Expanding the definition of “locavore” May 17, 2012

The concept of a “locavore” is pretty easy for most folks to grasp: someone who buys things that are produced locally. Typically, this is used when describing people who purchase locally-produced foods, whether those foods are animal or vegetable. There’s also the idea of “Think Global, Act Local” to remind people that we need to support local businesses. And, between the bevy of days designed to get us out there frequenting local businesses (i.e. Record Store Day, Free Comic Book Day, Small Business Saturday, etc.), you have a whole host of reminders that we need to consume local resources first, before we look outside of what’s right nearby.

And so, it was with a terribly heavy heart I heard the news yesterday that WFNX (101.7FM to those of us in Eastern MA) had been sold to Clear Channel. Yes, the folks who own the “IHeartRadio” brand that seems hell-bent on destroying all variety in radio had bought yet another station and was planning to take it from its current alternative music format to (likely) either Spanish-language talk or country.

I can’t describe how awful I felt when I heard this. I have all kinds of words that I would typically use for this circumstance which I try pretty hard not to use on this blog, for fear of giving the impression that I’m an off-duty sailor. Basically, this decision is just bullshit and it’s robbing the local area of a resource that many of us really enjoyed. My sister introduced me to WFNX in the early 90′s, on one of my trips up to Boston while I was still in college. I loved the variety, the fact that they played music that no one else even considered putting on the radio, and the sheer bravado of putting on music that wasn’t designed for people who only wanted aural pap. When I moved up to the Boston area several years later, WFNX became “my station” – the one I would listen to in the car all the time. Even now, working well out of the range of its puny transmitter, I stream it to my desktop at work so that I can keep tabs on the music I love and the DJ’s that I find highly amusing (in an era when most DJ’s are interchangeable animatronic figures with their own inner laugh tracks on constantly).

These days, when you turn on the radio in your car (assuming you only have terrestrial radio and haven’t ponied up for Sirius/XM), what you hear is fairly homogeneous. Any station you land on fits neatly into one of five categories: news/talk, classical, classic rock, pop rock or college radio. The alternative rock stations have been wiped clean off the map in many cities (my beloved WHFS in DC disappeared one day, suddenly, but is available for streaming these days). And now, the station that introduced me to Mumford & Sons, Foster the People, Arcade Fire, Young the Giant and many, many others is disappearing. The radio personalities that actually lent personality to the radio were let go. A skeleton crew will man the station until its final switchover somewhere between 2-8 weeks from now, and then Clear Channel will re-baptize it as something else.

If you think about what being a locavore means, there’s an inherent sense of consciously bypassing the homogenized experience – the pre-packaged, chemically-enhanced version of what’s on the market. You want the fresh strawberries from the farm one county over, not the ones that flew in from 3,000 miles away. You want the beef that’s hormone-free instead of the beef that’s had god only knows WHAT done to it in order to get that cow to grow faster in a pen that’s smaller than a bathroom stall. Sure, you pay more for that, but you pay knowing that you’re supporting local businesses and your own local community, and you’re doing something that’s better for you in the process.

Listening to local radio isn’t all that different. Sure, the sales channel isn’t exactly the same – you don’t purchase directly from the station, although you may hear about a show or a service and purchase directly from the vendor who advertised on the radio. But still, how is there all that much difference? When you have the opportunity to listen to new bands that have a sound that challenges your preconceived notions of what’s good, expanding your mind, how is that so different from turning up your nose at packaged foods? In my mind, my rejection of all things Bieber and any of the digitally-enhanced crapola that comes out of the record company machine doesn’t stray all that much from my desire to have organic milk in the house. I’m consciously rejecting that which I know is being spoon-fed to me and branching out. That I listen to this on local radio is far better than just streaming it from some faceless server owned by a media conglomerate.

The other piece of this is that I don’t just listen: I buy. When I hear something I like, I go to Newbury Comics and I buy it. I don’t buy constantly, and I often look through their used selections when something finally occurs to me months after a disc has come out and I’ve heard enough to know it’s worth buying. But I buy. And I buy local. Newbury Comics is much like a DC-area chain I used to work for back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. That chain was destroyed by the rise of Tower Records and Best Buy, and ultimately Walmart and Target did them all in. Newbury’s still managed to survive, although they’re very much on life support, to hear their CEO tell it. They’ve had to expand their offerings to include more clothes and other ancillary items, because that’s where they’re getting sufficient margin. They’re being eaten alive by iTunes.

