Tag Archive for: Tina Jordan

Bad Mommy

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A friend, and one-time guest blogger, Tina Jordan, just turned me on to a great blog that is carried by the New York Times called “Motherlode.” There, author Lisa Belkin expounds on a variety of parenting topics, often employing guest bloggers herself. Thanks, Tina. Now I’m really not getting anything done. See, it’s one of those blogs that is alternately fascinating and informative. I don’t really feel like I’m wasting time, because often I learn something. And there are also those times where I’m screaming “AMEN!” at the computer, because here I thought I was alone.

Did I mention that I hold the title of “Meanest Mom Ever”? True that. I told the child who bestowed the honor upon me that I strive to be the best at everything I do, and that includes being the meanest. Ever.

I visited the site the other day, which you can access at www.nytimes.com/motherlode and read with interest about one of my favorite topics: snacking. Let me give you a little back story: years ago, when I quit my in-house job to stay home with child #1 while gestating child #2, I started frequenting the local playgrounds and parks, if only to counteract the incredible boredom that comes along with leaving a high-paying, exciting job that offers you the company of fascinating people (hindsight is 20-20 after all) to spend your day with a four-year-old who, previously, has been coddled and mentally stimulated (for a small fortune, of course) by a nanny with only one charge. After my one thousandth game of “Candy Land,” I decided it was time to branch out. After lunch one day, I went to a park within walking distance of our house dragging only me, my kid, and one single, solitary, warm juice box, in the event that said kid would get thirsty. I’m not so worried about hunger, but I do worry about thirst. We got to the park and the kid went off to play, while I sat amidst other moms who were surrounded by coolers full of perishable food, not to mention a cornucopia of dry goods like pretzels, Cheez-Its, Rice Krispie Treats, and a host of other carbohydrates. Child #1, upon gazing at this Bacchanalian spectacle of little kid food, immediately pronounced, “I’m hungry.”

“She couldn’t possibly be,” I protested to the women who had turned their collective suspicious and derisive gaze toward me, “She just ate two slices of pizza. And she only weighs thirty-six pounds.” It never even occurred to me to bring food to the playground. Weren’t we there to play?

But my protestations were in vain. I was “bad mommy.”

When I was a child, we ate three meals a day. We occasionally came in looking for other sorts of treats, but they weren’t to be had. Nobody was cutting up oranges for us to consume at halftime during our CYO basketball games. Dare I say I even went to school a few days without even having eaten breakfast? The horrors. Today’s mothers and fathers are constantly monitoring their children’s food intake, making sure they are sated and hydrated with such fervor one would think that food and drink is scarce.

I was in the post office a few weeks back waiting on an interminable line behind a very pregnant woman with a barely-two-year-old little boy. He made one peep and she started digging around in her very big rucksack for food, offering him oranges, pretzels, water, juice, milk, a half a sandwich, and crackers. Once he made his decision of oranges, she wiped his hands with hand sanitizer (did I mention that he was sitting on the floor in the United States Post Office?) and gave him his snack, which he promptly dropped on the floor, picked up, and shoved in his mouth. When he was done with the oranges, he drank the milk. Then, he started on the crackers. By the time he was done, I think I had gained three pounds just from watching.

Okay, maybe the kid was hungry. Maybe he had hadn’t eaten since the day before. Maybe the mom knew something about his blood sugar that I didn’t. But I can tell you that no child that I know has ever been that hungry that they needed to eat a small meal in the post office a half hour prior to the dinner hour. Where did parents get the idea that kids need to be fed constantly? It’s baffling to me.

Back at the playground, someone eventually gave child #1 a pretzel rod or some such treat and she went off to play, something that the children who had the four-course meal awaiting them at the park bench seemed not to do. They circled like vultures, eating everything their parents had packed up for them, instead of swinging on the swings and playing on the slide and running on the basketball court. Eventually, I succumbed to peer pressure and began bringing a half-eaten bag of whatever snack was in our house, if only to show that I wasn’t completely cruel and heartless mother who denied my child her god-given right to eat a six-foot Italian wedge in between games of hopscotch.

Please feel free to chime in with your own bad mommy stories, Stiletto faithful.

Maggie Barbieri

Lacking the Decorating Sense

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This past Saturday night, my good friends (and former Stiletto Gang guest posters) Tina Jordan and Ted Hindenlang hosted the most fabulous book signing party for me at their home in our little Village. It was a fabulous night. Tina and Ted live in one of our Village gems—a 1918 Colonial that Tina has lovingly decorated with thrift store finds, tag sale treasures, some new stuff, and other things that came with the house, including a gorgeous baby grand piano that she has tried in vain to sell on Craigslist. One problem? Well, apparently nobody wants it . (Or maybe they don’t want to move it.) Other problem? Oldest daughter, M., has suddenly found a love for it and playing it. Tina got a mini-recital Saturday night prior to our arrival. But I have to describe to you this lovely home and all of the treasures inside. Because Tina’s got that decorating style that I just can’t pull off and everyone who came in marveled at. There was tremendous oohing and aahing over the finds that she has picked up over the years, knowing exactly where each and everyone was going to go in the house and what purpose it would serve.

Tina’s got the “eye”, as I call it. I don’t have it. And few do, I’ve decided.

My good friend and Village librarian, Mary, remarked that she picked up a antique milk crate at a tag sale. She loved it. Brought it home. And then wondered, “What in Sam Hill am I going to do with this?” But fortunately for Mary, like me, she watches a lot of the Food Network. She watched as Tyler Florence (one of our favorite chefs—maybe because he makes so much meat with such loving care?) took his old, antique milk crate, wadded up his dish towels and stashed them in the crate on his counter, never having to search through the elusive junk drawer for a towel to sop up whatever mess he had made while lovingly making that beef tenderloin. Mary was inspired. Her milk crate now sits on her counter, stuffed with a mélange of brightly-colored towels, always at her disposal.

