bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Not very creative.

    The county library system has six children's books about the history of the U.S. interstate highway system.

    I checked them out to see if any were good enough to qualify as "living books" for 20th century American history.

    Here are four of the six titles:

    • From Trails to Turnpikes
    • Eastern Trails:  From Footpaths to Turnpikes
    • From Trails to Superhighways:  The Story of America's Roads
    • From Path to Highway:  The Story of the Boston Post Road

    Four different publishers, four different authors.

    (The last two are pretty good, by the way.  FTTS:TSOAR, a Messner edition, has some terribly dated language about Native Americans and only takes us 2/3 of the way through the construction of the interstate system, but I know how to work around both those problems. FPTH:TSOTBPR, aimed at younger readers, is by the always excellent Gail Gibbons.)


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  • Introduction to the Devout Life 1-1.

    This week's new project I hope I will actually finish:  reading Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales.  I became interested in Salesian spirituality recently after reading a bit posted on Conversion Diary, and went on to read the book that Jen recommended.  From what I have read so far, the aspect of Francis's spirituality that jumps out at me the most is an attitude of cheerful detachment.    I could use a lesson in detachment for sure…

    So I have decided to attack St. Francis's most well-known work, and see if therein lies the program I have been looking for.

    Part 1, Chapter 1 is entitled "What true Devotion is." I love it when writers begin by defining their terms.  It makes me feel like we are the same kind of thinker.  

    Here's a bit that should give anyone pause (I have added paragraph breaks for improved blogginess):

    … we  all colour devotion according to our own likings and dispositions. 

    • One man sets great value on fasting, and believes himself to be leading a  very devout life, so long as he fasts rigorously, although the while  his heart is full of bitterness;–and while he will not moisten his  lips with wine, perhaps not even with water, in his great abstinence, he does not scruple to steep them in his neighbour's blood, through slander and detraction. 
    • Another man reckons himself as devout because he repeats many prayers daily, although at the same time he does not refrain from all manner of angry, irritating, conceited or insulting speeches among his family and neighbours. 
    • This man freely opens his purse in almsgiving, but closes his heart to all gentle and forgiving feelings towards those who are opposed to him; 
    • while that one is ready  enough to forgive his enemies, but will never pay his rightful debts save under pressure. 

    Meanwhile all these people are conventionally   called religious, but nevertheless they are in no true sense really devout…. 

    [M]any people dress up an exterior with the visible acts expressive of earnest  devotion, and the world supposes them to be really devout and spiritual-minded, while all the time they are mere lay figures, mere phantasms of devotion.

    Ouch!  It's very easy to convince ourselves that the good works we do are evidence that we love God.  But I think what St. Francis is getting at here is that, while anybody is capable of doing some good and even pious things, if we are truly devoted to the Lord then our devotion will become the common root from which every good thing (and not just the good things we like doing) can flower.

    I find there, too, a little bit of consolation for those of us who feel so many others are so much farther along than we are.  Appearances of piety aren't everything.  

    Moving on, here's an analogy I like:

     The ostrich never flies,–the hen  rises with difficulty, and achieves but a brief and rare flight, but  the eagle, the dove, and the swallow, are continually on the wing, and soar high;–even so sinners do not rise towards God, for all their movements are earthly and earthbound. Well-meaning people, who have not as yet attained a true devotion, attempt a manner of flight by means of their good actions, but rarely, slowly and heavily; while really devout  men rise up to God frequently, and with a swift and soaring wing. 

    "Rarely, slowly, and heavily"… yeah, that sounds familiar.  I like the image of the busy, somewhat lovable,  but essentially common little hen for the "well-meaning people," and how he names three very different flighted birds as types for the devoted, as if to underscore that there's quite a lot of variety and diversity to be found among the kinds of devoted life that can be lived.

    Of course, a hen can never become an eagle.  A much more hopeful analogy is to be found near the end of the chapter:

    Even as a man just recovering from  illness, walks only so far as he is obliged to go, with a slow and  weary step, so the converted sinner journeys along as far as God commands him but slowly and wearily, until he attains a true spirit of devotion, and then, like a sound man, he not only gets along, but he  runs and leaps in the way of God's Commands, and hastens gladly along the paths of heavenly counsels and inspirations. 

    See?  The limp can be cured.   Let's see if St. Francis can provide a program of exercises….

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  • Three homeschooling lists.

