Posts

Showing posts from January, 2011

Connecting

One thing City Girls are really good at is connecting with other city girls, especially city mamas. Just put a couple of us in the local playground and before you know it we've traded addresses for the best neighborhood schools, restaurants, after-school classes and sample sales. One of my goals with this blog is to share the struggles and successes of living in the suburbs of CT. Over time, I've receive great emails from readers who connect with my experiences. I love hearing from you guys! I love that a lot of you share some of your tactics for making living here a little easier, a little more comfortable. What I'd like to ask all of you is to please post your responses. Post your experiences or POV. Share this website with other city girls who are making the move to suburbia. We all know that feeling like you're not the only one going through something makes it way easier. So please don't be shy! I love hearing from you!

Citygirl versus Mother Nature

Image
The top of the bush in our front yard One of the things that really helped me adjust to the burbs was reading various Buddhist texts. Buddhism teaches you is that we create a lot of our own pain by resisting life!  When I moved here it felt so wrong and so "un-me" that I resisted everything about the burbs, the good and the bad. Needless to say that was pretty unhelpful. Why do I mention this today, two years later? Well we're having yet  another  snow day and I could resist mother nature by complaining and worrying about all the things I had planned to do today and that just won't get done or I can just go with the flow and be present, make a slow, hot breakfast for everyone and play in the snow with my kids. Resistance is futile! I'll be playing in the snow today.

Hyper Local

When I lived in the city I avoided the local news like the plague! Honestly is there anything more depressing than NYC local news? Over the last two years I've learned that it's a different story in the burbs. Local media is the best way to know what's going on in town. You want to know if the schools are closed. Turn to Channel 12 the local CT television channel  http://www.news12.com/index.jsp You want to know why there is traffic on the Post Road? Go to westportnow.com and you'll find out that traffic is being diverted from I95 because of a major accident. (By the way if you're hoping to get out of the suburbs this is also a good place to find out what housing prices are doing at a local level!)  http://www.westportnow.com Want to know who's kid got arrested for disorderly conduct or driving under the influence? Turn to the Minuteman weekly newspaper!  http://minutemannewscenter.com/westport If you're suffering from the winter blues, check out the c

PMS in the burbs

Every five weeks or so I get Suburbia PMS. It builds up gradually and then I find myself with a full blown case of it. What is Suburbia PMS? It's when a city girl has waited too long to get her day in the city and it shows! It's when I can't stand to drive another minute anywhere, I just want to walk. It's when I'm sitting at my daughter's gym class in a waiting room, surrounded by mothers who thrive on being uber surbuban moms and I just want to run. It's when my workout doesn't make me feel like I've released any negative energy. It's when I find my Wednesday afternoons of picking up the  three kids from school, feeding them their snack, getting them into the car, taking son #1 to karate with the other two in the waiting room, then getting everyone into a car to get them to a speed dinner, then getting them into the car to get son #1 to basketball, then taking the other two home for their baths, then putting them back in the car to pick

Flashback!

Image
Yesterday the whole family went bowling. It was hubbie's idea and it was a great idea.  After 20 minutes there, son #1 exclaimed: "this is the best day ever!." As I looked around, after missing my third spare in a row, I couldn't help but notice how different this was to bowling in the city. Last time I went bowling in the city, three girlfriends and I met up with our kids for an afternoon of fun. The lanes were brand new, the setting was more nightclub than bowling alley and while the kids bowled away we enjoyed a pitcher of cocktails. It was a fabulous way to get out of our cramped apartments on a winter's day. Yesterday, bowling in the burbs, I felt like I was back in the 1950's. The lanes and the benches have been there for the last 40 years. There were no cocktails in sight and no funky dance music. Instead it was filled with families of every socio economic background, retired folks, competitive bowling teams, disabled adults and birthday kids

Diversity in the burbs

Diversity and suburbia are not words that naturally go together.  Basically when you move out here for better school districts you also say goodbye to meeting and living with people of different social and ethnic backgrounds...for the most part. It's an issue I struggle with. Last week however,  I encountered a wonderful example of diversity in the burbs. I kicked off the year by holding a coaching workshop for women called Balance Life Coaching  http://balancelife.squarespace.com/bootcamp . It was a great way to start the year for many reasons: I love coaching; I love helping women get the life they want; I love motivating people to try things they're afraid to try. But the best part was that amongst this seemingly homogenous group of mothers living in Fairfield county, there was diversity. There were woman of different ethnicities (Asian, Jewish, Hispanic), at different life stages, of different professional backgrounds (ballerina, lawyer, digital marketer, writer, tea

Boys in the Burbs

Living in the burbs tends to re-inforce stereotypes from the 1950's. Moms stay-at-home. Dads go off to work in the city. Boys have to be multi-sport athletes Boys play with boys, not girls Boys go to hockey games and not plays. Although I loathe these stereotypes, one of them actually came in handy this week.  Boys are not afraid of dead mice.  That's right the mice are back! Hubbie took things in hand by setting mouse traps all over but the problem is that I wake up first in the morning, so guess who finds out first, if they've been any victims during the night? The first two mornings I woke up hubbie, way before his alarm goes off, and made him check for me. The third morning I tried to be brave....I found a dead mice on the kitchen counter and squealed the whole back to hubbie's arms.  Then yesterday I overheard the boys asking their dad if they could see the dead mice.   Not only did they see them, they had a whole discussion about it.  Sons: &quo

Neighborhood Doc

It's been two years since we moved out of the city and the majority of my doctors are still in NYC. It's not only about an emotional attachment (one of them was there at the birth of two my children and the passing of my mother) but it's also because I feel that they are of a different caliber. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right but I don't really want to take any chances. Having said that there are times when one needs a doctor for the small stuff and then it's not really worth going into the city. I asked around for months for a good GP in town and I didn't get very far. Either they had a waiting list or they were 20+ minutes away. Today I tried another solution, a walk-in clinic. I'd never been to one and I kind of assumed the people who went there were the un-insured. Well I couldn't have been more wrong. It's a super efficient, professional doctors office, that saw me at a moments notice, took my insurance and actually helped me fee

Busted!

Image
Now that I spend the majority of my existence in a car, it isn't surprising that it's a recurring topic on this blog. Bad driving happens every minute of every single day. I could tell you about the driver who took a turn and nearly ran into my car yesterday. It turns out it was a kid barely older than my 9 year at the wheel of his mom's Lexus. Brilliant idea, make sure your kids safe whilst he runs others over! Or the guy who spent an entire road swerving from side to side because he was convinced that he could read his email while driving! I could go on but today I discovered that there is a solution!  Have you heard about a new iPhone App called  DriveMeCrazy ? According to the website Tech Goes Strong, "this app  lets you report on driver behavior by license plate number.  You can flag someone for bad driving, and record a message that describes in vivid detail what they did to earn it.  The app also lets you praise good drivers—or cute ones.  The app is designed

Ready to adopt?

If you're thinking of moving to the burbs and buying a house, you really need to ask yourself just one question: are we ready to adopt? Owning a house, I've discovered, is like adopting a new family member. A house is really a living entity. It's alive and it's in flux. That means you need to treat it like a member of the family. You need to fit it into your monthly budget, you need to buy it new clothes (paint jobs), you need to make appointments for it (plumber, electrician, gardner, carpenter), it grows old and the older it is the more care it needs. The truth is a house almost needs daily attention in order to keep its value. So if you're a family of four ready to make the big move, ask yourself are you ready to be a family of five?