Should you give kids just a sip?

I’m very happy to be part of #TalkEarly’s blogger team this year, working to encourage families to have a lifetime of open and honest conversations with their kids about alcohol and making healthy choices.

The holidays are officially upon us and with that time comes entertaining, parties, and the toasting of all we have to be grateful for. For a lot of families, including mine, it may also be a time of year where our kids see us drinking socially more than we normally do. Upon watching the adults in their life enjoy themselves with a drink and friends or seeing champagne fizzle in a  glass, it may lead to the following question:

Can I have a sip?

I’ve always said yes, as my desire was to de-mystify alcohol and drinking and be as transparent as possible with my kids about all of it. It’s also what my parents did with me. And what their parents did with them. My mom and dad also spent time in Europe right before I was born and they felt that the laid-back, no-nonsense attitude towards drinking they saw there (particularly in regards to kids and young people) made a lot of sense. 

Vegetable Soup

Today would have been my grandmother's birthday, so to honor her memory I made her delicious vegetable soup last night and told this story to my kids.

Once, back in the olden days (sometime in 2003), we went to see Grandmom Joyce at her tiny, perfectly clean house in Trenton, NJ. My uncle and my cousin were also there visiting. They're both vegetarians so when we asked what was for lunch, Grandmom Joyce said: "vegetable soup". When we sat down to eat, it was clear that the soup had about 6 pounds of delicious, tender pot roast in it. My uncle looked confused.

The ongoing struggle w Imposter Syndrome

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I originally wrote this in 2010 and came across it today. I really needed to read it. My life has changed a lot in the past five years, but for better or worse,  I'm still the same. So I updated this post to reflect my current reality in the hopes that someone else might feel better knowing they're not the only one out there pretending at life.
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Ever since I was a kid, I've felt like a faker. A big phony, as Holden Caulfield would put it. And that feeling persists. Throughout my life, on the occasions that I’ve done well or had people praise me for something, one part of me has always sort of felt like: “Well thanks, but if you had any idea of what I was really like…”  Let's be honest - I'm not what I seem.

I've always been awkward like that. I wore the wrong clothes, and I always said something completely random that made people wonder if I'd recently suffered some sort of head trauma.  I tried too hard when that wasn't cool, and I didn't care when I was supposed to.