So, if I have to leave you with one idea as I sit in mourning for WFNX and desperately hope that Newbury won’t go the way of the dodo anytime soon: be a locavore about more than just food. Think Global, but for pete’s sake CONSUME LOCAL. Listen to your local radio station. Buy from your local CD store. If you live in the radio/musical equivalent of a food desert, seek out new music and new acts and buy their stuff. Go to local shows if you can. Just don’t give up on what’s local. Because, just as a radio station can disappear in the blink of an eye, so can a family farm. Businesses need patrons to succeed, and they need word of mouth to grow their base. Don’t let another decent station or music chain suffer because the deal is better on Amazon or the instant gratification’s there with iTunes. Think Global, CONSUME LOCAL. Please.

Kicking my training up a notch… May 15, 2012

It’s not every day when someone shows up at your door with a box filled with stuff. With things piled on top of the box. I do so love days like that, especially when the stuff that the person shows up with happens to be stuff I can use.

In this case, it’s stuff I know I *want* to use, so we’ll see if I can kick my own behind into gear enough to be able to use it properly.

This all stems from one of those “it’s who you know” things, where I happen to know someone who works for a company that makes fitness equipment that’s designed specially for women. Now, I say this not to get all mushy – “ooh, it’s pink and it has wings!” NO NO NO. “Things designed for women” isn’t code for “looks like a tampon and smells like Febreze”. In this case, it’s fitness equipment that was designed for different body needs. Will dh use any of it? Uh, yeah. Why? It’s not because he wants to get in touch with his feminine side…it’s more that there will come a point when his curiosity will get the better of him. (He was already sniffing around the fitness mats and was excited that there was more than one.)

Of course, I haven’t yet had the chance to try this stuff out. My friend was kind enough to bring all this stuff last night, showing me everything from mats to medicine balls. As I try things out, I’ll post some reviews so that you can see what I found that worked for me. Bear in mind that my current schedule has me working out – at most – 3-4 times a week, with most of my workouts running maybe 35-45 minutes (and a longer one on the weekend). Some weeks I work out more, some less. I work out when I can, as we can fit it into our schedule (dh is training for his first triathlon). Add in full-time jobs and two kids and our schedule is almost military-level regimented from about 4:45am until the kids are finally asleep for the night.

Thanks to a fitness competition that was going on at work for the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing my workouts on walking, but now I can start to reincorporate core work. Hopefully, this will be less likely to kill me than what the sadistic incredibly sweet personal trainer at my gym had taught me earlier this year. (For such a nice guy, he certainly got an evil grin going when I was feeling near death halfway through his workouts. Yeesh.)

My eyes are on the prize(s): becoming fitter and finishing this year’s walking marathon without limping my way into the finish line. FINISH STRONG. As it happens, I connected with the Director of this year’s walk and there are a bunchload of people who live in my town that are also planning to do this year’s marathon; I suggested that she help organize a training club, and she’s going to see what can be done to make that happen.

So we’ll see if this works. I don’t consider this a reboot or even a .x release. This is just continuous flow. I haven’t stopped moving. (On the contrary, I was averaging well over 10,000 steps/day for the last three months.) I’d just like to kick things up a notch and, with a little help from my friends (and some new fitness toys!) I think I can do just that.

Who’s with me?

P.S. – If things work out nicely with any of the items I try out, there is a chance for giveaways. *claps hands in joy and grins madly* Keep your fingers cross, peeps.

How to tell if you’re “mom enough” May 12, 2012

So, TIME Magazine decided to kick over a tracker jacker-level nest this week by putting an extended breastfeeding (EBF) mom and her 3 year old ds on the cover. With him breastfeeding. While standing on a toddler chair. [The article can be read in print or, if you can unlock, you can read it on their web site. More links - unlocked - here and here.] The basic premise is that it’s fun to star a holy war amongst moms during a year when we’re already talking about a “War on Women”.

Oh TIME, you are so awful sometimes.

My first reaction to seeing a mom EBF her 3yo was shock. It wasn’t that I was repulsed by the idea of a woman bf’ing her son; far from it, I think that’s fantastic. That she’s also incredibly beautiful and has a slammin’ body only made it seem crueller. She’s pretty, she’s got a great bod, and she makes bf’ing look like it’s so fricking easy (when I know for a fact that this is NOT the case for everybody). Ultimately, what bothered me about it is that her child shouldn’t need breastmilk at this stage of his development.

