Light and Momentary

Surely Not

Report card day. Alex (my fifth-grader) always does well and I'm never exactly sure how to respond. I don't want him to feel, on the one hand, that I take his efforts for granted; I worry, on the other, about making too much of a fuss. Will he start to feel like I prize the As more than all the other good things about him? I said something along those lines to him after we had talked it over. He said, "I wish you'd make a little more of a fuss."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. Emmett's dad told him if he got all As he'd get--

[wait for it]

[I can't even believe this is true but Alex swears it's so]

--an iPhone."

Next to which, I suppose, a pat on the back and a brisk "well done" might seem rather minimalist.

Oiled

1. The principal called me and said she agrees with me: kids need to move, she said, and taking away Joe's entire recess was too harsh. She's going to follow up with the lunch monitor.
2. My project director agreed to meet with me this afternoon. I am hoping to get her stamp of approval on my letter and the final version of the questionnaire so I can send them out (finally!) as soon as the Christmas mail rush is over. We shall see.
3. The semester is almost over! One in-class final (Monday), one big stats project (due the following Monday but I need to finish it early because next weekend is busy with family stuff), one take-home final. Lots of work to do, but one way or another it will all get done.

The Wheel Squeaks Reluctantly

This afternoon I dropped off a letter to the principal, complaining about a lunch monitor's discipline strategy. His response to a minor squabble: take away Joe's recess and ignore the--

--oops. Hit publish accidentally instead of saving as a draft. Here's the bullet point version of what was a much longer post in my head:

• If you keep a kindergarten student inside sitting still all day, you will have one squirrelly kid.
• If the goal of your discipline strategy is to encourage better behavior, you shouldn't do something that will set a kid up for further behavior problems later.
• If two kids are involved in a brief tussle (a kid grabbed Joe's shirt and Joe tried to pull away while he held on), it is unjust and counterproductive to take away recess for the kid who responded (while nothing happens to the kid who initiated).
• To someone with Seasonal Affective Disorder, taking away a kid's chance to play in the sun during the dreariest part of the year seems entirely unreasonable.

But:

• I have major baggage about disagreeing with people at the school.
• Last year I had enormous angst about telling Marty's first-grade teacher that we needed to modify a homework assignment because it was making Marty cry every night.
• First-graders shouldn't cry over their homework.
• That's for grad students only.
• And especially not (back to first-graders here) their reading homework, when I think the major goal of first grade should be to foster a love of reading.
• And FOR THE LOVE OF PETE not reading homework written by people who hadn't read the book. For real. Worksheet questions with no answer, clearly cranked out by someone skimming through without paying attention.
• But I still feel a little defensive about suggesting an alternate plan, esp. since the teacher wasn't happy about it. Better for Marty to stick with the program and cry over badly written questions, I guess?
• Maybe sometime I will post about first grade, because that teacher drove me a little nuts. For instance: if you have a left-handed kid in your class who isn't cutting neatly, do you think maybe it is prudent to see if he does better with left-handed scissors before you send home a note saying, "Marty needs to work on his cutting skills!"? For the record, he cuts just fine with left-handed scissors.

And:

• I have been thinking all year about the complicated question of educating kids.
• I'm not thrilled with public school.
• We're thinking about our parish school, but Alex says he doesn't want to go (too much homework, according to the boys in his Webelo den) and he's being pretty noisy about it.
• He doesn't, obviously, get to decide but he knows how to make a decision complicated.
• There's so much that's good about homeschooling.
• Except for the exhausting parts.
• The boys, Alex especially, reminisce fondly about homeschooling.
• But I just don't think I can juggle being ABD and homeschooling without burning myself right out.
• So I don't know what to do, which is why I meant to save this as a draft.
• But it's a safe bet that it would never have left my draft folder.
• Ergo, bullets.

I just invited eight people to come with their children and have cake and coffee. This means I should go make a cake.

ETA: My note to the principal wasn't "How dare they take away recess from my precious angel son!" Joe needed a better reaction to the other kid, and I know the lunch monitor has a tough job. I wrote the letter because this is the second time Joe has lost his entire recess over what seems to me like a minor infraction. This is a strategy that will only make life harder for his teacher in the afternoon: Joe is better at sitting still and being quiet if he has some time to run around outside.

Yawn

Last night I was coming home from a long day on campus and I was sooo tired. I stopped for gas and got a cup of decaf too. I noticed on the way home that I was perking up. I came in and started chatting away to my husband about logistic regression. When I went upstairs to sleep and lay there wakefully instead, it dawned on me: that wasn't decaf. I tossed and turned and tossed and turned. I thought about getting up to study since I wasn't sleeping, but I figured I'd be better off resting in bed.

