Can you see me standing here?

You probably heard my brood coming before you saw us. You saw my son’s energy and told him you wished you could bottle it up, commented on the blonde curls my daughters share, said they look like their mommy. Maybe you even told them that their mommy has her hands full. You talked to them and only them. 

I’m still standing here.

But you are talking to them.

“What’s your name, sweetie? How old are you? Can I have some of your curls?” (Which, by the way, is a very creepy thing to ask a small child who is now envisioning you coming after her to steal her hair. We’ve seen Tangled.)

I still exist.

I think.  

Sometimes as a mom of small kids it is hard to tell. I can very easily go a day or two (or three) walking around in public and never once have another adult acknowledge my presence. Invisibility, thy name is motherhood.

It happens even when the children are not there. When I am standing next to my husband and you say, “Hi Eddie!” and wave and walk away without noticing me.

Do you see the look I share with him as you walk away? The one that says, “See? I told you. It happens every day!” as I roll my eyes to Heaven and smile in disbelief. 

It happens at dinner parties and reunions. You just don’t know what to say to a woman who is no longer a woman, but a mom. Surely, a full-time mom must not have opinions about current events or the state of education. Certainly, she cannot be engaged in conversation while she is breast (or bottle) feeding. What is there to talk about if she can no longer talk about work? So she ceases to exist. She sits quietly at the table and pretends to be engaged and listening. But if you take the time to look at her you will notice that her slumped shoulders have very little to do with the posture required to feed a baby.

In five years as a full-time mom, I have learned to assert myself. To be the one who starts the conversation, even if I have a breastfeeding infant under a blanket. To look into eyes and not look away, but to hold that gaze until they acknowledge me. To stop having conversations through my children and give adults clues that it is, in fact, okay to talk to me as they would any other peer.

Stranger (to my daughter): I see Dora on your shirt. Do you like to watch Dora on tv?

My daughter will hide behind me, shy, and expect me to speak on her behalf, which I will, so as not to be rude to the stranger and also not force my daughter to participate in a situation that makes her uncomfortable. 

Former me would have looked at my daughter and said, “Yes. Dora’s our favorite,” maybe smiled politely, and walked away.  

But that is a lie because Dora is not “our” favorite. It is her favorite because she is the four-year-old and I am not. Now I can look into the eyes of an adult and say, “Our girls do like Dora, but when we get some grown-up time I’ve been watching Band of Brothers with my husband on DVD. My grandfather was in Normandy and it’s been really interesting getting some perspective on what his experiences in the army might have been like. Plus, it’s a Tom Hanks project, so you know it’s really good. Do you like Tom Hanks?” 

Who doesn’t like Tom Hanks? 

I can also pipe up and say “Hi Dave/Bill/Rob/Whoever!” and look into their eyes and smile after they address my husband and not me. 

These are not hard things to do, but they take some getting used to. Because now it falls on me to make sure that I am seen. My simple presence is no longer enough. I will not be seen until I am heard.

It is very strange to transition from being a conventionally attractive woman with a promising career to a full-time mom with a body that is nothing but average in every statistical sense of the word.  

I used to be noticed for how I looked, for what people could see on the outside.

Maybe it’s not a bad thing. After all, when I was a cheerleader and a skinny blonde I always said I wished people would notice me for my mind and not my boobs. 

Now people painstakingly attempt to ignore my (even larger) boobs, along with the babies that are occasionally attached to them. Now I have to use my brain and my mouth to get attention.

But please do me a favor. If you run into a mom of young children who hasn’t come to this place yet, the place where she is comfortable asserting her existence, just look at her. Ask her what her name is, where she is from, and what she likes to do. Acknowledge that she is there and that her presence alone makes her good enough to engage in conversation. She might need the reminder.  

There are a lot of ways that you can feed your family healthy food that is actually cheaper and better for you than the stuff you buy at the grocery store.

We are big advocates of buying local, and organic if possible, produce. I’m also a cheapskate. Those two things don’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. Some ways to find local food are pretty obvious, like go to a Farmer’s Market. The stuff there is usually still cheaper than the food at the grocery store, but you can get even better prices with a few simple tricks to save money on produce. 

#1: Buy Seconds.

“Seconds” are the fruit that the orchard can’t sell at full price because it fell to the ground, it’s too ripe, or it is bruised. They are sold at steeply discounted prices and you can stock up and freeze or can them to use throughout the year.

I didn’t buy any last year because we were busy putting our house on the market and caring for an infant, but in 2011 I bought 80 pounds of peaches for $30.  The cost for that many peaches at the grocery store would have been $160 that week (of course I checked the circular to see how much I was saving) and they probably would not have been locally grown.

In our area, I prefer Brown’s Orchard because they have an entire room dedicated to seconds and I can purchase more than one kind of produce at the same time. They are a little more expensive than the seconds at some other local farms, but they are a MUCH better quality. (I purchased seconds from a different orchard the same year that turned out to be rotting and invested with fruit flies. Gross. At Brown’s I’ve actually never been able to tell the difference between my seconds and the fruit they have out in the store, other than that the seconds are usually more ripe. And a few might have some very small spots, like the peach that is front and center in the above picture.)

