In the Kitchen with Elissa

So last night I was standing in the kitchen, and I had a sort of introspective moment. Ordinarily, those moments are not so great because they involve me making a realization about myself, like that I’m essentially lazy, or self-centered, or that quite possibly that last time I lost my temper with Jabber was the time that will mess him up irrevocably.

But this realization was about cooking.

I always say that I can’t cook. It’s true, I don’t cook. I don't usually tell people that when David is going to be gone from the home during a mealtime, he sometimes leaves a meal ready for me to heat up. That sometimes means always. That he also gives me detailed instructions about the heating.

(To be fair, David likes giving detailed instructions. He’s very helpful like that.)

It’s also true that cooking meat is difficult for me. For one thing, I won’t eat or let the kids eat ground meat (ground beef primarily, but I really can’t eat too much of any kind of ground meat), so there goes the primary source of meat from my childhood. Hamburger in everything, you know? But I just can’t eat it, not thinking about how it’s all ground up and who knows what is in it. I cooked a pound of ground beef once, it must be ten years ago now, and I looked at it, cooking in the pan, and just knew I wasn’t going to eat that ever again. I dumped it out in the garbage, and I don’t think I’ve eaten it since, at least, not on purpose. I won’t get into the e.coli chapter in Fast Food Nation that made me vow to keep the kids away from it until they are older and more…I don’t know, durable.

But still, when we lived in Oregon, I often cooked. I had a vegetarian cookbook, and I made soups, side dishes, full meals. I often substituted ingredients because we were poor and only had a few staples in our kitchen most of the time, but I cooked a lot.

Then we had Jabber, and I went back to work, and there it began. I didn’t get home from work until 5:30, and before I could even get my coat off, the baby would be reaching for me hungrily, with his little baby bird mouth opened wide. We’d settle into our perch on the couch, and there we would stay…both of us exhausted and hungry and a bit cranky.

So David had to cook.

And essentially that’s the reason he continues to cook: I work late, and the kids are hungry much sooner.

But last night I realized what my real problem is. It’s not that I’m a bad cook; it’s that I’m a bad meal planner. I look at the cupboards, and I truly can’t figure out what to make out of it all. I can sometimes think of one part of the meal, but then I’m at a loss as to what to do for the rest of it, or how any of it would go together.

Like a couple nights ago, when I went grocery shopping, the store bakery had these enormous loaves of garlic bread on sale, so I bought a loaf and set it on the counter. While David was asking me what I we should have for dinner, all I could think was, “Well, we should eat the garlic bread because it was probably not fresh to begin with, so…garlic bread. Goes with spaghetti. But we only have alfredo sauce made. And Jabber won’t eat that. Because it’s cheese. And he’ll only eat orange cheese, that’s not melted. Unless it’s on pizza, when white cheese, melted is okay. And Monkey won’t eat noodles at all. What kind of a kid won’t eat noodles, for crying out loud. Why the hell do my kids have to eat the complete opposite, anyway?”

And at this point, I think I wandered out of the kitchen. It was just too much for me.

David, on the other hand, turned on the oven and stuck the garlic bread in, a plan forming around in the back of his mind. He threw some chicken into a pan, melted some cheese, steamed some broccoli, tossed some chickpeas, and made us grilled chicken sandwiches on garlic toast with two side dishes.

I’m not completely helpless, though. I mean, sooner or later I would have poured us each a bowl of cereal.

Thank you Produce-Fairy!

Just a shout out to the wonderful soul(s) who left the huge bag of garden fresh produce on our bear...I want you to know I totally love you.

We have had so many yummy meals with those beautiful red tomatoes!

THANK YOU!!!!

Must be the second kid...

I remember reading an article when Jabber was a toddler about how some ridiculous number of parents of ten-month-olds stated that french fries were their child's main source of "vegetables." My jaw dropped. My precious baby's palate had never been even briefly exposed to such an abomination, of course! He ate finely minced bits of organic produce, drank juice that was watered within an inch of being, well...water, and all members of the extended family were given extensive instructions in the art of nurtitional label-reading.