Over the course of a breastfeeding cycle, from when your colostrum first starts to come in all the way through weaning, your milk is constantly changing its composition to meet the nutritional needs of your child. By the time your child is starting to get onto solid foods, your milk is nowhere near as thick or heavy in nutrients because your body just knows that other stuff is going into their system to handle that. So it seems rather odd that anyone would *need* to breastfeed that long…the milk can’t possibly be any better, nutritionally, than what they’d get from a dairy or grocery store. If anything, it may not be as good for you, since it will have less vitamin D and calcium – requiring the child to need to lean more heavily on vitamins or foods rich in the appropriate, otherwise lacking, nutrients.

So, it is mostly me shaking my head say, “This makes no sense.”

I also have a co-worker whose sister just gave birth to an overdue child who has lost a little too much weight since birth. The rule of thumb is that if a child loses more than 10% of their birth weight, they need to be fed more frequently, potentially be supplemented with formula, etc. while the pediatrician monitors more closely. We went through this with dd when my milk didn’t come in well, so hearing that my co-worker’s sister was going through this, too, was giving me flashbacks to my crying fits in the hospital when the milk just wasn’t there and dd was screaming out in hunger until I finally relented and let formula take the place of what I thought only I should provide. Apparently, my co-worker’s sister is taking this in better stride than I did with dd, so good for her. She’s also using a syringe (for those not in the know, this involves a very thin tube that you can strap to your breast so the child is mimicking the comfort of being held close without potentially getting nipple confusion from a bottle). So, she’s better positioning herself for being able to continue bf’ing once she’s gotten the weight issues under control.

As you fast-forward in life, there seem to be no end of times when you compare yourself to other moms. I look around and see moms who appear to be more capable, more patient, better financed, fitter, happier…just generally BETTER. And then I think about my own mom, who’s a superhero to me even more every day as I learn about what it takes to be what I consider a “good mom”. She was epic during my childhood – working full-time, often in managerial roles, being a full-time mom and primary caregiver, cooking dinner every night, keeping the house together and clean…she never seemed to lose it.

And thus I come back to how I feel about my momming. I was “single-momming it” this week, as dh spent the majority of the week out of town for a work trip. Each night, I was on the hook to get the kids from daycare on time, get them home safely and make dinner. I was the only one to put them both to bed, and I was the only one to clean up. On the night when one of them couldn’t sleep well without a parent, I was the only parent who could be woken, and I still had to get up on time the next morning and find a way to shower so that I wouldn’t go into work anything less than clean. I managed. Actually, I did a bit better than managing – I somehow convinced the kids after that first awful night that they should stay in bed all night, and both of them did. Evenings were well-coordinated and everyone played their part, and they ate and slept well for me. I got hot showers 4 out of 4 days that I was on my own. And each day, the kids were happy, got play time, got relaxing time, ate square meals, slept for the required amount of hours, and went to school looking as though we were still a two-parent household all week. Oh, and I managed to get all of my work done at work and then some.

So, then we circle back around to this notion of being “enough” of a mom. In my mind, if you’re trying to do as much as possible within your power (and within the limits of reason) to make/keep your children happy and healthy, then the answer is yes. There’s a lot of stuff that we can’t control, but there is a good bit that we can control, too. Parenting is all about jumping off a cliff not knowing whether the bungee, parachute or other flotation devices are going to work. And, on your way down (or up), you keep experimenting because what worked 5 minutes ago no longer flies, so to speak. You don’t need to EBF to be a good mom. You don’t need to buy the most expensive clothes or toys for your kids to be a good mom. You don’t need to be model-pretty and model-slender to be a good mom.

There’s a big difference between being able to have a child and being a parent. When you decide to BE a mom and devote time and effort to that, then you’re mom enough. Setting up unnecessary fights and agitating an already on-edge population just seems mean-spirited. Shame on TIME for fueling a fire that just needs to burn out, already. I don’t need a magazine to tell me whether I’m “mom enough”. I can figure that out on my own.

Crock Pot BBQ Pulled Chicken April 30, 2012

This recipe is about a month late in getting posted, not because I’m a completely lazy person but because I’m often going in so many directions at once that sometimes it’s easier just not to go in ANY direction when offered a few free minutes a day where directions aren’t required. Sorry about that.

So, once we get past that, we get on to a recipe that worked. Oh my, did it work. One of my favorite southern treats is a pulled meat sandwich (typically chicken, but pork is a close second), and when we were having family over for dinner it seemed like a simple way to prepare an easy crowd-pleaser.

