"A dozen chickens are less trouble than one neurotic house cat."-Ask Granny, via Amy, of course.
From today's Bee:
A new coffee company expansion is under way in the Sacramento region.
While rival Starbucks is shuttering hundreds of stores nationwide, Peet's Coffee and Tea is adding two more retail locations here this year – in addition to four already opened in 2008. The six new stores, which bring the area's total to 16, are in El Dorado Hills, Fair Oaks, Roseville and Sacramento.
It's also vastly expanding its shelf space for bagged coffee sales in local supermarkets.
Peet's CEO Patrick O'Dea says Sacramento was something of a test market for the company – "a good learning experience" on how to take its brand into a new city.
The results are most positive in the grocery sector, he says. Two years ago, Peet's was a "distant second" to Starbucks in terms of grocery sales.
Now it's No. 1, with a 15 percent market share, according to O'Dea.
Peet's, which was founded 42 years ago in Berkeley, also is contracting with third parties to open dozens of kiosks in local supermarkets, colleges and other locations, the exec reports.
How is Peet's able to expand when Starbucks is scaling back? One reason is that it hasn't saturated the market, as its giant rival perhaps did.
Another reason is that Peet's coffee is AWESOME. Apparently Bob Shallit has never tried it.
Fashion left me behind about ten years ago when everything switched to stretchy, drapy super-snaggable polyblends and 1970s patterns. I am hoping that eighteen months from now, when my body has settled into whatever it decides is post-baby normal and I need to finally replace my wardrobe, clothing will once again be tailored, monochrome and 100% cotton.Fingers crossed.
For now, I am still in the purgatory of maternity clothes. And I have a few words to say on the subject.
Designers, listen. I know we’re not friends. You don’t like me and I don’t like you. I don’t spend nearly enough on clothes to be your target market, and you make clothes apparently only to pain and insult me. Your maternity clothes seem designed around skinny women wearing artificial belly bumps rather than real women with real pregnancies. I am going to charitably assume that you design the clothes you do out of well-meaning ignorance rather than sadistic scorn for heterosexual procreators, so I’m going to help you out with a little advice.
3. A pregnant woman’s stomach extends more than two inches below her belly button. I realize that in your youthful days you may have found a little breeze down there kinda sexy. I do not find breezes sexy. I find them drafty. And I would like to be able to walk down the stairs without everyone below me staring fixedly at the two inches of exposed stretch marks that are feeling a chill because you can’t make a shirt that meets my pants. And this is not a size issue. Lane Bryant’s maternity clothes do the same stupid thing.
4. I do not actually want to share my cleavage with the world. They will get enough of an eyeful once I’m nursing. Until then, kindly give me a neckline that allows me to bend over and pick up my current children without flashing the old man sitting next to me.
To read the rest of her advice, click here.
First, and perhaps most obviously, many people with larger families encounter negative attitudes almost daily. Snide comments from strangers, nosy questions about their private lives, or unsupportive extended family all combine to make the members of a big family feel more like a circus side-show than legitimate members of society. The announcement of a new pregnancy is very often not met with joy, but with condemnation (if you are on the receiving end of such an announcement, be the exception and offer a simple congratulations). I could compile quite a list of all the obnoxious things that have been said to those of us with a passel of young’uns, but I'd rather not go off on that tangent. You'll just have to take my word for it that for many people, there does not appear to be any sort of regulatory gizmo betwixt their brains and their mouths. Yet I persist in believing that it's really not that difficult to be kind, or at the very least, silent!
Along those same lines, it often seems that families with lots of children are viewed with a more critical eye than those with the standard two. If a child acts up, it is of course because they come from such a large family and obviously don’t get enough attention. If their clothing is threadbare, it is because the parents must be financially strapped. If the baby has a dirty face, it is apparent that no one cares enough to clean it. Whereas a smaller family might be given the benefit of the doubt (all children throw tantrums at times, like to wear one item of clothing until it consists of three strands, and smear food upon their faces), for the larger family it becomes an opportunity to criticize. A mother pregnant with her second child is offered sympathy as she struggles with morning sickness and fatigue, but ask a mother pregnant with her fifth if she was offered any. This makes it difficult, even in a church setting, for those parents to share any difficulties they are having. I personally struggle with painful varicose veins that are aggravated during pregnancy. However, asking for prayer has sometimes been met with the attitude that such are my “just desserts” and so why would God heal me? I suspect the same attitude crops up when rebellious children, or money woes, are the issue.
Parents of large families are not out to prove anything. We’re not vying for your admiration, we aren’t trying to win any awards, we don’t view childbearing as some sort of contest (someone asked my husband during our last pregnancy if we were trying to “beat the Duggars”), and we don’t think you’re less spiritual than we are if you have fewer than we do. We aren’t asking anyone for special treatment, but it doesn’t seem too much to ask for common courtesy. Resist the urge to count out loud as you see us go by. Don’t marvel that we do, in fact, know all of our offspring’s names (even—given a minute or two—their birthdates)! And for the love of all the little green men on Mars, don’t ask us if we know what causes that. We do. And we enjoy it, although not as often as is (oddly) assumed.
Almost as difficult to deal with, in a way, are the effusively positive attitudes. Yes, this seems like a really strange thing to say in light of the previous paragraph, but having to decline imminent canonization is not pleasant. People who squeal, gush, flatter and insist that I must be, I simply MUST BE the most patient/organized/disciplined/loving/spiritual being ever to walk the earth wear me out. I have stopped volunteering the information regarding the numbers of my offspring mostly due to these reactions. I don’t have time to field a barrage of OMG!’s from the checkout lady at Wal-Mart while my ice cream melts. Plus, I don’t think it wins me any friends in the line behind me.
Please don’t put me on a pedestal. Honestly, it’s really lonely up there. We are called to be iron sharpening iron to one another, and in order to do that we have to be able to get close to somebody. When the comments run along the lines of “You’re my hero!” and “I could NEVER do what you do! You’re a saint!” I have to wonder what, exactly, the commenters think I am doing that gives me that status. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just a woman trying to do her best with the family God has given her, and I deeply value the support of friends who don’t expect me to have all the answers. You might be surprised to learn that the average mom-to-a-gob lives her days in much the same way as you do: she gets up, sees what needs doin', and does it. One day at a time, one foot in front of the other.
I don't think I qualify as a "mom-to-a-gob" yet. Maybe someday... How many do you think constitutes a "gob?"
