I am the meanest

I am easily the meanest parent by far in my Academic Book Club (the Dotytron too, by extension).  Last night we talked about allowances and one of our member's issues with telling her 9 year old that just because so-and-so has an iPod touch it doesn't mean that she'll be getting her own.

You know what I tell the Big Yam when he says that something is "mine" (as in his)?  I say to him, "Nothing in this house is yours.  It's MINE.  You don't own anything.  You didn't earn it."  LOL!

Then we got onto the subject of chores and I was saying that the Big Yam's job since he's been just under two or so is to feed the cats in the morning and at night (and to set the table).  Book Club was impressed and one of the members says, "Maybe I'll try that with my daughter.  Give her a sense that making an effort to help out around the house counts."  And I was all, "Uhhh, HOLD THE FARM.  Making an effort DOESN'T COUNT.  The job has to be done right," and I told them about how when the Big Yam spills the cat food on the floor (which he did for a few days on purpose because he liked the sound or mess or something), I made him pick up each and every piece and put it back in the bin.  

In the Dotytron-Lagerfeld house, making a superficial effort ISN'T ENOUGH.  We are firm believers that kids have to be enticed (read: forced) to do things that they dislike, or that are hard, or that are unpleasant, and they do them to a certain standard because eventually, they push through and discover that doing so is intrinsically rewarding.  The Dotytron's entire job is based around dealing with kids who have been told their whole lives that lip-service "effort" and "trying" is enough.  Then these parents send their kids to schools and leave teachers to deal with their messes.  That's not okay.  Not in our books.

In my house growing up, we never had our own money.  There was no allowance, no money for chores.  You did your tasks (and please note, the kids in my family did A LOT - like, when we went on family trips, my mum and Big D would NEVER, EVER, EVER carry their own luggage...my mum bore 4 children so she would have 4 bellhops.  Heck, when I was a kid, my mum would make us carry her purse because even doing that was too taxing for her) because that's just how it was.  Everyone had a role in making sure the family functioned and the parents' role was to earn money and put a roof over our heads and food in our bellies and the kids' role was basically to do whatever your parents told you to do.  If I had even asked for an allowance my mum and Big D would have 1) yelled at me; then 2)  asked me why I thought I needed my own money when they provided everything I needed/required and if I wanted more, all I had to do was ask (with the knowledge that I would more often than not get turned down).  

The idea of my kid coming home and whining about "So-and-so has an iPod touch and why can't I have one wahwahwah" is appalling to me.  I'd be like, GO LIVE WITH SO-AND-SO'S PARENTS THEN, YOU INGRATE.  Exceptionalism is a combination of innate personality and also being pushed.  You don't get to become a driven, motivated individual by getting iPod touches and whatever the heck crap else you decide in your pea-brained head you want.  

Then my friend C asked about whether the other book club members eat together consistently as a family.  JJ and I were the only ones who said yes.  Everyone else was in the trap of cooking separate meals of what the kids would like to eat and then eating another meal themselves of what they wanted.  I just...don't have the time or inclination to do that.  We always ate together as a family growing up and I really believe in family meal time as an important focal point for the day - especially with today's families, when you're all careening off in different directions for 10+ hours every day - I think it's vital to forge those connections and centre yourselves around the table.  Dinner is the meal I look forward to all day, so the idea of eating whatever bland food my kid might want is not for me (in my case, the "bland" food would be super-spicy Indian food, but that's neither here nor there).  Also, by the end of the day, I'm lucky if I have enough gas to get through dinner, clean-up, a bit of play, stories, bed, and gearing up to do it all over again (to say nothing for an hour for my own pursuits), so the logistics of making two meals is simply not in the cards.

Part of the reason I subscribe to Baby-Led Weaning is because of this idea that's central to it - you have to take a macro, long-range view of what your kid is eating and trust that they self-regulate. So yes, the Big Yam wasn't a super-fan of the clam linguine, but over the course of two weeks, he's getting the protein, carbs, vegetables, and essential vitamins and minerals that he needs.  Especially given the varied menus that I construct, if the Boobla has bits and pieces, the long-range view is that he's getting what he needs.

Anyway, they were all APPALLED when I told them that one of the things we do when the Big Yam is misbehaving at the dinner table (throwing food on the floor, being disruptive, screaming about being done when we're not done eating) is turn his high chair around and basically, disallow him from being part of the table.  They were shocked and basically thought I was a monster.  But here's my rationale: I think that participating in the dinner table (with the dinner table as a microcosm for society as a whole) is a privilege that requires you as an individual to accept the rules of behavior that are part of your social contract with the other members of your family/dining companions.  Failure to exhibit acceptable behavior  and respect for your dining companions means that you get taken out of the situation until such time as you're ready and able to resume upholding your end of the contract in good faith.  The Dotytron is such a fan of the practice that he thinks we should continue it into like, adulthood.  Can you imagine a teenager with his back to the table, being all like, "I can HEAR YOU RIGHT NOW"?  It's pretty funny.

So my friend JJ was like, the way that we do things might work for us, but it won't work for everyone, because some kids will starve themselves to death.  And in my head (and this is how I'm a horrible person), I was like, well, if the kid doesn't even have that most basic of survival instincts, don't they kinda deserve to die?  It's like this Louis CK bit that another lady was talking about last night; she went to see him do stand-up and he apparently said this thing about how, have you ever considered that kids with peanut allergies are meant to die from exposure to peanuts?  Hahahaha.  So dark.  

I dunno.  I just finished reading a book about kids living in slums in Mumbai who sometimes have to eat frogs and rats fished out of the sewage lake on their slums.  If those kids can eat that, then a middle class kid in the developed world can stomach something other than plain pasta, methinks.

Here's the thing they don't see though: when it is time for play, or fun, the Dotytron and I go WHOLE HOG.  Like, we ramp up the fun in direct proportion to how hard we come down.  This is one of the discipline-y things the Dotytron learned in this book he read a couple of years back on classroom management.  The idea being that you basically don't want it to be a carrot or stick situation.  You want to get to the point where the kid governs him/herself (shades of Foucault!) out of the desire to continue to be able to do fun/awesome/happy things.  The disciplinary mechanism should fade into the background.  It's not overly censorious - you try not to react (like, don't get into a screaming match, don't raise your voice).  Instead, it's more like you're so bored by the kid's disobedience/acting out that you present this impassive, stony, façade while simultaneously and immediately ceasing the fun thing you had been doing.  Few things rattle kids like impassivity.  We also try to treat the Yam like a sentient, rationale being with agency and we appeal to his reasonableness.  We do this by, for example, telling him that he has to stay sleeping in his own crib all night and that we are here, and we would never let anything happen to him, and that we love him.  We also do that couples-therapy thing where we acknowledge his emotions at that moment, "I know you're mad/angry right now" "I know you want to do XYZ right now and you're frustrated because you can't" but still explain why the way he's expressing those emotions aren't appropriate.  

