I think it is about time I admit to myself that I am never going to finish that felt Jesse Tree I started working on twelve years ago.
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].
-
-
We win.
Having deja vu about this topic, so stop me if I've told it before.
Yesterday evening our family went to a show at the Children's Theatre Company (did you know it's the only children's theater to win a Regional Theatre Tony Award? Yup, pretty awesome) and then, as is our custom, we went out for a late dinner at a restaurant. It was almost 9 p.m. when we found a place to park the car.
We try to pick places that tend to be empty on a late Thursday, since it's hard to walk in and get a table for six otherwise. You'd be surprised how much variation there is in that. A couple of weeks ago when Mark was out of town for a long business trip, I got a babysitter and went out (also on a Thursday night) to have dinner by myself, and tried a new pub in the next neighborhood — the menu was fine, kid-friendly, and the beer was excellent, but the place was completely packed. It was a forty-five minute wait for a table. I didn't mind (I sat at the bar), but I crossed it off my "walk in with the whole family" mental list.
Lots of places, though, are empty at 9 p.m. on a Thursday. If you can't scout it out ahead of time, you can make a good stab at it by seeing who has a happy hour that starts around then. Personally, I think a mostly-empty pub at happy hour is a perfect place to walk in with four hungry kids and two thirsty grownups. You can actually get a pretty good deal on dinner that way, especially if some of your kids are thrilled to eat the nachos and wings that are on the happy hour menu.
It's still a little fun to see the host's eyebrows flinch when we walk in. I only have 4 children, and I always wonder about what the flinch looks like when it's more than that.
+ + +
In this particular iteration of toddlerhood, we've been extremely lucky. Our youngest, who's not quite three, has been a very peaceable restaurant baby from the beginning: he eats slowly and so stays occupied throughout a dinner, is content to sit in a chair or on a lap, doesn't throw things, and isn't very loud. (Not all of our toddlers have been like this. We had an 18-month stretch of never ever going anywhere at one point.) We go out fairly often — we take a lot of road trips, for example, and then we have the theater-and-late-dinner tradition, and I like to celebrate our anniversary with dinner for the whole family at a Dress Up restaurant.
Does
Along the way somewhere we developed The Game.
It goes like this:
If a server, or even better, another diner in the restaurant, comes over to our table and compliments us on our very well-behaved and polite family, we win The Game.
If nobody says anything to us, we don't win The Game.
That's it. We don't give the kids a prize for winning, or a punishment for failing to win. We just smile and tell the kids (if they didn't happen to hear) "Guess what? We won The Game." Or, if nothing happens, the nine-year-old will ask as we are leaving the restaurant, "Did we win The Game, Mom?" and I will say "Not this time," and the children will sigh and be slightly disappointed.
+ + +
Some time ago the oldest decided that it was important that there be a way of losing The Game, so it was decreed that if anyone ever makes a point of coming to the table to tell us what horrible children we have, or to ask us to be quiet because we are bothering other diners, then that will be an instance of Losing The Game. Hasn't happened yet, though.
+ + +
Last night we won The Game: the server came over and in an awestruck voice told us that we had very well-behaved children. (The clear subtext was "You struck fear in my heart when you came in with four children at nine p.m. on a weeknight, but it turned out that my fears were unfounded.") Everyone was pleased. It seems that The Game motivates everyone to be excruciatingly careful about pleases and thank yous, and also to be solicitous of the toddler so as to prevent his screeching with dismay.
We have runs of bad luck at restaurants from time to time. (We have particular trouble at Indian restaurants. For some reason, somebody always knocks over a mango lassi. Always. If we ban mango lassis, then they knock over water glasses instead.) I try not to be intimidated, though. I have to admit that a lot of the stress of going to restaurants with kids is relieved by a rule-of-thumb that I made long ago, when I had two small children, and used to be anxious about the spills and messes –
Smile and tip generously.
(The more I think about this, the more I think it's only right. Children create the same amount of work, or more, for a server than an adult diner does; but they eat less-expensive food and don't drink alcohol, so if you just tip the standard 15 percent, the servers and busboys who work your table are systematically underpaid.)
I don't know if twenty percent is really enough — I've never run the numbers, I suppose I ought to — but if everyone is pleasant and nothing gets spilled, we tip 20% as a minimum. I'll tip 25% if we make a big mess or if the server is especially helpful to us for some kid-related reason.
