Selfish Mom

I’ve been everywhere but here

Mar 16, 2010 What's Going On

It’s after one a.m. and I really wish I was in bed right now, but I’m not remotely tired.  My body thinks it’s midnight, which is about two hours earlier than I’ve been going to bed lately, so I’m kind-of screwed.  Especially since I can’t laze around in bed tomorrow morning until it’s time to throw on a coat and take the kids to school.  (The Ass was still home this morning when we left for school, and I think he was surprised and appalled that I threw a coat over my pajamas to walk the kids to school.)

I spoke with Jake’s teacher last week and she mentioned that he’s been driving her crazy lately, talking all the time in class and just having a ton of extra energy.  We go through something like this every year around this time, when the weather starts to get better.  Last year it manifested itself in hitting a bunch of kids, a week-long reign of terror that landed Jake in so much trouble he didn’t see his favorite electronic things for over a month.  So, while talking a lot is definitely an improvement over hitting, I’m trying to do something to take care of the problem instead of waiting it out and crossing my fingers.  I’ll be taking the kids to the playground for half an hour before school, so that Jake can run off some of that extra spring-time energy.  I really hate the idea, and I’m almost hoping that it doesn’t work, because if it does I’ll be stuck doing it until June.  But I have the feeling it’s going to work.

Anyway, I should be asleep.  But I wanted to point out a few posts I wrote on other sites recently.  First up, I was on brownstoner.com last week, talking about some things that had to be done on the garden floor of our house before we could use it.  Remember, my brownstoner posts are lagging a few months behind reality, so they don’t know about the new kitchen yet (shhh!).

Next up, I was on the NYC Moms Blog today, talking about the pitfalls of telling the truth when someone asks you for advice.  And I think I forgot to point out my last NYC Moms Blog post, about a girl who was arrested for doodling on her desk.  Insanity.

OK, I’m going to bed, hopefully I’ll be able to get enough sleep before hitting the playground.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.

Tags: renovation

My Frigidaire dishwasher has given me back an hour a day

Mar 12, 2010 Product Review, What's Going On

The Installation

A few weeks ago, my Frigidaire appliances showed up: a refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and microwave (the washer and dryer are coming later).  If you’re picturing a couple of guys, a handtruck, and 15 minutes to set up and clean up (like I was), you’re in for a surprise (like I was).  Five guys descended on my house and took over.  They were fantastic.  They weren’t ordinary appliance delivery guys, they were event staging guys.  If you’ve ever seen Kelly Ripa standing in the middle of Central Park in a full kitchen, chances are good that these are the guys who got the kitchen there.  Still, my little brownstone probably challenged them in ways that the Javits Center would not.

Getting things into and out of brownstones is never easy: the entrances are small, there’s usually a tight turn right after you get in the door, and the staircases are narrow.  The guys were thrilled that these were going on the ground floor, but they still had to get them inside.  I’m not sure how they did it, especially with the fridge.  I couldn’t watch.  But somehow they did get everything in, and then they got to work installing.  The microwave worried me a little, as it’s basically hanging on the other side of my neighbor’s brick living room wall.  But they got everything set and were on their way, a short five hours later.

At long last, a dishwasher!

Once they had cleared out, I knew exactly what I was going to do first: run the dishwasher.  It’s been three-and-a-half years since I’ve had a dishwasher.  The funny thing was, I’d grown up without one, and only had one in the condo we lived in from 2002-2006.  But once you get used to a dishwasher, it’s really tough going back to handwashing.  It just takes so much time!  During the really intense part of the renovation we used paper and plastic everything.  I was actually a little sad when the plastic tarps came down after about six months, because with them went my excuse for paper plates, and I had to start washing actual dishes.  I became maniacal in watching over how many dishes were used.  If something was cooked in a pot it was served in that pot.  If a drink came in a can it was drunk in that can.  Soup, spaghetti, and cereal were the only foods I didn’t consider finger foods.  I tried as hard as I could to end up with as few dishes in the sink as possible, but still I spent about 90 minutes every single day washing dishes.  And if we had people over?  Forget about it.