    Every weekend during the school year, I open an assignment book to a new weekly page, ready for me to write down the week's assignments for each child.   I pull a particular binder off the shelf and begin paging through it, looking to see what I should plan for each subject.   As I find each bit of information, I write down the week's assignments in the spaces for each subject, occasionally making small changes where necessary to make up for a missed day here, or to leave room for an extra lesson there.  

    I have daily pages in the assignment book as well; every morning I write on them a to-do list for each child, referring back to the weekly page I made over the weekend.   I often rearrange assignments within a given week, swapping Tuesday's for Thurday's, or finishing everything up early so as to get Friday off; so I never make advance plans any more finely than "weekly." 

    The Master Binder was assembled before the beginning of the year.   I'm still working on the one for 2010-2011.  But I have the first three pages finished.

    The first three pages of my binder are three sets of lists that I find very, very helpful when I go each week to do the lesson planning.  Maybe you will find them helpful too.  The lists are redundant:  they each give me the same information, a.k.a. "the basic weekly schedule."  The information is presented in slightly different form on each page.

    Schedule by School Subject.  This is usually the one I put together first.  Here are the first few lines of it:

    Religion:  5th grader, M.  1st grader, MW.  Family read-aloud:  F.

    Literature:  Family read alouds:  MWF

    Journaling:  5th grader and 1st grader:  MWF

    Math:  5th grader, 5 lessons/week, MWF.  1st grader, 3 lessons/week, MWF.  4yo, WF.

    …

    Grammar:  5th grader,  T Th

    You see how this one works —  for every subject that we study, it tells me which days of the week each child is supposed to "do" that subject.     I use this page mainly over the weekend when I'm writing down the upcoming week's lesson plans, to make sure that I include about the right amount of material from every subject.  To streamline that task, I have listed the subjects in the same order that they appear on the weekly assignment page.  Once I run down the list, I'm done with my weekly planning.  Incidentally,  the first half of this page has all my MWF (non-co-schooled) subjects, the second half has all the Tues-Thurs (co-schooled) subjects. 

    Work Load by Child.  This page has three schedules on it, one for each child; each child's schedule has a list for Monday, a list for Tuesday, and so on.  It's the basic weekly plan of the subjects each child will study each day of the week.  For example, my first-grader this year has a schedule that looks like this:

    • Monday:  Catechism, listen to reading, journal, math, handwriting page, reading practice
    • Tuesday:  Nature study, music, reading/language practice
    • Wednesday:  Catechism, listen to reading, journal, math, handwriting/spelling, reading practice
    • Thursday:  Ancient world history, art, reading/language practice 
    • Friday:  Family religion read aloud, listen to reading, journal, math, spelling

    Even though this page essentially re-presents the same information that the first page does, I use it a bit differently, tending to turn to it when I am setting up the daily pages for each child.  If it's Wednesday, and I'm writing the to-do list for the first-grader, I can see which subjects go on his to-do list.   I also have this same page in grid format.

    The third page is more for me than for the children:  Teaching Load by Weekday.  This page has five lists, one each for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.  Each list tells me what teaching tasks I can expect to spend my time on.  It doesn't include work that children can do entirely independently — for example, my fifth-grader's math lessons and journal writing don't appear, since he can do those with essentially no help from me.  It also doesn't include the subjects that are nearly always taught to my kids by some other adult.  So, for example, Mondays:

    • Assemble school bags to take with us in the car
    • Preschool music class and my gym workout
    • Help 1st grader with catechism
    • Read aloud to children
    • Help 1st grader with journal entry
    • Math lesson with 1st grader
    • Reading practice with 1st grader
    • Phonics with preschooler
    • Assemble school bags to take to Hannah's on Tuesday

    Mostly so I can keep it to a single page, I take daily planning, record keeping, set-up and clean-up for granted and don't include those in my daily list, although I give myself a long-term planning and record-keeping hour on Wednesdays.  This page shows me, not what my children need to do, but what I need to do that will actually take chunks of my time and direct attention.  I turn to this page first, to see what goes on my personal to-do list for the day.    

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  • 60 things for preschoolers to do on their own.

    Via Cathie.  Some of them are cheating (for example, three of them are each 1/3 of a commercial Memory game) but surely you'll find some good ideas there.

    Don't skip to the list itself without reading the suggestion for how to deploy these activities (the "school box").  It sounds like a great way to begin training a preschooler to do "independent work" while Mom is busy with other kids — always important for homeschoolers, but especially in a larger family.

