Hi. I'm Allison, and I'm writing this at 9:40 on a Monday night with a cold cup of decaf next to me and a baby monitor that keeps crackling every time one of my kids rolls over. That feels like the most honest way to start a blog about family life, so here we are.
I'm 32. I live in a rented two-bedroom duplex in East Oakland, right about where it stops being Oakland and starts being San Leandro, with my husband Dan and our boy-girl twins, Theo and June. They were born in April 2024, which makes them about seventeen months old as I type this. Theo is loud and cautious. June is quiet and fearless. Nobody warned me that was a combination.
A little about us
Dan is an HVAC technician, which means in July he comes home smelling like attic insulation and in January he gets called out at 6 a.m. because someone's furnace died. I'm a dental hygienist. I went back to work three days a week when the twins were almost a year old, and the other four days I'm home with them. Yes, that means I spend part of my week cleaning strangers' teeth and the rest of it trying to brush the teeth of two people who clamp their mouths shut like tiny vaults. There's a joke in there somewhere.
We are not a fancy household. We rent. We drive a nine-year-old minivan with a sliding door that only opens on the second try. Our kitchen has about four feet of usable counter. But we're doing okay, and a lot of that is because of one very unglamorous thing.
The spreadsheet
When I found out I was pregnant with two babies at once, I did what any reasonable person does: I cried in the car, then I went home and opened a spreadsheet.
That spreadsheet has been running ever since. It started as a list of what two of everything would cost. Then it became our monthly budget. Then it grew tabs for diapers, daycare quotes, our PG&E bill, a meal plan, and a very sad tab called "things that broke." Friends started asking me for copies. My sister said, half as a joke, "You should just put this stuff online." I laughed. Then I thought about it for about six months. Then I bought a domain.
So part of this blog is the spreadsheet brain talking. I want to show real numbers, the ones people tend to leave out, because when I was pregnant I couldn't find anyone who'd just tell me what things actually cost for a normal family in an expensive area.
So why "Maple"?
Two reasons, and they're both a little silly.
The first is pancakes. Theo and June agree on almost nothing when it comes to food. Theo will eat any vegetable as long as it's green and nothing that's orange. June lives on cheese and air. But maple syrup pancakes, the small silver-dollar kind I make on Sunday mornings, are the one breakfast both of them eat every single time, no negotiation. On a hard week, those pancakes feel like a peace treaty.
The second is the tree outside our duplex. There's a big maple on the curb strip out front, which is not all that common on our block, and it turns a ridiculous shade of red in late fall. When the twins were newborns and I was up at 3 a.m. feeding one while the other finally slept, I'd stare out the front window at that tree under the streetlight. It was the one thing in the room that wasn't crying. I got weirdly attached to it.
Mama & Maple just stuck.
What I'll write about
Here's the plan, loosely:
- Recipes that toddlers will actually eat and adults don't have to pretend to enjoy. Lots of sheet pans and slow cookers. Nothing that requires a mandoline.
- Motherhood, the real version. Twin stuff, working-mom guilt, the days that go sideways.
- Baby and toddler gear, including what we bought and never used, because that list is long and a little embarrassing.
- Family money: budgets, daycare math, utility bills, how we keep a family of four afloat in the Bay Area on two regular jobs.
- My life in general, which is mostly laundry, but occasionally something interesting happens.
I'm not an expert in anything except possibly getting two toddlers into car seats in under four minutes. Anything health-related, please ask your pediatrician, not a blogger. What I can offer is what worked for us, what didn't, and what it cost.
A small promise
I'll try to post a couple of times a month. Some weeks that'll slip, because a twin will get an ear infection or Dan will be on call every night or I'll just be tired. I'd rather write fewer honest posts than a lot of polished ones that don't sound like me.
If you're reading this while rocking a baby, or hiding in the bathroom for four quiet minutes, or eating crackers over the sink for dinner: hi. I see you. Pull up a chair. There might be pancakes.
Allison
