March 10, 2010

mmm delicious (a Twitter contest!)

Dinner catches me off guard every single day. I have no idea how that’s possible, but there it is: we sit down to do homework and the next thing I know it’s 5:30 and Wade is on his way home and I’m staring into the freezer wondering how many more times this month I can serve beans and rice before everyone goes on a hunger strike.

(Answer: ZERO! Because I’m the only one who will eat it any more, which is sad, because I make a damn fine beans and rice. Although even I’m getting a little tired of it. But shh don’t tell anyone in my house.)

I need a robot to make me dinner. Rosie, from the Jetsons! Remember her? How awesome would that be? I loved Rosie.

Since I do not have a Rosie (dammit) I have to rely on my iPhone — not to cook, of course, just to help me plan. Last winter, I wrote about the Kraft iFood Assistant app –  I loved it then, and I love it now. Kraft has relaunched the app, with videos, which are awesome because I need as much direction as I can get. More, sometimes.

The iFood app lets you organize recipes and grocery lists right on your iPhone — for cooking challenged folks like me, this is a dream come true. I’m just hoping that the next upgrade will include some mechanism that actually cooks the dinner, but that seems like a lot to ask, even of an iPhone.

But I’m still hopeful!

This new version of the iFood Assistant also includes a reminder function, which means that you can plan your menu and then have your phone remind you of your plans. So instead of staring into the freezer at 5:30, you can have the reminder pop up early enough to actually get dinner on the table.

(Also, how ironic is it that the screen shot is for a bean dish? So ironic!)

I really love my iFood app, and I think you’ll love it, too — and so I’m hosting a little giveaway, to hook you up with your own pocket chef.

What’s up for grabs? Two $25 iTunes gift cards (the iFood Assistant is available through iTunes, for 99 cents)  and a $50 American Express gift card that you can use to shop for groceries (or shoes, whatever, I don’t judge).  Either way, you can turn dinner into a party, which is nice on a Wednesday night.

This is a Twitter contest, and the theme is food — specifically, foods that you wish you knew how to prepare (or if you’re already someone who cooks, foods you just don’t prepare often enough). To enter, follow @SusanW and send me a reply tweet with the food (or foods) you wish you were serving. You can include the hashtag #iFood if you want other people to be able to search other entries from your answer, but that’s optional.

Still not sure how to enter? Go to Twitter.com. Are you there? Good. Now! Follow me, @SusanW, and send me a tweet reply with the food you wish you were serving. It’ll look something like these:

@SusanW Pigs feet! #iFood

@SusanW I would love to know how to whip up some avocado soup. #iFood

I’ll pick a winner randomly from the tweet replies, and send that lucky soul a direct message on Friday (that’s why you need to follow me — I can only DM you if you’re following, see). I’ll also update the top of this post to let everyone know who won. This is my first Twitter contest, so let’s see if it works.

Thanks to all of you for playing, and to Kraft for providing the prizes. And an extra big thanks to Maggie Mason, for doing this first and letting me steal all her rules and language.

March 9, 2010

three: part one

Last week, when I said that three good things had happened? Here is part one of the first good thing: this morning I interviewed Laura Bennett for BlogHer.

You remember Bennett from Season 3 of “Project Runway,” but these days, she’s writing for a living rather than crafting runway-ready gowns. Bennett has been penning an occasional column for The Daily Beast, which covers everything from raising six kids in Manhattan to straightening her hair with formaldehyde, and she has a book coming out in April, titled “Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday? A Mother’s Guide to Sanity in Stilettos.”

And yes, I asked her about the stilettos. Because Rita ordered me to.

Celebrity interviews can be such a crapshoot; it’s impossible to know what you’re getting into, really, because it’s not like you know the celebrity personally. I interviewed Kate Gosselin in December of 2008, and of course asked her about all the flak she got for the way she treated Jon; her answers were terse and unhelpful, and it was a struggle to pull together 1,000 words by my deadline. What I didn’t know — what none of us knew — when I interviewed her was that her marriage was on the precipice and her husband had gone over the edge. But what that one interview taught me is that you have to be prepared for the worst and ready to make the best of it.