Because really, I want the server to be thinking when we come in: Hey, that one family with the four kids is in my section. I win!
-
Back from a break.
All right: we have stumbled back from a long, lazy Thanksgiving break.
Here's to not being beholden to anyone else's schedule.
Blogging will resume as soon as I think of something to write about.
-
Shielding.
Thought-provoking opinion piece entitled “How to Live Without Irony:”
For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt. One need only dwell in public space, virtual or concrete, to see how pervasive this phenomenon has become. Advertising, politics, fashion, television: almost every category of contemporary reality exhibits this will to irony.
Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.
I don’t think this is solely the possession of Gen Y. I am plenty susceptible to this myself, and had in my mind before encountering it in the article: “the ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism.” It is sort of like wearing black all the time so no one can accuse you of trying to look good, or choosing clothes because they promise to hide you, or parts of you, rather than reveal you.
There are many kinds of such shields, and the ironic frame might be the one that most closely resembles a Zeitgeist at this moment, but the others are all still around. There is also constant self-deprecation; the embrace of victimhood; pre-emptively wounding everyone around you with a mocking, “Don’t you have a sense of humor?”; acquiring a reputation for unpredictable explosive anger. Add them all together and it seems everyone has such a shield.
Perhaps it is contagious, a kind of arms race of the vulnerable. You cannot be left the only one who lacks protections. Everyone knows they are naked.
The author of the article identifies some people who don’t seem to carry the shield of irony:
Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind.
But many of these people may carry shields, too. I think elderly people — and the not so elderly, maybe starting in their sixties — aren’t infected by irony, not because they don’t put up shields against the world, but because they came of age before public irony had deeply infected the culture. They had other zeitgeists to deal with. And only someone who doesn’t personally know many deeply religious people — someone to whom they are a caricature — would assume that they are also immune from irony. Maybe if you had been raised in a very sheltered family and school, enough out of the mainstream that American popular culture would be a foreign culture. Once you have breathed that air, though, the shielding becomes part of you, and to learn to be real is to transform it. I don’t think it brushes off so easily, because it isn’t something completely superficial. It is more something you must deliver yourself from.
-
Public breastfeeding: back to the 90’s again.
If only it could be back to the 30’s or so. Jamie’s got a good rant going.
I’ve been listening to people talk about public breastfeeding since 1996. Things have changed a lot since then. In 1996 there was no state in the US in which a man could marry another man, and the idea didn’t seem likely to gain traction any time soon. In 1996 the Unabomber was still on the loose. In 1996 the impeachment of a President was ancient history. The world has changed a lot since then and yet people are still talking about public breastfeeding as a plot for corrupting the youth.
She dives into the Historic Photos of Breastfeeding trove, too.
-
Jarring, yet intriguing, juxtaposition of the morning.
Grading papers as foot-washing, courtesy of Jamie (alias Dr. Most-Gladly).
+ + +
Thought on this one: Why do I always seem to encounter the insights that might have helped me make sense of and/or endure some difficult task, long after I have put that task long behind me, probably for good? I had to do some grading of papers as a TA a few times, and I did it back then with the expectation of a working life spent doing things like grading papers, among other things.
But I haven’t put grading behind entirely, right, what with the whole homeschooling thing? Still doing it?
Not even close. Grading your own child’s papers, or the papers of a friend’s child whom you know well, is NOT the same because the intimacy of critiquing lacks the discomfort, that sensation of boundary-crossing. I am supposed to help my child grow up, navigate the requirements of adulthood, which here are communicating like a thinking person in a thinking world, and sending the correct social signals. I am authorized by human sociobiology itself to perform such tasks for my children (and, I believe, for the other children in other family groups close to me). Bathing your own child, however grimy, isn’t even close to foot-washing. Hey, mothers, if you’ve done time in the volunteer nursery — isn’t there a REALLY SIGNIFICANT difference between changing your own child’s diaper and changing someone else’s child’s diaper? Admit it. Your own kid’s poop doesn’t stink quite as badly.
The essence of foot-washing is that it violates a boundary we would all prefer not to violate. It knocks down an imaginary wall that we put there for our own protection against a number of uncomfortable truths: the sort of truths that are common to human beings. There is something in it that reminds me of the confessional (as it should). There is something in it that reminds me of Snowden’s terrible secret in Catch-22.