At my sister’s suggestion, I paired this with a maple cornbread recipe from the geniuses at King Arthur Flour – it’s a simple and tasty homemade cornbread that I will surely make again in the future. I also threw together a batch of kale chips, so there would be something green on the plate. OK, sure, the right accompaniment would’ve been either collards or fried okra, but kale chips seemed to be more my required level of effort. It also had the bonus of having been the first time my parents had them, so I had the rare pleasure of introducing them to something!

The “hardest” part of this particular meal is the shredding; everything else takes only seconds to prepare. Shredding can be tedious, but once you get into a groove with it, even a few pounds of chicken shreds pretty quickly. It’s just wonderful to have dishes that take virtually no time to throw together when you’re entertaining. Once we can get the kids to (reliably) eat meat, we’ll be making this more often. The other benefit is that, unlike the pulled meats I’ve gotten pre-packaged at the grocery store, I know exactly what’s going into the dish. Since I’ve been on a rid-my-house-of-High-Fructose-Corn-Syrup kick over the last year or so, this is a really nice thing. (FWIW, we use Heinz Organic or Simply ketchup varieties; both are HFCS-free.)

The first picture shows you the full plate; the second picture shows you what happened when we thought it would be fun to try some of the pulled chicken on the cornbread. “I just want a small taste of the chicken…what would happen if I put it on a square of cornbread?” My BIL and I both thought of this at the same time, and his positive response to bite #1 of the combination spurred me to try it myself. OH BABY WAS IT GOOD.

A plate full of OMNOMNOM

Two great tastes that tasted grrrrrreat together

Prep Time: 5 min

Cooking/Active Time: 8-10 hrs on LOW plus another 10 minutes to shred and 15-20 mins on HIGH

Serves: 8-10 people

 

Ingredients

2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken thighs

1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Marinade/Cooking Sauce:

• 1/3 cup worcestershire sauce
• 1/3 cup green chili sauce
• 14-1/2 oz can low-sodium chicken broth
• 1 cup apple juice

BBQ/Finishing Sauce:

• 3/4 cup ketchup
• 3/4 cup molasses
• 1/3 cup yellow mustard
• 1/3 cup worcestershire sauce
• 3 Tb green chili sauce

 

Make it Happen

1. Spray the inside of a 4qt round crock pot with non-stick cooking spray.

2. Add the chicken thighs and chicken breasts to the crock. Mix the worcestershire sauce, chili sauce, chicken broth and apple juice in a bowl and pour over the chicken.

3. Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hrs.

4. In a bowl, combine the ketchup, molasses, yellow mustard, and the worcestershire and green chili sauces that comprise the finishing sauce.

5. When the chicken is done cooking, remove it from the crock to a cutting board and shred with a pair of forks.

6. Dump out the liquid in the crock and put the shredded chicken back into the crock, along with the finishing sauce. Stir well to combine.

7. Cook on HIGH for 15-20 mins, just to bring the sauce up to temperature. Serve on rolls. Or cornbread. Or with a spoon straight to your mouth OMNOMNOM…

 

Data collection and your baby April 12, 2012

{aside: YES, I KNOW I said I’d post a recipe for the Carolina-style bbq chicken. I still will…I just haven’t gotten to it yet. Work, exercise, tired, parent, work, tired, parent, exercise…you get the drift}

*   *   *   *   *

So, dh decided to interrupt my Angry Birds Space/me time with a copy of the most recent Atlantic magazine. It seems that there was a piece written called “The Data-Driven Parent”, all about how parents are turning to technology to help them track their infants’ behavior, feedings, etc., in order to bring some order into the chaos. On many levels, I SO GET this.

Flashback to nearly 5-1/2 years ago when, recovering from my c-section for dd, I suddenly realize that A) breastfeeding is WAY harder than I thought it would be, B) I don’t appear to be getting the hang of it and neither is she, and C) I have a supply of breastmilk that’s directly inverse to the size of my breasts, which turned into porn-sized bazooms by day 3 post-delivery. With my child losing too much weight in the hospital from lack of nutrition, I tearfully turned to formula and, pretty much immediately upon arriving home, a Medela Pump-in-Style. I pumped, really I did, but I was producing half-ounces at a time. Meantime, my friends from the online birth group were producing gallons, it seemed. Self-esteem, meet the toilet.