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  • History schedule.

    Man, I hate doing it like this, but I'm going to have to make a rough pass through scheduling 20th Century US History, and nail down the specific books later, and tweak a little as we go.  By "rough pass," I mean I'm going to have to decide how many weeks to spend on each topic, based only on my guess as to how much good literature will be available for everything.

    Here's my stab.  The listed topics include concepts I want, at least, to touch on in discussions, not necessarily stuff I want to read a whole book about.  I can manage one to two books a week.  

    I hope to use some video and film clips and movies as well, now that we're into the era where video primary sources begin to appear.  In a different post I'll start writing about the sources, text and multimedia, that I choose.  But I may have to select a lot of stuff on the fly.

    Different from previous years, my goal in this year's study is "Bridge the gap between the history they've already learned and the current events they are hearing about in the world today."

    Very Rough Schedule of American History – Topical Arrangement

    Weeks 1-6.  American foreign relations. 

    ●    World War I

    ●    World War II

    ●    Manhattan Project/Nuclear proliferations

    ●    Cold War/Alliances/Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan

    ●    Fall of Eastern bloc

    Possibly also:

    ●    US Space program

    ●    Foreign aid and goodwill building

    ●    What is communism

    Weeks 7-10.  Economic topics

    ●    Depression/War industries

    ●    GI Bill/Postwar baby boom

    ●    “War on poverty”

    ●    Economic crises/natural disasters (using Flood:  Wrestling with the Mississippi by P. Lauber, which covers Mississippi floods in the 1920s and the 1990s)

    Weeks 11-13.  American mobility

    ●    Interstate highway system

    ●    Migrants and immigrants

    Possibly also:

    ●    Air travel

    Weeks 14-17.  Communication technology

    ●    Radio and popular music

    ●    Television and cinema

    ●    The development of computers

    ●    Internet and social media

    Weeks 18-21.  Parties and ideologies

    ●    New deal stuff, economic liberalism (FDR biography)

    ●    Scandals such as Teapot Dome and Watergate

    ●    The “Reagan Revolution” political realignment (Reagan biography)

    ●    Bush v. Gore and red state, blue state

    Weeks 22-26.  Civil rights

    ●    Women's suffrage

    ●    Segregation in the South

    ●    Brown v. Board of Education

    ●    Philosophies/bios of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

    ●    Continuing controversies about American racism

    ●    Disability rights movement

    ●    Election of first African-American president

    ●    Important Supreme Court freedom-of-speech cases with a focus on homeschooling  rights

    Weeks 27-30.  The American experience of childhood changes

    ●    Children's work changes/most children attend school

    ●    Gender and race restrictions are lifted (to be covered through the lens of “heroes and role models”)

    ●    The American family changes

    ●    Roe v. Wade (which we will not cover as a multifamily discussion due to its sensitive nature)

    Weeks 31-34.  Roots of the War on Terror

    ●    Post-WWII partition of the Middle East

    ●    Iran hostage crisis

    ●    Terrorism

    ●    First gulf war

    ●    First attack on WTC

    ●    Attacks of September 11, 2001

    ●    Second Gulf War

    ●    National security vs. civil liberties

    Weeks 35-36:  make-up weeks.

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  • Smart kid!

    Hurrah for the third grader who, faced with an "invention fair" project, actually invented something that people will probably buy:   the curvy bun for a curvy bratwurst.

    The buns sell for $2.50 for a pack of five at Connell’s Orchard shop in Chippewa Falls, WI. It was Sydney’s idea to package the buns in sets of five because he noticed that curved brats in the area are sold five to a pack. Making these sorts of simple observations prompted his invention in the first place.

    “He said to me, ‘Daddy, how come brats are curved, but the buns are straight?’”Jeremy Claxton recalls.

    “I remember I was going around a slight corner of the road and I had to wait for the corner to end to turn around and say, ‘Dude, I don’t have an answer for you.’”

    What I really like about this is that the boy came up with the idea, but he and his dad eventually consulted a professional baker for help formulating the bun.  Inventions are rarely the work of a single person, and it's good to know when to bring in an outside expert.

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  • A weekend camping menu.

    Planning for the summer's camping trips and other outings has begun.  I'm expecting to go tent-camping with our friends' families at least once or twice this summer, and the other day I called Hannah up to confirm our standard camping menu plan.

