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].

  • In charge of Christmas.

    Here I am in Minneapolis with nowhere to go, the impending birth of #4 preventing us from traveling.  We have never spent Christmas in our own home, not in 11 years of marriage, and have always gone back to Ohio, where other people baked the cookies and trimmed the tree and cooked the Christmas dinner (and bought lots of presents for the kids).

    On the one hand, it's nice to get all the way through Advent with our own wreath.  On the other hand, now we have to do all the STUFF.

    I am getting it done in bits and pieces.  I wrapped presents last weekend.   Working a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there, I made cookies all week:  Grandma's Hungarian cookies (jam-filled rich sugar cookies), mini pecan tarts, chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons, and finally some chocolate caramel pecan thumbprint cookies that I thought Mark would like.  We have plans to have Christmas Eve dinner with friends, although we haven't managed to schedule a Christmas dinner, so we might well be eating tuna salad at home (unless we decide to settle for "Chinese turkey" — I hear Shuang Cheng in Dinkytown is going to be open…)

    We put the tree up today, an artificial tree we haven't put up in probably six or seven years.  I handed Mark the string of lights and reminded him, "It's traditional to yell at the kids to stay away from you and get out of your way and stop bothering you until you get the lights on the tree."  He gave me a quizzical look, went into the other room, and had the lights on the tree in about three minutes.  I guess they didn't have that tradition in HIS family when he was growing up.

    We were going to save the ornament-putting for tomorrow, but the kids dove into the box and started before we could stop them, so we shrugged and let 'er rip.  The children exclaimed over the ornaments.  It is the first time they have seen many of them, because… well, because we've never had the tree up before, except once or twice when Oscar was a baby. 

    I said to Mark as we were setting it all up, "It's almost like our first Christmas together, like being newlyweds."  And it really did have a little bit of that feeling.

    He said, "It is.  It is 'our first' Christmas, our first own Christmas."  A pause.  "But I admit I'm still a little worried I'll be lonely, not being at home."  I know what he means. 

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    4 comments on In charge of Christmas.

  • Question: How can you tell why an email didn’t arrive?

    Mark sent me several e-mails from work in the past couple of days that appear not to have arrived in my inbox or my spam-filter-box or anywhere else, even though they didn't bounce back to him (that he can tell) and they appeared in his "sent" box at work.  Anybody have any idea how to find out whether the problem is on his end or on mine?  

    In the meantime, while I'm figuring it out — if you sent me an email that I haven't responded to in the past couple of days, you might try contacting me some other way — I think I'm set up to receive Facebook messages even from non-friends, for example.

    UPDATE:  Figured it out, filtering problem on my end.  My bad.

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  • What did “catholic” originally mean again?

    I always thought it meant "universal," i.e., meant for all peoples of the world, an assertion I'd heard repeated countless times over the years.  On the occasion of it being repeated by a columnist in his archdiocesan newspaper, Rich Leonardi has a post up pointing to a different explanation.

    For an orthodox explanation of the historical meaning of the word "Catholic" in the Apostle's Creed, see this entry from Catholic Answers:

    The Greek roots of the term "Catholic" mean "according to (kata-) the whole (holos)," or more colloquially, "universal." At the beginning of the second century, we find in the letters of Ignatius the first surviving use of the term "Catholic" in reference to the Church. At that time, or shortly thereafter, it was used to refer to a single, visible communion, separate from others.

    The term "Catholic" is in the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, and many Protestants, claiming the term for themselves, give it a meaning that is unsupported historically, ignoring the term’s use at the time the creeds were written.

    .The "unsupported historically" meaning of "catholic" is, I take it, the one limited to conveying the sense of "intended for all peoples at all times and places."  

    I find this interesting, and am sort of surprised at myself that I never noticed the root "holos."  It still raises a few linguistic or definitional questions to me — being the sort who likes to make nice distinctions.  Does "according to the whole" carry a sense of "that which we are all united in professing," i.e., a sort of one-ness?  If so, how precisely does it fit into the "four marks of the Church," that is, that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic?  How precisely is "catholic" (in the sense above) to be a mark that is distinct from the mark of unity, or one-ness?  Perhaps "one" means nothing more or less than the unique number… mathematical unity, rather than confessional unity.  

