.  I pay attention to politics because I believe that you can't complain about the system unless you participate in the system.  I love my children and I want the best in life for them.  I am an active participant in my son's school and plan on keeping it like that until my daughter graduates.  I don't really do PTA, though, there's only so much I can do.  I am a very lucky wife - my husband is a chef and makes the most incredible meals!  I'm working on the whole cooking thing myself...I must say, I'm getting better. I am a sociologist at heart. I have a degree in Sociolo