I love the idea of tag sales and thrift stores and going up and down the streets of Cold Spring, a little Village a bit to the north of here with store after store of treasures and antiques. But I see things and I don’t know what to do with them. A beautiful gilt mirror with just a tiny crack in the corner? I would love it. Somewhere. Anywhere. But I know I’ll get it home, hang it somewhere and look at it and think, “why did I buy that? It’s a cracked mirror.” Then I’ll see something like it in someone else’s home where it will look like it was made exactly for the wall where it has been hung. I won’t notice the crack, but I will notice the beautiful gilt and how it fits the wall perfectly.

My mother and father recently gave us one of what is apparently part of a famous series of “toilet paper oil paintings.” Hey—the guy was on Oprah. He’s famous. Ours is a predominantly blue winter scene that was painted in five minutes in a Catskill lodge in the 1970’s by a man who has made a fortune from these paintings. I tried hanging it in our dining room, where we had a big expanse of wall that needed a big piece of art. Unfortunately, Jim and I lack the appropriate “kitsch” gene to pull off the hanging of this art and it is now hanging in my attic office, seen only by me and appreciated only by me. This was part of the 70’s décor of my youth and fit in perfectly with everything else—shag carpeting, plastic slipcovering, and the like. But today, I can’t pull it off. Mom has made me promise that before the toilet paper oil painting goes the way of many other things in my home (the Goodwill store), I’ll give her one last crack at finding a home for it. Good luck, Mom. And good luck to toilet paper oil painting. I can’t say I’ll miss you. The only person I know who could make the painting work is Tina. I may have her do an intervention before the painting goes back to Mom. Maybe it just needs a new frame?

And another thing about Tina and the book signing party: she works full time, has two children, two dogs, and a very busy life. And her tree was up, decorated, with other holiday decorations scattered throughout her house so that the whole effect was like being in a holiday wonderland, populated by many of my dear friends, all clutching copies of “Quick Study,” waiting to have them signed.

Who’s luckier than I am? You don’t have to answer that. I don’t know a luckier person alive right now.

But here’s my question and I welcome my Stiletto gals’ input on this (because I know they have some), what is it about some people that they see treasure when the rest of us just see junk? And do you have the gene to pull this off, or are you like me, queen of the “matchy-matchy”?

Maggie Barbieri

I Love Books!!

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Our guest blogger today is Tina Jordan, senior editor/book reviewer for Entertainment Weekly.

I love books. As a senior editor at Entertainment Weekly—one who writes book reviews and edits book features—I’m immersed in the publishing world, and my office is inundated with galleys and books. My house, too is full of books—great teetering piles in places, in fact, since we ran out of bookshelf space long ago. Books are often found crammed between couch cushions, beneath the ottomans, under the desk in the study. I’m no highbrow snob, either. Heck, on the right day, I like Emily Griffin as much as John Updike. And yet, the older I get (let’s just say an important birthday is looming) the harder it seems to be to find books to swoon over. The ones that keep me up late turning the pages. The ones that lkeep me glued to the couch, ignoring my family for hours on end (if one of my teenagers gallops into the room, I look up a trifle resentfully and say, “Yes?”).

So why is that? Why is it that I don’t find as much that utterly, completely thrills me, that sends me over the edge? I don’t think I’m jaded or cynical. I don’t deplore the state of publishing or wring my hands over the quality of what’s written today. Sure, I like a lot of what I read. Sometimes I like it a lot. And I know exactly which book last made me weak in the knees: the new Elizabeth George novel, Careless in Red, coming out in May. For those of you who haven’t read her mysteries, well, I could write an entire column about her. Suffice it to say her books are intelligent, complex, and deeply, hugely satisfying. Reading one is like realizing that I’m ravenous, I haven’t eaten in days, and I can’t gulp down the pages fast enough.

So when the galley for Careless in Red arrived at my office, I felt a frisson of excitement. Like all Elizabeth Georges, it is enormous, an absolute doorstopper; I started reading that night when I got on my train in Grand Central, nearly missed my stop 40 minutes later, and, once home headed straight up to the bedroom, followed by a gaggle of dachshunds and kids. When I finally had some peace, I dove back in. I put it down, reluctantly, a little after midnight (can’t stay up as late as I used to!), and picked it up the next morning around six when I made some coffee. It was a Saturday, and I put all the usual weekend fun—laundry, housecleaning, grocery shopping—on hold, raptly turning the pages, occasionally sipping some cooling coffee. By the time the girls were up I’d finished, closing the galley with a happy sigh. That was two weeks ago, and Careless in Red is still vivid, some of its passages imprinted in my mind. George’s Scotland Yard characters, so familiar to me after many books, are old friends by now, so I ache for Thomas Lynley, whose wife was murdered, and Barbara Havers, as scraggly and socially inept as ever.

Who knows why I find fewer Careless in Reds than I used to? If this were a proper essay, I’d have mulled this over and come up with all kinds of smart reasons. But I do a lot less smart reasoning than I used to. No, I’ve decided there’s nothing to do but savor those special books when I DO find them. Right now, the new Benjamin Black is at the top of my nightstand stack, beckoning me. Right underneath is the new Jesse Kellerman. Then there’s a novel that looked good, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. All of them look terrific. (But no dutiful plowing-through for me—if I detest a book, I just toss it aside.) It’s likely I’ll enjoy all three of those novels. And maybe—if I’m really, really lucky—one of them will tickle that elusive place in my brain, and, addict that I am, I’ll be consumed by a book once again.

Tina Jordan