You can find farms in your area by checking a website like Local Harvest. Call and see if they have any seconds available. It never hurts to ask. Also, join the Facebook pages for your local farms. They often run specials for their fans. For example, last year there was a one day only buy one, get one free sale on 20lb boxes of seconds at one of our orchards. 

#2. Pick Your Own

If you’re not into growing your own garden (which is the cheapest way to get your produce, but requires a lot of work, time, patience, and outdoor space that some people just don’t have), many areas offer fields where you can pick your own fruit. We do this every year with blueberries and strawberries and have also done apples and cherries in the past. I find that the berries are the easiest to preserve because I can just freeze them. Apples are fun, but they require a lot of work to preserve. Cherries were pretty cool, but aren’t something that’s in our everyday diet, so we didn’t use them well and too many of them were wasted. Like couponing, you’re only really saving money if you are buying things you will actually use. So we don’t do cherries any more.

The picking is a fun experience for the kids and it’s a really inexpensive way for the family to spend quality time together and save money on produce at the same time.

We went blueberry picking last Friday and paid $3 per pound. That’s $0.19 per ounce. The blueberries at our grocery store are currently selling for $0.33-$0.50 per ounce.  And those are the “good” store prices because blueberries are in season and on sale right now. I paid $7.50 for 2 and a half pounds of blueberries. At the store that would have been up to $20. I just wash them and stick them in Ziploc bags and throw them in the freezer. I add them, still frozen, to pancake and waffle batter, yogurt, smoothies, etc. throughout the year.

#3 Learn to Preserve Food

In addition to being one of the few prepared in the event of the zombie apocalypse, preserving food is actually super easy and it saves you a ton of money. Literally, if you can boil water and you have access to a big pot with a lid, you can can your own food. Freezing is even easier if you are sort of lazy, like me. Which is why the blueberries are my favorite.

When you find in-season food at great prices, buy a ton of it. (Like 80 lbs of peaches for $30) Preserve it, and you can use it all year. That’s money that’s not coming out of your pocket every week when you’re at the store. There is no one else in my family that does any type of canning, so I’m self-taught via Google and this book and not all that great at it, but even I’ve canned peach slices, peach butter, peach honey, apple butter, apple sauce, and strawberry jam and they were all really easy to do, although time consuming. It feels really good to be able to reach in your pantry several months later when it’s 5pm and you haven’t made any plans for dinner and pull out something you know is healthy and locally grown that won’t cost you any additional money. I can’t even tell you how many times we’ve had a store-bought rotisserie chicken with apple sauce or peach slices from the pantry when I didn’t feel like cooking or we were going to be too busy for a meal that took a lot of time. Or blueberry waffles for dinner for that matter. It’s cheaper than fast food and way better for you.

Plus, if it’s already sitting in the pantry, homemade apple butter makes a nice last-minute Christmas gift. Ask all the people I gave it to the year I was pregnant with Penny and didn’t feel like doing any Christmas shopping by the time December (and with it, my due date) rolled-or in my case, waddled- around. Sometimes I take things we have canned when I drop of a meal to a new mom because I was cheap, pressed for time, and also I didn’t want to take 3 kids with me to the grocery store to buy something to make a meal.

One thing I have been horrible about preserving is tomatoes. Do you have any tricks? I’ve heard that you need to use a pressure canner because of the acidity level and we don’t have one. I’m also super confused by the limited tutorials on the internet.

Somebody please teach me how to can tomatoes!

Last week week we had the amazing opportunity to go on a family vacation to Florida’s North Captiva Island. My dad and step-mom have just finished building a gorgeous new rental property on the island. (That means you can rent it too, if you’re in the market for a tropical island vacation.)

I’ll do another post about the house itself soon. (Seriously, you guys, Pinterest-worthy doesn’t even begin to describe it.) First, I just wanted to share some of the vacation pictures with you.

Not gonna lie. It was a GIANT pain in the butt to get all of the kids there, coming from Pennsylvania. We had to take a plane to Ft. Myers, a taxi to the Island Club, a shuttle bus to a ferry, a 20 minute ferry boat ride, and then drive golf carts to the house because there are no cars allowed on the island.

Once we were on the island it seemed totally worth it.

The property lines go all the way to the water, so my dad & Helen actually own the beach in front of their house. The public is allowed to walk on it, but they can’t sent up camp. This makes it the most private and secluded beach I’ve ever been to.  I didn’t feel self-conscious in a swim suit once.

We got to swim right next to a manatee.

Here’s a shot of the house from the front. Their house is called Beauty and the Beach, in case you are already on the phone with your travel agent. (All of the houses have names instead of addresses.)

This was the view from the bird’s nest balcony.

It was a really cool place to vacation. Eddie and I rented jet skis with my sister and her boyfriend, Chris, one day and there were several local restaurants we visited. Eddie rented a kayak one morning and went fishing in the mangroves.

Mostly, though, we just hung out on the beach and in the salt water pool. I’d never even heard of a salt water pool, but it was pretty awesome.  The pool area was shaded by the shadow cast by the house until after lunch every day and the pool was heated to 84 degrees. I liked that the kids weren’t swimming in harsh chemicals.

We were very grateful to have the chance to take a family vacation so soon after Eddie returned from Africa. It was good for all of us to have some extra time with him.

The full day of travel to get back home was a bit too much for the kids, but we are definitely going to be back once they are a little older!