Sisterhood46

Now that a year has passed, I'm no longer a true burb newbie. At what point did that realize that? Yesterday I met a mother of an 18 month old boy who had just moved from NY to Westport. She told me of the challenges she was facing at adapting: missing walking, missing the visual stimulation of the city, regaining all of her bearings, wanting to stay in NYC after a day outing. Of course I thoroughly sympathized with her and remember feeling the exact same way. Truth be told some days I still feel that way. But what I told her was that eventually she would reach a place where the city was still a very important part of her life but that she would also embrace her new life enough to enjoy some of its aspects. Basically that slowly you see the positives of both instead of just the pain of not living in the city! I told her the honest truth: the more you hang on and resist this change the more pain you will feel! Now, am I still plotting my way back to NYC? you bet! Do I blast &quo

Fall is finally gone. What a relief! When I was a city girl, fall used to mean renting a car and taking a scenic drive to the countryside with the kids to admire the gorgeous fall foliage hues. I loved the amazing colors that mother nature came up with. Now that I live in the burbs fall foliage has come to mean something completly different. It means continuous raking from October to December. Again, raking is quaint for about an hour. Six weeks of it and let me tell you I wish I had hired someone to do the "fall clean-up" as they call it here. If you're moving to the burbs here as some helpful tips that I learned this past fall. 1. First stop is Home Depot. Get about 20 packs of refuse bags and a huge rake with a rubber handle and plastic teeth. Do not get the wooden one with metal teeth, it will take you about twice as long. Also pick up a pair of gardening gloves. You'll need those because contrary to what you may think you will not only be picking up leaves but de

One of the main reasons I write this blog is to help people who are moving to the burbs or people who are thinking about moving there get some helpful snapshots. Here is a really important one. Before I moved here I was petrified of gaining weight as a result of spending a majority of my time in a car versus walking. So when I got here I exercised religiously. But I was also feeling torn. I was surrounded by hyper fit women who literally spent all of their free time and a good deal of their disposable income on fitness trainers and programs. To me, the image of a stay at home working out consistently to look amazing in her skinny jeans, well it made me cringe. So I tried bootcamp, I jogged 4 times a week, jumped rope but I didn't have a trainer, I did it in a non consistent way on my own. The truth is that by fighting the norm out here, which is to work out consistently to fight the bulge with a trainer I made a mistake. The net net is that if you go from walking everywhere and wo

Back when I lived in the city I used to get these L.L. Bean catalogues and in them would be these really unattractive photos of women wearing flannel nightgowns and pajamas. Some even had matching slippers. I used to simultaneously laugh out loud and cringe because those pajamas were sooo ugly. I wondered who in the world wore those things? Clearly women who had given up! It's only when we moved out of the city last winter, that I realized who actually wears flannel pajamas....everyone and anyone who lives in a house and wants to stay even remotely warm! When you live an apartment temperature variations are pretty limited. Therefore you can wear your sweet cotton nightgown pretty much through out the year. When you live in a house it's a whole different story. It's cold!!!! It's drafty!!! I still haven't given in to the flannel option but I'm not looking much better thanks to the four layers of clothing I wear to bed! I'm talking long sleeve t-shirt, cott