Light and Momentary

My Beating Heart Redux

Remember right before my due date, when I had that funny thing happen with my heart?  When I talked to my midwife about it, she said yeah, sometimes pregnant women have tachycardia episodes.  But she added that mine was atypical for two reasons (one was that it lasted too long and I've forgotten the other) and that I should talk to a doctor about it.

We had only been in town a month; I didn't have a doctor; I had read that arrhythmias can be hard to pin down because they have to happen while you're being tested for the test to be useful.  I didn't call.

But then I had another episode a few weeks after Pete was born, and another one a couple of weeks later.  Oh, and did I mention the chest pain?  Not painful-painful chest pain, but nagging chest pain.  It was getting harder to ignore:  happening more often, lasting longer, becoming more intense.

I googled for information on heart problems in young women and found a story about a 34yo woman who keeled over dead with no previous history of heart trouble.  I called for an appointment.

"I am here a little sheepishly," I told the nurse practitioner.  I have no risk factors for heart disease, aside from an uncle with abnormal heart wiring.  Was I being a hypochondriac?  Was she going to recommend a jillion tests to cover her butt, or was she going to laugh me out of her office?

She did neither.  She tested my thyroid and ordered a stress echo.  It was yesterday.

I was not very happy about the test.  I thought it would end up being several hundred dollars' worth of inconclusive.  It was my first separation from Pete.  (I know, I know -- how many women have been back at a full-time job for two weeks by the time their babies are this old, and I'm spazzing about a one-hour test?  I just like to stay close to my babies when they're this little.)  I lay down on the table feeling like a fraud. 

After a series of ultrasound pictures, they put me on a treadmill.  I was walking slowly, and then a little faster, as the doctor asked me about the arrhythmias.  Suddenly, only about a minute into the test, I noticed he wasn't paying attention to me; he was too busy watching the screen.  "Stop!" he ordered. "I see it."  I think I saw it, too, a messy squiggle where there had been tidy lines.  I didn't feel a thing, though.

They rushed me over to the bed with some urgency, but the abnormal rhythm quickly receded.  Part of me said, "Hey! He saw it!  I'm not a hypochondriac!" and part of me said, "Ack! He saw it! There's something weird going on with my heart!"

His thinking is that I also have some abnormal wiring in my heart, which has only recently begun to cause me problems.  (Let's see... could it be... STRESS???)  "Is this benign?" I asked him.  Usually it is -- it's treatable with medication or with a straightforward surgery.  (What "straightforward" means to a guy accustomed to quintuple bypasses is not something I'm going to think about right now.)

He sent me home with a Holter monitor to get a 24-hour recording.  I will take it off as soon as I finish this post, and return it to the clinic.  They'll follow up with me next week.

I'll keep you posted.

Skorodophilia

Lots of people say they love garlic.  This is a post for people who reeeaaaally love garlic:  raw, hot, and fierce.  First, a story:

Once a young woman went away to college with no boundary-setting abilities whatsoever.  One night during her junior year, she and her apartment-mates threw a party.  This young woman kissed one of the men at the party.  She found it pleasant enough while it lasted, but quickly decided this was not a course of action she wished to pursue.  She marched into the kitchen, where she peeled a clove of garlic and munched it up.

Immediately, a garlic miasma pervaded the apartment.  An odoriferous cloud spread all through the environs, sparking complaints from the neighbors -- both upstairs and down -- and a letter of warning from the EPA.

Okay, I made that part up.  But it is true that my friend David surveyed me with some alarm from across the room.  He said, "Whoa.  Jame.  I can smell you from here."

Unfortunately, the man whose osculatory attentions I was attempting to avert was unfazed by my hellacious halitosis.  We sat on the kitchen counter together.  He looked thoughtful as he swigged vodka straight from the bottle.  He shook his head and said (and I am not making this part up -- the memory made me stop washing dishes to laugh), "You're one hell of a woman."  He braved the Breath of Death to bestow a goodnight kiss.  "Call me," he said earnestly.

It would be awfully tidy if I could say, "And from that night I loved both the man and the bulb."  I cannot.  I have no idea where the man is today (though I married his roommate a few years later), but oh I do love garlic.