Because dd’s weight was such an issue, I tracked everything about her eating and her diapering. We were actually told to do this for a few weeks, and then we continued long after the doctor told us it wasn’t necessary. Pages and pages of double-sided log sheets were completed until we had finally gotten to the point where I was willing to back away from the spreadsheets that I’d used not just to track the feedings but to draw charts with trendlines. {Yes, I’m THAT person. I’m willing to acknowledge it.}

With ds, my supply was better, but breastfeeding was still no better of an option. He and I never clicked, and while I was in the hospital, he actually gnawed me to the point where dh had to run out to a nearby compounding apothecary to get me super-special healing salve. I won’t get into all the gory details, but suffice to say that I wanted to hug and kiss the LC who managed to get me a Medela Freestyle breast pump from our insurer as a fully covered benefit the LAST DAY that they offered it, which coincided with the day I said, “Screw this, I’m jumping on the pump.” {Also side note: Ladies, health care reform is brilliant and some pumps are now going to be fully covered benefits. If you’ve ever pumped or plan to, VOTE OBAMA this November. #thatisall}

I leaned on the spreadsheets I had from dd’s infancy and just made a copy for ds, tracking his feedings and (Oh Dear Lord) comparing his intake to hers. He got significantly more milk than she did, although I did have to supplement with him anyway. But he had whole days where he got nothing but milk. It’s amazing. It’s victory. It’s probably completely incomprehensible that this was a BIG DEAL to me if you never had an issue with feedings yourself.

And this all does have a relationship to the Atlantic article – which talked about how parents are turning to technology to do pretty much what I did, only they’re going quite a bit farther. The parents interviewed for the article are turning to mobile and tablet apps to do their tracking (“Back in my day,” she wheezed, “We used EXCEL and we made those formulas BY HAND! GET OFF MY LAWN!“).

I have no issue with them doing this, but when they get to the point where folks like Belkin are going to enable – nay, encourage – parents who own their tech to share their results with each other so that you can compare and contrast your infant with some other random infant, that’s where I bristle. In my mind, checking the kiddos up the street for “what’s normal” isn’t always your best bet, since that’s a sample that’s often less than statistically significant. Really, if you want to know “what’s normal”, check with your pediatrician. They know this stuff. They went to school for this stuff. They can talk you down off the ledge about how some kids will be 99th percentile because – and I know this is a hard concept to grasp – when you have a scale, SOMEBODY is gonna be at the top of it and SOMEBODY ELSE will be at the bottom of it. That’s why it’s a range. Or a scale. Else they’d change the scale.

What worries me about this is that, instead of enabling parents to do the tracking that makes them feel more secure by having knowledge at their fingertips, it will actually encourage them to worry more, to get even more irrational by going all Dr. Google on their infants about what’s normal and what’s not normal for a 4-week-old baby.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but it seems to me that data collection and productivity apps are cool, and things that encourage panic and contextually-insensitive faux diagnoses are uncool.

Maybe I should just get back to Angry Birds Space; I was a LOT less cranky then.

Grill those beets! March 19, 2012

Consider this the world’s shortest list of ingredients next to the recipe for making toast: grilled beets. While dh and ds were at the grocery store yesterday, apparently ds pointed THE ALMIGHTY FINGER OF THE PRESCHOOLER at beets, and dh happily obliged. After all, when your small child is pointing to a vegetable that he’s actually likely to eat, you often want to pounce on that with all of the joy and verve of a tween offered a chance to see Justin Bieber reading the part of Edward in a table read of “Breaking Dawn: part 2″. (Maybe minus all the angsty swoon…but you get the point.)

The pair of ‘em picked out a lovely set of golden and red beets. Then dh prepped ‘em and put ‘em on the grill. Y NO CAN HAS PIC? Sorry, didn’t think to take one, but suffice to say that they were lovely. The golden beets have this terrific yellowish-orangy hue, and the red beets have a fantastic reddish purple color that just lights up a plate. This recipe yields  the same outcome as oven roasting, only you don’t have to bother turning on your oven (yeay!). DH also noted that he finds this method of peeling beets far easier than what I do – using a peeler on them when they’re raw so I can chop peeled beets before roasting them in the oven.

Pointing back to my question about how to have things that help relieve some of the monotony of one-night dinners and the related follow-up post by my friend Local Kitchen, we did have extra beets at the end of the meal, even with ds clamoring for a third serving. What do you do with said leftover beets? WHATEVER YOU WANT. The suggestions I had for dh were either to cut them up and toss them in with some leftover couscous for a simple lunch option or cut them up and add them to the salads he takes to work every day. Either way, they’re yummy and totally worth having. And, if you have a grill, they’re easy to prepare. Also, waste not, want not: this recipe also yields a bunchload of beet greens. USE THOSE BABIES. Make a salad out of ‘em, wilt ‘em in a pan before serving immediately…find a use for ‘em!