That's really just a long way of saying that me and the Dotytron are hella fun.  I make myself look like a giant goon by chasing the Big Yam around doing monster-face or pretending to be an alligator with my arms as big snapping jaws running around after him in the summer.  The Dotytron jams with him all the time or will spend sooo long at the play kitchen engaging in imaginary play or building trains.  The other night, we made this giant fort in our living room and the Big Yam's face when he went in...I wish I had a picture...he was beaming with this pure, open-mouthed smile of joy while we turned off all the lights and read stories by flashlight and told secrets.  

So yeah, I'm pretty mean.  But I can be pretty fun sometimes, too.  

This is a Yam-heavy post, y'all.  You've been warned.  Here are some things that happened on the weekend:

Offering Elmo a hot dog

Still Life With Hot Dog

These two run the worst kitchen in town.  You don't get anything you ask for, food falls on the floor and that walk-in is a s**tshow.

Trying to break into Bert & Ernie's apartment building.  Smallest, most persistent J-Hos ever.

This is what the fashion magazines would call "a look."  Crown, fuzzy jammies, and matching yellow high heels.

The Big Yam reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Sorry our house is the most low-lit ever.  That look he gives at the 35 second mark after running through that epic list of foods is classic Yam.

The roomie came over for dinner tonight and brought a lasagne she had made.  YESSSSSSS...MADE-BY-OTHERS-LASAGNE!!!  We had it with a caesar salad and leftover peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip blondies JJ brought to book club.

Fin.

My under-used skill

- I excel at making obscure, Vanity Fair-themed jokes (the magazine, not the Thackeray novel).  There isn't a Dominic Dunne or Gore Vidal bon mot I won't drop!

The Dotytron and I had an epic conversation (after our CD of tunes from Les Misérables, West Side Story, and Wicked had cycled through) on the drive down to visit my sis about our end-of-life wishes, based on me reading that Get Your Shit Together website's recommendations.  Just talking about what constitutes life, or a quality of life, or consciousness and at what point the other person should make the decision to pull the plug.  It is probably a sign of my inherent selfishness (and issues with mortality) that I insisted that if I was in a persistent vegetative state that I be kept alive for one year to see if I come out of it.  The Dotytron is way more selfless - he's concerned about the impact on his loved ones - like what a burden it would be for me to have to visit him all the time and have him be a husk of a person.  I don't know though - the Chinese way is to approach things with the sense that becoming a burden on your loved ones is kind of expected and that your loved ones should like, grovel for the opportunity to wait on you hand and foot and inconvenience themselves for you.  I'm just living up to my culture, man.  Then the Dotytron veered into "2nd partner" territory, as in: it would be weird for him and his future replacement-Lagerfeld to have me in their house, hooked up to breathing tubes and whatnot and I was all like, why would you want to be with someone who wasn't okay with you caring for the husk of your first partner?  It would be SO LIKE the Dotytron to end up with someone who was all stereotypical evil stepmother/2nd wife syndrome.

His high school girlfriend (who was in my art classes all through high school) made herself a homemade Tori Amos t-shirt that was plain white with the words, "what's so amazing about really deep thoughts?" hand written across the front.

CASE CLOSED.

Speaking of Tori Amos, I'm hosting Academic Book Club tonight.  There has been a feverish amount of tidying going on at Lil' Ugmo.  The Tori Amos segue is apt because one of the book club members, my dear strident feminist out-of-touch-with-popular-culture friend J, talked about going to a Tori Amos concert (like, recently!  In 2012!!!) at a meeting and I was all slack-jawed and gaped at her like she was a centaur or something.  Like, I can't believe reasonable people would go to a Tori Amos concert to watch an old lady with brittle hair thrash around and hump a piano bench.  But to each their own!

Anyway, I'm putting out a spread consisting of red wine, sparkling, flat, grapes, clementines, a green pea and pecorino dip, a goat's gouda (my current favorite cheese - it reminds me of the young pecorinos you get everywhere in Florence), an old Dutch beemster that is so loaded with those Parmesano Reggiano crystalline umami-bombs that I salivate just looking at it, and Le Riopelle, a triple cream cow's milk cheese from Quebec; some gluten free crackers, some bread, some baby carrots, and I made bittersweet chocolate budinos with salted caramel and chocolate crumbs, along with gluten free peanut butter cookies.  I have a hosting reputation to uphold and since this is likely the last time I'll be up for hosting book club until, say, 2020, then I want to go out in a blaze of glory.  Call me young gun.

Sometime between posting that post on Monday and today, my stomach/metabolism has waged an all-out war on my protestations of "not being that hungry."  I'm getting hunger headaches every 2 hours.  At first, I thought it was just a return-to-desk-job-after-a-weekend-in-Geneseo headache but then I realized that it went away when I ate.  So even though I don't feel hungry, my body is HUNGRY.  Like, this is me:

I can't tell you how much it amuses me endlessly the degree to which and the sincerity with which Dr. Rei can rhapsodise about this song - her "favorite duet of all time"

By the way, I countered that by saying that one of my favorite duets might be "Islands in the Stream."  

Anyway, even the "not feeling hungry" seems to be going away and today I was hungry and thirsty ALL THE TIME.  Even though I regularly drink TWO LITRES OF WATER A DAY.  But my blood volume is supposed to increase by 100%.  What the f**k are those two little twerps doing to me?  It's super-hard to satisfy hunger healthfully.  Like, I don't know how marathon runners or professional athletes do it.  My colleagues at work today were talking about cholesterol and I got all freaked out and I changed my McDonald's order from my big mac combo/filet-o-fish chaser to a filet-o-fish combo/filet-o-fish chaser.  This is after I spent about half an hour figuring out which McDonald's versus Popeye's combo variation was less likely to kill me.  I swear, I would learn advanced Excel just to build a model that would allow me to figure this kind of stuff out (2 pieces or 3? Biscuit or mashed potatoes? Eat half the biscuit and get an extra piece of chicken? Diet soda?!?!)  Maybe I should build an app for this.  I could call it "Hungry Pigs."  

This stupid multiples book I was reading (last one! I'm through!) had all these lamewad recipes at the back for "mini meatloaves" and fish burgers made with tinned salmon (barf).  My forays into Roseanne territory aside, I really do feel like the meals we cook at home are generally healthy and balanced.  Surely I'm killing it on variety alone?  I made myself an egg white and spinach and cheese omelet the other morning for breakfast.  It was very virtuous but the flavour and satisfaction derived from eating it was inversely related to the degree of virtue.  Egg whites are the grossest.  I mean, I like me a Swiss meringue buttercream and a lemon meringue pie and an île flottante, hard.  But ALL of those dishes find a way to cleverly sneak in some yolk goodness.  Last night we had clam linguine with a tonne of garlic and some baby heirloom hothouse tomatoes thrown in and it was DELICIOUS.  I love me a linguine alle vongole so hard.   

The bottom line is: don't be surprised if this little space devolves into me talking about what I want to eat (more than usual).

The Big Yam has reached a fun, fun, fun milestone: reading stories out loud to himself.  I feel like it's a G-D miracle.  He carries around The Very Hungry Caterpillar and reads out loud and counts out the foods and it's THE BEST!  He's always pestering me in the mornings and the both of us at night to read stories and trying to get more stories out of us and it's really, really hard to say no and stick to a firm bedtime.  How can I say no to a nascent love of reading?  

