Light and Momentary

We aim to please.

Do I have a "healthy, organic, yummy oatmeal cookie" recipe?  Why, yes, I do.  Would I like to post it to distract myself from the fact that my 15-minute presentation for stats class today actually took me 30 minutes when I practiced it?  Why, yes, I would.  It's from Get the Sugar Out.

Preheat your oven to 350 and in a mixing bowl combine 1½ c. rolled oats, ½ c. whole-grain flour, ½ t. salt, ¼ t. baking soda, and, if you like, a dash of cinnamon and 2 T. chopped nuts or raisins.  In a separate bowl, mash two medium bananas and mix in 5 T. oil.  Add wet ingredients to dry and drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake 10-15 minutes.  Yield:  about 2 dozen.

These are very toddler-friendly; I probably wouldn't serve them to visitors unless I knew for a fact that they had barley malt syrup and nutritional yeast in the pantry at home. 

The Drama Queen Cooks Dinner

I think the midterm was fine.  I think.  We had to create an SPSS syntax file for the last problem, and my first try was rejected.  "Bah!" said SPSS. "I spit upon your pitiful attempt."  Always demoralizing, with the clock ticking at the end of a midterm.  But this professor is extremely helpful, even in the middle of an exam.  She was passing by and saw my unhappy face.  "You're telling it to consider all the males and none of the males at the same time," she explained after a glance at my coefficients.  Aha.  That would make me a little tetchy too, were I a statistics software package.

To distract you from my drama queenliness, I offer you my standby chicken recipe for boneless breasts.  Perhaps it is odd to serve up a chicken recipe just in time for the first meatless Friday of the season, but it'll keep for Saturday.  Or whenever.

Preheat your oven to 350 and hit a 9x13 pan with non-stick spray.  Set up a little assembly line with your package of about 6 chicken breast halves at one end, next to a bowl of plain yogurt (about a cup), next to a plate of seasoned breadcrumbs*, next to your baking dish.  Roll a chicken breast in the yogurt, roll it in the breadcrumbs, and plunk it in the baking dish.  Sprinkle with sesame seeds if you like them, and drizzle over a half-stick of melted butter if you are a person obsessed with following recipes to the letter or if you are feeding a cachexia sufferer.  I haven't used the butter since the first time I made this, in 1993.  Bake uncovered for 50-60 minutes, depending on the size of the chicken breasts. 

*Seasoned breadcrumbs:  1 c. dry breadcrumbs or wheat germ if you have no bread to crumb, 1/4 c. grated Parmesan cheese, 1 t. seasoned salt, sprinkle of thyme, dash of pepper, whatever else floats your boat.  This is probably more than you need for six breasts, so you might reserve some of it in a separate dish.  That way you can dump it on the plate if you need it at the end, or save it for later since it won't be contaminated with raw chicken juice.

The yogurt makes the chicken moist and tangy and the breadcrumbs give it crunch and flavor, circumventing the whole dry/tasteless/cottony problem that plagues most boneless skinless chicken breasts.

Nos morituri te salutamus.

I have to take a midterm in about three minutes.  Suddenly feeling woefully underprepared.  Gulp.

Toddler Nursing

Pete doesn't think we should sleep late on Sunday mornings.  He was up before seven this morning, trying to coax me to get out of bed and play.  I was not a willing coax-ee, so he played with my sleeping self.  I woke up to a game that made me laugh and laugh.

He lifted up my pajama top and said, "Ah! [Imagine packed into that 'Ah!' all the delight and feigned surprise a toddler could squeeze into a syllable.] Mama nana!"  "Who'd'a thunk it?" he was saying. "My mama has nana.  Perhaps it's a good time for a wee smackerel."  A minute later, the same thing again.  "Well, imagine that! Nana!"

On Valentine's Day we got takeout Indian food and Alex confused Pete.  "Want some naan?"  "Nana?" Pete asked, puzzled.  The two of them play a game sometimes, where Pete pretends he wants Alex to nurse him.  They both think it's hilarious.

As I was typing, Pete came in and reached up to me.  "Nana," he said decisively.  With my oldest son I was often vaguely worried about toddler nursing.  People seemed to think it was weird; I wasn't confident that he would ever wean peaceably.  He was very, very attached to nursing.  I wish I could send a message to my younger self:  Relax.  He will wean.  Enjoy the cuteness while it lasts.

A Valentine from My First-Grader

"Yov are wisi [wise]
and Prtte too."