In the small Appalachian town where I went to high school, garlic was considered slightly exotic. (Although, oddly, ramps -- far more exotic by most people's standards -- were very popular when they were in season.)  I don't think my mother ever purchased a head of garlic in her life until I came home from college complaining that a person couldn't be expected to cook anything without garlic.

A Spanish restaurant near my in-laws' house serves a potato salad with raw garlic in the dressing.  The first time I ate it must have been after an error in the kitchen:  there was so much garlic that it walked a fine line between amazing and painful.  I keep trying it, whenever we go back to the restaurant, but it's never been the same.  I think of that first time fondly.  Endorphin Buzz Potato Salad, I call it in my mind.

When I saw Crescent Dragonwagon's recipe for Garlic Spaghetti, I knew I had to make it.  If you really love garlic, you should try it too.  Cook 8 oz. spaghetti.  While it's boiling, put 8 cloves of peeled raw garlic in a food processor along with a raw egg, a third of a cup of grated Parmesan cheese, 4 T. softened butter, a pinch of dried basil and another of salt, and a lot of freshly ground pepper.  Whizz to a fairly smooth paste.  When the noodles are cooked the way you like them, drain them and quickly return them to the pot.  Toss with the garlic paste until it is thickened and creamy.  (I am squeamish about raw egg, so I usually turn the heat on, very low, when I am making this or spaghetti carbonara.  Not the purist approach, but what good is a purist who gives her children salmonella?)  Serve with red pepper flakes and more Parmesan cheese.  Feeds 2-3 skorodophiles.

Now I have to warn you:  eating this is a little bit painful.  (In a good way.)  Privately I think of it as S&M Spaghetti -- the garlic is that intense.  It is not even remotely kid-friendly unless you cook the garlic first, which turns it into a pleasantly innocuous vegetarian carbonara-esque dish.  But if I am alone, cooking for myself after the kids are in bed, the grownup version is on my short list of solitary indulgences.

Oh, my goodness, while I was writing this post I googled the man from my story.  He has posted a paean to polyamory on the web, a fact I find disconcerting.  My instincts were on target, I guess -- too bad I couldn't think of a less dramatic means than my anti-Binaca strategy to get the point across.  (Hey! There's an idea for a marketing genius somewhere.  Anti-Binaca, for the woman who can't say no.  Tuck it in your purse before you go to that frat party.  Comes in Fetid Anchovy, Rankest Roquefort, and the time-tested Allium Overload.)

I am shaking my head at the monitor here, thinking of all the times I have blogged about my difficulty saying no -- considerably diminished now, but still a problem occasionally.  If I ever have a daughter I will teach her to love garlic.  But I will teach her something else, too.  When she first tells me no I will say, That's a good word, sweetie.  Use it well.

Valor and its Parts

Oh, my, I am having a Sally-Field-at-the-Academy-Awards moment after all of your supportive comments.  Thank you very much.  If you are a pray-er, please pray for the woman who was angered by the whole thing.  I am sad to think that a conversation here played a part, however small, in someone's choice to leave the Church.

Once more into the fray, this time minus the sarcasm.  It just exasperates me, you know?  Every nine months or so, public breastfeeding makes the news.  Breastfeeding advocates say, "It's natural!"  Newspaper columnists say, "So is peeing!"  And I want to fling myself out the window in frustration.  I am typing on the first floor, in case you feared for my safety, so the only thing bruised in a despairing defenestration would be my petunias and perhaps my dignity.  Anyway:  let's talk about the discretion question.  Lots and lots of people say public breastfeeding is fine as long as the mother is discreet.  What if she's not? 

I suggest that we ditch the discretion caveat for three reasons.  One is personal, one is practical, and the third is philosophical.  Before we get into it, let me tell you that I am an ordinary American woman, reared in this country where nipples are seen in Playboy and in art museums.  I felt a frisson of embarrassment last week at church when my 3yo tugged on my nursing dress and accidentally exposed me.  (None of my dresses fit quite right at the moment.  It's like I have a layer of subcutaneous guacamole smeared on my back.)  I am not looking for license to waggle my slobbery nipples in a stranger's face -- perish the thought.  But I have these three objections to the idea that women must be discreet in order to nurse in public.