I wonder if Jamie might find some irony in the discomfort of critiquing existing alongside the imposter syndrome — the collection of all such critiquing is the way imposter syndrome is communicated from teacher to student, in a sort of intellectual laying-on-of-hands. (Personally, I would be a little bit concerned for a budding academic who entirely lacked that sense of uncomfortable self-awareness. It’s a useful faculty, if it can be channelled.)
It might be a little funny to think of such a thing in the banality of grading papers, but I think there is a lot to be said for the comparison. Someone did it for you, and now you’re to turn around and do it for others. It’s thoroughly uncomfortable for everyone involved, but it has to be gotten through and everyone is the better for it, even when nobody’s very well-practiced at the task. It requires the will overcoming the reluctance that persists, for a good natural reason, in our nature. And the will has its own reasons — not wholly natural ones — why it is good and right that it should prevail.
-
Blast from the past.
I just opened my email to find an email from myself. It was a little bit spooky, because I had entirely forgotten sending this email. I checked the date: January 9, 2012.
In a second I recovered, because I send emails to myself all the time using the free version of FollowUpThen. I just don't always send them for ten months in the future.
This is what I wrote myself:
—————————————————————————————
TO: bearing
FROM: bearing
SUBJECT: Get ready for Advent!
You already have Christmas Cards, and your advent candles are in good shape. You need
– Jesse Tree ornament plan or some such thing with daily readings
– Advent calendars for the children
– white ball candles for christmas
– new purple and pink ribbons, and red ones too — go buy some premade
ones or some spools(And while you're at it make a plan for St. Nick's day and your anniversary.)
————————————————————————————–
Yeah. I was all set to send myself a THANK YOU YOU HAVE NO IDEA email, except that there isn't yet a mechanism for sending those back into the past.
Yeah. I like FollowUpThen. This is not a paid advertisement.
-
Blub blub.
Here is an obscurely inconsequential Minneapolis item:
Minneapolis voting precinct located entirely in a lake
Not one voter cast a ballot in one Minneapolis precinct on Election Day. That’s because the only living species in Ward 10, Precinct 3B, is of the aquatic variety.
A newly redistricted precinct map shows 3B is located entirely in the eastern half of Lake Calhoun — the biggest lake in Minneapolis. City Clerk Casey Carl says the watery precinct is the “unintentional result of a programming error” made in drawing new ward boundary lines.
Charter Commission chairman Barry Clegg tells the Star Tribune that the mapping software couldn’t draw a line around the edge of the lake without putting a census block in the wrong ward. Clegg says it was supposed to be cleaned up for the final map, but never was.
Perhaps they're just looking out for a very special contingency. It's my observation that the population of the eastern half of Lake Calhoun increases significantly after the ice gets thick enough to drag an ice fishing house out there.
But generally, Minneapolis stays on top of things. The error came to light when a reporter asked why nobody voted in 3B.
If you'd like to see the watery precinct, you can look at the map here.
-
Duck, duck, duck fat.
Saturday was the last relaxing day I would have for a while (I have to drive to Ohio with the kids by myself next week — long story), and while I was out running errands I semi-impulsively decided that what I really needed was a lengthy, satisfying cooking project.
There's something I love about spending a few hours in the kitchen and emerging with something tangible, like a big pot of complicated beef bourguignon or a stack of casseroles in the freezer for an upcoming busy time. I don't really enjoy baking very much, but those of you who do may recognize the same satisfaction in getting all the Christmas cookies made and frozen, or making an extra-fancy birthday cake for someone special. I suppose it's not very different from the pleasure of having all the tomatoes canned and cooling in rows of jars on the counter, except that I don't can, either.
Anyway, while I was out I stopped into a grocery store to get an ingredient I needed for Monday's dinner at H.'s (my turn to bring my crockpot), and in the store I impulsively bought two large frozen ducks.
+ + +
I do not buy duck often. I will order it in a better restaurant if duck breast (or even better, magret de canard) is on the menu — I've never been disappointed in it, because I guess restaurants don't tend to put it on the menu if they can't do it right — but it's been maybe five years since I bought duck at the store.