I had The Ass bring down all of the dusty boxes of kitchen items that I hadn’t seen in years: the “good” plates (meaning you wouldn’t bring them on a picnic), actual glass glasses, serving items.  Everything had to be washed, absolutely everything.  It had all been in boxes since we’d moved in years ago, packed by sweaty guys who may or may not have washed their hands that day.  He then went into the next room to let me do my thing, but stayed close enough to make sure I actually did it.  He knows me too well: if left totally on my own I would ignore the big picture, and spend the entire evening organizing the spice jars, or labeling everything, or counting the silverware to discover that we’re missing two forks, a knife, and a spoon.  But I was working hard getting our kitchen set up.

After about an hour, he tiptoed and surveyed the mess.  He asked if there was anything he could do to help.  “No, I’ve got it.”  “Are you sure?  I could at least run some dishes through a light cycle to get the dust off.”  Well, score one for the new Frigidaire dishwasher, because it had been on and running for an hour, and he hadn’t even heard it!  I think that’s the best compliment someone can give a dishwasher: I didn’t know it was on.

So, just having my new Frigidaire dishwasher has given me back at least an hour every day, probably more.  I no longer dread clean up, I no longer let the dishes pile up because I can’t stand the thought of washing each one individually.  It’s been heaven.

I wrote this review while participating in a Test Drive Campaign by Mom Central on behalf of Frigidaire and received a Frigidaire Refrigerator, Range/Microwave, Washer/Dryer set, and a Dishwasher to facilitate my review.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 2. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.

Tags: dishwasher, FPHD2491KF, Frigidaire

Your Shape Review

Mar 10, 2010 Product Review, What's Going On

Your Shape Challenge Update

I’ve been part of the Your Shape Challenge for the past eight weeks, and while I’ve mentioned the game a lot and talked about a few different aspects of it, I haven’t really done a full review, so the people running the challenge have asked me to do one.

First of all, I should mention that since the challenge started, I’ve lost ten pounds.  At this point that’s two pounds more than my goal, which was to lose one pound a week.  And of course I can’t attribute all that to the  Your Shape game – I’ve been eating 1,500 calories or less whenever I can manage it (I’d say that was roughly five out of the eight weeks), drinking more non-carbonated liquids (that would be watered-down Crystal Light, averaging about 24 ounces a day) and just generally trying to be more active.  But on top of that, I’ve been exercising with Your Shape two or three times a week (except during those three weeks when I wasn’t eating well – see how that works?!?).  I feel stronger, and with the weather getting warmer I’m also going to incorporate some jogging into my routine in addition to Your Shape.  All of those things together have combined into a pretty smooth and painless ten pound loss.  I haven’t done anything at all drastic, I haven’t been at all miserable, and I’m fitting very comfortably into my size 14 pants – a couple of them are even too big.  That’s been the great thing about this challenge: the people running it never said “Go use the Your Shape game twelve times a week and then tell us how much weight you’ve lost.”  They understand that it’s part of some over-all changes that are helpful for losing weight.

The Your Shape Game

So, the game itself: to recap, there’s a little camera that sits either on top or at the bottom of your TV and connects to your Wii, and that camera shows you onscreen in the Your Shape game.  You’re on the right side of the screen, and a Jenny McCarthy avatar is on left, talking to you and showing you what to do.  The goal is to mimic what she’s doing.  It’s not a good idea to stare at yourself in the game for two reasons: #1, there’s a tiny bit of lag between what you’re doing and what you see on the screen, which will mess you up.  And #2, you’ve really got to watch Jenny.  So why have the camera at all?  That also has two reasons: #1, you can see if you’re doing what you should be doing: getting your legs up high enough, getting your arms straight enough, etc.  In fact, I discovered pretty early on that if I thought my arms were straight out, they were actually hanging down a surprising amount.

Reason #2 for the camera is the whole point of this game: it tells you how well you’re keeping up with Jenny, and  you don’t have to hold anything or strap anything to your body.  The camera just reads it.  It took me a few tries to get it positioned right.  I started out with it at the top of my TV, and that was no good – it was telling me that I was only doing the exercises about 50% right, and I knew I was doing better than that.  Then I moved it below the TV, and it got a lot more accurate.  Finally I got it positioned just right at the very front of my TV shelf, and it reads me really really well – I’m consistently between 80 and 90%.  If it’s telling me that I’m doing an exercise 85% right and I concentrate on getting my arms up a little higher, I watch the % tick up a few numbers.  If I try to slack off a little, I get almost instant feedback telling me that I need to focus.  It’s like having an aerobics instructor in front of you, except you don’t have to put on a perky spandex outfit and leave your house.