There was a reason for this, beyond just new parent paranoia. Jabber came to us allergic to a plethora of foods, with his first reaction scaring the pants off us at 11 weeks. We already had to scour the labels for hints of dairy, soy, egg, and peanuts, so why not check for things like artificial coloring and partially hydrogenated anything? He was a healthy little bugger, that Jabberwock.

Fast forward to last night. Monkey came waltzing in to the living room with something in his mouth. "Whatcha got in your mouth, buddy?" I asked. He opened up his mouth happily but stayed out of my reach. I tried unsuccessfully to identify the odd white shapes in his mouth.

Monkey is known for not always having the ability or desire to differentiate between food and non-food items when putting things in his mouth, so I of course acted real casual and stealthily pounced on him, pinching his cheeks together to force these little white pebbles out of his mouth.

One popped out, and the fragrant smell of artificial orange flavoring wafted up. The baby was chewing on a mouthful of Runts candy. Yeah, like an entire mouthful of sugar and colorings and wax and whatever...all condensed into these hard little spheres that make me so nervous about choking that I make the four-year-old eat them sitting perfectly still next to me. So what did I do? Well, I got the poor sugar-starved child a box of Nerds, of course. Much safer, you see.

Oops, gotta go. Monkey wants another piece of frozen pizza.

Random PSA

Monkey just ate what I believe to be three coffee beans from the kitchen floor. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
That is all.

Good News Abounding

Well, after my pissy little post tantrumming about my home, I thought I'd put together a bunch of good news, for the record.

Monkey's vocabulary is rapidly expanding. Although he is far from meeting or exceeding Jabber's huge vocabulary from the same age period, he has expanded a bit from his typical "dis," "dat," and "uh-oh" to include a few more words. For one thing, he has resumed saying "mama," and it even means other things besides "I'm hungry!" It makes me melt every time I hear him say it. Another vocab addition has the opposite effect on me: he has started saying "HIT!" which is followed by an enthusiastic smack, usually right across the face. Niiice. More constructive is his use of pointing to his mouth and saying "me eat," even though it does sometimes (humorously) come out as "eat me." :)

Jabberwock had a playdate, which is unusual, since I wasn't good at the whole dating thing the first time around, and since few of my friends have kiddos in his age range, it follows that he doesn't have a huge array of friends, either. But yesterday the two of us went to a local park to meet with a couple of siblings from his old daycare, and we all had a very nice time. Without Monkey along, I actually found myself able to converse with the other mom, which was super nice, and the kiddos played like crazy. We went for a little hike, had a picnic, and shared a sand cake, among other things. Jabber fell into the river a little bit (just his feet and one leg) while throwing stones and filling his bucket with water, and then he played in the sand for another hour or so. The result was a seriously happy kid with shoes I may just have to throw away.

Monkey took a blissful two-and-a-half-hour nap today, which allowed me to grade a bunch of papers and read a bunch of blogs.

We all ate a healthy lunch, which is wonderful since last night David brought home a pizza and jelly beans and I could not come up with a single reason on earth not to eat everything in sight.

Also, I found out today some interesting (to me, anyway) tidbits about Monkey's food preferences: Strawberries win out over all other food choices. Matchstick-cut carrots are second on the list, even winning out over string cheese and apple-cinnamon rice cakes. He will have nothing to do with meat of any kind (which we pretty much knew already, and since Big Brother is all about the meat like his dad, I have proposed a dual system of food preparation that made my husband almost threaten to ride off into the sunset alone. So I guess until I'm willing to do all the dual-meal cooking, I will continue to eat venison and poultry, or go hungry. Monkey still has his nummies, so he can take it or leave it.) Broccoli, even with yummy red pepper hummus on it, gets tossed onto the floor after one bite.

I was reading Parents magazine, an article about the sex lives of mothers (I know, I know), and it was about four moms who kept a five day journal about their sex lives (which seemed to me an awfully short period of time for a mom to document her sex life...but perhaps we need to step it up a notch around here, lol!). ANYWAY, both of the moms of infants were breastfeeding (yay!), and the mom of older kiddos said it wasn't abnormal for the kids to sleep in their bed. The fourth woman was still pregnant, so who knows. Anyway, good to see this in a really mainstream mag.