First, the personal:  as you may have gathered from my older posts, my mantra in working with breastfeeding mothers is I Am Not In Her Shoes.  I don't know if that baby never went to breast because the mother was molested and just could not face the thought; I don't know if she weaned at eight weeks because her husband said the leaking was disgusting and things had been shaky between them anyway since the baby came.  Even if she says, "I didn't want to feel like a cow," or something that rubs me the wrong way, I cannot know the whole story and I am not going to presume that I do.  I make choices for precisely one set of children, and as long as I don't see gross abuse or neglect I'm not going to hassle another mother.  I'm guessing she has enough hassles in her life already.

My unwillingness to demand discreet breastfeeding arises from my desire to give other mothers room to make their own choices.  Who determines what's discreet?  Personally, I do it this way:  I'm careful to stay covered in church, a little more relaxed if some midriff shows at a playground or a restaurant, and I don't think about it at home with another nursing mom.  Absent a moral imperative, though, I'm reluctant to impose my rules on other people.  Last year I was considering going to the CCL convention -- I have family near the convention site -- but I found myself really bothered by their dress code, which prohibited sleeveless clothing.  It would not have been a hardship to find things with sleeves to wear for three days, but the apparent assumption that I wouldn't make wise choices on my own troubled me.  I don't buy anything sleeveless unless the armholes are modest, the neckline is modest, and the cut of the garment is reasonably generous.  Is there something I'm missing here, something irresistibly erotic about those four inches of flesh just below my shoulders? 

I think rules about how other people should breastfeed are similarly unhelpful.  You want to drape a blanket?  Go for it.  You hate blankets?  Nurse without; no argument from me.  You didn't notice that your baby scooted your shirt aside?  We've all been there, hon.  Relax.  And that leads me to my second point, the practical one.

Nursing discreetly is a learned skill.  It takes time and practice to get good at it.  Breastfeeding is most important and most vulnerable in the early weeks, when many first-time mothers are not able to get baby to breast in one smooth unobtrusive motion.  Does the pressure to breastfeed discreetly or not at all make it harder for new mothers?  I think it does.  I think some of them stay home, feeling isolated (and perhaps resentful about the pressure to nurse when it means being lonely at home), and others switch to formula.  Many, of course, do fine.  But I'm thinking again about breastfeeding duration rates in this country:  what does it take to nudge that curve upward, one baby at a time?

At this point in my life I feel called to assist new mothers -- specifically through providing breastfeeding support, but in a broader sense, too.  I want tell new moms in my community, "Welcome to motherhood -- we're glad you're here"; I want to help them enjoy their babies.  If American ideas about breasts make it harder for mothers to give their babies what they need, it's the ideas and not the babies that need to change.

Third point, the philosophical one:  when the US becomes a breastfeeding culture again, people will not pay much attention to nursing mothers.  Kathy Dettwyler says that typically, in breastfeeding cultures (even those with much stricter standards about women's dress), breasts are sort of like elbows: they have a job to do and people don't get worked up about seeing them do it.  Are your elbows showing right now?  Not a problem, right? 

As we move from Point A, where discretion is expected, to Point B, where it's optional just like long sleeves are optional, women are going to make a range of choices.  Some will stick closer to Point A; others won't.  Don't get me wrong here:  I'm not saying, "Expose yourself! Lift your shirt bravely up to your clavicle and you too can be part of the vanguard!"  I'm only saying that it's appropriate for a changing culture to have changing mores.

Jennifer, I think, said something I've been thinking about:  that it's hard for older men who grew up thinking that breastfeeding should be private to accept public breastfeeding now.  Really, I'm not out to catapult anybody's grandpa into ventricular fibrillation.  But her comment makes me reflect on eyebrow piercings.  (What, your grandpa doesn't have a pierced eyebrow?  Maybe it's his navel that's pierced.)  I went to high school in a little Appalachian town where it was edgy to have two holes in one ear.  For a long time, the sight of someone with body piercings made me flinch.  And a tattoo?  Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P (and that stands for provincial).  These days if I thought that way about everyone with body piercings and tattoos I'd be needlessly worried about a sizable chunk of the 18-34 demographic.  I've had to discipline my thinking:  other people's exterior decorating is not usually my business. 