The Dotytron had an assignment for his grade 6 students who are on the cusp of actually getting to play their band instruments.  He's been gradually working up to it.  The lead-up assignment was for them to research their instrument and to report back on stuff like: how to make a good tone, how your mouth should be, notable players of that instrument, etc.  He had one person come back and report on the flute.  The notable flutist was...

Alyssa Milano.

LOL!!!  Kids rule.  The kid also noted that "Alyssa Milano also plays the piano."  

As an aside: I was reading up on Syria today.  Ugh.  Not good.

I'm trying not to let on too much, but having two twerps is freaking me out.  I just feel like it increases the odds that something bad is going to happen...like the very fact that there's two twerps is tempting the fates.  I know there's nothing I can do about it and it's one of those "come what may" scenarios but I just have this low-grade nervousness.  It's partially hypochondria and partially being a worrier and partially having lived with a midwife for 4 years and partially reading too much about odds and statistics and having a shaky grasp of grade 11 finite math (which I somehow got an A in by the skin of my teeth, with the weird side effect of retaining nothing from that class.  I blame this on Dr. B, our teacher, who was so old and doddering he smelled like he was rotting from the inside out).  

Fin.

  

A Funny Thing Happened

Part 2

...at the ultrasound clinic at Mt. Sinai.

But before we get to that stage, there is the stage where I find out that I am with child.  As SMckay rightly accuses me, I always think I'm preggos.  I take pregnancy tests like they cost nothing (they don't).  You know what's super-profesh?  Taking a pregnancy test at work!

I was semi-convinced (not for the first time, for literally the 10th time) that I was with child and went with Dr. Rei at lunch and bought a not-cheap test and then took it at work because I'm a first-rate spoiler and have to know everything, all the time.  It seemed to show that I was preggos.  So I brought it home with me and grabbed the mail, and was trying to be all funny, and said to the Dotytron (who was dancing with the Big Yam to Eric Dolphy in his studio), as I was rifling through the mail, "We got this weird delivery notice..." AND THEN WHA-BLAM, super-profesh pregnancy test in yo' hand!

But the line was super faint so we were happy and then immediately, WTF WHY DID WE EVEN WANT THIS - THIS IS THE WORST and were second guessing the results.  So I took two more dollar store ones which showed progressively fainter results but all in the "you're with child" direction.  We put the tests on our dresser and decided to never speak of it again.

A week after, I got hand foot and mouth, so I called the Roomie and had to prematurely spill the beans because I wanted to know what I could take for an analgesic and what I couldn't.  And of course I called the midwife clinic because I wanted to make sure I got in...but then we didn't tell anyone for a bit because we were semi-convincing ourselves that if we didn't talk about, then s**t wouldn't get real.

Up until three weeks ago, I've just been doing my thing.  A little more tired than normal at night, but otherwise, asymptomatic (which is what happened last time).  Then I convinced myself that I was having a molar pregnancy (which is when it's not a little twerp in there, but an abnormal mass of cells), so when I saw my midwife for my first visit, I was telling her my hypochondriac fears and she was like, "well, are you feeling sick?" (well, technically, first she was like, "where did you even hear about such things?") and I said no, and she said, "Usually, when people are reporting that they're feeling really sick, we either think twins, or we think molar, so I can reasonably assure you that you're having a healthy, single, baby."

LIES!  ALL LIES!

Anyway, cut to me, lying on the ultrasound table, as our stern, unfriendly, taciturn ultrasound tech was looking at the screen.  She was super-straight-faced the whole time, which wasn't reassuring.  Then she asked me if this was my first ultrasound.  Yes.  Then if there was a history of multiples in my family.  Uhh...no.  What?  Then, "How would you feel if I told you there were twins?" Dotytron: "Are you serious?" Me: *burst into tears*  Ultrasound tech: *pause* "Congratulations"

I basically lay on the table and cried, interspersed with hysterical laughter and me saying, "Oh my god.  I can't even.  I can't EVEN..." on repeat.  The ultrasound tech went back to her taciturn, not reassuring ways. I was like, are they even okay in there?  According to the Dotytron, the two twerps were bouncing around like two Mexican jumping beans on an 80s water bed and seemed to be fine.

Thoughts running through my head:

- OH MY GOD. WE NEED A MINIVAN.  LIKE NOW.  WE HAVE NO MONEY.
- OH MY GOD.  WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY FOR TWO KIDS IN DAYCARE AT THE SAME TIME.  WE HAVE NO MONEY.
- OH MY GOD. REMEMBER THAT STEPHEN KING BOOK (this one) WHERE THE GUY WAS COMMITTING MURDERS WHILE HE WAS BLACKED OUT AND IT TURNED OUT IT WAS HIS PSYCHOTIC TWIN WHO HE HAD ABSORBED IN UTERO CONTROLLING HIM WITHOUT HIM KNOWING? WHAT IF THAT HAPPENS TO ME?  SUB-CONCERN: WE HAVE NO MONEY.

LOL!  Then we called the Roomie, after much back and forth, because the thought of multiples generally makes her want to barf, for a few reasons: 1) the Roomie is generally scared of child-rearing and considers one child a daunting task.  2) the Roomie is freaked out by premature babies and multiples tend to be preemies.  She used to get this neo-natal intensive care for medical health practitioners newsletter delivered to the house that we called "jellybean quarterly" because every cover had like one of those naked mole rat preemies on the cover and we were all thoroughly grossed out by it.

I was also crying because I was sad for the Big Yam and I was sad because I knew this meant a hospital birth and that I might not be able to have midwifery care any more.

As my ladies, Mhui and G at work have reassured me, that second-child sadness for your first kid is normal and would happen even if there weren't two little twerps in there.  But one of them said something wise - your first kid is the only one of your children who will have had the benefit of both parents' undivided attention and that's pretty special.

Anyway, now that we've processed things we're in full on PROJECT MODE and are trying to mobilize and get things in order so that we can decommission the Dotytron's studio and move it into the basement and then move the Big Yam into that room and get another crib for the nursery.  We're also trying to beg and borrow whatever we can in terms of peripheral stuff and I've started keeping an eye on Kijiji for dual strollers and whatnot.

The good thing is, the things that we did invest in for the Big Yam hold their value well and are very sellable.  Like our Uppa Baby is going for $400 on Kijiji.  I'm also a psycho who likes to be extra prepared for everything so we've had back-ups of a bunch of stuff (bottles, cloth diapers, swaddles, receiving blankets, etc.) that will easily cover us for two.  I was contemplating selling our crib and then getting 2 mini-cribs for a smaller overall room footprint, but then when we thought about it and realized that the next step up would be a bunk bed, and that babies outgrow mini-cribs faster (especially when you tend to have giant babies), we realized a regular sized crib would hold us over until we felt comfortable putting a toddler/kid in the top bunk.

Basically, the only immediate concern now is affording a minivan, somehow, somewhere.

Down the line it's going to be child care, somehow, somewhere.