Part of the reason is that the price tag is pretty alarming. My six-and-a-half pound ducks each cost more than twenty dollars at my ordinary grocery store. (I would have bought smaller ones if there had been any). Like I said, it was kind of an impulse buy. It's probably a better idea to shop around, or look for a sale around the holidays (I guess — I know when turkeys and corned beef briskets go on sale, but I'm not sure if duck has a sale season). Googling around, I see that Aldi stores in the US carry duck for about a dollar less per pound than at my Cub. Oops, I'll go there next time. Googling also indicated that I might find a decent price at an Asian market, which I might have to check the next time I need to stock up on fish sauce. If you have a farmer's market or other source for locally raised duck, or you're a hunter, you might do even better.
But I intended to squeeze everything out of the duck but the quack, plus entertain myself for an afternoon, so I hoped it wouldn't be wasted.
+ + +
I thawed my ducks in a sink of cold water, and when they were pliable enough I set out some aluminum roasting pans, opened the packages and started cutting.
I've never just done "whole roasted duck," even though a properly done one is beautiful, because I am notoriously bad at whole roasted chickens. Duck is even more persnickety than chickens because — well, in my opinion the difficulty with whole chickens is that the breast meat is different from the dark meat and is done at different times, and I don't like hovering over the oven with foil and thermometers; and duck has even MORE discrepancy between the legs and the breast. The legs are really full of connective tissue and behave better when braised, while the breast roasts nicely. So I always cut the damn thing up.
And that's why I always buy two: because I need to feed the family on the duck breast alone.
+ + +
I performed an advanced separations technique ("cutting the damn thing up") for a while. I am used to cutting up a chicken to roast the parts on the bone, but the duck separation has a somewhat different purpose. What I was after was this:
- one pan with the four duck breast fillets, skin-on, but cut off the bone
- one pan with as much of the rest of the skin and fat as I could remove from the duck carcass
- two pans each holding the remainder of the duck carcasses, most of the dark meat attached
- the internal organs of the ducks, which I was going to toss because, sadly, I hate organ meat, even at $3.59 a pound sunk cost
This took a couple of knives and a sturdy pair of kitchen scissors, and a lot of paper towels, as well as about six feet of my kitchen counter and both sinks, and a good deal of time. Maybe an hour.
(Where were the kids during all this? With Mark, mostly, or watching movies. You don't want to cut up two ducks unless you're sure that all small children are being adequately cared for for the duration.)
I set my bowl of skin and fat aside, and I set my ragged-looking carcasses-trimmed-of-skin-and-fat aside, washed my hands real good, and proceeded to make dinner out of my four duck breast fillets. They were big enough to feed my family of six, considering that we generally eschew Everybody Gets Their Own Hunk of Meat dinners.
+ + +
Four-duck-breast dinner:
- Put a rice cooker on with rice. For a special treat for the kids, we used WHITE RICE. They were ecstatic.
- Wash up some kale and wilt it with garlic and oil, then add some liquid and let it braise on low.
- Wash some fresh fruit for the kids. We had grapes.
- Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Score the skin on the duck breasts in a diamond pattern. Season with salt and pepper. Preheat two heavy skillets over medium heat — dry — cast iron is perfect for this, but I only have one and my good big heavy skillet worked fine — and place the duck breasts skin side down in the hot pans. Let 'em cook until the skin is crisp and the fat rendered out. I think mine took about 12 or 15 minutes, but you have to keep checking. You do want them to be good and crispy, so that the skin looks DONE. Otherwise they'll spend too much time in the oven crisping up.
- Meanwhile, whisk about 2/3 of a cup of plum preserves (I used my mother-in-law's preserves made from home-grown plums — truly worthy of glazing a duck breast) with a tablespoon or two of soy sauce and some red pepper flakes. Five-spice powder would be nice if you had it (I couldn't find mine). I believe that apricot or cherry preserves would also be very nice, maybe even blackberry.
- Turn the duck over in the skillet and carefully spoon off as much of the fat as you can. DO NOT THROW THIS FAT AWAY. Save it in a glass container and set it aside for Phase 3 of Operation Get Your Money's Worth Out of These Ducks.
- Brush all the preserves mixture over the duck breasts. Transfer the skillet to the oven and roast. I believe the internal temperature you are going for is 135 degrees F, if you like them on the rare side, but even if they get a little overdone (mine ALWAYS do — roasting birds is just not my strong point) they will still taste great. Duck breasts just don't dry out the way a chicken breast will. Anyway, it will not take long to finish them in the oven. Five to eight minutes and you absolutely should be checking.