My parents and in-laws have had a lot of trouble getting accustomed to their younger daughters' piercings ("I can't stand to look at that THING on her face," they say), and it may well turn out that it's harder for me to adjust my attitude in my fifties and sixties than it has been in my twenties and thirties.  Maybe it's more difficult for our hypothetical older man to get comfortable with the sight of a nursing baby than it was for me when my friends began having babies.  But breastfeeding is so important -- not only to mothers and babies but to our whole society as it tries to slow the health-care-cost juggernaut -- that I think it's reasonable to ask people to try.

So I'm curious -- what's your take on the discretion issue?  Here's another voice -- a woman who chooses not to nurse discreetly.  I'm guessing many of you will disagree with her; you may well disagree with me too.  Tell me what you think.

Mammals and More

"What are you thinking about?" my husband asked me as I stared grumpily at our print of the Virgin of the Green Cushion.

"There's a discussion of public breastfeeding [hat tip: TiaKay] that's bugging me.  I'm tired of talk about public breastfeeding."

"You love to talk about public breastfeeding," he said.

"No, I've said what I have to say:  I'm right.  Get over it."  (Yes, I am a Repository Of Amazing Charity and Humility; no need to dwell on the unfortunate acronym.)

I posted at length last summer about breastfeeding in public after I was told on public transit that my behavior was offensive.  What I said there is most of what I have to say:  to oppose public breastfeeding is to oppose improved public health.  But what troubles me about the discussions at Open Book is the people who are couching their opposition to public breastfeeding in Christian terms, saying that nursing a baby with others around is an offense against modesty.  And that makes me want to say, Go soak your head.  In curdled formula.  (A font -- nay, a geyser -- of charity I am.)

But really:  how can you believe that a good and wise God has fashioned women's bodies and yet want to make breastfeeding more difficult?  Who put the lipase in human milk?  Who planned the whey-casein ratio?  Those things make human milk extraordinarily digestible, and as a consequence human babies need to nurse frequently.  God could have made women to be like rabbits, who nurse their kittens once a day.  (Some mothers might have preferred this arrangement.)  But he did not.  If babies are to receive the food their Creator designed for them (you know that JP2 encouraged mothers to breastfeed, right?), we as a society have to get more comfortable with public breastfeeding.

Some of the Open Book commenters were talking about discomfort with public nursing as if it were a universal happening:  men everywhere have always found women's breasts sexually appealing, and so good women have known to nurse in private.  To which I say: Bunk.  Anthropologist Kathy Dettwyler has studied this question; she reports that breast stimulation during sex is a minority sexual behavior among the world's peoples.  Strictures against public breastfeeding are chiefly a twentieth-century Western idea.  A bad twentieth-century Western idea -- one to be discarded, not defended. 

I have been reading Lauren Winner's Real Sex, in which she talks about the need for Christians to recognize the ways that the culture has wrongly ordered their thinking.   Sex is her primary example, of course; she offers consumerism as another.  I submit that breastfeeding is a third.  Squeamishness about breastfeeding smacks of Gnosticism and puritanism, not to mention reprehensible formula company advertising.  It has no place among a people who celebrate their redemption through the Incarnation.

Amy Welborn asked why women got emotional about breastfeeding.  I have posted before about what nursing my children means to me, but there is an incarnational component I have not often touched on.  I want to live a life in which I rise up in the morning thankful for eyes to see with and feet to plant on the floor beneath me, and lay me down at night grateful for a body that grows weary and for sleep to refresh it.  And all through the day I will nurse my baby with a glad heart, offering this living fluid to the children I am called to serve, in service to the One who offers me living water.  The Lord who did not spurn a human frame did not spurn his mother's breast, and breastfeeding has been transformed by the Incarnation along with the whole created world.  Breastfeeding is something good and right and normal, not something to be hidden in the cry room with the tantruming toddlers.

Through the Open Book debate I found Genevieve Kineke's blog (she is (or was?) the editor of Canticle magazine), in which she argues that women ought to cover themselves with a blanket if they nurse in public.  I don't buy that, personally.  Some of it is contextual, because I am writing in June and I get hot enough, nursing a sweaty baby while two of his sweaty older brothers jockey for position on either side of me, without adding a blanket to the mix.  But most of it is a year-round point of view:  a draped blanket, in my view, proclaims: "Attention, please!  This baby is nursing!  And his mother is not terribly comfortable doing it in public!"  Since many people ill at ease with public breastfeeding seem to object to the idea of a nursing baby as much as to the visual of a nursing baby, I don't think draping a blanket addresses the real problem.