The one thing that the camera doesn’t read so well is the floor exercise portion.  My % score usually drops by about ten as soon as the workout moves to the floor.  But, like that five pound weight gain that I get every single month when I have my period, I just expect it and ignore it.  The other problem with the floor exercises is that often you’re supposed to have your head down, or even turned away from the TV, and Jenny does not do a good job telling you that you need to change sides or do the next rep.  For the next version of the game I think the designers really need to focus on those exercises that need more audio cues, and have Jenny count you down and tell you to change sides and all that, every time.  This is never a problem with the standing exercises though, only the floor exercises.

My favorite part of the whole thing is that you get to choose which muscle group you really want to work on, and then get to further choose between burn, strengthen, or tone.  I mean, all of your muscles are going to get some kind of work out, but if you choose abs, expect a lot of crunches and double leg lifts.  If you choose legs, you get less floor work and more jumping.  And if you own hand weights, a balance ball, or an aerobic stepper platform, the game will incorporate those into your routine as well.  Whatever I choose, there’s good variety and after eight weeks I’m not at all tired of the exercises.  There are muscle groups I’ve never chosen, so I’m sure there are a lot more exercises for me to explore.

The workouts that I’m getting are intense.  I almost always do a 30 minute routine, and the first 20 minutes just kill me – constant movement.  After that it slows down a bit, with some floor work and more breaks.  At the end I’m always sweaty, a little out of breath, and tired – just what I want from a workout.  I never felt that tired after a workout DVD, and I realize now it’s because I wasn’t pushing myself hard enough.  It’s so easy to slack of when nobody’s telling you that you are.  As hard as I’m working, though, one small thing on the game that just seems wrong is the calorie counter.  It will tell you how many calories you’ve burned, but it will lie.  Monday, for example, I did a 30 minute burn routine focusing on legs.  It was intense, and I absolutely got a great workout.  But there’s no way that I burned over 600 calories in 30 minutes.  I would only burn half of that jogging.  So until they fix that equation, ignore it.

There are other parts of the game that I don’t really use.  For example, there are challenges that can get you ready for a bathing suit, a New Year’s resolution plan, and a de-stressing challenge that’s basically yoga.  My daughter loves to do that one.  I set her up with her own profile so that she would stop messing with mine, and she’ll do yoga for an hour at a time.

To sum up, I would definitely recommend this game for anyone wanting a tiring routine with lots of variety.  You’ve got the freedom to move around without holding a controller, and the added motivation of seeing yourself on camera.  It’s helped me get stronger and smaller during the coldest part of winter, a time when I usually wouldn’t be getting any purposeful exercise at all.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 & 8. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.

Tags: Jeny McCarthy, Wii, Your Shape

Is BMI meaningless, especially for kids?

Mar 4, 2010 Kids, Weight Loss

I was quoted this morning in a piece on ABCNews.com about tracking kids’ health through the use of BMI.  An adult’s BMI is calculated using height and weight, and that number puts you in the underweight, normal, overweight, or obese category.  It doesn’t take into account muscle mass, cholesterol, blood pressure, sugar levels, activity levels, waist size, or any other indicator of health and fitness.

And when you start talking about BMI for kids, it gets more complicated, because a BMI that’s considered OK for a ten-year-old is obese for a seven-year-old.  I don’t think using BMI to track kids’ health is a good idea at all.  (However, unlike most of the commenters on the ABC piece, I don’t think trying to improve kids’ health is a commie-liberal-big brother idea either – those commenters get paranoid and nutty pretty fast.)  [Please note: the comments link has been working on and off all day; the link is correct, it's a problem with ABCNews.com.]  Whether a kid is healthy or not is complicated.  My son was in the top 5% on the BMI charts for a seven-year-old when he was seven, which is what triggered the note home.  The problem is that the kids’ charts compare kids by age.  My son was towering over the other kids in his class, so the comparison was completely out of whack.  The charts allow for the fact the older kids are supposed to have a higher BMI, but not for kids who are very tall for their age.

It’s just one of those things where a number or a label without information is useless.  I knew the assessment was ridiculous, but had to actually look up the info and explain the BMI-by-age concept to The Ass to talk him down after he saw the letter.  He’s not a stupid guy.  He’s actually quite smart, smarter than me in many ways.  But the government told him his son was obese and he took them at their word.  That’s a problem on many levels.