    There's only one everything. – Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

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    1 comment on What did “catholic” originally mean again?

  • Oh my. I must see this documentary when it comes out in April.

    Check it out.

    Link to the documentary website.

    And h/t to MrsD.

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  • Christy P and Hannah, this recipe link is for you.

    Because it looks like the kind of thing you'd both like to make:

    Chicken Larb Gai (although I can't see why you couldn't make it with beef or pork)

    ADDED:  Here is the correct recipe from the NYT site

    Also because I bet it is easily adapted for picky-ish children by simply setting aside some of the cooked meat after the acceptable flavorful ingredients have been added but before the unacceptable flavorful ingredients have been added, or even by setting the ingredients out in little bowls (pre-mix the lime juice and fish sauce) for mixing at the table.   I could see this being a very quick and tasty weeknight dinner.  Some shredded carrots would round it out nicely I think.  UPDATE:  Note the comment at the link about the ground toasted rice, I noticed its absence too.

    h/t The Heavy Table

    UPDATE:  I made this tonight, adding roasted rice powder. I made it exactly as described, except that I used brown rice instead of sticky rice, and boneless skinless chicken thighs rather than white meat.   For the rice powder, I toasted a couple of small handfuls of raw brown rice in a hot dry nonstick skillet until it started to pop like popcorn, and got nice and nutty brown and crunchy; then I ground it in my spice grinder, which is really a cheap coffee grinder that I never grind coffee in, and added the powder to the meat salad with the lime juice and fish sauce.  

    It was a complete winner.  Everyone loved it, all the kids included.  We had it with shredded raw carrot dressed with salt and lime juice, plus the cucumber and other garnishes, and extra brown rice.  Sriracha sauce and soy sauce at the table.  The only thing I might do differently next time is serve it as a salad on the lettuce, rather than as wraps — it's less fun but also not quite as messy.   And I do think you could easily set aside a portion of minimally spiced meat for any children who prefer not to have their food mixed together too much.

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    2 comments on Christy P and Hannah, this recipe link is for you.

  • Regional Thanksgiving recipe searches.

    Following on the last post, another link from Neal at Literal-Minded:  Interactive map showing the frequency, by state, of search terms on Allrecipes.com in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.  Regional variation in menus (why don't the Dakotas like "green bean casserole"?!?  how many people in Idaho did it take to push "butternut squash" over the tipping point?) and sometimes in vocabulary (check out "yam" vs. "sweet potato") are obvious and interesting.

    Careful in your interpretation, though.  There are, for example, comparatively few searches for "pie crust" in the South.  My assumption (totally stereotype-based) is that this is not because Southerners don't eat pie at Thanksgiving, but more likely because Southerners know how to make pie crust.  Or maybe if they don't know how to make it, they buy refrigerated pie crust.  I think I know someone who could probably tell me the answer to that one.

    If, like me, you grew up in one region of the country and now live in a different one, you may find the results especially relevant.

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    4 comments on Regional Thanksgiving recipe searches.

  • One of those “no reason, I just liked it” posts.

    I don't follow anyone on Twitter, period (semicolon?) but I'm tempted to after discovering, via a link from Neal at Literal-Minded, @FakeAPStylebook.  A selection:

    . Do not confuse "lyme disease" with "lime disease," an affliction caused by over-consumption of mojitos. 


    . It is not necessary to refer to the Mountain Time Zone. There will never be a story from there.

    . Metaphors may not be used by Journalists unless they are at least Level 5 and have taken the "Imagery" skill. 

    . The plural of apostrophe is "apostrophe's." 

    . Only use the word "proactive" if it will dynamically impact your synergistic throughput paradigm. 

    . All composition titles are to be denoted with quotation marks instead of italics because this is still 1955, apparently. 

    . The British spelling of "color" is "Blimey, color, I say! What ho!" 

