Grasshopper New Media Presents...

I’ve been scurrying through my recipes in preparation for our annual beach-fest.  This is the weekend that we, along with my 6 siblings, their families and my mother gather on the coast of Maine for sun and fun…  All together we are 7 siblings+6 spouses+ 24 cousins+ 1 mother.  We’ve been getting together for the [...]

Many pieces had to fall in to place to make us reach a point where we decided to have all 9 of us live together. My mother passed away and my nephew’s non-custodial mother moved away from the area where my brother lived. He wouldn’t have left there if they were still around. My husband [...]

The kids are busy, I get that. They have school, homework, soccer, etc. But I still want them to contribute to the house and its upkeep. Yet getting them to do chores is like asking them to swallow hot coals. Still, I needed to solve this problem. Parenting advisers say, “Pick Your Battles.” Well, this [...]

The economic forecast is grim. Cloudy with a chance of relatives… moving in. Many of us our looking for ways to tighten our belts, many are in dire straits, dealing with job loss, plummeting values on all our assets; it ain’t easy and it doesn’t look like it is easing up any time soon. Yesterday [...]

For this week’s column, I am going to cheat just a little bit. See, when I accepted the challenge to write stuff for this wonderful site, I hoped to bring a working Mom’s perspective with each and every post. I figured that that was the reason for my being at this particular table.
I [...]

One girlfriend from back home, four flirtini’s and six full seasons of Sex and the City leave me thinking about life, love and friendships. Call it nostalgia or just call me crazy, but why does life always seem sweeter in memories?
Before I moved away for university, I had a full life. I had a little [...]

One of the things I realized after a while of being an at-home mom, was how similar running a home was to running a business. While the “widgets” you produce are children and hopefully happy adults, in some ways, it’s very analogous to any other business venture.
For example, household finances are just another version [...]

When Stew and I met, he had recently moved here (Portland, Maine) from the Buffalo area, where his son, Mo, age 8 still lived. Stew hated being so far from his son and as soon as he and I became serious, vacations and major holidays revolved around spending time with Mo. That was as it [...]

I’m sitting here typing while the boys watch shows on the television. Currently we’re giggling at an episode of “The Suite Life With Zach and Cody”. Other favorites of late include “Ben10″, “Hannah Montana”, and “Star Wars: Clone Wars.” I was discussing it with a friend recently and realized that most of [...]

I work in a middle school.  Middle school is that scary place where teens and preteens try to figure out who they are and where they belong and what in the world to do with their hormones and deodorant, all the while being expected to do their homework and pass their classes and navigate the [...]