According to the radiologist, we've got monochorionic diamniotic twins which means they share a placenta but each have their own amniotic sac (which is good, because if they were all in one sac they could get tangled up).  This means they are most likely identical twins.  This kind have nothing to do with heredity or family history of multiples...it's a fluke of nature.  The risks are greater with multiples and because they share a placenta, there's a risk of them developing Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS) where one twin hogs all the blood from the donor twin and the donor twin is small and sickly and doesn't develop normally and the recipient twin has stress on its heart because of the all the extra stuff it's grabbing (it's like the movie Twins).

I'm kind of freaked out by that and the prospect of going early.  I'm also freaked out because I'm supposed to be eating an extra 600 calories a day and I'm not anywhere close to that (I'm using my Fitness Pal to track my consumption) and I'm not like, super-sized hungry or anything...I'm just kind of normal hungry, even if I am craving fettuccine alfredo like mad.

The good news is: my midwife said she wasn't going to send me away.  I had a big spiel all ready to go with her to convince her to keep me (chief amongst my points was that, as she knows, I'm really really really good at giving birth and being pregnant - if my experience with the Big Yam is anything to go by) but she said that she would consult with an OB and send me to this multiples clinic at Sunnybrook but that she would still be the main person coordinating my care and will probably be the one delivering the babies if everything is a-okay down there and I don't need a c-section (with the OB in the room, of course).  Yay!  I love my midwife.  She rules.  I'm under the care of the multiples clinic from 20-32 weeks because they're a level III (or something) hospital and they're equipped to handle jellybean quarterlies.  After that, I revert back to my OB and midwife combo at the hospital closest to us.

As you all know, I find reading about pregnancy and most parenting-related things monumentally boring, but because I'm being swayed by the "multiples are a special case!" malarkey and so I read some books but they're the most fear-mongery things in all of Mordor and so I'm going to stay away from that for the time being.  It's just stressing me out that I'm supposed to be gaining a lb a week and that by 20 weeks I should have gained 25 lbs and that my uterus is the same size as a woman, having a single baby, but if that woman is EIGHT WEEKS AHEAD.  I also don't want to have jellybean quarterly so I don't know what to think.  I'm just doggedly eating small meals and doing my thing and hoping for the best.

So yeah, THAT HAPPENED.

We spent the weekend with my sis and her family.  The Big Yam's face when he's surrounded by his cousins is beyond cute.  He just beams with a big, open-mouthed smile.  He knows he's surrounded by his own peeps.  I'll throw up some photos tomorrow.

Tonight for dinner we had this baked orzo eggplant casserole-type thing with caesar salad on the side, by way of the Ottolenghi cookbook.

Fin.

A funny thing happened...

Part 1

Two nights ago -

Me: "Ummm, we really haven't had a chance to sit down and talk about the Lance Armstrong doping admission to Oprah.  We should make some time for that."
Dotytron, not missing a beat: "Yeah, you're right, we'll have to try to get to that tonight."

LOL!  Reason #24601 why the Dotytron is the best: ability to roll with the punches.  Reason #24602 is the fact that we both know nearly all the words to Matthew Sweet's 90s classic, Sick of Myself.

I negative care about the Lance Armstrong thing.  One: because those bracelets were the worst.  Two: because I can't believe people are trying to recuperate his image after he was a cheating, weasel of a lying-face.  Three: I can't take anyone who dated Sheryl Crow seriously.

I've put the recipe for that chicken & kale casserole down below there, because it's delicious and because the Martha Stewart recipe that is the most Google-able calls for a whopping 48 OUNCES of ricotta, which to me is insane, because that's like, 3lbs.  The best thing about this casserole was the lemon zest in the mixture.  Revelation!  A little bit of citrus zest does wonders to elevate the starchy richness of a carb-laden casserole.  This might be a de rigeur step from now on.

We are battling the cold one casserole at a time.

Fin.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
Chicken & Kale Casserole
Serves 6-8 generously

1 pkg. whole wheat macaroni/penne/farfalle (375g)
2 T. unsalted butter
1 whole onion, chopped
minced garlic to taste
2 bunches kale, sliced thin or chopped into small pieces
3 cups cooked chopped chicken (I used turkey because that's what I had frozen)
2 containers ricotta cheese (I used the Silani Extra Smooth, 6% - which comes in smaller containers than the 454g ones you commonly see...but feel free to use 2 of the 454g containers.  More ricotta isn't a bad thing per se, but 3lbs is getting a little excessive, IMO).
zest of 2 lemons
3/4 c. grated parmesan
1 1/2 c. panko breadcrumbs
3 T. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

- cook the pasta as per package directions and then drain
- meanwhile, in a large skillet or dutch oven, heat the butter and sauté the onion and garlic until translucent.  Add the kale and cook until wilted
- add the chicken, and then turn the heat off.  Stir the pasta, the lemon zest, the ricotta, and 1/2 c. of the grated parm into the kale mixture and toss well to combine
- pour into a 9 x 13 casserole dish (or 2 8x8 baking dishes)
- mix the panko with the olive oil and the remaining 1/4 c. of parmesan cheese until the panko crumbs are thoroughly moistened.  Spread this mixture on top of the casseroles
- bake the casserole, covered with foil, for about 45 minutes at 350F-375F and then remove the foil.  Bake an additiona 15-20 minutes or until the panko topping is nice and browned.

In which I face the obvious truth:

...I eat too many eggs.

I'm still using My Fitness Pal to track my caloric consumption because in case it's not blindingly apparent: I love documenting my life.  It dovetails neatly with my innate OCD/list-making nit-pickiness.  My Fitness Pal's daily summaries are NOT kind to yours truly.  I am consistently getting too much sugar, cholesterol, fat, and sodium, and not enough of the good stuff: calcium, dietary fibre, and iron.

It's f**king demoralizing, guys.  I can't even handle it.  WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?!?  You're supposed to balance your carbohydrate intake with protein, so I eat cheese and eggs in the morning and what does that get me?  Buckets of extra cholesterol.  But you can't eat nuts, because they're too fatty!  There's only so much Greek yoghurt a person can have, and quite frankly, it doesn't fill me up the way an egg does.  Also, the good Greek yoghurt (and by that I mean the Liberté 0% vanilla) has sugar and is too rich for my blood (in cost, not calories).  I don't want to eat endless boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  That life seems like a shadow existence to me.

I just can't even.  HOW MUCH BABY ARUGULA DO I HAVE TO EAT TO GET ENOUGH DIETARY FIBRE THAT'S NOT FROM GRAINS?!?  Edit: I just re-checked my stats and my dietary fibre is all good.  Phew.

If anyone has any good ideas, then please do impart them here.  It doesn't help that every search of "good sources of proteins" lists eggs in the top 10.  And don't even MENTION quinoa.  Quinoa is not an enjoyable food.  It is penance food.  Don't get me wrong, I will eat quinoa (usually with eggs), but I'm not as stoked to eat quinoa as I am to go to town on a million deviled eggs.  It's just not the same.  Furthermore, now we're hearing all these reports that bougies are making quinoa unaffordable for the Peruvian farmers who produce it.  I actually think that's a good thing though, since increased costs for quinoa means that those Peruvian farmers would (presumably) be seeing increases to their standards of living.