    One summer the three families managed to go camping five times, and that was the summer that we streamlined the weekend camping menu to perfection (at least for our families).

    Here are some things to consider when you set up a multi-family campout meal plan.

    (1) Go allergen-free.   If anyone in your camping party has a food allergy or intolerance, don't bring that stuff along if you can help it.  It's not too bad if the allergic person is an adult or a very watchful older child, and if the allergen is confined to a single easy-to-isolate item; but in general, camp food gets strewn all over the place, and it's very hard to keep things separate.  In our case, one of our adult friends has celiac sprue and must avoid wheat; so all our cooked meals and snacks are gluten-free.  (We have made an exception for graham crackers for s'mores, which we think we can control pretty well.)

    (2) No fruit with sticky remains.  Apple cores attract bees and black flies, which are no fun.  If you pack any fresh fruit, stick with things like grapes or maybe clementines, which leave inoffensive, dry little peels.   

    (3)  Consider a cooler-free, and therefore a fresh-meat-free, trip.  I know, I know, half the fun of cooking out is hot dogs roasted on a stick over the campfire, bacon in the morning, and maybe steaks or burgers.  But hear me out.  The cooler and ice necessary to keep all this stuff from poisoning you is HEAVY.  And it's remarkably hard to practice food safety rules when there's only one food prep surface, a wood picnic table, and all your water  bottles are clustered together on it.    This doesn't mean you have to go meatless (although that can work really well).  Shelf-stable meat products work fine:  aseptically packaged, dehydrated, smoked, or canned meats do fine.  Uncracked eggs are okay overnight if you're going to cook them through.    Depending on how they are packaged, hard cheeses will be fine all weekend.  And many fresh vegetables will get no worse than a little wilty.

    (4) Don't rely on a cooking fire the first evening.  You have enough to do — fight Friday rush hour traffic, put up the tents, set boundaries for the children — before you even get the fire started.  Don't keep your kids hungry while you do all this.  Pack a picnic basket.   Use the cooking fire to make snacks later on.

    (4 and a half).  Bring charcoal.  Wood is nice, but finicky.  If it turns out you don't need it, just take the charcoal back home.

    (5) Simplify when dividing up "what to bring."  You can settle up any disparities in cost later.  It's so much easier to remember "My family is in charge of breakfast" than "My family is in charge of the green peppers for Saturday morning breakfast, the canned broth for dinner, and the raisins for the trail mix."

    (6) Consider cooking two meals, not three, on your full day in the woods.  You're all going to be nibbling trail mix and jerky anyway.  Why not just call it lunch?  It'll give you more time for hiking and fishing and stuff.

    (7) For multifamily trips, try "stone soup" to minimize planning.  Have each family bring an assortment of odds and ends to make part of a stew — a few vegetables, potatoes, bits of smoked or dehydrated meats, dried beans or grains, some spices or herbs, canned broth, etc.  (Don't overdo it!  One cup of solids per person is more than enough).  Then put it together and see what you get.   For three families, we always make two different pots of stew:  one on the bland and simple side, and one on the spicy and interesting side.  Part of the fun is deciding which ingredients go into which pot.  (We have been known to throw the leftover beef jerky into the soup.)  We put them into two dutch ovens right after breakfast and let them cook on the coals all day while we hike.  Have some packaged bread or tortillas or chips on the side, and you've got a satisfying and very trouble-free meal.

    (8)  Simplify with "brunch porridge" on the morning before you leave.  Mix it all up and set it to cook on the coals while you squeeze in one last morning hike, then come back and eat it up before taking down your camp.  (We have been known to throw the leftover trail mix — M&Ms and all — into the oatmeal.)  Aseptically packaged or canned milk is nice to have for this purpose, but powdered milk will do if you want to save weight.  

    (9) If you camp a lot with the same people, have a "standing menu."  It's a plan.  You can change it if you want to do something different, but you can also get going much more quickly and spontaneously if you've got a standing default plan.

    Here is this summer's standing weekend non-backpacking camping menu for three families:  six adults and eleven children.  

    Friday Dinner:  Each family brings their own "brown-bag" dinner that requires no cooking.

    Friday Campfire Snack:  S'mores.

    Saturday Breakfast:  Scrambled eggs with sauteed peppers and onions, salsa, and corn tortillas.

    Saturday on the Trail:  Trail mix and jerky.

    Saturday Dinner:  Stone soup.