I will also point out that when your 2-1/2 year old son decides to wipe purple beety hands on his white t-shirt, baby wipes appear to take out most of the stain. *cough*

Prep time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 1 hour

Serves: 3-5 (depends on your beet-lovin’ level)

Ingredients

1 bunch golden beets

1 bunch red beets

Make it Happen

1. Start your grill and aim for about medium-level (indirect) heat. When ready, this should be up in the 450F range.

2. Trim off the beet greens and scrub each beet bulb clean.

3. Wrap each beet bulb in aluminum foil; place the foil-wrapped beets on the grill and close the grill cover.

4. Turn the beets every 15 minutes until at desired tenderness, approximately 1 hour for medium/large beets (3″ or so in diameter), slightly less for small beets (2″ diameter or thereabouts).

5. Remove the foil and then carefully remove the beet skin; this is most easily done by rubbing the beet in a paper towel, which should fairly well slough off the skin.

6. Either serve whole or chop into bite-sized pieces and serve.

{interlude} Time to post March 17, 2012

At tonight’s dinner party for family, an interesting conversation broke out (as one often does) – this time, one the subject of this blog. My mother, sitting across from me, commented that she wanted the cookbooks that were used in the generation of the meal, and I explained that one recipe was a mish-mash mod that I will be posting (next post I PROMISE) and the other did come 100% from a cookbook. I then commented a bit about how infrequently I’ve been posting lately. It is, after all, fairly hard to post frequently about all the lovely recipes I’m creating when much of our routine is built on…well, routine, and that means that we tend to cycle through a number of the same recipes every month because that’s what keeps our schedule from flying completely off the rails.

My sweet BIL then commented about how that’s actually fine. That’s my M.O., basically. My sister then chided me to remain true to my brand (tee hee), and thus that means dealing with the balancing act that my life is so much of the time. Really, creating new recipes daily just isn’t for me; I simply don’t have the time. I whined a bit about how I wish I could post as frequently as some of my other friends, and then I was swiftly reminded by dh that most of the frequent posters I know are people either A) work from home/stay at home, B) have no children, or C) both. Good point. Working outside of the home and having a husband who does the same, plus having two kids, it’s sometimes a wonder that I get out of the house with underwear on and my teeth brushed. (Trust me, on the days when you can’t have it all, best to go with the underwear; mints cover many evils.)

And thus we have this reminder: I may not post a ton, but I’ll post when I have something to say. Hopefully you’ll find it worth reading. If I ranted every time I got ticked off at the rampant attacks on women, I’d be posting every five minutes. If I posted only every time I create or discover a new recipe, IT MAY BE A WHILE. Thus, balance. You get some rant, you get some recipe. Sometimes, you get some parenting stuff as I discover things like how incredibly frakking smart dd is (she read everyone’s fortunes to them after our Chinese dinner the other night…which would be unremarkable if she weren’t still < 5-1/2 and waiting to enter Kindergarten). I will also note that I don’t post recipes that fall flat. If I don’t think I’d want to eat it again and/or if it needs significant adjustment, it won’t get posted until said adjustment(s) have been made. No point in posting something that’s only half-baked (no pun intended); when I fish around for recipes online, I’m assuming that they don’t suck. I just try to return the favor by posting recipes that I think absolutely are worth having again and again.

So, there you have it. And, as for the dinner party that we had tonight…there WILL be a recipe posted soon for the main dish: a crock pot Carolina-style BBQ pulled chicken. I can truly vouch for that recipe NOT SUCKING. And that’s what makes for a post, at least for me.

Question: What’s for lunch? March 11, 2012

As we gear up for dd’s first run at camp, in a few months, we have to make a decision as to whether we want to have the camp provide her with a lunch or if we should make the lunch ourselves. We’ve had it easy the last few years; ever since she was able to eat solids 100% of the time, she was getting her lunch and snacks from day care. Now, we’re on the cusp of Kindergarten, and camp is a bit of an informal dress rehearsal for some of that.

Of course, setting aside the cost issue (buying lunch daily isn’t cheap) and the nutrition issue (she’d pick chicken nuggets and fries or pizza EVERY DAY if we’d let her), there’s the other concern of her spending so much time in line that she won’t have enough time to EAT her lunch.

So, I’m curious to hear from the parents who already have kids in school and/or those who have to provide the lunch for their kids at day care. What do you do? How do you keep the food cold/fresh if you send it in with your child? Do you switch it up or have pretty much the same lunch all week long? How do you work around pickiness (like, say, a child who isn’t naturally inclined to liking sandwiches).

