Fixin' Supper

Apparently, there are some of you out there eating red and processed meats with every meal.

I was scanning the news real quick, and I saw this item in the New York Times: Paying a Price for Loving Red Meat. A new study shows that people who eat more red or processed meat don’t live as long as the rest of us. Here’s the money quote:

To prevent premature deaths related to red and processed meats, Dr. Popkin suggested in an interview that people should eat a hamburger only once or twice a week instead of every day, a small steak once a week instead of every other day, and a hot dog every month and a half instead of once a week.

Umm, OK. Really? Are even you low-carb people eating that much red and processed meat? I guess someone is.

So I was SO jonesing to get out of here this a.m. I told Ashby like, at least 3 times, what time to show up [he spent the night at home with the 3yo last night] so he would not delay our departure!

He gets here and takes a load of stuff to the car. And we’re waiting, waiting, waiting on the pediatrician. Who finally shows up and says we’re not going anywhere.

Harper [I will spare you the "2-day-old" or in our Fixin' Supper nomenclature, the 2do, abbreviations] has jaundice, which I had kind of noticed late yesterday in the back of my head, but wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to. Seeing as how we have doctors to pay attention to that sort of thing for us.

And I get the idea that he doesn’t think it’s a HUGE deal, but especially because she’s a bit early [born just shy of 37 weeks], it’s perhaps not just a breastfeeding issue [slight jaundice is practically de rigeur for the bf set and no cause for worry], but instead, an immature liver issue. So, right now we are hoping that 24 hours or so under the bright lights [and on top of this cool electric blue light blanket] will take care of things. We’ll know more in the morning — she’ll have another blood draw at 5a on Wednesday. If that looks good, they’ll take her out of the lights for observation [and, I'm sure, another blood draw :( ] to make sure her bilirubin level doesn’t spike back up. If all goes well we can go home tomorrow night, it looks like.

I will say, I am not an emotional person [not even while pregnant! -- though apparently I am bossier while pg], but it takes someone more stoic than I to see her newborn baby with patches over her eyes, half-naked and lying uncomfortably on her back, alone in a plastic case and not shed a tear. It’s the alone part that bothers me so. I am massively grateful for the health of all of my children, and all present indications say this is nothing more than a speed bump for Harper — but newborn babies are made for cuddling 24/7 in my book [actually, if you want "my book" on parenting, you'll be reading Katie Allison Granju's Attachment Parenting and every word that the Sears have written], and her holding my finger through a hole in a plastic wall don’t cut it.

Send us your good thoughts and wishes for going home tomorrow!

She’s here!!

Harper Corley Barnes
Born 4/26/2009
4:05 p.m.
6 lbs., 9 oz.
19 3/4 inches

I’ll admit, I’m not your sheep. Nashville’s school crossing guards seem to have cowed most drivers into a 3-4 mph speed limit [far less than the 15 mph actually mandated in school zones], even when there’s no one under 30 in sight. So I know I drive you crazy, insisting on going somewhere between 13-15 mph in a school zone when the way is clear.

But seriously, I get tired of the finger-wagging when I’m not doing anything wrong. Crossing guards don’t like me as a pedestrian or as a driver, because I insist on the significantly lower standards of “what’s legal” and “what’s reasonable and proper,” as opposed to their dictatorial mandates, which are more along the lines of “how much can I make you do.”

This morning, we turned the corner near my daughter’s elementary school. This corner is a half block from the crossing guard, who stands at the next corner. Since we were coming off a full stop at the turn, we never approached 15 mph. But from the moment I turned, the guard was blowing her whistle full steam and shaking her hand at me to stop. As we got closer to the actual crosswalk, I could see she was also furrowing her eyebrows and generally giving me the evil eye. Since I was slowing from my already turtle pace to stop, I have no idea why. We actually knew the people crossing the street, and my pedestrian friend and I shrugged our shoulders at each other.

I get into trouble with the other crossing guard at school pretty frequently as well. Seems that when I’m a pedestrian, I insist on crossing the street when no cars are coming — but she hasn’t yet noticed that I want to cross, or that it’s safe to do so, or stepped into the street to “help” me with her ever-present whistle. That doesn’t make her happy.

I am sure this is actually a challenging job at times. There are kids who dash into the street. There are cars that literally zoom through the school zone. But I drive the same way to school at the same time every day. We’ve had the same crossing guards for several months now, after a lot of turnover last school year. And in general, are moms in minivans your problem drivers? I don’t get the anger at a driver and sometime pedestrian who’s not doing anything wrong or dangerous. Shouldn’t you save it for the person who barrels by at 23 or something?

Dear God,

Please make me be not so stupid. Last year I got remarried, and I jokingly said to friends, Now I don’t have to hire a babysitter to go to meetings anymore! But truthfully, that’s a major benefit of being married when you’re a do-gooder, because do-gooders tend to accumulate evening meetings like other people collect pennies.