- Transfer to a cutting board and let the duck rest a few minutes while you spoon off the pan juices.
- Slice the duck thinly — quarter inch slices — keeping that little sliver of crispy skin on each, for which you will need your knife to be quite sharp. Arrange the slices on a platter and pour that deep purple-brown, plummy sauce all over. Toss a handful of sliced scallions on top and serve it with the aforementioned rice and greens.
- If you have a Trappist dubbel ale to go with it, SO MUCH THE BETTER. I did!
My six-year-old daughter begged, "Make this every week!" I said, "um, no." But maybe next week I will make the rest of the package of white rice, and she will be just as happy.
+ + +
It turned out that we only ate three of the four duck breast fillets. I had one left over! You know what that meant? Duck fried rice a couple of days later. File that away in the "awesome leftovers" category.
+ + +
After the meal was done and the ale bottle was empty, I had to head back into the kitchen to deal with the bowl of fat and the carcasses. I thought maybe I might stick them back in the fridge and finish the next day, but the night was still young and Mark had offered to do the dishes, so I decided to get it over with.
I put the carcasses in their pans in the oven, there to roast until the meat was all cooked through. Here is where a little patience might have been better: I think I would have gotten more meat off of them if I had roasted the duck more slowly at a lower temperature, to encourage some of that abundant connective tissue to let go. Live and learn.
Eventually I would pull the carcasses out and pick them as cleanly as I could of meat from the legs, thigh, wings, and back. This was harder than I remembered it, probably because I had roasted them too quickly. But I managed to get quite a lot of meat shreds off the ducks, certainly enough for a casserole, maybe two if I stretched it. This went well-wrapped into the freezer. It is, I think, destined for enchiladas, which are easy and very tasty with duck — green enchiladas, maybe, or picadillo. Or possibly I will combine some with white beans and sage for a Tuscan-inspired sort of dish. We shall see.
+ + +
After the carcasses are picked, of course, they are not done. I cracked them into pieces and distributed the bones among several freezer bags labeled "Duck Carcass For Stock." I think I can get three or maybe four pots of stock out of the two ducks, or if I like I can add a wing here and a leg there to my chicken stock to make it richer, darker, and more gelatinous.
+ + +
While the carcasses were safely in the oven, I turned my attention to the bowl full of fat and skin scraps. I cut the chunks up into inch-size pieces and put them all in a large saucepan with a cup or so of water, then set them to boil. The water keeps the temperature low until it all boils away, giving the fat time to render; once the added water's gone it still bubbles for a while, I guess as moisture comes out of the duck skin. You have to stir it from time to time to keep it from sticking to the bottom, and as the water leaves you have to pay closer attention, because you don't want it to burn.
The skin of the duck, near the end, starts to brown and crisp, and turn into what looks a lot like pork rinds but is actually duck rinds. Duck cracklings! I had a paper-towel-lined plate and a slottted spoon handy, and as these started to turn brown and crispy I started carefully removing them. Let as much duck fat as possible drip back into the pan; anything that soaks into the paper towels is wasted. (Now that I think about it, it might be better to drain your cracklings on a rack set over a bowl. I went for the paper towels because that's what I do when I make tortilla chips. Duh.)
Once all the cracklings are spooned out of the pot and the heat is turned off, take that pot of duck fat and pour it through a cheesecloth-lined strainer into a measuring cup. Admire your work:
There's probably more duck fat lying around the kitchen: in the bottoms of the roasting pans with the carcasses, in a bowl with a spoon in it next to the stove where you spooned the fat off the pan from searing the duck breasts. You can expect to get at least a cup of fat out of each duck, if you did a good job carefully saving the fat as you go along. With two ducks, you can think of this as the equivalent of a pound of expensive butter. Nothing, nothing, is better for frying potatoes, and I'm told that it is also a nice fat to use for a savory pastry. Mine pretty much all goes into fried potatoes over the following weeks.
I gave a cup of it to H., though, as a present. She received it with great joy.
+ + +
So out of my two ducks, here is what I got:
- Meat for one really fancy family meal (the pan-roasted plum-glazed duck breast)
- Meat for three less-fancy, but still pretty special, family meals (let's say two pans of enchiladas and a batch of duck fried rice)
- Three or four pots of duck stock, or alternatively an enhancement for 6-8 pots of chicken stock
- Almost a pound of premium cooking fat
- DUCK CRACKLINGS which theoretically keep in your fridge for a while and are a wonderful thing to sprinkle on top of a salad, unless you eat them all with a nice hoppy IPA the next day as a bedtime snack
- An evening's entertainment, if you like cutting up poultry
Let's deconstruct this, shall we?
