With Thanksgiving less than a week away, have you made your menu plans yet?

I love cooking and I’m brilliant at it! So of course I have… 

Umm… Correction. I love to eat. I’m a competent cook, but mostly, I’m a kitchen hack. So when Whole Foods offered a sample pre-cooked turkey dinner and all of the sides for a pre-Thanksgiving trial run, I was eager for the opportunity!

The Menu

We were sent an organic pre-cooked Diestel turkey- prepped, seasoned, and ready to pop in the oven. It took a little over an hour and half on 350 degrees to continue roasting the bird. It was a vast improvement over the four hours it took to roast my very first Thanksgiving turkey while living in London, but that a whole OTHER story…

The sides included: a surprisingly delicious field roast stuffed en croûte (a vegan option!), stuffed acorn squash, a spicy posole soup,  a savory mix of glazed sweet potatoes and figs, and a creamy, delicious broccoli cheddar potato gratin. 

With the exception of the  field roast stuffed en croûte, the side dishes arrived in oven-ready trays and took an additional 20 minutes from fridge to table. So simple!!!

The field roast stuffed en croûte took 45 minutes to bake at a higher temp and was, by far, my children’s favorite dish.

Rich grain meat seasoned with toasted hazelnuts and rosemary stuffed with sausage-style mixture of field roast cranberries, apples, and crystallized ginger wrapped in an en croûte vegan puff pastry.

With Whole Food’s Holiday Menu, I was able to get an impressive Thanksgiving dinner to my table…  on a busy school night… in just under two hours.

My secret to “homemade” pie

I have a well-established history of burning pies. Just ask my friend, Valerie (@DomesticValerie ) from Suburban Bites who so lovingly made me a flaky, buttery peach pie to bake at home over the summer…

All I had to do was put it in the oven for a set amount of time. Let’s just say, it’s so sad that we’ve never spoken about it again. (Nor, has she made me another pie…) This is my burn-proof method of making a perfect Thanksgiving pie…

A Perfect Pumpkin Pie from Whole Foods

The Finishing Touch

Don’t forget to grab a bottle of wine and holiday flowers to complete your holiday table!

Pacific Rim Riesling 

Good moms cook from scratch, but smart moms outsource.

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Whole Foods Market has a variety of delicious food and pre-cooked menu options to make entertaining this Holiday Season a breeze! There are plenty of new items from goose, vegan and super healthy to traditional favorites.  If you’re in the Bay Area, check out Whole Food Market’s Regional Twitter Handle, @WFMNorCal and Microsite, Holiday Worth Sharing.

Follow them on Twitter and tag #WholeForTheHolidays for a chance to a win a turkey dinner!  There will be one winner a week.

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Disclosure: Whole Food Market provide my family and I with a lovely Thanksgiving dinner to get a flavor of the new offering from their 2011 Holiday Menu, which we thoroughly enjoyed! I was not otherwise compensated. The thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not reflect those of Whole Foods Market.

When you start thinking of parenting in terms of an overall context and an end goal, as I have recently started to do with Marble Jar, certain behaviors suddenly go from being an aggravation to a teachable moment.

Realizing that things aren’t necessarily about being “bad” as opposed to “good”, we’ve shifted the conversations to the difference between right and wrong. I’m more patient with my kids, knowing that they aren’t trying to be difficult. They are just trying to figure out how the world works and their place in it. And, sometimes, there are bumps along the way…

Here is an example.  My five-year-old son’s tattling has recently morphed into full-fledged, blatant lying.

Now, I am by no means a parenting expert, so I have no idea why little kids lie. I can, however, tell you that lies at this age are nothing like the ones teenagers or adult tell. First of all, little kid lies are usually ridiculous, completely transparent, and pointless. It is easy to blow them off as nothing because it’s take just as long to make sense of them and it is to explain why it’s wrong.

Little kids’ lies aren’t about getting away with something, sparing someone else’s feelings, or being deceitful. Usually, their lies are all about the moment and nothing more.

Their motivations are also completely different as well. They lie because they want to avoid punishment or because they really don’t know the difference between make-believe and real life.  Sometimes, they lie just for the attention… as I suspect is the case with my son.

So one Friday morning a few weeks ago, Mike and I woke up and rushed to get the kids up and to the breakfast table. Once they were settled in front of their bowls of cereal, Mike ran outside to take the trash to the curb and I went to take a quick shower.

I had barely lathered (well on my way to rinse and repeat) when Scout ran frantically into the bathroom. “Mommy, Lou is choking! Lou is choking!”

I scrambled out of the tub, shampoo running into my eyes and water dripping everywhere. I grabbed my towel and barely covered myself as I slipped and slid into the kitchen to find… Lou was completely and totally fine.

She wasn’t even eating… much less choking… on anything.

