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].

  • Kid food at home.

    Christy sent me this link to a NYT story commenting, “Relates to homeschool (sort of):… kids with more structure eat better than kids with less structure.”  According to the article, which references a study published last year in the American Journal of Public Health, overweight children gain more weight (and underweight children less weight!) during summer than during the school year. Among the factors that seem to be involved:  scheduled meals, supervision, and reduced TV viewing.

    (Homeschoolers:  Are you ready for your skeptical relatives to start telling you that science has proven that homeschooling will make your kids fat?)

    Seriously, I don’t know any homeschooling family who hasn’t put a great deal of thought into managing meals and snacks.  The ones I know personally are mostly natural-foodie, eat-your-veggies types.  And many, including myself, are just a wee bit prone to control-freak in general!  I was at a fellow homeschooler’s house last week; prominently displayed in the kitchen was a chart, MTWThF across the top, Breakfast Lunch Snack down the side, all filled in with different menus, the same every week, to simplify the decision-making.  This is not an uncommon solution, especially since it’s a timesaver too.  And how often have I heard, “I just don’t keep junk food around.  Otherwise I would be eating it all day.”  (Lots)

    At my house, breakfast and lunch are informal affairs.  Most of the time we eat at the same time, but not always; and I serve them a very limited menu of quick-to-prepare, mostly vegetarian foods that I know they’ll eat cheerfully.  Oatmeal, toast, scrambled or soft-boiled eggs, occasionally whole-grain waffles or pancakes for breakfast; sandwiches, canned or leftover vegetable soup, quesadillas, English-muffin pizzas, occasionally noodles for lunch (always with a side of fruit or baby carrots).  I don’t keep any kind of low-nutrition snacks around at all, not even crackers; but the children plow through apples, oranges, and grapefruits all year long, and now that it’s summer, they are plowing through strawberries, blueberries, cherries, and watermelon as well. I see no reason to restrict their fruit intake, since nobody except me shows any sign of overweight.  

    We have a sit-down “tea time snack” at three-thirty.  I instituted it to bring a little peace and happiness to the end of the school day, to give us another time block for storytime, and to fortify the kids against whining for food while I am cooking dinner.  If I try to be ambitious about it at all, I won’t do it — so “tea snack” is where I use pre-packaged things, usually better-quality granola bars, cookies, and crackers, served with a glass of milk and maybe some fruit.  Or I might offer them sweetened yogurt, or Jell-O instant pudding.  I’m going for something sweet, pleasant, and treat-y that contains a bit of protein to keep them full till dinner. 

    When we have tribe days — days I spend with Hannah’s family or Melissa’s family or both — I bring something portable, crowd-pleasing, unmessy, and already-made.  Yesterday, I brought the children salami-and-neufchatel-cheese and peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches on whole wheat bread, served with natural applesauce cups.  The children sat around the table, but Hannah and Melissa and I ate standing and chatting in the kitchen.  I had something better for us:  Wasa crispbread crackers, neufchatel cheese, smoked salmon, and lettuce and tomato, some leftover tabouli, and raw sugar snap peas to munch on.  Sometimes the oldest girl, who is ten, joins us in our grown-up nosh, but yesterday was a peanut-butter day for her.  The tea snacks I bring these days are granola bars and fruit.  

    Dinner is the time in our day for a carefully planned and prepared, balanced meal, for trying new foods and “practicing to like” the Brussels sprouts and okra, for tablecloths and folded napkins, for family conversations and passing the salt, please.  I know many homeschoolers strive for the family-meal atmosphere at all their meals; it’s not my style, though I appreciate and admire it.  Even though it’s the easy way, my way is quite structured too, and I’m pretty confident it’s working well for us.

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  • Gains, pt 2. What’s wrong with me.

    (If you just got here you might read part 1 first)

     

    Here’s the root of my weight problem [in 2008, that is]:  I have an irrational fear of getting hungry.

     

    I tell people this and always someone wants to figure out Now why do you think that is?   Supposedly it is because my parents made me clean my plate (they didn’t), or it’s because we couldn’t afford enough food when I was growing up (rather the opposite), or it’s because my mother fed me formula on a schedule (formula yes, schedule no), or it’s because I have a yawning emotional hole that I am trying to fill with food (plausible for previous periods in my life but not now).  More likely I think is that it’s related to being hypoglycemic from my preteen years until my first pregnancy, though there’s kind of a chicken-and-egg problem with that argument.  Frankly, I don’t care where it came from.  But there it is.