Now I am sooo tired. And I am on my own with four children until 7:00. Eek.

Have you ever had one of those moments in a class where you ask a question and no one understands what you are asking? Yesterday in stats class I learned something I will always remember, but in a rather painful and embarrassing way. I am trying to decide if I can tell the story in a non-boring way, since it involves the difference between odds ratios and relative risk (useful! fascinating! really!), but it will have to wait until my inner editor has caught up on sleep.

Rambly Thanksgiving Thoughts

Hurray, I love Thanksgiving. We haven't hosted Thanksgiving since 2003, when I attempted, on Mark Bittman's recommendation, to spatchcock a turkey. (<--note to the curious: a bad idea)

This year I procured a turkey from a farmer (a real live not-too-mutated-to-walk-around turkey, only I suppose it is a real dead turkey now, with no more walking around in its future). I found his blog through Amy Welborn's comments and was surprised to find that we went to the same school at the very same time for undergrad. I am going to make a huge pile of cornbread stuffing with celery and onions and fresh sage and walnuts, and bake a bit of it in the bird because it gets so tasty that way. And if I only put in a little, we won't have to fear the campylobacter, wouldn't you say? esp. since it was a small farmer's clean-living turkey? Then at the table I will say, "Oh, look, something shiny!" and stealthily score an extra helping of the stuff that was in the bird, because I'm aboveboard and openhanded like that. Or perhaps I will say,"You look like you need more salad!" and pass the salad bowl instead of the stuffing bowl. I am not a fan of green salad on Thanksgiving, but we're having green salad anyway. My FIL thinks you can't have a celebratory meal without green salad so green salad there will be.

I was going to make cornbread tonight for stuffing, but I have just discovered that we only have white cornmeal. I think if one attempts to make cornbread stuffing with white cornbread, the Thanksgiving police descend with their megaphones. "Put down the pseudo-cornmeal and no one gets hurt!" they shout as they swarm the house. Then they take the offending party off to the Thanksgiving gulag, where the meals include all the misguided stuffings known to man: gingerbread stuffing (what was Nigella Lawson thinking?), cheese Danish stuffing (okay, I made that one up), and enough white cornbread stuffing to teach the guilty cook the error of her ways.

Not wishing to visit the Thanksgiving gulag myself, I plan to purchase some yellow cornmeal this very night.

I am still thinking about what else I can do in advance. This is in contrast to Thanksgivings past, when I have had a timetable drawn up that starts on Sunday. I think I'll do the sweet potatoes tonight: I puree them and add orange juice, crushed pineapple, pecans, a pinch of nutmeg, a smidge of brown sugar, and enough butter to clog an elephant's aorta. Butter is the key to Thanksgiving dinner, I think. It's not the turkey or the pecan pie; it's the butter.

***

Well. It is much later now and I still only have white cornmeal in my house. I did not make sweet potatoes and Elwood just tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You wanted to get to bed early." Probably a good plan, getting to bed early. Tell me, please, about your favorite stuffing, and about the weirdest stuffing you've ever seen. I'm curious about what else they're serving in the Thanksgiving gulag.

Oh, PS to PWK: it's mama, and not mama. Mama sounds pretty high-falutin' in these parts; mama is all I ever hear. And PPS to Tracy and anyone else who wondered: pink pancakes weren't very pink, and they were well-received.

ETA: not sure why I am feeling so solidly traditional this year. Maybe I'm too distracted to make anything other than the Thanksgiving meal I can make in my sleep. Well, not in my sleep, perhaps, but at least while busy thinking about Cronbach's alpha. For Thanksgivings past I have made cranberry sauce with pearl onions and chipotles in adobo, but this year it's a straight-up no-surprises meal. I would never complain about being served stuffing from a box, even though I do like to make my own. I save my complaining for "innovations" that ought not to have seen the light of day, like pumpkin-cranberry cheesecake tartlets.

Crunch and Protein

I am so tired. I was up in the night with a puking toddler, but I wanted to get a few things done before bed. My advisor was expecting some revisions from me. I have some new data for my stats project and I couldn't go to bed without plugging in the numbers to see if my hypotheses seem plausible. (And, huzzah, they do.)