7 ounces of *rendered* duck fat = $10, so my pound of duck fat is worth more than twenty dollars on its own — there, I already paid for one duck.
A boneless duck breast fillet can cost you at least $11 — Looky there, I had four! Call it $40.
A quart of prepared duck stock (or concentrate to make a quart) would cost you $6. I expect about eight quarts of stock out of this.
Fully cooked pulled duck leg meat is about $7/lb. I guess I got maybe a pound out of it.
So for my $45 and one evening's investment, I estimate I produced a retail value of $100. It's still not cheap — I mean, you could eat chicken breast and make chicken stock and chicken enchiladas (don't bother with the fat, though) and save your money — definitely a premium foody experience, akin to eating in a restaurant.
But even though it's not cheap, it's frugal. Very little is wasted (especially if you can find something to do with the organ meats, and you don't lose some of that fat in paper towels.)
I'm not sure, but I think I even tasted some of the quack.
-
Poison control update.
Remember that story about MJ getting pine sap in her eye, and I called poison control from camp, and all turned out well and we didn't have to drive 45 minutes to an ER, and my vacation was saved, and so I wrote a blog post wishing I could send cupcakes to the poison control center, and ChristyP made it happen via the wonders of social networks?
The Hennepin County Medical Center liked the story enough to ask me if I wouldn't mind contributing an edited version to their "Faces and Stories" section of their PR/advocacy site. I didn't mind.
If you go there today (11/12/12) you'll see my 9- and 6-year-olds in the photo on this month's "Featured Story." They're fishing in the picture, because at the time I was calling Poison Control I was too busy to snap a photo of my screaming children for posterity. So we went with "an outdoor activity involving eye protection" instead.
Also, you'll see a picture of the poison information provider getting his cupcakes!
+ + +
The story, "Delivering Care by Delivering Information," will fall off the front page eventually, and I'll replace the link then.
-
Adult swim, part II.
Jamie asked me to write about taking adult swim lessons.
Here’s where I wrote about the year of lessons I took from my local YMCA.
After a while, I figured it was time to start learning and improving on my own. Continuing…
+ + +
All along, while I had been taking lessons from the instructors at the YMCA, I had been thinking: “Finally, I know how to swim laps. When I begin my next pregnancy, I’ll stay strong and healthy by swimming laps every week. Maybe twice a week.”
Soon after I decided to quit lessons and just swim on my own, I became pregnant with my third baby. I started out excited, and in those early weeks I plunged eagerly into the pool, secretly smiling and thinking about the little one who would soon be swimming inside me.
And then the first trimester hit me like a truck, and I spent every spare minute, for approximately 19 weeks, either sleeping or wishing I was sleeping.
Didn’t even dip a toe in the pool. Mark took the older one to swim lessons by himself. I stayed home with the toddler. It was one of those long and grueling pregnancies, and the burst of energy never seemed to come. I never went back to the pool, even at the end.
Looking back on it, I wish I had dragged myself there anyway. I know now (after a fourth pregnancy) that swimming can be easy and relaxing, that the buoyancy of the water is a blessed relief from the weight of a swollen abdomen, that even a little large-muscle movement can restore a sense of total mental balance. At the time, it just seemed too hard. And that was more about my inexperience with regular exercise than it was about the pregnancy. I still thought of getting up and moving as something I ought to do rather than something I wanted to do, and that meant I was eager for an excuse to stay on the couch. Pregnancy was a great excuse. Nobody would blame me for sleeping all day. All pregnancy long.
+ + +
If you have been following my blog for a while, particularly if you are one of the people who followed me when it briefly became a Weight Loss Blog, you know that I gave birth to that daughter in mid-2006.
And you know my New Year’s resolution for 2008 — once my daughter was no longer a tiny baby — was to start swimming twice a week.
And you know that I kept that resolution.
And you know that this is how I learned to embrace regular exercise instead of couch potatoship.
And you know that this was a transforming experience.
I still had a lot of learning to do about swimming, particularly the breaststroke, but I didn’t think that any more lessons would help. So I turned to the Internet and to books.