So, next time I am tempted to say to my sweet, dear husband, “Sure dear, you work late; I’ll take the kids to the meeting with me,” please help me to remember how that is not a good idea with a very active 3yo boy who tends not to take naps anymore.

Love,

Me

Despite what seems like never-ending rain, I’ve been doing a lot of garden work in the past couple of weeks. A lot of it has involved transplanting half the tomatoes I started from seed into regular pots, out of their seedling trays. I need to do the other half today.

But I’ve been delaying about one of the most manual-labor-y tasks I have in the garden — and I finally decided yesterday morning that I simply couldn’t delay one moment longer: I had to build the trellises if I wanted to get the tomatoes in on time.

[Now, right off the bat, we can acknowledge that this is pregnancy nesting in some form, because I've planted tomatoes well into May and still gotten lots of fruit. But, I don't plan to be doing any planting in mid-May this year, and we'll certainly have tomatoes a lot sooner if I hurry the heck up and get those plants in the ground.]

So yesterday, I had Ashby help me unroll the fencing I’d bought to create the trellises from, I cut it, and I wired it to the poles. For the most part, it was like building a chain link fence, if you’ve ever done that. A lot of pliers and wrapping wire and crimping it. While no one would call that fun, I’m pretty good at it, and I find a lot of satisfaction in accomplishing manual tasks like that.

Let me NOT recommend this method of trellising to you if say, you’re 36 weeks pregnant and you have had rheumatoid arthritis, so your hands get tired and cranky easily anyway.

I’ve had trouble with my hands swelling the past couple of weeks, due to the pregnancy, but as long as I don’t use them in some way really out of the ordinary, they’re always better in the morning.

Building a fence or a trellis does not fall into “the ordinary” for my daily activities.

So I knew after getting the first two trellises set up that my hands were going to be in bad shape. But I figured, no need to go through this twice. Might as well push on through.

I got all four in place and secured, but it started to rain as I was finishing the last one, so I took that as a sign. It won’t be too much effort to finish it up later this week once the weather improves. [It's pouring rain at the moment.]

Let’s just say my hands were not amused. And of course, after I finish doing that kind of work, I’d normally pop a couple of Advil…which you can’t do while pregnant. I barely did anything with my hands the rest of the day, and spent quite a lot of time with them over my head, but they kept me awake a decent portion of the night. The whole pregnancy swelling thing is strange to me. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but once you get past a certain point, you are hyper-aware of your hands or feet. You can’t stop feeling them.

They are much better today and should be back to normal tomorrow, based on my recovery from other over-the-top things I’ve done recently. And as soon as we get a couple of sunny days later in the week, I’ve got a lot of tomato and cucumber plants and lima bean seeds going in the ground.

Despite the fact that 3/4 of this house are omnivores, we don’t eat a lot of meat. When we do, it tends to be chicken or turkey. But I have this thing for processed meat. I suspect it’s salt-related. As much as I love sweets, if I had to choose, I’d take Fritos any day. And so occasionally I get a craving for a dish with sausage or bacon or some other kind of meat product. You know, something that used to be real meat until they added a lot of salt and chemicals to it. Mmm.

Recently, I was at the store and noticed the bologna. While I like the high-end, butcher-shop variety, I’m just as happy with Oscar Mayer. I picked up a package of light bologna, trying to be healthy. I won’t make that mistake again.

1. Bologna isn’t healthy anyway.
2. The main difference between this and regular bologna seemed to be that they’d made the slices thinner. That’s a ripoff.

This did start a conversation between Ashby and me about olive loaf, however. Remember olive loaf? It’s basically bologna with pimento-stuffed green olive slices studded throughout. I happen to live in an urban neighborhood, where grocery stores are sometimes small, but one area where you can count on a full selection is the processed meat aisle. [Hey! I'll have a side of nitrites with my dioxin-laced soil and my exhaust-perfumed air!]

So in two grocery visits recently, I’ve looked for olive loaf, just for old times’ sake. And I can’t find it.

I have a political theory issue that’s been bugging me in several facets of my life recently, some overtly political, some not. I keep running into people with an authoritarian bent, and the more of them I run into, the bigger my problem gets.

Sidenote: You know how as you get older, the negative aspects of your personality seem magnified? OK, well anyway, that’s my mom’s theory, and I have seen it ring true in a number of people I know. I can’t decide if it’s that at some point we all say, The hell with it, I’m going to quit apologizing for who I am and just be me, or if we lose some of the social skills that enable us to mask our baser instincts when we’re young and looking for a mate. Either way, keep in mind that this post may begin exposing those judgmental aspects of my personality that I have long preferred to share only with those who have to love me.

Across the political spectrum, I keep seeing people wanting to dictate how the rest of us live. I could make an argument how these authoritarian tendencies don’t make sense for either liberals or conservatives, but both camps are full of people who want to tell the rest of us what to do.

• People who want to forbid gay marriage
• People who want to keep the uniform policy in Metro schools
• People who want to restrict adoption to certain groups
• People who want to subject pregnant women to drug testing

I could go on. But without a scorecard, I wouldn’t necessarily know which side of the aisle some of those ideas originate on. And I think a lot, if not all of them, are well intentioned by most of their proponents.