And Edited to Add: My last good news of the day was when I came downstairs in a little sundress, trudging reluctantly over to my stack of Shakespeare essays that need to be graded, and Jabberwock came skipping up to me and whispered in my ear, "Mama, do you know what? You look just like...a princess!" Then he kissed me on the cheek, without any begging from me or anything. This was especially nice since about an hour earlier he had informed me that he thought Daddy was the best daddy in the whole world, and he was pretty sure that his best buddy's mom (the one we saw yesterday on our playdate) was the best mommy in the world, and he was going to take Daddy and go live with her and his best buddy. Gosh, thanks, kid. I asked him what I was supposed to do without my two guys, and he shrugged. "You'll think of something," he said.

It's not a good sign...

When I've got writers' block for the title.

Mostly, since I've started doing this blog thing (less than a month ago, and already I'm a hopeless addict), I just go about my daily life and then a topic starts twisting and turning in my mind. By dinner time, my fingers are itching, and by the time the kids and husband are in bed, I'm ready to roll. But tonight I've just got a slew of little random thoughts in my head. So why not form a list? A list of today's thoughts, in no particular order.

1. Deadlines. I have literally fifty million of these coming up this week and next for the end of the school year. Fifty-two million if you count the bills I still haven't paid for the month, but until school is over, I have to limit my attention to the work deadlines or I may explode. Or implode. Some kind of plosion, anyway. Sometimes I like to think of myself as the type of person who performs best under a little bit of pressure, and in fact I often use that very thought as a great excuse to procrastinate (like, say, blogging instead of finishing my work?). So far, I'm doing okay with this philosophy, although the periodic episodes of racing heart and dizziness may be an unfortunate side effect. I am going to blame the crushing headache I had this afternoon on all the data I had to enter and analyze on reading scores, though. Hello? English teachers are not made to analyze data. I would, however, be perfectly happy writing a poem on said analysis.

2. Making lunches. I really despise this, though not as much now that my kiddos are in a new daycare with a woman who makes them food, even with Jabberwock's food allergies. Now I only have to make one lunch instead of three. I did go grocery shopping this evening, after I got done working out at the fitness center (after I washed three Tylenol down with a cup of coffee and took a twenty minute nap, of course), and that makes lunch-making much better. Which brings me to thought number

3. What the hell are they doing to the strawberries out there in California??? Those suckers were the size of my baby's head! Granted, living in Minnesota I have a bit of a skewed perception about fruit and vegetable growing, since we aren't even close to being able to put them in the ground yet, and the average farm strawberry around here is about the diameter of a nickel. OK, maybe a quarter. But these strawberries were monstrous. I know, I should have taken a picture, but hey, I'm lazy. They are tasty, though.

4. I'm still on the lunches. I think what bothers me the most about this mundane chore is the fact that I am physically incapable of making my lunch until AFTER I clean the entire kitchen. My husband cooks for me (I know, I'm completely spoiled, but srsly, NOBODY would survive around here if I did the cooking!), and unfortunately he has no issues with cooking in a dirty kitchen. He doesn't really seem to see the mess, and he definitely doesn't clean up when he's done. I'll say, "Honey, thanks so much for dinner, but couldn't you just clean up a little bit as you go?" and he'll look around, genuinely puzzled. "I did," he says, his eyes sweeping blindly past the saucy fingerprints on the fridge door, the cheese wrappers and empty bean cans on the counter, the tomato pulp pooling on the cutting board, dishes and silverware littered all over. So on an evening like tonight, when I took off right after dinner and nursies to work out and grocery shop, there's quite the array of crapola waiting before I can make my lunch.

