I believe (?) I can fly...

Passover is over. With it comes some sort of sadness, but this time it's not for the holidays that are over.

It's probably no secret to anyone who knows me or who reads this blog that my housekeeping is lacking and my standards are kind of low. Not terribly low - while working full time, we almost never eat take out, husband and children have clean clothes, dirty dishes are not piled up to the ceiling and the house is habitable- but not very high. Some chores get postponed for months if not years. I never feel this more acutely as before Passover. As most of my friends are busy spring cleaning, I settle for some mild form of decluttering and basically Pesach cleaning my living room, dining area and kitchen. I don't believe that Passover should necessarily equate to spring cleaning and have very good reasons for not doing it during that time. After all, I am an accountant by profession and the months of February through April happen to be pretty busy for us. However, with Pesach there are some deadlines that one must meet. When spring cleaning is done on one's own schedule, well, it kind of never gets done. At least in one shot.

So what's up with sadness? This Passover I made a commitment to 1) rejoin Flylady AGAIN and try to stick with it, 2) to keep my dining room table, kitchen counters and sinks clean at all times. Sounds like not that much, right? Only that I found myself washing dishes and wiping counters almost nonstop all the time. I mean it - except for the times when we ate/slept/went for a walk, ALL THE TIME. And that's only part of the kitchen and dining area! Towards the end of the last day, I gave up and left some silverware and cups unwashed. But I have done it all the other seven and a half days, and have housewife's eczema to prove it! The most annoying part? This kind of forced me to neglect kids' room a bit and when I walked in today, I found a mountain of clothes piled up on the rocking chair. How??? And in only two days???

That's when the sad realization hit me. Basically, if I want my house neat at all times (not just when kids are in bed and no one actaully appreciates semi-neatness), I will never be able to really rest or do anything other than clean. There will always be something else to do. And, while the house will most likely be much neater than now, working this hard is not a guarantee that it will be really neat. This doesn't sit well with me. At all.

So I am sad. And depressed. And finishing horrible Passover chocolate (it's Swiss, but the lowering of pure cocoa % actually makes it taste very cheap, though cheap it isn't) because tomorrow I am also starting Weight Watchers. And thinking that maybe my old self that didn't notice and/or wasn't bothered by disarray was better than the new/older me, at least for blogging and socializing purposes.

Ahh, I already miss holidays.

My annual Passover rant

Last Sunday I went grocery shopping and picked up a brief guide to Passover products in the supermarket. I quickly leafed through it when one section caught my eye: baby food. This year, to my great disappointment, the only certified kosher for Passover baby food is some foreign made fruit mush with added sugar. This is the first time I have seen refined sugar added to baby food. So naturally I wanted to see what the guide would say about baby food, which was not certified and whether some of it would be acceptable to use during Passover.

It might have been the fumes from Windex during Passover cleaning or exhaustion or my natural working mother defensiveness, but one sentence, actually one word in that section, ticked me off real bad. I quote,

"Ideally, it is best to (gasp!) prepare baby food at home using a blender or food processor."

Guess which word (gasp!) @#$%ed me off?!

Gasp? Gasp?!!! Excuse me? I was not reading an article or a blog entry or an essay on the topic. For goodness sake, I was consulting some very simple product guide. How dare they gasp at me and all the other mothers who are looking to buy baby food? What the hell? I understand and respect their recommendation, but what's up with the attitude? I was looking for mashed bananas and butternut squash, not crack cocaine!

Here's the newsflash for those MEN who have compiled the guide: I am reading your guide to (gasp!) only find out which products I can and cannot use during Passover, not to subject myself to the your judgment of my mothering/cooking skills and definitely not to the pitiful attempts at sarcasm from individuals who not only (gasp!) never made baby food themselves, but probably wouldn't even know how to plug in a food processor let alone use one, (but whose mothers - no doubt - busy as they were with Passover preparations still found time to make their own baby food, so why can't the modern women?) Gasp...

Here's another newsflash: if I (and all other women you are gasping at) made my own baby food - as I often do - all the time, as well as other products that I am perfectly capable of making myself instead of buying ready made, your kashrut certification revenue would greatly suffer. So would your employment and ability to come out with sarcasm- laden guides.

So here's a suggestion: when you prepare next year's guide, you will think about the last time YOU (not your wives) made baby food, how much you contribute to Passover preparations (vs your mothers and wives), how much you need your organization to generate revenue and raise contributions, and then make your buying recommendations for kosher consumers respectfully and (gasp!) keep your gasps to yourself? And if your compulsion to gasp overtakes you and becomes unbearable, you will express it in the blog post or - even better - in a private journal, away from exhausted female eyes?

Just a suggestion.

Then again, Windex fumes are thinning out, so I might look at this very differently a week from now...

Every breath you take

Wowie wow wow! It has been almost three weeks since my last post! Wow! Time flies!

Well, this one will be short.


My obsession with home early pregnancy tests (EPT) had reared its ugly head once again, which prompted SubHub to utter one of his funniest lines ever. (Actually there were two lines, but I don't remember the first one exactly because the second one was soooo good.) He looked over my new super-multi-mega-pack-SubWife special edition EPT purchase and uttered, "Every time you pee, it costs us five dollars."

Little did he know that it's $5 on sale and including super-multi-mega pack discount...

(The first line - I think - went something like, "You know, you don't need a pregnancy test to pee, you can go straight into the toilet?"

So I declare this line to be the quote of the month! (or with the say my posting goes, it might end up the quote of the decade.)

I would like a side of air with that

I met a friend whom I haven't seen in a while this past Purim. Amid the sugarfest that Purim inevitably becomes, we somehow got on a conversation about the evils of sugar and processed carbs. Her point was, if I understood correctly, that many health-related evils are directly or indirectly related to sugar consumption. In order to be healthy one must completely eliminate all refined sugar and simple carbs.

I am not a big defender of sugar or white bread. I definitely could stand to lose quite a few pounds and eliminating sugar would help. However, I am just not buying the theory that all the evil is rooted in sugar. (I will also admit that few things in life are as satisfying as a freshly baked still warm white bread with a cold glass of milk. So yeah, I am biased.)

On the other hand, there are many other theories that blame other foods for all the ailments humanity suffers. There are those who say that dairy is evil; others say that it's actually meat; then there are those who claim that the only healthy lifestyle is avoiding all animal-derived foods. It doesn't stop there. One of my colleagues, citing numerous studies, said that fruit is to be avoided because it is high in sugar and whole grain Cheerios is bad for you. It doesn't end here because there are evils lurking in the form of salt, caffeine, alcohol, hydrogenated oils, not to mention preservatives, pesticides, coloring agents and other man-made chemicals.

Where does that leave me, if I were to follow every advice? Initially I wanted to say "with spinach", but there's E. Coli, then I wanted to say "cucumbers", but someone told me that the seeds in those could be bad for some people. Then I thought of beans, but men - how much beans can one consume before becoming a menace to society? (The answer: not much.) So that leaves me with an empty plate and stomach. Which would make advocates of the very low calorie lifestyle very happy. But not me...


Full disclosure: the post was written while drinking fully NON-decaffeinated Irish Breakfast tea and home made raisin cookies most definitely baked with sugar.