Talk To Me

Okay, two questions for you on this snowy Tuesday.  First, why Neapolitan ice cream?  Why did someone decide to befoul perfectly good chocolate and vanilla ice creams by mixing them up with repugnant fake screaming pink pseudo-strawberry?  My boys complain when I eat the chocolate and vanilla and leave the "strawberry" stripe down the middle, but what's a person to do?  Why not chocolate, vanilla, and dulce de leche? or pistachio? or coffee chip?  I do not understand.

Second: what would you do with a $40 Amazon gift certificate?  I was given one as a thank-you gift and I am not sure what to do with it.  Ideas appreciated.

I realized today that I haven't posted pictures in ages and that was one of my plans for this blog:  more pictures.  So here are Joe and Pete getting acquainted with the gecko.  Let this serve as a warning to anyone who might think about checking her email while the toddler has a little yogurt snack. And this one should alarm evildoers everywhere, especially the ones plotting to interrupt Alex's piano lesson.

When I Was a Wee Lass...

...we went to school in the cold and in the swirling snow.  When I was a freshman in college we had a week of temps in the twenty-below range, and there was no question of canceling classes.  I remember trotting off to my 9:00 Latin class, heading into the wind blowing off Lake Michigan.  I remember going to my Milton class during the Valentine's Day blizzard of 1990, and our professor joking about how bad the roads were. 

But today the kids are off school -- and so am I!  Everybody's getting accustomed to warmer winters, I guess.

I think the discussion was fine yesterday -- thank you for your good wishes.  Right after class I met with my project director and having an immediate distraction was helpful.  I am still dissecting the discussion in my head, but it could be worse.

One of the cool things about yesterday's class was a feeling I'm not quite sure how to label -- maybe I can call it synthesis.  We talked a lot about influences on early development, prenatal and postnatal, and I shared a lot of what I've been learning about the effects of breastfeeding. 

(Parenthetically, breastfeeding appears to mitigate most of the effects of prenatal PCB exposure on the developing brain.  Kids are exposed to much higher PCB levels through human milk, but the kids who are showing deficits at school age are the formula-fed ones.  We should not be freaking mothers out about toxin levels in their milk; we should be lighting fires under communities about the need to reduce toxin exposure in the womb.  That's when the damage is done, apparently.)

Anyway, synthesis:  I hate the Mommy Wars propaganda that says Stay-At-Home Motherhood Will Rot Your Brain.  (Of course I also hate its counterpart, Good Mothers Find Quite Enough Stimulation In Motherhood, You Selfish Career-Minded Twit With The Neglected Children.)  I spent the better part of a decade at home, with only occasional forays into paid employment.  It is really satisfying now to see how well my at-home volunteer experience meshes with my academic interests.  I can bring the things I learned in those years at home into the classroom, where it is new and relevant information for my fellow students.  Cool, huh?

I just talked to Elwood P., whose bus was badly delayed by the weather and whose giant workplace is all but empty.  He said, using the very same Andy Rooney-esque inflection that I used when I titled this post, "When I was a lad..."  Thirteen years of marriage and we're turning into each other, I tell you. 

The kids and I are going to play in the snow.  See you later.  :-)

Note to the Voices: Quiet in There

I have this quirk:  I like public speaking.  I like it a lot when I'm preparing for it, when I'm doing it, and for about half an hour afterward.  Then I start taking the talk apart.  I think, "How stupid was that joke? I forgot to connect those dots. I shouldn't have used that analogy."  Etc.

Last month I did a talk on breastfeeding for an Attachment Parenting International chapter about an hour away.  I had a lot of fun with it; they laughed in all the right places; they took notes and asked good questions.  On the way home I was flaying myself with the shoulda-couldas.  That night I registered for their online forum and they didn't respond to my registration request for most of a week.  I was convinced -- I mean I knew in my soul -- that they were having an admin debate about whether they should let me join when the mothers who had been at the meeting needed a place to vent about how bad the talk was.

Guess how many posts were there about the meeting when I got approved.  Got a guess?  Did you guess zero?  Because if you did, you win a prize.  Why am I such a spaz? I do not know.

Tomorrow morning I am leading that discussion on environmental toxins and developmental delay for my seminar.  At this point I feel prepared.  I have read more than a dozen articles; I can tell you about the differences between the Dutch study and the Michigan study and the North Carolina study and the weird German study.  I have all kinds of questions prepared and a fun idea for an illustration of the problems involved in studying environmental variables and language development (big-picture environmental, as in not genetic).  I have transparencies showing how biomagnification works, explaining why human babies can be exposed to such high levels of PCBs.

