Category: Motherhood

Last week my husband asked me what I wanted for Mother’s Day. I thought long and hard and honestly I couldn’t think of something. Don’t get me wrong a new diamond wouldn’t hurt anybody, but I really don’t need anything. Then, I thought of my friend Tricia and decided to give up my wish for hers.

Almost three years ago I met her, a woman like no other in my life time. It was a hot summer day and we were both at the pool chasing after our crazy toddlers. Mine was a little over 3 and hers just 18 months old. Her contagious laugh and loud kindness are the traits that I enjoy the most when I am in her company; she masters the ability of making people feel special.

Time passed and Thomas, her baby boy, struggled to breath and eat. He was born with a congenital defect called Double Aortic Arch, which caused severe vascular compression of the trachea and air restriction into the lungs. Continue reading “Brave Heart”

United States is a super power in the world in many aspects. However, there is one area in which it fails like any undeveloped country: the absence of paid maternity leave policy.

When I first moved to the US in 2005, I was 24. I was single and had no plans of having children, yet I thought there was a maternity leave policy similar to my home country Colombia, back then 14 weeks. Soon enough I learned, when one of my best friends had her first baby, that the Family & Medical Leave Act in general only guarantees that a woman won’t lose her job for 12 weeks, but if she wants to get paid, she had to accumulate paid vacation time. Continue reading “Licence to Procreate”

I am not an athletic person now nor when I was growing up. Not only did I not like sports, but my home country was not very supportive of anything besides soccer for boys back in the eighties. Also, my mom had to work full time to support us, so she didn’t have the time or means to sign me up for extracurricular activities.

However, even though I hated contact sports, I had to play at school. Against my will, because I was one of the tallest girls in my class—I have been 5’7’’ since I was 13–the coaches always chose me to play basketball in grade and high school.

I remember finishing every game all bruised up and with a couple of sprained fingers that looked like Italian sausages, swollen and purple-grayish!

Continue reading “Cheerleader Mom”

I have been an Olympics fanatic since I was a little girl. Therefore, last Friday I watched the entire inaugural ceremony of the Rio 2016 Summer Games, and besides learning Brazilian history and a bunch of new country names, I also learned that “Super Model Cat-Walk on High Heels” had became a new sports discipline at the Maracana Stadium.

Kidding aside, over the weekend I watched different competitions of men and women’s cycling, beach volleyball, gymnastics, and swimming, the latter, the sport of Dana Vollmer. This amazing athlete–Gold Medalist of the 100 meters butterfly at the 2012 London Games–returned to the pool to defend her gold and world record. However, she was defeated by Sweden’s Sarah Sjöström, and Canada’s Penny Oleksiak, both 16. Continue reading “Olympic Mom”

For the past two and a half years I have been buying my son Lego sets, age appropriate or not. Secretly, I bought them for myself, because I missed out on the experience when I was a kid. Finally, in the past week, my son fell in love with them and has spent hours playing during the last days of the summer vacation before he starts kindergarten.

Although he plays well most of the time, he is a little impatient and complaints if his Lego creations don’t cause intergalactic explosions. Then, I have to remind him to be thankful, telling him about the children all over the world who have nothing to play with, except what they can build with their own hands out of garbage. This is Esteban Quispe’s story; the seventeen-year-old genius from Bolivia who build a robot like Disney’s Wall-E out of waste from a dump. Continue reading “Building Blocks for Greatness”