     

    Consider the evidence:

     

    • I tend to “stock up” at meals by eating extra.  I catch myself explicitly thinking, “I’d better eat more now so I won’t get hungry later.”
    • There are certain foods that I eat compulsively if they are just sitting around as leftovers, even if they don’t taste very good to me. Never sweets, always carbohydrates, great for packing in as many calories as possible in a short period of time.  White rice; plain pasta; tortilla chips; dry cereal; white bread; pizza; saltine crackers.  I can still eat a whole sleeve of saltine crackers, no problem.  (No wonder going low carb helped me.  Eliminating these things from my house was a good thing.)
    • I rely on external cues to tell me how much to eat.  If people around me are eating, I do too.  If there’s still food on the table, I have another helping.  If something will be thrown out if I don’t eat it, I eat some.
    • I get very antsy on road trips as mealtime approaches, if we haven’t yet planned when and where we’re going to stop for the next meal.
    • I get irrationally irritated when I’m over at someone’s house for dinner and dinner is delayed for some reason.  I have to squelch the urge to keep asking, “So, when’s dinner going to be ready?”   I mean, I know it makes me a terrible guest, so I do my best, but it’s really hard!
    • My friends who dine with me regularly will tell you that whenever I am responsible for feeding a crowd, I am very preoccupied with there being “enough” food. Either I make too much, or I start apologizing for it the minute people arrive. “Erin!  Chill out!  If we get hungry we’ll make some sandwiches!”  Doesn’t matter.  Hostess anxiety is my lot in life.
    • Oh, and then there’s this recurring dream I keep having where someone gives me piles and piles of food and I know that I have to eat it.  The menu, the reason I have to eat the stuff, and the setting varies (buffet restaurant; friend’s house; interview luncheon), but the theme is always there.  I have had this dream for as long as I can remember, maybe five or six times a year.

     

    Ready to psychoanalyze me yet?  Look, you can call it “gluttony” if you want.  I won’t shy away from that term.  It is a self-centered way to be, I’m tired of it, and I’d be a better person if I overcame it.

    [Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

    I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

    I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]

    I think there’s two basic approaches to this problem.  I don’t see any reason why they can’t be applied simultaneously.

    #1 Get over the fear (and maybe some of the self-centeredness that goes with it) of being hungry

    #2 Find ways to soothe the fear of hunger that don’t involve pre-emptive stuffing

    Part of the reason it’s working, I’m convinced, is that I’ve sort of accidentally solved problem #2, or at least I’ve found a couple of strategies that work, surprisingly well.  And I’m organizing everything I do around #1:  getting used to the idea that Hungry Is OK.

     

    More later.

     

    (Part 3)

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  • Gains. A multi-part post.

    The last few weeks:

    63.84.200.46

    (The graph was generated by SparkPeople.com)

    (ADDED:  A useful piece of context:  I am about 4 feet 11 inches tall.)

    The last time I successfully lost weight this fast — 2 lb/week — and kept it off until the start of my next pregnancy, I was doing hard-core low-carb.  By the end of that, I’d convinced myself that LC was the weight-control style that worked for me, and it was going to be the only way I could keep the extra pounds off for the rest of my life.

    I was wrong.  This has been different.  I’m still using some of the helpful tricks I learned while I was low-carbing, but I’ve not been following a low-carb diet (and it hasn’t been low-fat either, by the way).

    I tried to gear up for LC life again several times after post-pregnancy weight loss stopped, and I just couldn’t get into it and wasn’t enjoying it very much.  I don’t mean to diss real-food LC living, which is basically lots of fresh vegetables, moderate amounts of meat, and small amounts of fruit and whole grains; it’s a fine way to solve the “What should I eat?” problem, and as I’ve said, I had success with it before.  But not this time — maybe it’s because I’m busier now; maybe it’s because I’m trying to plan meals for a larger family; maybe I just got bored with the good food/bad food dichotomy.