Let me say clearly that I am not advocating deliberate indiscretion -- I'm not sitting topless in my pew giving glory to God for the beauty of breasts.  In fact I doubt you'd notice Pete nursing if you sat next to us in Mass.  Occasionally, though, a piece of clothing slips or a baby arches away unexpectedly (I am a geyser of things other than charity), and it may take a second for a mother to rehab her deshabille.  Briefly awkward?  Perhaps.  Erotic?  Surely not.  I remain bothered by the Open Book commenter who seemed to say that any glimpse of a woman's breast in any context was a lure unto the infernal lake of fire.  That sounds like something for you and your confessor to work on, buddy, and not so much the mothers with hungry babies.

I dimly remember feeling awkward about nursing; one of my best friends had her first baby a few months before my oldest was born and during my first visit to see the baby her top stayed hiked up over her nipple after the baby had finished.  I remember puzzling over what to say.  I knew how to let her know if her zipper was open, or to hand her a tissue if something was hanging out of her nose, but her nipple! was staring out of her shirt! with baby spit on it!  What to do?! 

I can tell you this:  awkward feelings about breastfeeding diminish with exposure to breastfeeding.  For the sake of American babies as well as the children and adults they will become (did you know that a mere 13 weeks of breastfeeding protects children against gastroenteritis for the succeeding seven years? or that breastfeeding protects baby girls against breast cancer in adulthood?), we cannot expect their mothers to hide, or be embarrassed, or pump before outings, or supplement with formula, in order to sustain an outdated notion of decorum.  (Please, if you disagree with that contention, do not even begin to compare breastfeeding with defecation.  No breastfeeding advocate anywhere is proposing public defecation.  We are only saying that if a baby can be there, if a baby can have a bottle there, a baby should be able to breastfeed there.  The suggestion that breastfeeding activists are secretly yearning to have sex or urinate or move their bowels in public impels me toward yet another sort of geyserhood.)

I am curious:  are there any men out there? This blog is coming up on its thousandth comment and I think two of them have been from men.  Say hi, guys, and tell me what you think about nursing in public.  Is a lactating breast an erotic sight?  Does it leave you feeling uncomfortable?  Did your perspective change after you had children, if you have them?  The idea that public nursing could really provide someone with a sexual charge is very strange to me, but I admit that I can only see from where I'm standing.

Last week I left a comment at Linda's about sleazy music in girls' dance classes.  I linked to the lyrics of a song that I heard twice five years ago but that seems to be inked into my brain like a bad tattoo.  For days now I have been chanting it in my head, at one point picking Pete up to sing to him and finding "Sweat, baby, sweat, baby, sex is a Texas drought" at the tip of my tongue.  I snapped my jaw shut and heaped imprecations on the head of the man who wrote those lyrics.  (And may I point out that mammals do not have a monopoly on copulation?  Wouldn't it have been more accurate to say, "You and me, baby, ain't nothing but chordates, so let's see how the sex is and then maybe have more dates"?  Hold on, hold on -- I think I hear a music industry exec beating a path to my door--)

--Anyway, Christians agree that we must reject the thinking behind a song like that one.  (When I catch myself thinking the chorus I try to revise it appropriately:  "You and me, baby, are mammals with immortal souls, so let's do it with our spouses as an implicit renewal of our marriage covenant."  The scansion, I know -- I'll keep at it.)  Of course we are more than mammals.

But let us also reject, with equal vigor, the opposing error -- the Gnostic fallacy that our bodies are evil and that we deal best with their difficulties by shoving them aside out of sight.  Let us rejoice in the truth:  that our bodies have been redeemed and our desires can be rightly ordered.  Yes, breasts have been sexualized in this culture.  So let's change the culture.

Biology dictates that nursing infants will nurse often.  Charity dictates, in my view, that those of us commanded to "suffer the little children..." respond graciously when their mothers strive to meet their most basic needs.