5. Five is a nice round number, so I thought I'd share one last thought for the day. I debated posting about this, since I don't really want my son to be too embarrassed, but it's just so darn cute I can't resist. We dined quickly last night in a lamentably fast food nation style (but at least with milk, apple slices, and string cheese and sweet potatoes from home for the kids) and then went down to throw some rocks in the Lake. Jabberwock discovered halfway through our walk that he needed to use the (nonexistent) facilities, so we beat a quick retreat to the van. Shortly after he realized his need, he tugged on my sleeve and said, "Mama, I think I pooped in my pants a little bit. I thought I was just going to pass some gas, but some came out." Poor guy, we were still quite a ways away from our car. David carried him back and got him all cleaned up, and he was a really good sport throughout the ordeal.

When we got home, I said to him, "Jabber, I'm really proud of how well you handled this whole situation. You did a great job with this." He looked up at me, and with a wry little grin said, "Oh, yeah. I did a great job. Four years old, and I pooped my pants. Great job." SARCASM! Perfectly executed sarcasm from my sweet four-year-old! Mama was so proud!

The Diet that Isn't a Diet

I've never been on a diet before, but it seems like I am right now. I've begun tracking my calories on an online journal (but I'm not telling you where, lest you go there and tell me to stop stuffing my face this instant and get your ass off the couch already, Elissa!) and have lost a number of pounds that I'm pretty happy with.

Still, I'm uncomfortable with this dieting thing. Growing up, I can't remember a single time when my mom wasn't trying to lose weight--getting ready for swimsuit season, slimming down for so and so's wedding, losing those holiday pounds--it seems she was always on a diet. I remember my mom and my aunt poring over calorie-counting books, drinking cans of TAB, eating nothing but grapefruit and iceberg lettuce. I specifically remember the 1,000 calorie diet they were on that had rigid meals laid out for each day of the week: Day 1: Breakfast: one half hardboiled egg and one half piece toast, without butter. Lunch: open-faced sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and one thin slice turkey and 4 oz. skim milk, celery or carrot sticks optional. Seriously, you want to talk about setting a woman up for failure? My metabolism kicked into starvation mode just reading the menu.

Of course I was never really happy with my body, either, although I think my mom did all right in not going overboard with the criticism. Like any mom, I suppose, she made small comments about how I should start sucking in my stomach and did I have to eat that last cookie, but the weight obsession was always about her own body, not mine. I remember Mom comforting me when my grandma told some friends who were picking me up at the airport to look for "the chunky redhead." Yeah, that did wonders for my self image. She reassured me that just because all the women on my step-father's side were like eight-and-a-half feet tall and couldn't pinch an inch did not, by any means, make me qualify as chunky. (Though looking back, I probably was, even for a shrimp.)

Still, I vowed that I would just be as healthy as I could be, that I would never obsess over the numbers on the scale, that I wouldn't worry about weight gain or pants size or whether my butt looked big. I promised myself I wouldn't avoid pictures because of a fear of my double chin or my flabby upper arms.

Yet here I am, counting calories. Two kids have redesigned my body, and I accept that. I love my shape-shifting self. Just...couldn't I be a little thinner? A little less...like a mom, maybe? I celebrate my mom body while wishing to whittle it down to a more manageable me. I break my promise to myself and step on the scale with bated breath, hoping to fall below a certain number. I contradict my philosophy of self-acceptance while pulling the tape measure taut around my hips with pursed lips of disappointment. And I worry about cascading into that endless cycle of weight loss and dieting that I witnessed growing up.

So, I'm not on a diet. I'm just "eating healthier." (while limiting my calories, heh.)

And, several positive things have occured because of this diet that is not a diet, things other than the weight loss:

1. I have actually consumed vegetables on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day.
2. I have had a bag of jelly beans in the house for almost two weeks now, eating only one serving at a time, and not every day.
3. My whole family is eating less junk, especially if I do the grocery shopping. All in all, we've eaten much more healthy meals when I have to log them on the internet for anyone to see.
4. I have actually found more energy because of the exercising, which somehow has meant that I'm still getting stuff done around the house, even with the extra time I'm spending exercising.
5. I get to listen to back episodes of This American Life on my laptop while riding my exercise bike in the basement.

Just somebody stop me if you see me slurping a TAB and eating grapefruit, 'kay?