Related to yesterday's post (which I've been told was hella depressing - apologies), here is an awesome site that I stumbled upon that will help you get your s**t together.  It was started by a woman whose husband was killed unexpectedly.  Get Your S**t Together  It provides a handy checklist that will help you decide how much life insurance to get, and also, to make things convenient and easy for the executor of your will and whoever has Power of Attorney.  We've (or rather, I) have done a lot of that already, but it's a good idea to have copies of your life insurance, passwords for banking, credit card info, etc. all in one place.  Smart stuff.  I remember when Poppa D passed away we had a hard time logging onto the wifi in their house because he was the only one who knew the password.  Things like that are small, but do make a difference (in addition to like, you know, not having to worry that you're going to lose the house and can pay for your children's education).

Last night was the funnest.   I went to the Eaton Centre with Dr. Rei to do some residual Xmas exchanging but we had dinner at Sansotei Ramen first.  Nothing dispels a snowy, blustery, wintery day like a big, steaming bowl of tonkotsu ramen & karaage.

I wish I could have shown you guys my tuna noodle casserole dinner last night.  It was a thing of beauty.  I accidentally deleted it.  More galling, I accidentally deleted this video of the Big Yam laboriously setting up his refrigerator magnet gears in one big, long, epic row, and turning the dial, only to find that the gears were stuck.  He doesn't get the mechanics of it quite yet.  It was so funny, only because of how long it took him to set it up and how thwarted he was.  Kid thwarting is hilarious (to mean adults).  The other day, he kind of bailed putting on his slippers and did that classic "Oooof" thing that you do when you trip or fall, and then followed it up with the quickest, "I'm okay!" We died laughing.

Fin.

On aging

My honest opinion: don't do it.  

Poh Poh (the Big Yam's Tai Poh) got a spot in a nursing home this past week and was moved into her new digs on Wednesday.  We went to visit her on Sunday evening with my mum.  

The good: the facility is a Chinese one, is close to my mum's house, and is a newer building so everything looks fresher and cleaner and brighter than some of the other, sadder places I've seen (like that one on the corner of Dufferin and Bloor).
The bad: it's a nursing home, people.  They suck, any way you cut it.

The staff were all really sweet.  I think something about the Chinese filial-piety, veneration of the elderly thing means that there's inherently more respect and care for the elderly, but maybe I'm projecting.  I will say that I'd be very surprised if the staff that I met were capable of elder abuse, whereas that hasn't been the case of other retirement residences/nursing homes I've come across.  My Poh Poh's Alzheimer's means that she's on a floor that has restricted access - to prevent people from wandering off and strangers from getting in.  

There's nothing to say - it's grim, but in order to assuage my mum's guilt over having to put my Poh Poh in there, I will say that the grimness is inherent to the generalized process of getting so old/incapacitated that you can no longer care for yourself/be cared for by loved ones who have external full-time responsibilities, and nothing to do with the facility.  We arrived at meal-time and all the residents on that floor eat together at one time, grouped at tables.  The food smelled pretty good.  I think another thing about the specificity of Chinese-run facilities is that (as far as I know), the specific Chinese foods they're serving have to be made fresh and can't necessarily be delivered in powdered form from a Serca or Beaver Foods truck.  

She has a private room that overlooks the courtyard and features utilitarian, hospital-issue furniture with her own bathroom.  It's all pretty institutional-looking but there are activities to do every day (like karaoke - Dotytron: "I have a feeling that particular session is pretty hilare," and cooking classes and gardening) and this is only her first week there.  

The Big Yam, bless his little geriatric-loving heart, was in high spirits.  He's been talking about "maybe see Tai Poh" for the last few weeks and when we picked up my mum to go, he said to my mum, "Go see Tai Poh's new house" and my mum (who is hearing impaired), said, "we're going to see Tai Poh's new home" and the Big Yam replied matter-of-factly, "yes" (more correctly, it sounds like "yesth" with his lisp).  It's pretty cute watching him and my mum interact because they frequently have parallel conversations about the same thing entirely in short, observational sentences with an economy of language.  He was SO HAPPY to see his Tai Poh and of course, the other residents on my Poh Poh's floor (the ones who were more aware of their surroundings) loved him.  

This one old guy was like, "he's grown so much!" (I've never met him before in my life) and kept giving the Big Yam an enthusiastic thumbs-up and big, toothless, gummy grins.  When we went around the corner, the Big Yam pulled on my hand wanting to see "Gung Gung again" (Gung Gung being a general, respectful designation for an older man.)  

It relieved a lot of the internal pangs to see the Big Yam in that environment.  First of all, it made my Poh Poh so happy.  Second of all, it helped make some of the other residents happy.  Third of all, he's at the perfect age where he's so blissfully unaware of his surroundings that he can interact with her without being aware in the slightest that she's not 100% herself.  I'm not going to lie: it was emotionally really hard for me and the Dotytron (and my mum too, I'm sure).  An old woman in a wheelchair was periodically shouting a nonsense refrain from her room, at nothing.  It is a strange hinterland that people with Alzheimers and similar degenerative brain conditions occupy and it hurts you, as the outside observer because of their liminality - my Poh Poh is at once lucid and aware enough of her own surroundings to know she's not at home, and yet, not so aware or unaware that she can either continue to live with my parents or fail to care about her immediate environment (assuming that any level of brain degeneration results in enough loss of sentience that one can reach the point of not caring at all, on any level).  

I try to take comfort in the fact that the Big Yam and my Poh Poh have such a special bond and such a special relationship, but it is a bond that makes us unbelievably happy and sad at the same time.  Because he won't be able to understand when she's gone.  Because he's so young that he won't be able to remember how they were best buds.  Because life is inevitably about losing people you love and being lost in turn.  

It's an old chestnut, but a true one: every day, is a getting closer, going faster than a roller coaster.  The amount of things that have happened in the past 5 years, both good and bad, is staggering.  I blink and I find myself married, with a home, a kid, and down 4 grandparents, and a father-in-law.  I don't know how we're supposed to manage it, and by "it" I mean "life."  

I'm in a melancholy mood.  I re-read The Fault In Our Stars because I picked it for our book club next Wednesday and I wanted to refresh my memory.  The season doesn't help.  Reading about mortality and love and what it means to live and die doesn't particularly help.  That book is SO GOOD.  So good, but not really doing much to dispel the glumness of my latest trifecta of read books.

The Mansion of Happiness is a collection of Jill Lepore's essays on life and death (as the cover says).  The essays are loosely related, but generally use one illustrative example (like, the board game from which the book derives it's title) to use as an aperture into how American views on life and death have changed over the past 150 years.  The essays can be a little disjointed from one another, but I particularly found the ones on birth control and the right to life movement fascinating, as well as the ones that detail the regrettable perversion of Darwin's theory of evolution into social Darwinism and the subjugation of certain races and classes of people.  The first essay is a bit of a slog, but after that, I found the rest of them quick going, with a lot of interesting factual nuggets and a feminist slant.