    . @Athenrein: Yes, but for simplicity's sake, you may shorten "Unemployed-American" to "American." . In high school sports stories, do your best to play up star players' big-league chances so their failures are more tragic.

    . If an editor draws a little dick on your manuscript, it's probably not a correction. It's more likely he just likes drawing little dicks. 

     That last one brings back memories.  Not that anyone ever actually drew a penis on anything I wrote.  At least not that I noticed.

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  • Pretending I’m not here.

    I am hiding in the bedroom upstairs.  Downstairs I can hear my children enjoying a dinner of pizza, juice, and carrots, under the watchful eye of a pair of polite young ladies we know from church.  They are tween sisters, #1 and #2  of five.  My kids, especially MJ, like them.  I do too.  I overheard them leading my children in grace before meals when they sat down to the pizza.   Good for them.

    The girls who are paying us a visit this evening — sorry, the girls that I am paying to visit us this evening – have something in common with our family.  We are just getting started with babysitting. 

    This evening, I have hired them to play with the kids (technically just the younger two — Oscar is 9 and old enough not to be babysat, but not old enough to be in charge of his siblings) while I am busy hunting through the attic for baby clothes and newborn-size diaper covers.  Mainly, though, the evening is a dry run for "real" babysitting later on.  You know.  The kind where Mark and I leave the house.  Without (some of) the children.  And we pay someone to make sure they, and the house, survive for a couple of hours.

    Odd as it may seem, we have literally never done this before.  Oh, we've had dates from time to time, but we've always left the children with someone that we know and love enough, um, not to pay.  Grandma and Grandpa have taken the kids for an evening, of course.  And we've relied on dear friends, "we'll watch your kids this weekend if you'll watch ours next weekend," that sort of thing — always people the children know and love and feel very safe with.   This means that we haven't gone out without the children very often over the course of our marriage.  Grandma and Grandpa live far away, and though we trust the goodwill of our friends and are happy to return favors any time we can, it's sort of self-limiting because nobody wants to exploit that kind of generosity.  We know they're there when we really NEED a date night; that means saving it for those times.

    Which makes it kind of an interesting case study.  Why didn't we cultivate babysitters sooner?  Why have I been a mother for 9 years and tonight will pay a babysitter for the very first time ever?  Or, conversely, if I'm not the type to pay a babysitter, why am I doing it now?  Is there some principle I've renounced?

    Yes and no.  I think it's more a case of the family dynamics being different now that there are three children, the ages we have.

    I believe pretty strongly in maintaining strong attachments with and among the children, and limiting separations.  I have always done the sorts of things you'd expect — lots of babywearing, nursing past age three or four, that sort of thing — and one of the things we've done is kept the kids with us quite a lot, not using institutional day care or babysitters, which took some juggling when I was in grad school and Mark was working, let me tell you.  We were never willing to leave Oscar with someone he didn't know very well, back when he was our first and only, and it wasn't much different for Milo either.  At the YMCA we would take turns playing with our little guy(s) in the childcare facility, rather than leave them while we both exercised, until they were so comfortable with the staff there that they weren't upset at all to be left — I think not till well after they were two or three  years old.  We weren't willing to teach them the hard, tearful way that we would come back to them, we wanted to steer clear of the discontinuity, of that first shock of abandonment.  And Mark and I really and truly preferred to keep our "date nights" rare, or to take the children along with us, rather than get used to leaving the children with someone else.  We really didn't feel we needed to get away from the kids and be just a "couple," at least not very much. 

    After all, we're not just a couple.  We're a mom and dad.  We have sought to find our romance, and our selves, within those roles, and it's generally worked for us.

    (Pausing here to acknowledge that not everyone feels the same way, and really, that's fine.  If parents truly need to get away by themselves more often than we have needed to, to nurture their marriage and each other, then by all means they should do it.)

