Mamapedia Voices

There is certainly no one size fits all beauty regimens no matter what are you are or whether you’re a Texan or not. There are, however, a few things every woman can do to help improve her skin! Here are a couple of beauty secrets that all woman of every age can do to help her skin.

• Drink lots of water to stay hydrated. Unfortunately coffee and tea don’t count.
• Never go to bed without removing your makeup. I can’t believe how many of my friends don’t wash their faces before bedtime. Don’t be surprised if you wake up with pimples after not washing the dirt and oil from your face. Let’s not even discuss a dirty pillowcase.
• Eye cream is essential! Especially wearing one with an SPF.
• Speaking of sunscreens, slather it on during the day, even cloudy days. Don’t forget tops of hands, neck and chest. I wear foundation with an SPF which is a very easy way to remember sun protection.
• Get a good night’s sleep. They don’t call it beauty sleep for nothing!

Cindy Bokma is a published author, aspiring screenwriter and run the popular beauty blog, Hello Dollface. She’s also mom to two children, three if you count her husband.

Adam and I are childless for the weekend. Samantha is staying with her “godparents,” Jon and Chris, for what we hope will become a regular Kid Swap weekend. Jackson stayed with us a couple of months ago and we had a blast. This time, Sam went to their house.

She’s been there many times before, and once we even lived with them for 2 weeks while we were “homeless,” so it’s not unfamiliar territory. Still, it’s a big deal, for us and for her. She stayed with her grandparents for a weekend while we were in Florida last month, but somehow, it felt different to leave her there while we went off for a couple of days than it did to drop her off with Chris at a McDonald’s halfway between our house and theirs. I almost chickened out and drove her all the way to Richmond, but luckily Chris talked me out of it. About 10 minutes after the exchange, Chris called me to report that there were zero tears and that Jackson and Sam were busy talking in the back of the car.

As for us grownups, we’re going sleep in, go out to fancy restaurants, and maybe catch a movie. I suppose we could take a little trip somewhere, but we’ve had enough travel for the summer, and really, there aren’t a lot of places that we can’t go with Sam along. Sleep seems to be the thing that we miss most from our childless days.

Letting Sam go for this weekend is part of a commitment Adam and I made to each other when we decided to have a child. We wrote Children Vows, a promise and a statement of our intentions in having a baby. The predominant theme was that we would never allow the child to replace our marriage as a value. I’ll write more about our Children Vows in the next week or so, but right now, I need to go put on a nice dress.

Amy Mossoff lives in the DC area with her husband and 3-year-old daughter, and writes on parenting, Objectivism, and all the good Little Things in her life.

I don’t really obsess about age or getting older. It happens to everyone so be it. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel that old (yet) and while there is an occasional grey hair and wrinkle… I am still battling acne so it doesn’t fee like I am old. Are you allowed to have wrinkles and zits? It should be outlawed! But aging happens, to us all, and apparently when we are not looking.

I got an e-mail with a picture of the hubby and me taken at a wedding we were at this summer. It was a good picture and I was excited because we have very few pictures of us without children. Than I noticed my hand… my husband noticed my hand and he said “Well it would have been a nice picture if you hadn’t been apparently shooting up that morning, I’ll have to airbrush it”. All of a sudden I had an old lady hand!…More

I love cooking for my family, but even I find it difficult at times. There are days when I am dead tired, or bored with my menu and desperately need inspiration. I know I am not alone in feeling this, I’ve heard other mothers cry uncle, asking for new recipes to reinvigorate their repertoire.

At times like these I retrieve my go-to recipe binder and look up some of my old, most-favorite meals. These are the dishes that I know I can make during the day while my daughter naps, or during any downtime I have. They are also always guaranteed to be delicious, my family never turns them down. With fall fast approaching in the northeast I find myself thinking of cooking heartier, hot casseroles that warm both the heart and stomach. To this end I’ve been making rich lasagnas, green salads and thick crusty bread.

My favorite part about lasagna is that it is easy to make ahead of time, and can often serve an entire family for at least two meals. Since I try to cook seasonally to the best of my abilities, I often use fresh vegetables from the farmers’ market in my lasagnas. This adds an element of freshness and health to a delicious meal….More

There is a lot of confusion in the world about Time Out. What it is, how to do it, and how to make it work. I am here to help demystify the time out.

Here are my qualifications – I’ve got an almost-two year old, I worked for two years in a residential facility for kids with Mental Retardation and Behavioral Disorders (the toughest behavior cases out there) and lived to tell about it, and I went to school to be a Special Ed teacher (and took Applied Behavioral Analysis and other courses to learn how to deal with kids).

The most common misconception I read/see/hear is that a time out is for punishment. It is not. The time out serves two purposes.

1. It removes the misbehaving child from whatever stimulus or situation is causing the misbehavior (so, if little Sally is hitting little Johnny, it removes Sally from Johnny’s presence, which interrupts the hitting behavior).
2. It reestablishes parental authority (in other words, it reminds the child who is in charge)….More