    So I decided to try, um, eating less.  Ha!  You’ve heard, perhaps, that keeping a food diary is one of the few habits that’s proven to assist weight loss, almost universally?   I know from experience that I eat better if I keep a detailed record.  So I started one up again, sort of; what I kept was more like a feed-forward record, or a plan — I used an online nutrition tracker to make the “diary” a day in advance, hung a printout on the wall, tried to stick to it, and at the end of the day made adjustments to reflect reality.  I carried planned, premeasured snacks with me when I went out, so I wouldn’t be forced to improvise if I got hungry.  And I gave my electronic kitchen scale a prominent place on the counter.  I did some other stuff too, which I’ll post on later.

    I found out some stuff about myself in the process.  In retrospect, I believe that this time my habits have been addressing the underlying mental defect that’s been causing my lifelong weight dysfunction.  (Whereas the LC lifestyle worked more by counteracting some of its effects, and previous fruitless attempts to do the low-fat thing tended to exacerbate them.  Again, more on that later.)

    More later.  I will say that the graph plotted above literally begins on the day that something seemed to click in my head, and I thought to myself, “I’m ready to try being okay with being hungry.”

    (Part 2)

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  • Social services.

    DarwinCatholic has a thoughtful and, to my mind, balanced post about the tension between social services and face-to-face helping your family, friends, and neighbors.

    True community and mutual obligation is when people help other people, not when help is distributed to other people through the taxing and spending of an anonymous bureaucratic organization. And yet true community involves rough human edges and failings that, in all honestly, many of us do not really want to accept. We would rather have the dehumanized consistency that bureaucratic organizations provide.

    Right down to the “there aren’t any easy answers” conclusion, the position he’s laid out is very close to my own (he may have done a better job explaining it than I would have).  I am wondering what my small knot of readers thinks of his post.  Care to discuss?

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  • Sign of the times.

    “Build a wiffle ball field and lawyers will come.”

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  • The spelling binder is ready.

    One subject at a time, I’m putting my STUFF into final form.  

    I cobbled together my own spelling program last year, and it’s not been too much work to get it ready for next year.  I’ve been following the study-test-study algorithm (more or less) set out in the inexpensive ($60 gets you all the way through high school) program Spelling Power, but I don’t use (yet) the word lists provided in that program.  Instead, I am using lists I generated myself, organized by sound-spelling correspondence.  For example, here is the very first spelling list I gave Oscar at the beginning of his second grade year:

    /n/ is most often spelled n

    an, and, ant, bin, born, can, end, fan, fun, gun, hen, in, man, men, net, no, not, on, pan, pen, ran, run, sent, sin, son, sun, tan, ten, van, vent, went, win, wind, won

    Actually, I gave him a longer list of words, including things like “spinach,” “volcano,” “pancake,” and “money,” made him read the whole list of words, and then asked him to choose a sample (so many from each line of the list) to be tested on.  You’ll notice that he chose the “easy” words!  That’s okay; the point here is for him to learn that the sound /n/ is most often spelled with a single letter n.  Later, when we get to the list “/ee/ is sometimes spelled ey,” or “/u/ is sometimes spelled o,” he’s going to see “money” again. And then, “money” will be one of the easier words on that list.  Maybe that time he’ll choose it.

    He copied his list onto a form for studying, and I tested him later, and we repeated missed words until he didn’t miss any more, and then we went on to the next sound-spelling correspondence.   The first 42 lists were the most common spellings for the 42 most common sounds in English.  (Did you know that /ee/ is most often spelled with a y?)  We almost got through all of them in second grade.  I have a few left over to do at the beginning of third.  The next set of lists are the next most common spellings for those sounds.

    Anyway, I just cleaned out the binder — threw out all the old spelling papers to make room for new ones.  I did, however, keep the study forms Oscar filled out when he chose words from my lists, and put them in a section in his binder.  The backs of each sheet are blank — I decided he will use the backs on his second tour of English sounds, so that on the back of “/n/ is most often spelled n” he will write the list called “/n/ is often spelled ne, especially at the end of words.” (Airplane, alone, anyone, bone, borne, brine, caffeine…)

    One subject down.  I forget how many to go.

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  • One of those little “why I homeschool” anecdotes. Or, why prime numbers are the unfairest numbers of all.

    From Language Log, an anecdote in a post that’s not about schooling, but about the cultural development of number words.  

    (The boldface is mine; I just included a paragraph on either side to give a teeny bit of context for the writer’s observation.)