Inquiring minds want to know and operators are standing by…

Progress? What Progress? March 9, 2012

Yet again, Time Magazine has something interesting to read. This time out, I guess in observation of “International Womens Day” (who comes UP with these holidays?), Jessica Winter wrote a fabulously funny commentary asking that most obvious of all questions these days: “Are Women People?”

The answer is, sadly, no. We’re just about everything BUT people. Of course, according to former Massachusetts Governor and eternally animatronic GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, “Corporations are people, my friend!” Yes, dear, of course they are. And the first day that a corporation shows up asking to date dd, I will drive to BassPro and buy the biggest shotgun I can get my hands on.

I also found it quite amusing that Winter came to the same conclusion I was discussing with a co-worker just yesterday: the lack of a Y chromosome is NOT a disability. Women can do all kinds of amazing things, excepting that whole (reliably) peeing standing up thing, and yet we’re still treated as second-class citizens. Even now, it still seems highly unlikely that this country is ready to elect a woman President – although I really did think Hilary had a good shot at it. The only female brought up to the podium on the GOP debate stage this cycle was just Rick Santorum in bad drag.

I feel like women are just under attack lately. Maybe it’s not lately – maybe it’s been a lot longer than that with seemingly no end in sight – but it seems like any lull has certainly been broken by just a spate of really horrifically anti-woman statements and actions that managed to make it to the news. Whether it’s being called “sluts” for using contraception, being threatened with transvaginal ultrasounds when deciding to have an abortion (I’ve had a transvag ultrasound – NOT comfortable) or just about any of the other WTF-inducing moments, I can’t decide whether I should strap my breasts down or whip ‘em out and stand in the middle of an intersection.

Part of what frustrates me is that things continue to move backwards, even as we move forward in time. I’m a statistic, many times over, whether we’re counting the times I was sexually harassed at a workplace (years ago) or when I fended off a sexual assault so that it could stay in the “attempted” category. I probably know lots of other women who are statistics, too. I would like to think that all the complete tools that are out there trying to degrade the public standing of women, like the Limbaughs and the Santorums of the world, will one day WAKE THE F*%K UP and realize that they know women. The women they know deserve better than what they’re trying to do to all the women that they don’t know.

The other part is that I can’t protect dd from all of it. When I was a little kid, Gloria Steinem was always in the news, and Ms. was a title that working women were proud to use as a symbol of their independence from a male-dominated hierarchy. Now, I wonder how many women below the age of 30 could even pick Gloria out of a lineup, would even know what she went through to help get it to the point where it could be commonplace for women to be in roles other than steno pool, waitress, or on our backs. I want things to be better for dd than they were for me, as they were better for me than they were for my mom. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right?

There’s no reason to have to accept a male-dominated dialogue that favors mean soundbites over sound reasoning. There’s no reason to have to accept being treated like a walking incubator instead of a thinking, feeling person with an ability to make rational decisions about my own health care. And there’s just never a reason to listen to a hate-filled windbag from either extreme end of the partisan scale. Extreme views may win ratings, but they rarely win arguments.

When I go into the voting booth this November, I plan to fill in the oval for the candidates I believe to be least detrimental to women. None of them are really pro-woman (excepting maybe someone like Elizabeth Warren, who seems to be fairly self-aware about her whole XX chromosome situation). See, I don’t just owe it to dd to make things better…I owe it to myself.

Is “childism” real? March 5, 2012

Hanging out Sunday night, I happened across this piece – ‘Childist’ Nation: Does America Hate Kids? by Judith Warner. The concept is interesting: we, as a nation, seem to have swung back in some crazy-ass direction where now people are all okay for stifling the creativity, joie de vivre, and very safety of children in the country. Hmm. I think I beg to differ. I think it’s been around for a lot longer and is far more ingrained than any ‘ism’ can possibly express.

Sure enough, things like No Child Left Behind do little to show that we’re trying to handle the immense variation in children’s learning development, but standardized tests were around decades ago and didn’t seem to derail children from having useful and prosperous futures back then. (I had to pass four state-level standardized tests just to be eligible to graduate from high school, and somehow I managed to do that without ending up in a padded cell.)

And while the terrible tragedy of a young girl being run to death for having lied about eating a candy bar is just that – a terrible tragedy – it’s not like there weren’t screwed up parents for pretty much the entire history of, well, parenthood.