Really Good, Really Weird

I am not a huge fan of either tomatoes or watermelon.  I'll eat them both, but not with great enthusiasm.  So I'm not sure what grabbed me when I saw this recipe in Mark Bittman's "The Minimalist" column three years ago, but I wanted to try it immediately.  When I served it to my husband that night, he kept saying, "This is really good," alternated with, "This is really weird."  And that about sums it up. 

I love this salad; I start jonesing for it when the warm weather brings watermelons to the grocery store.  When I serve it to guests, they always look at me a little funny.  Usually that only lasts until the first bite, though.

Tomato-Watermelon Salad

Halve 1½ cups of cherry or grape tomatoes, and chunk 2½ cups of seedless watermelon.  Slice a half-cup of scallions and crumble a half-cup of feta cheese.  (Mark Bittman recommends blue cheese, but I do not love cheap blue cheese and prefer the good stuff unadulterated.  He was riffing on a Middle Eastern dish of watermelon and feta in the first place, so I decided to stick with the feta.)  Make a dressing from 2T. watermelon juice (no juicer required; take a hunk of watermelon and squeeze), 2T. extra-virgin olive oil, 2T. sherry vinegar (worth tracking down), salt, and a pinch of cayenne.  Garnish with a quarter-cup of cilantro.  Serve in a glass bowl so the colors show.

This is best the day it's made, but I think I am going to eat some of the leftovers for breakfast anyway.

I've started a Vegetable Project list in the right sidebar, where I'll try to post new recipes regularly.  Watch for updates.

Not With a Bang--

--but not with a whimper either, we ended our school year on Friday.  I am relieved.  And I am a little more optimistic about homeschooling next year than I was last month.

I love the idea of homeschooling, but as with all things the reality has warts and prickles absent from the abstract notion.  I've written before about how homeschooling means I have to keep pulling my perfectionist self up short, saying, "Get a grip, Jamie; it's only second grade."  I tend to aim too high in most things I do.  Periodically I make myself little schedules for the day, schedules in which 9am will find me having dispatched the laundry, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the problem of water quality in the developing world as well, leaving ample time in the afternoon to knock out the works of Trollope and whip up a nice little galantine of turkey for dinner.

This is one of my struggles as a mother because of course I want my children to live lives in which they aim high.  Also, I want my children to live lives in which they are shielded from bitter disappointments and feelings of inadequacy.  Maybe they could also live lives in which they solve the puzzle of the Marburg virus and write a Pulitzer prize-winning book about it.  Maybe I should stop drinking real coffee on an empty stomach, you think?

Anyway, if I looked back on the goals I set for our school year in August I would have to laugh.  Instead of berating myself for what we didn't get done, or the various shortcomings of our three years of homeschooling, let me tell you about something that's gone well.

As I was becoming Catholic thirteen years ago I was surprised (I'll be candid: in my 21yo omniscience I was self-righteously appalled) at the unfamiliarity with the Bible I saw in the RCIA team.  They would say things like, "Somewhere in the Bible it says, 'He who sings prays twice,'" and I would shudder pompously.  I hope I've shed the smugness, but the underlying love for the Bible remains and is something I want to share with my children.

So when my son was in kindergarten he learned the books of the Bible.  I wanted him to feel at home with their names, to know from age five that Habakkuk was one of the minor prophets and Colossians was one of Paul's letters.  That fall I read him Genesis and Exodus (with the tabernacle design scheme slightly abridged); that spring we read the gospel of John and the first half of Acts.

When I told him that January that we were moving to the New Testament he was indignant.  "I want to read Leviticus!  We should go in order!" he insisted.  "Honey, Leviticus is really boring," I said.  He was so adamant, though, that I sat down with him and read the beginning of Leviticus.  At the end of the first chapter he said, "That was great! Can we read another?"  In one sitting we read nine -- count them, nine -- chapters of Leviticus.  We read another nine chapters in shorter spurts before his enthusiasm waned.

The following fall we finished Acts and read Mark's gospel along with a handful of epistles; in the spring I had planned to read Numbers and Deuteronomy.  "Not so fast!" said Alex.  "We didn't finish Leviticus."  So we finished Leviticus, and then read Numbers and Deuteronomy.  Some days I can't decide whether he's headed for jail or for a career as a canon lawyer, but he is one tenacious kid.