When my daughter saw me, she wanted to get up from the table and I had to coax her to stay put and finish breakfast. Then, she and I had to go through the whole charade of convincing her to eat. She would refuse. I would find another way to ask…

Several precious minutes later, I was finally able to resume my shower– steamed about the time we had squandered and fuming at my son. We were late to school and work again that day, and all I could sputter and spew at my son was, “Why?! Why would you make up something like that?”

“Opps, I forgot…” he said, which is his version of when someone says, “I’m just joking. Can’t you take a joke?” when you know that they weren’t joking at all.

I let if go for the moment, but it was no surprise when, a few days later, a note came home from his teacher informing us that Scout had told a lie in school about a classmate.

I asked my otherwise truthful and over-sharing son to explain what happened and he dutifully spared no detail. As he did, the words that I was too exasperated and frazzled to form a few mornings before, came to me in a spark. There, presenting itself was a “teachable moment”.

While it may seem harmless  or fun to make up a little story or get everyone riled up, lies affect everyone around you.  I pointed out how his little lie about his sister choking caused unnecessary drama and made the entire family late that morning. Likewise, telling a lie about his classmate made his friend get in trouble, and probably took time away from class or recess.

“How would you feel if someone made up a story about you and you got in trouble for it?” I asked him.  ”Bad and no fair”, he said.

For the first time, I was able to provide him with a clear correlation between his words and actions with a real-life situation. A true cause-and-effect. The bigger lesson, of course, is how interconnected human beings really are to one another. The small lesson is how hurtful and damaging lies can be.

I can assure you that making these connections had a far greater impact on my impressionable son than if I had given him a timeout or simply said “lying is bad” and left it at that.

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Marble Jar is available for the iPhone/iPad for FREE in the App Store.  To learn more about this app, read:

• My introduction post on Marble Jar in which I outline how (and why) to start using this app.
• My interview with founders: parenting expert, Vicki Hoefle from Parenting on Track, and Winwin Apps developer, Anna Rosenblum Palmer.
• Creating a family mission statement with Marble Jar.

Disclosure: This post is the final part of a compensated series sponsored by Marble Jar . The thoughts and opinons expressed in this post are my own, and do not reflect those of Marble Jar or its founders. 

{Image Credit: “Goofus and Gallant”, Highlights for Kids. October, 1980) 

On my children’s bookcase, there is a tatter copy of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon. It arrived as a baby gift for my first born and has been a well-loved bedtime favorite in my house ever since.

Over the years, I’ve seen various iterations of this book, including Goodnight Goon and Good Night San Francisco, but its latest revamp gives this timeless classic a digital spin!

Goodnight iPad: a Parody for the next generation written by David Milgrim under the pseudonym, Ann Droyd. (Nudge, Nudge… get it?) swaps the mittens, kittens, and bowl full of mush for LCDs, Nooks, and WiFi.

In the bright buzzing room, there was an iPad and a kid playing Doom
And a screen saver of a bird flying over the moon.
And there were three little Nooks with 10,000 books…

Intended to be funny and charming, this book is a gentle reminder to tech obsessed savvy families like mine in unplug every once in a while and just enjoy the silence. In fact, it’s good for you!

Goodnight iPad is available in actual book form (hardcover, no less) on Amazon for $10.17, and currently comes bundled with Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach (Hardcover $8.97) and Monsters Eat Whiny Children by Bruce Eric Kaplan (Hardcover $10.87).

Marble Jar is a clever little parenting app inspired by Parenting On Track™, a program that emphasizes the relationship strategies for guiding children towards positive behaviors, rather than quick-fixes and behavioral controls.

The goal is to teach parents practical and collaborative methods that encourage every member of the family to participate in the life of the family, according to their age level and abilities. By having everyone participate, the end result is a stronger, respectful, and fulfilling family life.

How does the Marble Jar App support the Parenting On Track™ Philosophy?

Parenting On Track™ focuses on two things: the relationship between parent and child and the ability to raise independent, self-sufficient, thinking people. So what does this look like on a practical, day-to-day level?

According to  parenting expert, Vicki Hoefle, from Parenting on Track, it’s about…

Focusing on all of the wonderful things happening in the house—the bright spots. The moments when you notice the best in your kids– when they show patience for a sibling who may have knocked over their building for the twentieth time or reading with an elderly relative. These are the things we miss because we as parents are so focused on correcting behavior.

This isn’t a radical philosophy, just one that is not often favored because it requires more time and thought on behalf of parents. However, the outcome is far more successful and lasting than “quick-fixes” or “punishments”.

The Marble Jar app provides a simple and fun way for parents to emphasize otherwise abstract concepts such as good manners, being a gracious winner/loser, or helping others, and turns them into observable steps that the whole family can do.

How does the Marble Jar App differ from other “parenting tricks”?

Since the release of the Marble Jar app earlier this year, many users immediately began adopting it as a way to “reward” good behavior, likening it more to a digital sticker chart, treats, or the like. As soon as the developers noticed that the app was being used in this way, they issued this statement:

Parenting On Track™ DOES NOT support the use of this app to dole out rewards. Parenting on Track™ DOES NOT advocate praising or rewarding as a means of building healthy relationships with children, fostering independence and helping children develop healthy self-esteem. It was never our intention for the application to be used in this manner.