+ + +
The first really helpful Internet resource I found was a trove of articles on the website of H2Ouston Swims, a USMS masters swimming club in Houston, TX. It contained so much information I was almost overwhelmed, but I read lots of it, took some notes, and tried some of the drills.
Probably the most useful concept I learned from the articles was the skill of “sculling.” (The series entitled “Get a Better Grip!” talks about this.) It has to do with angling your hands to act as “propeller blades” as they move through the water, and how that ties into the arm strokes. (I wrote briefly about it here.)
Just as important as the skill itself was the revelation that I needed to take these movements into my mind and think about them — in particular, I needed to read about them as described by a skilled writer. The real-life instruction in the pool was helpful to a point, but I needed to take the skills apart, analyze them, realize what each motion accomplished as part of the stroke, and then put them back together the way they were supposed to go. Once I understood how the arm motions and leg motions work together to cause body rotation — how the rotation itself provides some of the propulsion — how the relative position of the two arms during the catch can create more or less drag in the water — then I found I felt stronger, purposeful, confident. As if I could choose how to make my body work. More in control.
In February of that year I ordered two books about swimming. One of them, I realized later, was written by the H2Ouston Swims coach. The other was a begin-at-the-beginning how-to-swim instructional manual. I used the latter one to teach myself, finally, how to swim the breaststroke. (The crucial mental breakthrough? I stopped trying to pull-breathe-kick-glide, and started thinking of it as kick-glide-pull-breathe. For some reason, that made my brain much happier and I became instantly able to integrate the pieces of the stroke together. I have never had anyone evaluate my breaststroke to tell me if I am doing it all wrong, but it seems to work, so I am kind of afraid to ask.)
The workouts in my books were too long for me to start, so I went online looking for short swimming workouts. I found these at BeginnerTriathlete.com. That website had a set of beginning swimming workouts that started at 400 meters (for me, 400 yards, since my pool isn’t metric). Let me just point out that there are not many published workouts at under 1000 yards. But 400 yards is only 8 times across the pool. That is a nice, easy way to start out — and if you can’t do 400 yards yet, it won’t be long before you can work your way up to it. Highly recommended. Even better, the workouts come in three kinds: endurance, form, and speed. I mostly did the endurance and form workouts, since I only had two swims per week, but I did occasionally dip into the speed workouts.
+ + +
I kept swimming, and later running too. All through my fourth pregnancy (until I worried about turning the baby breech in late pregnancy) I swam twice a week. I couldn’t wait until I could get back in the pool at six weeks postpartum. Unless I have a sinus infection or lack pool access for some reason, I never go more than a week or so without craving the water.
I have played around with hand paddles, with lap counters. I have been through at least half a dozen swimsuits. These days I follow a minimalist, 1650-yard workout that requires little thought and takes a bit more than 45 minutes:
- 300 yard warmup: 2 laps pulling, 2 laps kicking, 2 laps backstroke
- 400 yards freestyle, 100 yards breaststroke
- 300 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
- 200 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
- 100 yards freestyle
- 150 yard cooldown: 1 lap backstroke, 1 lap kicking, 1 lap pulling
I am too busy right now to think about improving, so this is my holding pattern. I only have one goal, which is to get it reliably below 45 minutes — an average of 1 minute 22 seconds per lap. The warmup and breaststroke are much slower than that, so I need to speed my freestyle up considerably to break that.
One of my greatest pleasures comes weekly when I bring my now-six-year-old daughter to her swim lesson. Her lesson is 40 minutes, so I can almost get my whole workout in while she swims. When she is done, she patters over to the end of the lane where I am finishing up, s
its down and dangles her feet in the water, and taps me on the hand when I arrive at the wall. “Can I swim with you?” she asks, and if the pool is not too crowded and no one is sharing the lane, I say “Yes” and she hops in with me. I tow her to the midline and back, nodding approvingly at her paddling form, grinning and clapping when she shows me how she has learned to dive to the bottom or to float on her back.She cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a swimmer, every week stuffing my hair under a cap and jumping right into the cold pool without hesitation or shudder. Every one of her lessons have been, for her, learning to do something she sees me do all the time.
-
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
- Lifelong conversion.
- The conversation.
- “Unprofitable servant”… of God.
- Mardi Gras recipe hack: Bread Machine king cake.
- Minnesota furious.
Categories
…more to come later
bearing blog 