    … I’d like to point out that comparing exact quantities is only one aspect of the way that people “perceive exact quantities”.  Once the “cognitive technology” of number is established, there are many other properties of particular exact quantities, or classes of exact quantities, that may become cognitively salient.

    Once, a five-year-old of my acquaintance, stimulated by kindergarten exercises in counting and comparing, announced a discovery: there are a “fair numbers” and “unfair numbers”. Fair numbers, he explained, are when if you have that many things, you can share them with a friend so that you each have the same. With unfair numbers, somebody always gets more. (This was not part of the lesson plan — in fact, I learned about it because his teacher perceived his enthusiasm for unscheduled discoveries, expressed in idiosyncratic terminology, as distracting and even disruptive.)

    After you’ve understood something like the distinction between even and odd numbers, it seems to me that it becomes (to one degree or another) part of the way that you “perceive exact quantities”….

    “Okay, Junior, now as an exercise, I want you to extend the property of “fairness” to the general case of n friends…”

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  • Speaking of grilled fruit.

    Well, I wasn’t, but Christy was, at the end of her post about roasted garlic-buttermilk-goat cheese spread.  And that reminded me of a sandwich I encountered on the Fourth of July (incidentally, it complemented a 4th of July spread that included hamburgers, satay, and properly prepared sticky rice, very nice.)  The sandwich was:

    • grilled fresh pineapple (recommended:  rings, 3/8 of an inch thick)
    • fresh basil leaves 
    • crisp bacon 
    • cream cheese
    • on French bread split lengthwise.  

    If that doesn’t turn you on, there’s no help for you.

    Recipe courtesy of my friend from high school’s younger brother.

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  • Official French.

    Most of the bloggers I read regularly fall into just a few categories:  

    • law professors or economists who comment a lot on current events and pop culture 
    • mothers at home, including but not limited to homeschoolers
    • Catholic blogs, of the canon-law-nerd, theological flavor
    • scientists and engineers commenting on technology and science. 

    But that’s not all; there are a few odd ducks in there, and one of those is Language Log.  Linguistics, vagaries of the English language, law related to language use, all kinds of interesting stuff if you like phonemes, words, phrases, sentences, rhetoric, etc.  as much as I do.  

    Did you ever take French?  I did, for a long time, and at one point I was fluent. (Who knows how I’d do in a conversation now; I overheard a mother and her 12- or 13-year-old son speaking French to each other just yesterday, and I tried to eavesdrop, but my rustiness and the poor acoustics combined to prevent me from understanding any of it at all.)  Anyway, if you did, and maybe if you didn’t, you’ll remember the story of l’Académie Française and its attempts to make the French stop saying English-sounding things like “software” and “email” — of course, these weren’t an issue when I was taking French in high school, I think my teacher told us the problem back then were words like “weekend.”  

    Anyway, if that makes you wax as nostalgic as Proust in a bakery, Language Log has a very interesting post for youabout the Académie’s most recent decrees regarding French regional languages.  Might also interest you, as they point out over there, if you are interested in the legal status of English here in the U.S. (fact:  it is not our official language, something that I once tried to point out in a class in France during a classroom debate about the proper limits of free speech.  None of the French people there, and I think hardly any of the Americans, believed me.)

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  • Chicken Mole casserole — definitely a keeper recipe.

    More or less from Recipezaar, a quick chopped-cooked-chicken recipe that I know I’m going to be making a lot.  Sometimes simple is exactly what you need.

    • 1/2 cup mole paste, Doña Maria brand
    • 2 cups chicken stock
    • 1.5 to 2 cups shredded cooked chicken
    • 8 corn tortillas, cut into quarters 
    • 2 cups Monterey Jack cheese 

     

    Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  In a saucepan over medium high heat, whisk together mole paste and broth until smooth.  Stir in chicken.  Grease 8- or 9-inch square baking dish. 

    do n = 1, 4

        Arrange 2 of the tortillas (that’s eight quarters) in an attractively overlapped tiling pattern in the dish.   Top with 1/4 of the total quantity of sauce and 1/4 of the total quantity of cheese. 

    end do

    Bake 25 minutes.  Let cool a bit before serving.  Serves 4 safely, maybe 6 if some are picky children.