It seems like a week can’t go by without hearing some horrifying story of what someone’s done to a child: sexual assault (I’m looking right at you, Jerry Sandusky, and it makes me want to puke), physical abuse, emotional abuse…the list just goes on and on. It’s to the point where you almost have to go numb if you want to be able to listen to, watch or read the news; otherwise, you might lose your nut listening to the filth and bile that humankind seems to heap on itself, especially its most vulnerable population.

But, I’d like to point out that there’s more to it than that. Sure enough, Warner does point out that America’s lack of support for affordable, high-quality child care is part of the problem, and I agree 100% with her. I’d also like to note that it shouldn’t take Beyonce whipping out a boob in a New York restaurant to get people to agree that breastfeeding is okay in public. As far as I can tell, the only people who think bf’ing in public is offensive are those who see breasts as “tits” only. Au contraire – boobs can sometimes be breasts, sometimes be tits, sometimes even be BODACIOUS TA-TAS… – and whatever they are, it’s none of anyone else’s business. Feeding your child should be okay in a restaurant. People go to restaurants to eat, right? OK. (nods)

And setting aside the Tiger Moms and the Parisian Moms, and whatever other form of Titled Mom you want to come up with, kids need structure. They need boundaries. They need freedom to run while simultaneously being able to know that there’s a home to come back to. That’s why I get so completely annoyed when I hear about how we need to make sure that everybody gets a trophy whenever there’s a competition. No, they don’t. Whoever wins should get a trophy, and maybe the next 2 or so other kids. Everybody else just gets to see the trophies. Sounds harsh? Well, which is harsher – letting kids think that everybody always wins or teaching them that winning has to have some value to it or else it’s not really winning? I think of this exchange from the movie, The Incredibles, where the mother (Helen) is trying to make sure that her son, Dash, understands why his superpowers might be too much for competitive sports. She tells him that “everybody’s special”, which prompts his grumbling retort: “Which is another way of saying no one is.” We’re not all Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, or {pick the really fast/gifted athlete of your choice}. Doesn’t mean we can’t strive for it, but doesn’t mean we’ll all get there. Teaching kids otherwise is actually crueller than giving them some dose of reality, in my opinion.

Where else do we fall down? All over the place. We medicate kids early and often when it’s not always clear that they need it. We leave parents of autistic children to fend for themselves all too often, when it’s clear that they need access to MORE assistance, not less. We actually debate whether or not dads should have access to paternity leave. We fill the shelves of grocery stores with countless boxes, jars, cans, and plastic cups of foods targeted to kids that are filled to the gills with high fructose corn syrup, chemicals and other crrrrap that growing bodies (or even fully-grown bodies) just don’t need.

Oh, I could just go on and on.

I’m not saying that kids don’t need to be separated from adults at times. I like having some free time to myself when no one is hanging on my leg, asking me whether they can watch “Wiggly Wiggly Christmas” for the umpteenth time, or jumping off the couch when I expressly forbade that not two minutes prior. But, the thing is: these are my kids. I take them as our responsibility. It’s up to me and dh to decide how to civilize these wild creatures who were brought into this world as a way for us to extend our family tree one more generation. I’ll do everything in my power to protect them from the stupid and mean people, but I know there will be a point when my reach won’t be good enough. At that point, I have to rely on them to be able to take care of themselves to some extent and call me in when they recognize that they need help. So I have to do what I can to prepare them for that eventuality, and the stupid and mean people keep coming up with new and exciting ways in which they can be awful to kids (and their parents, which has a trickle-down effect on the kids), so it seems to make the life of a parent that much more challenging.

Of course, no one put a gun to my head and made me have kids. And it seems like every generation has some point when parent A turns to parent B and says, “Are we really doing the right thing, bringing kids into {this} world?” (where {this} is always punctuation for some really awful thing, like nuclear proliferation, homophobia, or the rampant spread of reality TV). So maybe it’s just a never-ending cycle. On the other hand, there is somewhat of an antidote to this. If parents all over the place said, “I won’t be like that” and then actually WEREN’T that parent, and if employers, school superintendents, politicians, and everyone else went about their day trying not to be that guy, maybe we’d get somewhere.

As I’ve said to dd on more than one occasion, “Politeness costs you nothing.” I really do consider that to be true. It costs you nothing to be nice to someone, to do the right thing, to smooth the path for the person behind you. But it seems to cost you your very soul (if not various other possessions) when you deviate from that. Quoth Wil Wheaton, “Don’t be a dick”. Oh that more people could live their lives with this in their hearts. Kids – and adults – everywhere would rejoice.