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers earned it's Pulitzer Prize like whoa.  This is investigative, immersive non-fiction that lies at the junction between anthropology, sociology, and Dickens.  Detailing the lives of select residents of Annawadi, a slum that lies at the edge of the Mumbai International Airport, bordered by luxury hotels, over the course of 4 years.  This is a ground-level study of global capitalism and the seemingly insurmountable division between the ruling classes in a booming metropolis of the new millennium, and the shifting underclass that lives on the margins, endlessly searching for openings to grab a foothold on stability and to rise up from poverty.  The book is descriptive - there is little editorializing from Boo on the widespread corruption, hope, despair, and capriciousness that make up the stories of the Annawadi residents.  This is globalisation and it is capitalism in all its raw, unfettered glory.  Where there are opportunities for upward mobility but where these opportunities are dependent as much on luck and fate as hard work and skill.  Here are the clashes between old beliefs and new, between traditional gender roles and a new world for educated women, where Muslims and Hindus are forced to live side-by-side, where caste still matters even as the city churns itself towards a newly imagined, democratic future-self.  I can't say enough good things about this book.  It is staggering in its scope and execution.  The questions that Katherine Boo asked to land in Annawadi are central to anyone hoping to understand the realities of unfettered capitalism outside of the North American context.  

Katherine Boo is so damned smart.  This is her quote from the afterword of the book: "It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people ARE good, and that many people try to be..." 

See?  Smart.  That quote and the experiences of the people in this book also made me re-think some of the unquestioned, institutionalised racism towards First Nations in Canada  that I had unconsciously been allowing to color my views of the "Idle No More" movement that's been happening.  I needed that kind of re-alignment and re-assessment of my unconscious biases and I'm glad that this book kick-started it.

The rest of the weekend was busy.  Chinese school, grocery shopping, visiting our friends R & R and seeing their new little baby M, who slumbered away in my arms like a quiet little sack of teeny tiny (fingerling) potatoes.  We started watching Homeland, which I enjoy 150% more than Deadwood, if only because it provides lots of opportunities to see Claire Danes do her signature-Claire-Danes ugly cry.  It also provides lots of chances to crack up any time someone says the name "Abu Nazir" with intense solemnity.  It's super-far-fetched but I find it way more engaging than Deadwood.

On Friday I made us homemade Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Supremes.  These were AWESOME.    I based it off this recipe, which is less a recipe and more of a wake-up call to spark the thought that OH MY GOD, OF COURSE I CAN MAKE THESE AT HOME.  Very filling, but very delicious.  I made my life easier by pressing them in the panini press and also crunching up the tostadas into big pieces, which made folding the (whole wheat) tortillas around the filling much easier.  Big hit:

Sunday we went for all you can eat hot pot with my mum, after R & R stuffed us with a million Babu treats (fish patties and samosas).  The Big Yam seriously ate at least 4-5 different treats (which Babu charmingly calls "Shorteats") and the patties were SPICY!  He kept reaching for another one after I tried to cut him off.  He's a total Tamil Tiger.  Consequently, he was ruined for any food at hot pot.

Tonight we had tuna noodle casserole with my patented buttered challah cube topping, alongside green beans and brussels sprouts.

And that bring us to the end of this lengthy post.

Remember: don't get old (but also don't die young - you can see the bind you're in).

Fin.

Slog

Feeling the slog lately, folks.  Not much to report, still reading the same book, doing the same things, just the daily grind as it were.

Yesterday was a bit of a rough day.  I basically turned into a fat little weirdo and went to town eating the most DISGUSTING things, all spurred by an incredibly salty pseudo-Thai food lunch.  This resulted in scrapping last night's planned dinner (baked eggplant) in favour of hot dogs and KD (also salty).  Then I went to town and destroyed three quarters of a bag of dill pickle chips (also salty) and then ate a giant slice of that chocolate cake washed down with a cold, icy glass of milk.   I was sooooo thirsty all night.  It was the worst and basically wasn't worth it.

The Dotytron downloaded Deadwood and we've been watching it but I kinda hate it because everyone on the show is like, super ugly and grimy and dirty and unattractive all the time and I don't have the patience for that kind of wild west realism.  So I've spent the last few nights complaining mightily and then passing out in a pool of my own spit on the couch and then turning into mad dog when the Dotytron wakes me up to go upstairs to bed and throwing a million punches and thrashing around like a tantrum having toddler.  It's super-fun for my partner-in-residence, let me assure you.

The Big Yam, aside from weirdly deciding to go on strike from one of his two chores (feeding the cats - the other chore is setting the table), has been super-fun after dinner and we've been spending time coloring and then singing along to him playing the harmonica.  He's so cute.  He requests "Home Range" and "Blackbird" and what he calls the "Fish Song" (this one) all the time.  Here's a video of him playing the harmonica:

I love this kind of family time.  I love the energy in our house when this stuff is happening.  I know I'm going to look back on these videos and remember how happy and content and warm and cozy the house was with the Dotytron playing his guitar and the Big Yam discovering music.  When the post-dinner before-bed goes well, it's magic I tells you.  My only wish is that the Big Yam was a bit better with independent play - the ideal scenario is the Dotytron playing guitar and me reading or knitting and the Big Yam absorbed in his own activities (quietly).  It would be nice to get that some days.  But I get why he's so into being with us and having our attention after 10 hours spent at daycare (or "work" as he calls it).  In recent weeks after reading something that clued me in to how he must be feeling at the end of the day, I've relaxed a bit on the rigidity of having the Dotytron start dinner as soon as he gets in the door.  Having even 10 or 15 minutes of focused, parental play time is all the Big Yam needs to recalibrate and I find it does ease our transition into dinner and then the night.  There's less of a fight this way and it's not so harried.  Everything can wait.

We've been really good about using the slow cooker and capitalizing on quick meals to get us through the weeknights and it's paying off in spades.  Tonight we had that baked eggplant with an arugula salad on the side.  SHAME: I just realized I've been spelling "arugula" wrong for YEARS.  It doesn't help that spell-check for some reason doesn't recognize the correct spelling.  DON'T UNDERMINE ME, SPELL CHECK.  THAT'S A B***H-A** MOVE.

Fin.

Oh Captain, My Captain

Sorry it's been silencio...things have been stressful here lately.  

We had a pretty wide-open weekend with few commitments, and so when SMckay called me with an idea to piggyback Lolly's trip to Guelph for haircuts and visits on Saturday, I jumped at the chance.  The Dotytron had already made plans to jam with his friends that day, so I was going to be rolling solo with the Big Yam and was feeling slightly daunted by the (imagined) interminable afternoon hours with just me and him.  So I loaded the Big Yam up into the Captain, and drove to Lolly's and she drove us in the Captain to Guelph.

We had good times all day and I got to see J and her baby V and be mortified by the fact that the Big Yam proceeded to smack V upside the head with, among other things: a tractor, a teacup, and, in dire situations, his bare hand.  The poor little Hungarian Princess was a mass of welling eyes and quivering bottom lip and I felt like the worst parent in the history of the world.  I don't know what the Big Yam's problem is with the hitting, but right now he has mad issues!  I know it will pass but it's trying.  Being the parent of a hitter (and I'm told it's the same for parents of biters) is the worst.