    But since MJ came along we've been more cavalier about the kid-care.  Take the YMCA for example.  We worked pretty hard to get MJ to stay in the YMCA child care from a young age — she was somewhere between one and two when we started leaving her there with her brothers.  We are hoping to get the new baby comfortable with the place at an even younger age, obviously not until he is content to go without nursing for the block of time and is comfortable with the staff.  And here I am paying a babysitter.  Have I abandoned my principles? 

    With the caveat that I am probably good at fooling myself — I do not think I have.  What I think has happened is that I have seen the development of the dynamic among my children — the sibling relationships.  Remember, these are kids who spend a lot of time together, constant playmates, since they're not separated daily for age-segregated schooling.  Here's the thing — when Oscar was my only little person, to leave him in the YMCA childcare for 40 minutes was to leave him totally unmoored from every anchor of safety he'd ever known.  Until he could really understand that he was safe there in that environment, it felt so very wrong to force him into it.  But now, my children are a package.  Mary Jane, at age three, doesn't enter alone.  She enters with her six-year-old and nine-year-old big brothers.  She calls Oscar her "protector."  She believes she is safe and loved in their presence.  And from what I have seen, she is right.   I see that she is comfortable and unafraid.  (No, she's not always really HAPPY about going into the childcare while I work out, but I can see she is not terrified or disturbed.)

    Anyway — Mark and I talked it over and decided that it's  time to branch out a bit.  We still like to take our kids with us when we go to restaurants and gatherings (heck, the kids joined us for our anniversary dinner date last Saturday night, and it was a blast.)  But as time passes, as we have a little bit more money to spend and a little bit more burnout sometimes at the end of the week, the truth is that we would like to have a chance to concentrate on each other just a bit more often.  More often, I think, than we are willing to exploit the good will of our friends.   The new baby will be coming along for quite some time, of course, but that's fine.  New babies have their challenges, but it is not hard to give a new baby everything he needs while still carrying on a continuous conversation.  And I think that's what we're after.

    I have about 45 minutes left of my babysitters.  I am resisting the urge to eavesdrop some more, but I am wondering whether I could possibly sneak downstairs to find out if there is any pizza left.  Should have packed myself a sandwich before sequestering myself up here!  How funny that on this, my first night in 9 years in which I have literally bought myself a few hours of freedom, I am somewhat imprisoned in my own bedroom.  Hurray for the wireless internet connection.

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    1 comment on Pretending I’m not here.

  • “Only.”

    Alice Bradley of finslippy has a beautiful post about her one son Henry.

    Of course I know, rationally, that only children can be happy and successful. I know that Henry's happy and well-adjusted and loved beyond measure. I do.

    But it keeps coming up. They think I'm selfish, I think, when other parents ask me if Henry is an "only." Stingy. Not willing to spread myself just a little too thin. I want to give them my reasons. My very good, well-considered reasons. But I'm afraid they'd argue that those reasons aren't enough.

    A lot of her commenters have written to say that they understand and completely get what she is saying.  I am not someone who can completely get it.  I will have four children soon.  I can't imagine having only one and deciding to stop trying for another child.  But then, I have never suffered a miscarriage, and even if I ever do (God forbid), I won't experience it the same way she and her family experienced theirs.  I don't want to pretend that I can imagine how she feels or what she and her husband went through.  It would not be fair or honest.

     I am grateful that she let us in and wrote the post.  

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  • Pork chop skillet dinner with Italian flavors and a sourdough comment.

    Oink!  Mark picked up a hundred pounds of custom-cut hog from the farm yesterday.  Because nobody felt like grocery shopping, I promised I'd figure out dinner from the pantry and freezer, and that was definitely a reason to inaugurate our half-hog.

    When Mark and I were first married, one of our favorite meals was a one-skillet dish of rice and boneless pork chops in tomato sauce with green beans and basil, topped with cheese.  For some reason I made it less and less as time went on.  But not too long ago when we started eating smaller quantities of meat with our meals, we discovered that, although the original recipe called for a pound and a half of meat, it's really very easy to adapt it so the meat plays a smaller role.   Also, I prefer to use millet or quinoa rather than the white rice called for.  I think any grain that cooks "like white rice" would work, maybe bulgur or couscous even. 