I must admit that I was guilty of doing the same thing, until I had an opportunity to speak to its developers about the true intention of the app. The Winwin Apps developer behind Marble Jar, Anna Rosenblum Palmer, was the one who set me straight:

Unlike other parenting tools, Marble Jar is NOT about rewards. It’s about the natural consequences of practicing certain behavior. For example, if you want to work on being a good guest or good host- public manners. Make the goal of your jars be about hosting or attending a party. If you want to work on environmental skills, go camping as a reward.  The job of the parent and the children is to figure out what it is you are practicing and letting the celebration be related.

It’s also about celebrating the good things that are already happening in your fmaily and taking your emphasis away from the negative—nagging, leading, etc. If certain things are not working, then sit down with you family and ask, “How can we make this work well? What is our routine?”

Marble Jar is about working together to make your family life  WORK. The unexpected bonus is that you get to cheer on and celebrate one another as you move towards your goals. When you have kids who are actively participating in the family, as opposed to kids who are just waiting on cues from Mom and/or Dad, you are fostering independence and helping them to create healthy habits.

What happens when you make this shift in a parent’s head? What impact does it truly have on a family?

Combining over twenty years of parenting education with modern technology, Marble Jar helps families set goals, create small actionable steps, track progress, and most important of all– celebrate success!

According to Vicki Hoefle,

When you make this congnative shift in a parent’s head and they start putting marbles in a jar every single time they see their kids are being remarkable- which, of course, they are a million times every single day, there is a shift from making kids compliant to raising thinking people.

No one will ever be judged in where they put away their shoes or how to they hang up their backpack on a hook. We are, however, driven by our ability to make good choices and be self-sufficient. With that in mind, we should be trying to create life long habits instead of waiting for cues from mom and dad.

Create a marble jar together that works for everyone. The intent is that when you do things repeatedly, you know what the expectations are, and things are consistent, children create healthy habits.

What are the questions parents should ask as they set up their jars?

The five types of jars that Marble Jar suggests you create are as follows:

• Jars that help you notice what’s working.
• Jars that help you build cooperation and teamwork in your family.
• Jars that help your child develop strong, useful habits.
• Jars that help your child manage the daily tasks in his or her life.
• Jars that help kids earn privileges by demonstrating consistent responsibility.

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Marble Jar is available for the iPhone/iPad for FREE in the App Store.  To learn more about this app, read:

• My introduction post on Marble Jar in which I outline how (and why) to start using this app.
• Creating a family mission statement using Marble Jar.

Disclosure: This post is the final part of a compensated series sponsored by Marble Jar . The thoughts and opinons expressed in this post are my own, and do not reflect those of Marble Jar or its founders. 

Behold, the Duffy family holiday card of 2011 has arrived!

Front:

Back:

It took not one… but two photo sessions to capture the right images in this card. The first one was the wrong time of day. The kids were cranky and the lighting was wrong. We were all sweaty and stressed… and it showed. So we recreated the “moment” a week later, except earlier in the day. Clothing, hairstyles, and make-up were nearly the same. (Spot the difference and you get a prize… and by prize, I mean a hardy “Good job!”)

It took another week to get the images from the photographer, and a few more days to pick the right card and wording. Finding gorgeous holiday cards was simple. It was picking just ONE that was the hard part. Regardless, the entire process took a lot time and energy that, quite frankly, I have very little to spare these days.

So, why do I even bother?

I would like to think that our friends and family would notice if we didn’t send cards this year– that the Duffy mugs and our holiday greetings of good cheer and love would be greatly missed on their mantle, door frame, or wherever else one displays holiday cards. On the other hand, I would like to think that people would totally understand…

After all, I’m not that great about sending birthday greetings and (shameful admission) were it not for Facebook to remind me, I would probably forget entirely.  I have two little kids! I’m a working mom! We have a busy life! These are things that my dearest already know about me (and they love me anyway).

So, again, why do I bother sending my annual Christmas card?

It’s because I’m not that great with everyday greetings, and this is my one time of the year to tell people that I still think of them– everyday, in some way– even if I don’t have the time to call or email or whatnot.

It’s because I am a busy working mom, and it’s important to reflect and remember for whom and why I am working  so hard.

It’s because I have two terrific kids (and a wonderful husband) and I want my pride in them to show.

It’s because my dearest family and friends DO care to know how we are doing.

It’s because getting a photo done, picking out a card, and finding just the right words is as close to handmade as I will ever get, but the sentiment, care, and love is just as deep.

It’s because I really do love all of you so much… and wish you a Happy Christmas and a New Year filled with boundless joy and rich with  blessings.

Disclosure: I have been contracted to work for Tiny Prints through the holiday season. Regardless of my employment status, I order holiday cards every year and will continue to do so for as long as possible! I have not been compensated for this post, and the thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.