It's Lolly's birthday today so we discussed our options and she wanted to go to Mandarin so we planned to meet up with the Dotytron and Lolly's hubby in the west end of Toronto.  We're in the Captain, it's 6pm, we're all peckish, we're on the 401 eastbound, just outside of Guelph, and then the battery indicator comes on the dash (or at least, I notice it's lit up).  So I'm like, "Uhhh, the battery light is on." To which SMckay replies, "It's fine, I'm sure it's nothing, keep going."  But because I'm a paranoid nerd when it comes to cars, I look it up in the book, and it says it has something to do with the alternator belt and you should pull over (which Lolls says she's NOT going to do on the 401) and check it out, and if the belt is fine (not that I have any earthly idea what an alternator belt looks like), then get it checked at the earliest possibility, but if it's worn, then your car could overheat.  I'm reading this out loud and look at the temperature indicator and me and Lolls notice that it's cranked all the way to "H."  I call the Dotytron and fill him in on what's going on.  He calls me back five minutes later and is like, "the boys say that if it's the alternator, just keep driving, because otherwise, once you stop the car, it won't start again," and I get all shrillsville panic mode and I say, 

So we're both like, "we gotta pull over" and she doesn't want to pull over on the 401 (rightly) so we're trying to get to the next exit.  From the back, SMckay is like, "Ugh. Don't pull off at 312, cuz there's like, nothing there," and Lolly and I got all snappy with her (in retrospect, this is funny), about how we DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THE AMENITIES AT THE EXIT BUT WE HAD TO STOP BEFORE THE CAR EXPLODED.  We just manage to pull off and pull into this car stop thing just as our power steering gives out.

6:30pm.  In a random, rape-y car stop off some deadsville exit (SMckay was right about that) outside of Guelph. With a sleeping Big Yam (thankfully) and a car that's getting colder by the minute.  So I'm calling CAA and the dude is all like, "Is the Dotytron in the car with you?" and I say no, and then he does that apologetic "hmmm" sound that phone customer service people do when they're about to screw you.  BECAUSE CAA COVERS THE PERSON, NOT THE CAR.  Which is the STUPIDEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE.  He puts me on hold for a million hours to "see what he can do" and the solution he comes back with is that his "supervisors" are willing to waive the waiting period and sign me up for automatic basic coverage, which gets me a free ten kilometre tow and then I would be responsible for paying the rest of it to Toronto.  I was like, "Uhh, why don't you ask your supervisors if I can just G-D pay for the premium coverage now and they can waive the waiting period for that?" (premium package covers towing your car to wherever you want within 200km) and he puts me on hold for a million more hours and finally agrees.  THANK GOD.  So we wait for a million hours for the tow truck driver to show up and SMckay convinces her adorable and nicest Papa in the world to come and drive us all to Toronto.  Seriously. Best Papa ever!!!  Meanwhile, the Dotytron calls me and is like, "So...the guys here are going out to eat soon...so what's going on with dinner?  Should I wait for you guys, or..." and I almost reached through the phone and strangled him.

When we finally get to Lolly's house to meet up with the boys, it's 8pm.  Everyone is STARVING. Tempers are short.  We show up at the Mandarin and there is a FORTY FIVE MINUTE WAIT.  We go to a nearby restaurant and there's ANOTHER hour long wait.  It's tragic.  People are getting to the point where they're like, "I just don't want to do anything any more" (you know when people are so dispirited and crochety that you give up having an opinion because you just want to be a foul owl?   We were all that).  Anyway, we somehow pulled through the badness, decided to make Lolly happy and give her the Mandarin meal she wanted, and we were sat within 30 minutes and we ate and instantly regretted life.  But this happened:

So it was all worth it in the end.  Also, the Big Yam was a trooper.  He was up until 10pm and ate the latest dinner of all time and was just lovely about it.

This was great because on Friday, I kept the Big Yam home with me on my day off for the morning, and he was a monster and it was non-stop time outs and lots of me yelling and I just felt awful and guilty and at the same time, mad at him for not being a peach.  So his behaviour on Saturday made up for it, big time.

The good thing to come out of our Friday hours together was that we made this cake:

It was AMAZING.  Think: the best, classic, chocolate cake with white (vanilla) frosting you can imagine.  It used a new (to me) frosting called butter roux frosting which creates something so light and fluffy, it belies the fact that there is flour in it as a base.  It's the perfect marriage between true buttercream (based on a Swiss or Italian meringue - my favorite for it's lightness, but it's actually heavy on the butter and labour intensive) and what I call fake buttercream (icing sugar and butter, which makes something kind of thick and gritty, but which can also be delicious, in a homespun kind of way).  This frosting was so light!  The cake is a classic, oil-based chocolate cake, which means that it comes out very chocolatey and very, very moist.  You can also make it all in one bowl with a whisk - no mixer required!!!  I used this recipe, from the blog Posie Gets Cosy, here.  The only change I would make is to line the pans with parchment (I had some sticking issues) and to switch to a whisk attachment for the frosting after creaming the butter with the paddle attachment.  I also omitted the almond extract (didn't have it) and put the beans and scrapings of a 1/2 of a vanilla bean in the flour-milk roux mixture.  The Dotytron and I are obsessed with it and are eating this cake like it's going out of style.

 For dinner on Friday night I made us shepherd's pie.  I mixed leftover mashed potatoes (from my turkey dinner last week) with mashed cauliflower for the topping and it was awesome!!!  A great way to add more vegetables and it adds a nice flavour.  The two textures meld together so that you don't notice it at all.  I made enough to freeze a giant pan so that was also a bonus.

I spent all of Friday night toggling between the menu for East Side Mario's and Red Lobster.  Guys, Red Lobster has SHRIMP FETTUCCINE ALFREDO and it's ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT.  I want a giant plate of fettuccine alfredo so bad...I can hardly stand it.  We're hoping to head down to Geneseo in a couple of weeks just so I can go to Delmonico's and get my fix.  I just lost about an hour of my life salivating over the Delmonico's menu.  I want veal parmigiana AND alfredo and that giant rib-eye steak!  With fried calamari and fried mozzarella triangles!!!  LOOK AT THOSE PRICES, PEOPLE!  They are not fooling!  And best yet: the quality is good!!! It's not garbage food (the way East Side Mario's is).  UGHHHHHH, I want it so bad.

Last night we had dinner at Momma D's and she made us prime rib and we had mashed potatoes and beans and beets.  She also made the Dotytron a birthday cake - a classic mom cake - golden cake with mocha fake buttercream.  It was DELICIOUS.  It brought me around again on the fake buttercream and the sweetness of those old-fashioned cakes.

Tonight we tried to get our lives back on track with that spicy grain soup and quesadillas.

Found out from my mechanic that the alternator belts just got worn.  The repair isn't that pricey, thank goodness.  Captain Save-A-Ho is on my bad side, lately.  I guess this is what you get when you buy an 8 year old car, for $6000.  This hasn't put me off of buying used.  I can accept that cars break and they have a limited life span, and I think it's ludicrous to buy new.  To me, it's six of one, half dozen of the other.  If I bought the Captain new, I would have had to put in this amount of money at this point in the car's life anyway, but I would have overpaid (in my opinion) for those first 5 years of driving worry-free.  Rotors and belts wear out, that's just natural.  However, I will concede that next time, we're going Toyota or Honda and everyone else can go eff themselves!