    It's truly a quick, one-pot meal, and very much a kid-pleaser in our family.  Here's how we did it tonight, with a few notes on possible variations.

    Italian-flavor skillet pork

    • 3 Tbsp olive oil
    • 1 lb and 4 0z bone-in pork chops (that's two inch-thick chops), OR 1 pound boneless pork chops.  The amount of meat can vary anywhere from a half-pound to one and a half pounds.  (You may wish to have it sliced so that each person gets "a piece of meat;" or you may elect to cut the meat off the bone after cooking, chop it up and return to the skillet.  Either way works.)
    • 1 cup quinoa soaked in cold water for 30 minutes and rinsed and drained, or 1 cup white rice or millet or similar. 
    • 1 fifteen-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes, roughly chopped and drained, the juice reserved and water added to the tomato juice to equal 2 cups liquid
    • 1 fifteen-ounce can tomato sauce
    • 1 and 1/2 tsp basil or oregano or combination
    • 1/2 to 1 cup chopped red or green bell pepper
    • 4 cloves garlic, minced
    • 12 ounces frozen green beans (French-cut, cut, or Italian)
    • Salt and pepper
    • 4 to 6 ounces of provolone or mozzarella or monterey jack cheese
    • 2 to 4 Tbsp of freshly grated parmesan 

    Heat the oil in a broiler-safe skillet that can later be covered, and brown the pork chops well on both sides; remove to a plate and pour off the fat.  Season the chops with salt and pepper. Add the water and tomato juice and stir, scraping browned bits off the bottom of the pan.  Add 1 cup of the tomato sauce, the quinoa or other grain, the basil and/or oregano, the bell pepper, the garlic, and 1/2 tsp salt.  Bring to a boil over high heat, then return the pork chops to the top of the mixture, cover, and simmer on medium-low heat about 20 minutes until the grains are tender or nearly so and the chops are cooked through.

    Remove the chops and stir in the the green beans, mixing well.   If desired, cut the meat off the bone, chop it, and stir it into the skillet, then top with grated cheeses; or, if the pork is sliced into serving-size pieces, return the slices to the skillet, top each slice with sliced provolone (or mozzarella or monterey jack) cheese, and sprinkle the skillet with grated parmesan.  Pass the skillet under the broiler to melt and brown the cheeses.

    We served this tonight with steamed Brussels sprouts and a jar of Grandma's home-canned peaches.  Plus a bottle of Shiraz.  The kids added ketchup to theirs.  Enough was left over for Mark's lunch tomorrow.

    Now a note on the sourdough.  I had been mixing my dough in the bread machine on the dough cycle, letting it have a long, cool second rise, and then trying to shape it all into boules or baguettes.  The results had been less than fantastic.  It all tasted great, but the dough is so darned delicate, the shaping step was destroying a lot of the structure.  I could feel the dough deflating under my fingertips, no matter how carefully I tried to handle it.

    So the last time I mixed up a sourdough bread — in this case a white-rye combination — I decided to let the dough have a long cool second rise, covered, in the bread machine pan, and then — get this — I left it in the bread pan and baked it in my oven. 

    You know, it doesn't look all rustic and wonderful the way a beautiful sourdough boule or baguette looks.  It looks like a loaf of sandwich bread.  It's not fancy and beautiful.  It's practical and down-to-earth.  Meaning, er, you can make a sandwich out of it.  

    But you know what?  It's a loaf of really good, sturdy, well-risen sourdough sandwich bread.  I just may have to live with it.

    (Rough recipe:  1 cup fresh sourdough starter, 1/2 cup water, 1 cup rye flour, 1 plus 1/3 plus 1/4 cups bread flour, 2 Tbsp fat, 2 Tbsp dry milk, 1 and 1/2 Tbsp sugar, 1 and 1/2 tsp salt, no yeast.  Covered the pan with foil, started the dough cycle at bedtime, then transferred the pan to the oven in the morning and baked it to an internal temperature of 208 degrees.  375 made it a little bit too brown.  I'll try 350 next time.)