The second grade plan:  Joshua/Judges/Ruth (with no Lyle Lovett accompaniment) in the fall, and Matthew and Revelation in the spring.  The complications of our spring meant we were still wrapping up Matthew last week, but it was a very pleasant wrapping up.

At the beginning of Alex's kindergarten year I read about Simchat Torah, the Jewish celebration that always follows the reading of the last chapter of the Torah.  I love the idea:  one year older in the Lord, one more journey through his Word.  And so I borrowed it.  Every time we finish a book of the Bible, we have a little procession through the house, singing "Thy Word, O Lord, is a lamp to my feet and a light unto my path" to a catchy little tune that lends itself, apparently, to enthusiastic high-kicking.  (No injuries yet, I am happy to report.)

On Friday we finished our school year with the Great Commission.  Marty said, "Is that the end?  Too bad it's over."  Alex said, "Can we have our parade now?  Can I be the one to hold the Bible?"  (Lest we sound too Hallmark-y to be believed, let me hasten to tell you that Marty was unhappily declaring me "the baddest mother in the world" not very much later.  Oh, and as I was finishing this entry, my husband came in to say that the first thing the older boys did with the jumprope he just bought them was tie the 3yo to a tree.  No Hallmarkiness here, folks.)  We high-kicked our way around the house and then went to the zoo with friends.  It was a delightful end to a rough year.

A new Catholic homeschooling group is forming here and I'm intrigued to see what it will be like.  That's my sine qua non for homeschooling next year:  I have to find homeschooling support here or I just can't do it.  So we'll see what happens; for now I'm feeling peaceful about not knowing which way to go.  "Behold, I am with you always" -- however we decide.

Friday night Alex said, "Mom, I think we should make a schedule for our summer days."  We are so much alike, my firstborn and I, which both motivates me to homeschool him and drives me slowly toward insanity on some days of homeschooling him.  So we will sit our schedule-happy selves down tomorrow, I think, and plan:  lazy hours of reading in our new hammock, trips down the bike trail to a leafy park nearby.  Knowing the two of us, I predict that more ambitious items will surface too.  Watch out, evildoers of the world, because now that Alex and I are done with school we're going to have some time on our hands.

The Vegetable Project

Item:  I just finished Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book, which is full of stories about his "Super Size Me" adventure and the latest antics of Big Food. 

Item:  I have twenty pounds (eek) of pregnancy weight to lose.

Ergo: the Vegetable Project.  For the month of June, I'm going to eat five servings of vegetables a day and cut out refined sugar.  And, of course, I'm going to blog about it.

Don't Eat This Book is flawed.  It reads like a blog in hardcover; a little more editing would have made it a much better book.  There is a "let them eat cake" tone in some places -- too many encomia to organic veggies and not enough focus on the problems of cost and availability, especially in poor neighborhoods.  It's not in the same league as Fast Food Nation, which caused me to call all my friends and family saying "Read this book!" and tell my children I would only take them for fast food once a year.  I read DETB compulsively, though, sloppy editing notwithstanding.

So this is my super-size-me-in-reverse project.  ("Minimize me" doesn't sound quite right.)  I had visions of a nifty calendar in the sidebar with links to recipes, but I'm going to have to keep working on that one.  Here's a recipe to start:

Garlicky Pasta Sauce with Kid-Friendly Greens

Peel a head of garlic (do you know the trick where you smash each clove hard with the flat of your knife and the peel slides off easily? also useful when pitting olives) and chop it roughly.  Saute in oil, along with red pepper flakes to taste, until tender.  Add a 28-oz. can of chopped tomatoes and two 15-oz. cans of garbanzos.  Simmer 20 minutes or so.  Stir in a thawed 10-oz. package of frozen spinach.  (You can substitute other greens here if you like -- I used beet greens.  Chop them finely and add them at the beginning along with the garlic.)  Serve over pasta with grated Parmesan cheese. 

I used whole-wheat pasta for that extra-virtuous feeling, but ended up with a virtue deficit when I waited too long to start cooking and snapped at my children as my blood sugar plummeted.  Here's to better planning by month's end.