All that, though, gets me to this: Laura Bennett was lovely — warm and friendly and hilariously funny. It was a great interview, a best-case scenario; nothing was off limits and her answers were relevant and useful and interesting. At one point she was digging through her handbag looking for her lipstick to tell me what brand it was. You’ve got to love that kind of dedication.

The absolute best part, though, was when Bennett confessed to cutting her own hair. “Right now I have a pixie haircut,” she told me. “It’s another one of those things — some people are totally freaked out about their hair; I’ve always been really casual about my hair. Like, oh it’ll grow back, what the hell.”

I can totally relate to that.

You can read the entire interview at BlogHer, and you can preorder the book at Amazon.

March 4, 2010

reeeeeeead to meeeeee!

When Henry was a toddler, he would bring us book after book and insist that we read to him, literally for hours on end. I would hear those PSAs that suggested parents read with their kids for 20 minutes a day and would weep because at the 20 minute mark, Henry was just getting warmed up. I dreamed of having a child who only wanted to have 20 minutes of story time. What a nice break that would be!

(I have that child, by the way. His name is Charlie.)

Henry would come to us with a book and hold it out; if we didn’t respond fast enough he would push it into our hands or laps. And if that didn’t work, he would haul off and hit us with it, because dammit woman, your job is to reeeeeeead to meeeeeee! Except of course that since he didn’t talk (AT ALL, no lie) he would just smack us with the board book or picture book and then wait until the reading started. It was crazy.

When he was a little older, maybe three, and was finally talking, he would memorize books; he would ask us to read the same book over and over and over and then sit on the floor and recite the exact words on every page. It was annoying but at least it was a break from reading.

These days, Henry is writing stories about superheros and their adventures; occasionally, his stories are about conflicts that sound suspiciously like the ones he has with other kids at school. It is fascinating to see how he is using stories to work through what’s on his mind. This year has been all about distinguishing between kids who are really your friends and kids who are not; we’ve talked a lot about how he is required to be kind to everyone, but how he does not have to make any extra effort with the mean kids. And of course, we’ve talked about the point at which he needs to go to an adult for help with the mean kids, and how to know when he’s at that point.

It’s not a conversation I love, but it’s one we need to have, and to keep having.

As part of that conversation, we tell stories — about things he’s done with his good friends, about what Wade and I do with our friends, about times when friends have really come through for us. The stories give him a way to grasp what it means to say that someone is a friend, and just like when he was a toddler, he latches on to those narratives and replays them over and over in his head.

And hopefully, they help.

 * * * * *

Stories are one simple way to get inside your kids’ heads, to give them a script for the things in their life that can seem overwhelming and scary. We tell stories about the first day of school and the first night in a big kid bed and all the days in between. We tell stories about being brave and being independent and being kind. GoodNites has gathered these stories in their Bedtime Theater campaign, to give parents a way to open the door to talking with kids about difficult and important issues.

It’s a good project. (Although that link, to the Bedtime Theater site, has sound, so be warned. Sorry.)

They’ve also provided a super cool gift pack for me to give away today — let’s recap what’s in it, shall we? An iPod shuffle, a pair of Logitech speakers,  a $25 iTunes gift card, and a super soft cuddle blanket, all of which comes packed in a reusable Patagonia bag. The whole thing is valued at $175, which is not too shabby.

The winner of the second GoodNites Bedtime Theater gift bag is Mama Bear, who wrote “My daughter learned to read by ‘reading’ The Very Hungry Caterpillar to us after we had read it to her. She was brilliant!” Yes she was! And what a great memory.

There’s still time to win — I’m giving away one more gift pack on Monday, March 8; to enter, leave a comment on the original giveaway post by midnight Sunday night. And don’t forget that the GoodNites people are giving $2500 for the best contribution to their Iggy and his Wiggy Bed series, which is awesome.

Disclaimer: I have partnered with GoodNites® for this series of posts and giveaways; I am being compensated for my participation in the Bedtime Theater program and for hosting these giveaways, not for promoting a product. Just so we’re all clear.