    Saturday Campfire Snack:  Popcorn.

    Sunday Brunch:  Oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, and dried fruit, made with canned evaporated milk.

    Beverages:  Tang, tea, coffee, powdered hot apple cider.

    Each family is responsible for bringing these things:

    • Their own brown-bag dinner for Friday
    • Enough eggs to feed their family for one breakfast
    • 4-6 cups worth of solid ingredients for stone soup
    • Cooking oil, salt, and dish soap

    Plus:

    • Family #1 brings trail mix/trail snacks for everyone, plus herbal tea
    • Family #2 brings campfire snacks for everyone, plus black tea and powdered cider
    • Family #3 brings breakfast tortillas/veg and oatmeal/mix-ins, plus coffee and Tang

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  • Running off the rails.

    Jen at Conversion Diary spent a week in retreat at a monastery.  (Check out the photos at this post — wah, I want to have lattes on retreat too!)  Here she posts “6 things I learned from living on a monastery prayer schedule.”  In part

    4. It makes you surrender your life to God at the micro level

    I always try to better surrender my life to God, but I often think of it at the macro level alone: e.g. I’ll work on trusting him with what I’ll be doing 10 years from now, my children’s vocations, my writing projects, etc. But living according to a rule of prayer involves even deeper surrender. There have been quite a few times since I’ve been here that I was really into whatever I was doing, and the last thing I wanted to do was set it aside and go back to the church to pray. To let go of my activities requires an act of trust: trust that God will give me the grace to pick up where I left off if whatever I was doing was important in his eyes, that this “interruption” won’t irreparably derail whatever I was doing, etc. I find myself taking these little leaps of trust at almost every prayer time, whereas back at home I simply push back my prayer or meal times to accommodate whatever it was I was doing — no trust necessary.

    This was something I needed to read.

    I am not, really, a time-waster (most days).  I don’t, for example, think that I spend “too much time on the Internet.”  I enjoy blogging and reading blogs and other interesting things, and I spend some time on it most days, and I don’t think the total time is  excessive.  It’s perfectly ordinary to have a hobby, and to use leisure time to do something that’s fun (or to multi-task, as I am doing now as I blog on my netbook while nursing a baby to sleep in a quiet bedroom).

    But I don’t always like the focus I have on it.  It’s hard for me to tear myself away quickly to attend to my children or to begin some task I ought to do.   And it’s a distraction.

    It’s a self-indulgence.

    I keep hinting about wanting to use what I’ve learned to defeat [what I thought of as] gluttony, to combat my next most besetting vice, which is letting this leisure-time activity of mine (and it’s really not just internet use — reading in general is part of it too) consume my attention.  It’s possible that part of the problem is overconsumption, devoting too much time to it, and I guess I haven’t exhausted the possibilities of self-limitation of total hours.  But honestly, I don’t think it is “total time” that is the trouble.  It’s the totality with which I get absorbed, even in taking a very short break to check e-mail or to dash off a quick blog post.  It’s the reluctance to be interrupted.  I think Jen may have put her finger on it a bit in her post.

    Part of my vocation as mother demands that I make myself available to be interrupted when my children need something from me.  I am terrible at this.  Yes, I also need to train my children not to interrupt me for trivial matters, but you know, I want to be a mom who says “Sure, I’ll read you a story” or “Yes, I’ll help you settle that argument” or “Okay, I’ll feed you breakfast.”  I don’t want the first thing I say to my kids in the morning to be “Aaaargh!  What are you doing up already?  It’s not even seven o’clock yet!”  Even if I’m not done with my blog post.

    I am struggling with how to put the pieces together for a strategy to change myself.  If I can do what I’ve already done, what can’t I do?  But I still am not sure how to go about it.  I feel like I need a plan.

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  • Guest Post by Mark: My role in my wife’s fitness and weight loss.

    by Mark

    This is my first stab at guest blogging, so my plan is to keep quality low to maintain room for improvement in later posts.  Perhaps later I will be able to touch on the climbing and homeschooling topics that came up in the responses to the bleg.  

    While Erin and I were sharing the driving to Estes Park,  we discussed my role in her exercise and weight loss successes.   This isn't advice for other husbands per se, but perhaps my experience might be useful to others as they go about supporting a loved one in achieving significant life changes.  