But I know that by the time I get home from class tomorrow I will be convinced that it was dreadful, that my advisor is secretly wishing she had never agreed to take me on as a student.  Why?  I wish I knew.

I have found that sometimes when I post embarrassing quirks on the web I am less prone to them.  So I am posting this on the web.  Wish me luck, please, with the seminar and with the STOOPID self-criticism on the drive home.

P.S. to Sarah: answer to your fish question (and more!) coming up soon.

Still Alive, Just Busy

We had a good trip to Chicago and my roommate's baby is darling.  I hadn't seen her older daughter, now 3, since she was about seven months old, and it was fun to watch her with my Joe.  "When I am four I will be big," she told him earnestly.  "Yeah," he said, full of casual savoir-faire, "just like me." 

For a brief interlude this week everyone was snot-free, but the interlude is over and I am back on nose-wiping duty.  This winter is highlighting a hitherto-unappreciated advantage of homeschooling:  less mucus.  We have been passing it around and around and around in a big slimy circle.  The  middle boys had a mystifying malady this week:  following a couple of days of fever and malaise, they each had an expanding pus-filled lesion on a finger.  Marty's was huge and tight as a drum.  It looked like this, only much larger, bigger than his nail.  Joe's was smaller, down near his hand, but still nasty.  Both the convenient care doctor, who lanced the lesions on Tuesday evening when I began to worry that Marty's bugs were bent on whole-hand hegemony, and our regular doctor, who followed up with them yesterday, were puzzled.  The boys seem to be on the mend, though.

On Monday I am leading discussion in my seminar.  My topic is persistent organic pollutants and language delay, and I am a little nervous about sustaining two hours of discussion.  What if they all thought the readings were boring?  I picked a reading from Having Faith, Sandra Steingraber's excellent book about environmental hazards to children who are gestating and breastfeeding, to provide background, and two articles from researchers who study kids exposed to PCBs and dioxin.  It's scary stuff. 

One of the interesting findings is that kids get much higher doses of these chemicals if they're breastfed, but the breastfed kids fare better than the formula-fed kids.  The researchers aren't sure exactly why.  Fetuses are clearly more vulnerable than babies (did you know the fetus doesn't have a blood-brain barrier?), but human milk, even highly contaminated human milk, seems to make a difference.

A Michigan team of researchers theorized that it's not the milk, it's the home environment in breastfeeding families.  This is the trouble with studying environmental variables that affect language development:  it's messy stuff, with bundles of factors all interwoven.  What if lactation primes mothers to be more responsive to their children's cues?  There's some evidence in support of that idea, and if it's true, then you could argue that breastfeeding shapes the family environment. 

I have no idea how you'd measure any of that.  Maybe I will change directions entirely and study something nice and quantifiable like traffic-calming devices.  One thing is clear to me from these readings:  don't eat big freshwater fish if you are a woman in your childbearing years.

Oh, dear, sounds like bloodshed.

***

No blood was actually shed; it was just Bionicle trauma.  I read an article on play behavior that said PCBs seem to have gender-bending effects.  PCB-exposed girls are significantly more likely to engage in swordplay and the like; PCB-exposed boys are way, way more likely (p<.01, I believe) to have tea parties and play house.  A person observing my boys at play might speculate that their body burdens are pretty low based on their love of weapons and explosions and projectiles.

They're home from school today and they'd probably have less Bionicle trauma going on if I were playing with them and not blogging.  Catch you later.

Updates

Today I said yes to Job #1 (little kids) and no to Job #2 (nursing home).  It will be a little while before I start seeing families, but I won't complain if things don't really get rolling until after spring break when my seminar is over.

We might actually get all those vegetables eaten by Monday, although it will require some determination and possibly some eating salad for breakfast because...

...We are going to Chicago this weekend.  We'll be in Hyde Park, soaking up the folk music and visiting with my old roommate and her new baby.  If you're a fan of free folk festivals in fun and fenerable facilities (I couldn't spoil that lovely alliteration with a silly /v/, now could I?), Ida Noyes is the place to be.

This isn't really an update but it makes me laugh:  on Wednesday after swim lessons I took the boys to Panera.  The other Panera in town hands out little buzzing pagers when you place your order, but at this one they just announce your name when your food is ready.  A man walked toward his table saying, "Didn't they give us a little vibrator?"  I'm not sure Panera is the venue you're looking for, sir. 

See you Monday.  Stay warm!