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  • Anticipation.

    These days swing wide, from bursts of sudden energy to collapsing breathless into a chair, from intense longing to hold this baby in my arms and see his face to wide-awake fear in the looming shadow of the coming day of birth.  It's positively crazy — I'll never hold the baby closer than I hold him today inside me, and yet when I put my hand on my belly and feel him moving I think of putting my hand on a pane of glass I can't quite see through.  We will never be so united again and yet I feel that we are more separate now than we will be after his birth.

    I went looking today for the photos from the other birth-days.  Oscar's are prints from a film camera, I will have to get down an album to look at those.  I haven't turned Mary Jane's up yet, still have to look on my old laptop.  I found the pictures from Milo's birth on the desktop computer and clicked through them one by one.  We are in the attic bedroom in our old duplex.  It was my own face I wanted to look at, to try to recapture a memory of the post-birth relief and gladness, something to temper the right-now-very-strong memories of mid-labor exhaustion. 

    The pictures helped a bit.  In one that won't be posted here (quite NSFW), I hold the towel-wrapped pinkish bluish new baby on my bare knees, the umbilical cord still snaking between us.  My face is unsmiling and slack — it is not a picture of rejoicing, but a picture of total relaxing at the end of the effort — not bubble-bath and good-book relaxing, but end-of-the-race walking-it-off.  I like that picture, though.  It says:  It's over, thank God. 

    An even better one that I can share is here:

    IMG_0782
     

     Mark is holding baby Milo on his chest while the midwife does the newborn exam.  I am being checked by the apprentice midwife.  My face isn't fully visible, but you can see that I am better, that I am glad, reflected in my husband's face.  I remember that moment or one very close to it, and I am pleased to have the picture. His smile here is a grin that I love dearly.

    The newest birth now is only a few weeks away.  My other babies were born in summer and autumn; Mark carried each of them out into the sunlight soon after birth. January, though, will be frigid and snowy and hostile.  I have a few more weeks to feel more ready, thank goodness.  One of the gifts (!) of late pregnancy really is its discomfort.  After a while, I know, I will be ready for it to be over, so that when the pangs come I'll feel anticipation of relief almost as strongly as anticipation of suffering and uncertainty, and that will help get us all through it.

    The strongest memory I have from Mary Jane's birth is of knowing I could not push harder, realizing I HAD to push harder (stuck shoulder), and — what do you know — I pushed harder.  It is really quite amazing what one can do when one has no choice.  And that's what is coming up for me:  a day of no choice, a day when all my other plans will be laid aside, because I will have no choice but to labor and birth.

    I was so thrilled to be pregnant in the spring, and I'm still enjoying being pregnant, and I'm still grateful.  It's scary anyway.

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  • A sweet little detail.

    I know, you were expecting something gritty, or maybe some math, after the last post.  Too bad.  You come here, you get what I serve.

    From today's Strib:

    Just in time for the holiday shopping season comes Sugar Sugar, which celebrates sweet teeth of all stripes. Baby boomers will get a kick out of owner Joni Wheeler's small but tempting array of long-forgotten goodies: Good News and Oh Henry! bars, Mallo Cups, French Chew taffy and Black Jack, Fruit Stripe and Clark's Teaberry chewing gum. Big glass jars are filled with a variety of alluring edibles, including a large licorice assortment.

    Fantastic. I am a licorice addict.

    … Aside from a vintage See's Candy poster, another lovely touch is the change-filled jar next to the cash register.

    "That's the tax fund," said Wheeler, explaining that her burgeoning after-school crowd hasn't quite figured out that buying a dollar's worth of candy actually costs $1.08, which is why she encourages her grown-up customers to toss a little change into the "fund" and cover the 8-cent difference. Sweet, right?

    Yes indeed — this place sounds like a great addition to the neighborhood, and she's well placed for children walking to and from several neighborhood schools — there's a Catholic school steps away, for one thing, and it's not far from a couple of public schools. I'm going to have to tell my kids to gather up some of their spare change and take them somewhere for a surprise.

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