    I came up with ten specific things I did to support my wife.   She claims that I didn't do anything to undermine her efforts, but I'm skeptical that everything I did was helpful.  I assume that most of the readers are familiar with her story, so I'll skip over the  parts of the story where she decided to start exercising, and focus on my response.   

    Here is what I did:

    1) I said “yes” the first time. When Erin asked if we could change our family schedule so that she could get two workouts every week, I said yes without hesitation.  I wasn't sure  what we would cut out to make the time, but I just assumed that we could make it happen.

    2)    Then I said nothing for a long time.  Erin was inflexible in her schedule  because she feared that if she missed any workouts, she might let them all slide.  I didn't like this, but  since she was really going to the gym and working hard, I kept quiet about my desires for more flexibility.      

    3)    I listened, or at least pretended to, every day.  After the exercise program was in full swing, Erin decided to stop being a glutton.  At this point ALL of her conversation topics were about food.  I listened to her talk about calorie counting, I listened to reviews of diet books.  I heard about how many almonds she ate for a snack, and I smiled and thought about skiing while she rambled on about serving sizes.  I realized that if Erin was going to change her eating forever, then she was going to have to be obsessive about it for a long time.  I smiled, acted engaged, and asked just enough questions to keep the appearance of engagement.  In truth, I felt a bit of awe towards Erin on this front.  I have always been prone to fixate on topics, but Erin's  focus on her eating habits was unlike anything I had ever seen.  This was single-mindedness like I had never seen.

    4)    I pushed her to explicitly enumerate her "eating rules."   Erin came up with lots of great rules for her weight loss, but she would lose track of them.  Erin is a firm believer that calorie counting works for her weight loss, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort to really count every morsel and crumb.  The rules are a short hand way of keeping food intake in  control without having to scribe everything in a notebook.

    5)    I looked at Erin's weight chart every morning.  Erin plotted her weight on a chart that she kept on the bathroom counter.  I could glance at this and know how things were going without having to ask.  She and I are both data lovers, so this was a great tool.

    6)    I did the statistics. Erin was always worried that “it” would stop working at some point.  I mean that she was so used to diet failures that she could not truly internalize the idea that the weight loss was really something she had control of, but instead her emotional reaction was as if it was something that was happening to her.  This manifested itself as a fear that anytime her weight ticked up ½ pound she would panic and announce that “it had stopped.”  

    My response was to do a regression analysis on her weight loss data and use it to estimate the normal variation in her weight.  I used this to say that either “No, you didn't stop.  This is just noise.” or “Yes you did stop, get back on habit.”  Once she got to maintenance mode, I set up a statistical process control (SPC) chart for her using modified Westinghouse rules.

    Erin had lots of experience trying to lose weight, but she had never really had a long period of holding steady at a lower weight.  In the past the weight loss was always followed immediately by either a pregnancy or by simple regaining of the pounds.    With the control chart she could add or subtract rules depending on if she was gaining or losing weight after she had reached her goal.  The Westinghouse rules also kept her from over reacting to small, random swings in weight.     

    7)    Coaching.  I learned early that I had a simple but critical role.  It was a blend of the Socratic method and tactics of the secret police.  At the dinner table, Erin usually gave me a stream of consciousness dump of her day's activities.  In the moments that I was really listening, I would take notice of anything that was out of line with her rules. If she said she made pretzels at Hannah's and ate two, then I noted the white flour and snacking behavior.  If she ate bedtime snack or grabbed leavings from the kid's plates, I would note that too.  I would not mention them if she was still losing weight, but if her weights stopped dropping, then I would ask her if she had been following her rules.  If she said yes, then I would recount the “violations” I had noted for the week.  In truth she usually knew if she had been “cheating” and me just asking the question would bring out her own recount of the weeks dietary misdemeanors.  Sometimes, however,  she was not aware. 

     (I tried calorie counting recently just out of curiosity.  It lasted all of 5 hours because it is REALLY hard to keep track of what you eat.  Having someone spy on you helps.)  

    8)     I excluded Erin's new clothes from the family budget.  Typically we would have a line item for clothes for everyone and Erin is in charge of keeping us on track.    Erin fretted because she needed  new size 6 clothes to bridge her between her starting point and her final size.  She hated to buy new clothes because it was a lot of money and she would not wear them long.  It felt wasteful to her to have a “temporary” wardrobe.  I told her that she had three options:  We could save money by having her gain the weight back; she could go naked; or she could buy whatever she needed even if she didn't wear it long.  I had to remind her to feel positive about this since needing new clothes was a tangible outcome of her success.