But. [And here's where I'm going to go off the rails. Forewarned and all that.]

Did NONE of these people grow up during the Cold War? Did NONE of them spend much time studying authoritarian dictatorships? And really, maybe that is the thing. I can say I’m a bit of a geek on this front. I was a European history major who went to college in 1989. Seriously, what a great time to be that kind of person. History was happening every single freakin’ day. Worldwide political movements that began at the beginning of the 20th century and shaped most of the major events of that span were ending right as I was studying them. I spent a lot of time reading, writing and thinking about both National Socialism in Germany and communism, as it was embodied in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe.

And a few tiny, tiny things I took away from all of that are ideas like this:

• We are all a lot closer to 1984 that we’d care to admit.
• Evil is banal, and it’s all around us.
• We are it.
• A thousand tiny choices really do add up to monumental misdirections in the course of human events.
• Saying, “It doesn’t affect me,” is the worst kind of ignorance. They really are coming for us next.

I don’t mean to compare individual political positions people take today in the United States with Nazism or with Soviet-style communism. [Another soapbox, another time: Why it really is both stupid and bad to call someone who disagrees with you a "Nazi."] But I do mean to say that the little things matter. And I don’t understand how thinking people can look themselves in the eye and say, “Well, I just know better than you on this point.” Or, “It works for me. You shouldn’t have a problem with it.” Or perhaps worst of all, “It’s for the common good.”

The tyranny of the majority is very real. In this country, in ways big and small every day, we allow a misdirected sense of “democracy” to run roughshod over freedom. Taking a vote and forcing the 49 percent to live by the dictum of the 51 percent isn’t about liberty. It’s about exerting authority. I reject your authority over me. That’s not what I signed up for. I signed on for a country that celebrates individual freedom, liberty and respect for each other. That your rights end where mine begin and vice versa.

In case you haven’t noticed here before, my two children are VERY different, especially when it comes to food. The 9yo used to eat anything — until she went to kindergarten. That year, her food tastes changed dramatically. When she turned 8, she also decided to become a vegetarian. [A picky, vegetarian 9yo is EXACTLY as hard to feed as you think she would be.] To her credit, she has really worked on the picky issue in the past year, and she finally seems ready to branch out more in her eating habits.

The 3yo is the eater the 9yo used to be, to a large extent. He eats almost everything you serve him — all food groups. This time around, I simply know better than to congratulate myself on that. We’ll see what the next few years bring.

But the problem with the 3yo is something I have YET to encounter with his older sister. He has a truly frightening ability: He can tell from the other end of the house, through walls even, when someone else is eating. It doesn’t matter how small the morsel or how fast you chew. If you put something in your mouth, he knows, tells everyone else, and wants some himself.

Now actually, I was much more like this as a child than I was like the 9yo. At least, in my memory. I know I went through some picky stages, but I don’t remember that being my overriding food personality. But the food radar on the 3yo is really impressive. At times I’ve been worried at how much of a social eater he is — while I certainly view eating as a largely social experience [would I spend so much time sharing my thoughts on it with you if not?], I don’t want to train my kids to think that you should eat even when you’re not hungry. At the same time, the 3yo is so skinny there’s obviously no cause for worry at this point, and he does refuse food if he’s not hungry. So I really don’t worry.

But I do get really annoyed. Late this afternoon while all the tornado warnings were going on, I was watching the weather on TV and working in the kitchen to put some casseroles in the freezer. I’m trying to get ahead a bit for the summer when the baby is born. During the time it took me to put 3 casseroles together and freeze them, including making marinara sauce from scratch for one of them, I put two things in my mouth: One fun-size Snickers, and 1 tortilla chip. Despite his paying no attention whatsoever to me the rest of the afternoon, the minute those two items hit my mouth, the 3yo appeared out of nowhere with the same question: “Whatcha eating? I want some.” There’s no way the child was hungry. He’d just had a large snack not an hour before.

I actually saw the only false positive I’ve ever noticed on his food radar today, as well. I was picking up some of the crinkly, plastic, recyclable packaging I’d emptied when I started cleaning up and SHOOM! the 3yo appeared. “Whatcha eating? I want some.” I guess what I take from that is that I eat too many things that come in crinkly packaging, but I promise you his radar also works on completely silent food.

The really funny thing is that after being refused the second, late-afternoon snack he wanted, he professed not to be hungry at dinnertime. A problem quickly but inadvertently solved — five minutes later I had to tell him that boys who didn’t eat any dinner certainly didn’t get to share a peanut-butter cup with their moms after dinner.* Guess who actually was hungry after all?

*Just to be clear, we do not have the clean plate club at this house. I have never used the “clean your plate or no dessert” rule. I think that teaches bad habits, too. [Obsess about food much, do we?] But you do have to eat at least some dinner if you want dessert in my house, just on general nutritional principles. We eat grow food before fun food.