You’ll find old posts from the original Country Mouse Confessions blog here. I haven’t edited anything from those old posts, they’re just here for nostalgia. And to remind me how far I’ve come. And because I’m too lazy to do anything else with them, but deleting them feels like erasing some really hard-won lessons.
2 in 52 is just going to be a celebration of that, the togetherness I'm building in my second year as a mom, and the way food acts as the glue. I'm sure the meaning of this project will change and grow with me as I change and grow as a person, a mother, and a cook. But right now, at the beginning, this is what I'm committing to: 2 in 52 is the food diary that's taking me from Mom to a 1 Year Old to Mom of a 2 Year Old. Our year, summed up in 52 dishes that fed us. They're the fence-posts between my baby becoming my toddler. They're the glue.
The deeper into this writing project I get, the more I realize it has very little to do with Nora after all. Cooking for my family is how I've defined myself in this brave new world of motherhood. It's not just Nora I cook for, though. It's my husband and my parents, and neighbors and friends from church. And myself. I bake, especially, for myself.
Giving someone a cup of bone broth is the equivalent of offering the warmest hug. It revitalizes you in ways other foods just can't, stirring something warm and good awake in your soul, like whispers from the universe that everything is going to work out. It is a sigh and a nod and a, "Don't you worry." It's comfort in a cup, and it'll chase whatever chill you're carrying around right away.
One of the first things my father told me about being a parent is that the days are long and the years are short. It's the most accurate description of motherhood I've found so far, perfect and simple and comprehensive in summing it up
Maybe it's because I'm 30 now, or because the older I get the more introverted I become, or because I insisted that I was going to take on no more new clients and then took on three new clients, plus two new writing projects of my own and a new column I want to pitch to a site I've never worked with before, but I woke up this morning and I wanted to cancel all our weekend plans.
Country Mouse Confessions is refocusing a bit to cast a wider net over everything going on in my life. What does this mean for the website? Well, for one thing... cute baby photos.
The four-month sleep regression snuck in through the back door last week. Two nights of no sleep for me and James was avoiding eye contact and backing away slowly any time I rage-stomped into a room. He's a smart man; his survival skills are on point.
Dear Nora: You haven't figure it out yet, but your Mama is sort of a hot mess. I wrote you a one-month letter and then I blinked and now it's today and you're four months old and all I have to show for it are 14 arm rolls (we count them almost daily) and four knee dimples and 47,823 photographs of you.