I've been meaning to post about these for ages but it kept slipping my mind.  In the Big Yam's stocking this year, we got him a pair of slippers from this Etsy seller, Wooly Baby.  These are the coolest slippers ever and I'm in love with them.  First of all, they're made from recycled materials.  The uppers are felted recycled sweaters and the bottoms are suede, which makes them non-skid.  The elastic around the ankle coupled with the height means that they stay on and they're so warm and cozy and stylish.  I love them.

I also knit the Big Yam this cabled hat and mittens and they were in his stocking.  Apparently at daycare J asked him who made him the beautiful hat and whether it was his Mama, and the Big Yam was very serious and said, no, Santa brought them.  I get no cred, but at least we know that Santa indoctrination is working.

This morning when he woke up we did our customary, being cosy and smushy in my bed routine while he drank his milk and he said to me very seriously, "I go to work."  Haha.  You sure do, buddy, you sure do.

Fin.

Evidenced-based research

As a corollary to my stance on informed choice, I also believe in evidenced-based research.  I recently came across two parenting blogs that provide an evidenced-based research approach to common parenting issues:

Squintmom
Science of Mom

I like these blogs because, as has been evidenced time and time again, I find reading about parenting issues (sleep training, introduction of solids, discipline techniques) fantastically boring.  I tend to go with my gut, based on being a rational, well-rounded individual, and therefore finding people who ARE willing to cull through academic studies and summarize the findings on these issues in as unbiased a way as possible, saves me a lot of time and has the added bonus of helping my ability to defend a position with some degree of authority, while putting in very little of the dirty work myself.  BONUS.  

Anyway, the Science of Mom has this 6 part series on sleep training, which I passed along to the Roomie, not as a way of persuading her, but as a way of giving her some information she might not otherwise come across.  The Science of Mom lady's findings very closely match my own experiences from sleep training the Big Yam and from going with my gut, and are best summarized using her mantra:

"Parent with love. Parent with respect. Parent with knowledge. Parent without fear."

Her sleep training summary can be found here. I very much believe that it's detrimental for parents to tie their sense of worth as parents to their ability to silence their baby's crying.  Crying is their way of expressing frustration.  It is GOOD to experience frustration and the associated adversity and I believe that part of being a successful parent is giving your child the space to work through frustration and adversity and more importantly, the space to express their full gamut of emotions and know that they're being heard and not immediately mollified.  

I also believe strongly that you have to treat children, and even babies, as rational human beings.  Babies can understand long before they're able to talk, and it's important to give them the respect of explaining your actions and why you're doing what you're doing and making them feel secure.  Since we returned to regular work schedules on Monday, we've been putting the Big Yam down to sleep in his crib and he's been waking in the night crying out for us.  On Monday night, the Dotytron hopped out of bed and grabbed him and brought him in for Sleep Away Camp, which immediately settles him.  Last night, I hopped out of bed and went into his room.  I told him that we were here, that I was going to pick him up, that I would sing him a song, and then that it was time for him to go back to sleep.  He requested two songs, and I sang them, and then I laid him down in the crib, tucked him in, and told him that Mama and Baba love him but that it's time to sleep and that we're right next door and we'll see him in the morning.  And he said, really quietly, "okay" (which obviously pierced my heart with a million tender shards of love and affection) and I left the room and he stayed down until morning.  Getting the "okay" from the Big Yam goes a long way to ensuring Yam compliance (in the immediate term).  

The "okay" kills me.  On Saturday night, when we were at our friend Fox's one bedroom apartment for a big French Canadian-themed dinner with a bunch of Supper Clubbers, I put the Big Yam down to sleep on Fox's bed and tried getting him to go to sleep but he wasn't having it.  I told him that I was going to leave the room to go get Baba to come in and sing him some songs.  He was lying on his back, in this strange bed, in what is obviously a bachelor pad, and he did his quiet "okay" and lay there with his eyes open staring up at the ceiling while I left him in the dark room.  That two-syllable word was so filled with trust and patience and the love that underscores both those things that it still rends and mends me in endless simultaneity today.  Such a small moment, but I was filled with love for my brave little trusting Boobla.

The Roomie's parenting style came up recently in discussion because she's been criticised for it by some close (mutual) friends of ours.  The Dotytron, as usual, was so smart and had this to say: "As far as parenting styles go, I'd only be concerned for baby T if the Roomie wasn't doing well.  Since this is the parenting style that's making her happy then I know that T will be happy.  If she's 'setting herself up' for something down the road, then it's going to be what it's going to be, but for now, the most important thing is that she's doing something that works for her."  He's a smart cookie, that one.  The Roomie's style is her style.  It fits her life and her choices make her happy.  Her style wouldn't work for me and the Dotytron because we are two individuals with a lot (some would say too many) interests and in order for us to be happy, the baby had to be incorporated into our lives as a discrete individual inside a family of similarly discrete individuals who had to maintain a balance between accommodating this new addition and still pursuing our individual interests.  Subsuming my life to a baby's would never work for me and would make me unhappy and therefore would produce an unhappy baby and family unit.  

My friend G always comments about how during one of our get togethers during my early days with the newborn Big Yam she was impressed with the ability with which I fluidly switched from talking about being a new parent to switching to my opinion on some current event issue or another that had come up in a parallel conversation, and how that hadn't been her experience with other parental figures in her orbit thus far.  Can you IMAGINE a Karl Lagerfeld who didn't have things to say on films or popular culture or philosophy or Idle No More or the fiscal cliff?  I HAVE OPINIONS, PEOPLE.  AND THEY MUST BE HEARD!  

That's why going to the drop-in centre always made me slightly screwy in the head.  It was nice for the Big Yam, but not great for my intellectual development to be dealing with all the "careers" (my term for stay at home moms).  Perhaps it was this particular sample.  I get that the conversation would necessarily be rooted around the commonality, or what brought this disparate group of people together in the first place, but you would think that after a few months of going some place 3+ times a week, the conversation would veer towards other things.  

Tonight for dinner we had freezer posole with crushed tortilla chips and avocadoes and shredded cabbage mixed with lime and sour cream.  It was amazing:

I've put down the recipe for the sour cream pancakes we made on the weekend.  These pancakes turned out nice - they have a lower flour-to-wet-ingredients ratio than most and so they come out a little eggier, but definitely not dense or dry.  I'd say they're like a cross between a Dutch baby and a regular pancake.  They're also not too sweet and could hold up to many different toppings.  I adapted them from a recipe on Smitten Kitchen.

Fin.





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Sour Cream Pancakes
makes 14 4" pancakes

3/4 c. plus 2 T. all purpose flour
2 T. sugar
2 t. baking soda
3/4 t. salt
2 cups sour cream
4 eggs
unsalted butter, for cooking pancakes

- whisk sour cream and eggs together.
- whisk in dry ingredients until combined.
- slowly heat 1/2 T. of butter at a time in a heavy cast-iron skillet (what I use) or your preferred pancake pan.  
- drop a scant 1/4 c. of pancake batter at a time into the pan, cook until golden and set on bottom and bubbly on top, and flip.