    Doña Maria mole sauce comes in a jar that makes about 2 and a half of this recipe.  It would make sense, therefore, to double it, unless there’s no danger of an opened jar of mole sauce sitting around for long in your house.  The last time I was in Wal-Mart, though, I found an aseptically-boxed form of Doña Maria mole that is “ready to use,” which I think means it has already been diluted somewhat.  I think you need roughly two of these boxes (more or less) to equal the amount of mole (no molal/molar jokes here please) in the recipe.   Unfortunately I only have one; but I do have some nice chicken broth, and maybe some good-quality salsa, so I think I can  adapt for tonight.

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  • Dryer.

    I wanted to post a picture of the new attic drying rack but I think Mark has the camera.  It’s made of four or five wooden slats, about six feet long, hung on cords that run through the ends (think a wooden-runged rope ladder, only much wider than it is long).  The cords are attached by hooks to the the ceiling and to a wall; the rack can be collapsed and hung out of the way.  If I can, I’ll add a picture later.

    Laundry and I have a dysfunctional relationship.  Throughout our marriage, Mark has done most of the laundry.  I keep telling him I’m going to do it and I keep not doing it.  In our old house I said it was because the laundry room was in the gross basement that was dangerous for the kids.  In this house I have a shiny, uber-functional laundry room and no excuses.  Still, clean dry laundry piled up till the weekend, when Mark would spend hours folding it all and putting it all away.  I tried setting a goal of “one basket per day;” until a couple of weeks ago, I never even managed that.  Meanwhile, I always got annoyed at the way Mark did it (followed by guilt over my ingratitude) because he mixed up the baskets, and he got annoyed at me because I didn’t.  (When he looks at four baskets — mine, his, kids’, and linens — that are each 25% full, he sees one load of laundry that has to be done now.  I look at the same thing and see laundry that I don’t have to do yet.)

    Why couldn’t I just do one load of laundry a day?  I think I hate laundry because it’s never finished.  I like going to bed with everything done for the day, but laundry never gets “done” — there’s always more.  Even if I spent all day washing and drying and putting away EVERYTHING, at the end of the day there’d still be (at least) five dirty outfits and a pile of kitchen rags.  Mark thinks this is nuts, and he’s got a point, but clearly this issue of mine was not going away and I needed to change something about the way I do things.  

    Anyway, I need some time to see if it keeps working, but I seem to have found a way around it.  Here is how I fool myself every day into thinking that my laundry can be “done:”  Instead of thinking of laundry as a process that gets rid of dirty things, I am thinking of laundry as a process that produces clean, folded, put-away things.  

    No, it’s NOT the same.  The old way, the goal about laundry was always “Catch up on laundry,” which meant “Wash and dry as much as I can and put away all of it,” which never happened. This way I can set a meaningful, reasonable goal, such as:  Today I will fill my kitchen drawers with a week’s supply of clean dishcloths, towels, napkins, and tablecloths.

    I can never “wash all of it.”  But in a day I can produce a week’s supply of linens, or a week’s supply of kids’ clothes, or a week’s supply of my clothes, or a week’s supply of Mark’s clothes.  

    So I made a little schedule (Monday my clothes, Wednesday kid’s clothes, etc.) and two weeks later it’s still working pretty well.  I got it all done, two weeks in a row.

    Enter the air drying rack.  Now I have to plan ahead because it takes hours to dry stuff.  I think I’ll start by promising myself that if the load doesn’t air-dry in time for me to put it away on schedule, I will finish it in the dryer.  It’s still an improvement.
     

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  • “It is the right of a child to have individual love all day long.”

    From a book written in 1953 by Elton and Pauline Trueblood, which my friend (the Friend) had borrowed from her meeting house; she was reading parts of it aloud to us yesterday as we sat on the grass under a blue, blue sky while, let’s see, eleven children played around us.  

    The title, I believe, was The Recovery of Family Life; it seems to be out of print but is in many libraries and can be found used.  What made this slim little volume so interesting was that the authors wrote about changes in the American family that we often think of as happening, on the whole, much later.  They could see things beginning to change and they were pointing them out.  In particular, writing for a mid-fifties audience, they tried to draw a comparison between the de facto, spontaneous changes in the American family (more women working, more small children placed in day care) and the ideological, planned changes called for by Marxist philosophy.  

    I hope I get a chance to read the book in full — it’s a very little book and in the short passages that my friend was reading to us there were many little gems that sparked our conversation for a long time that lovely afternoon.

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