    9)    Compliments on Erin's appearance. She liked knowing that I could notice  her slimming down.  

    10)    I stopped asking for “trigger foods” to be on the shopping list.  There are some foods that Erin has a really hard time not snacking on, so I just gave them up so that she would not be tempted.  This really wasn't a big deal for me.  We have always done a lot of our dietary management at the shopping list level, so I was used to not having things around that we didn't want to overconsume.   

    11)    I split plates with her when we went out to eat.  I let her pick whatever she wanted, then I would plan to eat half and fill out the rest of my order with appetizers, salads, or if I was really hungry, another entree.  Erin learned early that for her, the strategy of ordering a full meal and taking half home didn't work.  The second half didn't make it to the doggy bag, so it was better to get it off her plate right at the start of the meal.

       There you have it.     Maybe next time I'll write a post on risk tolerance, risk mitigation, and who not to hire if you want to spend an afternoon in the mountains in Utah.  

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    11 comments on Guest Post by Mark: My role in my wife’s fitness and weight loss.

  • Interviewer effect.

    When we were studying the Civil War this past year, I made some use of "slave narratives" as primary sources.   I had thought of these as authentic, true descriptions of what it was like to live through slavery and emancipation.  

    But primary sources are not always as primary as they seem.  Ta-Nehisi Coates highlights a commenter who points out something that had never occurred to me as I used them and read them to the children:  the invisible role of the interviewer.

    …The biggest problem with the way that many of the slave narratives are transcribed is that they leave out the dialouge of the interviewer. That hurts because it encourages us to ignore the interview situation itself. 

    This doesn't mean that we have to go straight to the idea that the interviewee is being ironic, or falsifying how they feel, but it does mean that whatever they are feeling includes being in the presence of an interviewer who might be a stranger, or just as often might be someone they know, but who is almost certainly better off and almost certainly white. Several of the interviews I read were conducted by people from the family that the subject worked for or even the family that they had been enslaved by….

    …all of that is important to keep in the front of your mind because otherwise it's tempting to read the narrative as a missive straight out of the subject's head, straight from the time of slavery to us, and it;s not. It includes that room, and all of the getting by that it took to get both of those people into that room.

    …The WPA narratives are terribly valuable, but they are also incomplete documents and I think we should always read them as such whether they confirm or contradict our deeply held positions. You have to kind of hold off closure as you read them.

    Definitely something I will keep in mind when reading interview-sourced texts in the future, whether historical documents or in current periodicals.

    (As I think I've mentioned before, if you have any interest whatsoever in Civil War and antebellum history, you should be reading TNC's blog, which is about many other things besides.   I think he's cooking up a book, which I'll be in line to read; I read his memoir The Beautiful Struggle last year and was just blown away.)

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    1 comment on Interviewer effect.

  • Audiovisual.

    So one of my homeschooling friends (hi Cathie!)  is really into the idea of different "learning modalities," you know, some people are auditory learners, some are tactile learners, that sort of thing.   She always tells me that I am a classic visual learner.  I admit I am not always sure that I buy it.

    And then something comes along like this little YouTube gem.

    And I think maybe there's something to it.  Because when I watch an animation like that, I feel like I'm really hearing the music properly for the first time.  It makes so much more sense to me.

    (h/t Jimmy Akin)

    ADDED:  Many, many more at the animator's YouTube page here.  I particularly got a lot out of his rendition of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, movement 1 — the logic of the piece is made very obvious by the graphics.  You can see the countless places where that little three-note "da-da dum" rhythm that begins the piece, a musical bit almost too short to be called a theme, recurs and recurs and ties the whole thing together.    

    My children were mesmerized by this.  Oh, also, his stuff is available for download and he sells a $25 DVD.  Could this be part of music education this year?

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    2 comments on Audiovisual.

  • MrsDarwin calls “bullshit.”

    On the mythical "orgasmic birth."

    No, neither of us run a "family-friendly" blog.  Why do you ask?

    UPDATE.  Christina in the comments helpfully provides references to orgasmic-birth stories. I link, you decide!

    http://www.unassistedchildbirth.com/sensual/orgasmic.html

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5bm9-B6Ec4&feature=related

    http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=1218320

    UPDATE AGAIN.  A poetic response from Bob the Ape .

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    9 comments on MrsDarwin calls “bullshit.”

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