What’s the answer?  I have no clue.  I’m lucky that I have one kid who chooses to eat like a health nut and another who is active enough that he burns off the huge amount of carbs that he consumes.  If one of them had a health problem I would expect my doctor to talk to me about it.  He’s got all of my kids’ information right there in front of him, and even more important, he’s got my kids right in front of him.  Does he need the government’s guidance talking to me about my kids’ weights?  I don’t think so, but if they’re going to tell him anything, I’d rather it be something useful, like whether or not my kids can run and play with their classmates and how they do on fitness tests.  What their blood tests should look like.  And yes, whether their measurements are in a safe range, based on many factors.  Using one number to target kids will include kids who don’t need the intervention and exclude kids who actually need the help.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted.  Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: ABC news, BMI, Weight

A “Nightmare” of a meal at Mojito

Feb 28, 2010 Around NYC

Back in May of 2009, Kitchen Nightmares – one of my favorite shows – filmed an episode in my neighborhood, at local Cuban restaurant Mojito.  It’s never a good sign for a restaurant to make it onto the show, and I felt glad that I had never eaten there before.  I’ve seen plenty of episodes with rotting food and bug-covered kitchens, and I’d told myself more than once that if I ever found out I’d eaten at one of the Kitchen Nightmares restaurants, I would promptly make myself throw up just for good measure, no matter how long ago the meal had been.  Seriously people, kitchens crawling with bugs; food older than my kids; staff members that act so cringe-worthy on camera I can’t even imagine how much worse they are off camera.

But my love for my websites was apparently greater than my fear of food poisoning, because I managed to snag a reservation one of the nights they were shooting and convinced The Ass to go with me.  I was hoping to write it all up for Filming In Brooklyn, but of course the production made me sign so many papers I decided in the end it wouldn’t be worth the headache and kept quiet (online, anyway) about our little adventure.  So, basically, we paid a babysitter to watch our kids while we paid to go eat in a restaurant that we knew to be so incredibly bad it had made it onto Kitchen Nightmares.  We did this willingly, enthusiastically even.

If you ever get a chance to eat during the filming of one of these shows, you want to do it on the last night – after Chef Gordon Ramsay has worked his magic and brought the restaurant around.  We were definitely not there after the make-over.  The food was pretty bad.  But of course, we weren’t there for the food.  We were there to see the show get produced, maybe hear a few expletives straight from Ramsay’s mouth, and perhaps even get on TV.

We were seated against the back wall of the restaurant, which gave me a good view of everything that was going on, and gave The Ass a great view of the back wall and the giant boom mic that would occasionally hover over my head.  I would know it was there because we’d be talking about something personal – the kids, gossip, it was a date after all! – and all of a sudden The Ass would ask me how my food was, out of nowhere.  That was the only way I knew we were on camera – the cameras were zooming in on us from across the room.

The cameras got close to us only when I sent something back.  Sending something back is something that I hardly ever do.  I mean, something has to be just downright awful, or simply the wrong order, for me to send it back.  I’m more likely to leave hungry and never ever return.  But we had been told on the way in that if we didn’t like something, we should let a producer know.  I let the producer know that my rice and beans were pretty gross (come on, how do you mess up rice and beans?), and I would absolutely not say that I was pushed to send them back, but I was encouraged.  Or rather, the producer looked so hopeful that I would send it back that I just couldn’t let her down.  So I sent it back, and got something new, and that was that.  The rest of the meal wasn’t great, but wasn’t worth sending back either.

The whole time we were there, we didn’t hear any shouting, didn’t see any drama, didn’t get to watch Chef Ramsay foam at the mouth.  No staff members fled in tears.  All in all, kind-of a let down.  Chef Ramsay did wander through the dining room a couple of times but never came to our table.  This was his night to observe, to see how the staff and owners do on their own before getting his help.  No fireworks.

The episode finally aired this week (you can watch the Mojito episode of Kitchen Nightmares here) and while we don’t appear in it for even a split second, it’s a good episode, you should watch.  It’s fun seeing how shows are made (and I really wish I could find a way to resurrect Filming in Brooklyn without giving up on sleep entirely), so if the show comes to your town you should try to get in.  But remember, if you actually want good food, try to get a reservation for the last day!

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Chef Gordon Ramsay, Clinton Hill, Filming In Brooklyn, Kitchen Nightmares, Mojito