Anyway, I went into the kitchen and shook my head at the mess. I figured I would just put away the cranberry sauce (I've been trying to get a jump on Thanksgiving since we're hosting) and not sweat the dishes tonight. I decided I wouldn't even transfer the cranberry sauce into a storage container; it could go into the fridge in the saucepan. I picked up the lid thinking, "Hm, why is there orangey splatter on the inside of the lid? The sauce wasn't really bubbling and it wasn't orange either."

I'm glad I looked before I clapped the lid on. The orange spot was a sluggish little ladybug. Wouldn't that have been a festive addition to the cranberry sauce?

In which five hours of solemnity turns out to be really fun

Hey, guess what I just did? We drove to the cathedral on a drizzly gray afternoon to attend a two-hour Mass followed by a nearly three-hour banquet with four kids in tow. And we all had a good time, too.

When we were newly married we met a priest who became a friend. He has baptized three of our four children; he heard the first confession of the fourth (who is actually the first but you know what I mean, right?) and presided over his first Holy Communion. Today he was named a monsignor and we went to see him in his spiffy new soutane.

We saw a bunch of old friends -- some we hadn't seen in more than ten years. We saw a tiny new baby and exclaimed over how big all the other kids were getting to be. The bishop stood up at the end of the banquet and said, "I prepared a long talk on the ecclesiology of St. Theodore Mumblewumble [might have been a real name but you couldn't prove it by me], but I'm not going to give that talk. Drive safely: watch out for the deer and watch out for the cops. And may almighty God bless you." A plenary indulgence was offered to those in attendance at the Mass, so if I should die before I wake, I'll pray for you all, friends. :-)

The Boys Are Back In Town

Well, actually, it is the mama who is back in town but no one ever wrote a catchy song about that.

Hey, this has nothing to do with my trip, but can we talk about mama/mommy? Maybe it's because I grew up in the South, but I have always been mama and not mommy. My 5yo, the chatty one, will tell you all about it if you make the mistake of commenting on his "mommy." If a stranger at the library says something like, "Is your mommy reading you a good book?" -- there will not be an answer to the actual question forthcoming. Instead he will say, "My mom hates to be called mommy. She only likes mama or mom."

Recently there was a post at Homebirth Debate (why am I still reading Homebirth Debate, you ask? an excellent question to which I have no satisfactory answer) about the "infantilizing" word mama, after which a commenter decreed that "mama" connotes a fat frumpy woman in a denim jumper whose many kids all have snot-encrusted faces. Niiiice. Couldn't be, you know, regional or cultural variation.

I'm curious about preferences and connotations in a less adversarial environment. What did you call your own mom? What do your children, if you have them, call you?

Oh -- trip was fine, talk was fine, Pete was mostly fine. Glad I did it; glad to be home. I am going to make pink pancakes for breakfast, using strawberry yogurt because we're out of milk and buttermilk and plain yogurt. Will they eat them? I guess I'll find out.

Fashion Consultant

I am leaving tomorrow and I am a little sad about it. I'm going to a huge convention in a wonderful city, and I'm giving an hour-long talk on a subject I find fascinating, and I'm really not sure the whole thing is a good idea. I've never been away from Petely overnight before and I am afraid he will be sad. It's only one night, right?

I am also a little worried about mean people coming to my talk: people who want to demonstrate that they know more about the topic than I do, or people who think I am pushing a particular political agenda, or people who are some kind of mean I haven't thought of. This morning's reading was Shadrach et al. in the fiery furnace, and I've been thinking about them all day. (The drama queen strikes again.)

Anyway, I didn't sit down here to whine. I sat down to tell you that I just asked Elwood, "Do you have any fashion advice for me? What should I wear?" Most people would have worked this out some time ago, I realize, but I have been stumped by the shoe issue. If I am taking public transportation, I need good walking shoes. Do my good walking shoes go with any of my favorite dressy clothes? They do not. Should I wear impractical shoes and take a taxi? This offends my frugal Scottish soul. Should I take extra shoes? That would violate the Parsimonious Packing Principle.

You see my dilemma.

At this moment I am wearing a dark orange shirt with mint green pajama pants. I wanted to wash the pants I wore today, but I was busy and distracted and didn't put on a pajama top. I clash violently. You would need to shield your eyes to be in this room with me. Elwood, however, looked me up and down when I asked him to put on his fashion consultant hat. "Wear anything," he said. "Wear what you're wearing."

Yeah.

Ugh

Perhaps he thought it was foul soup because something told him it wasn't going to stay down. Marty threw up all over his bed and sprinkled the carpet too. He managed to get vomit behind his ear, which is a pretty neat trick if you ask me.

Chant with me: FLUKE FLUKE FLUKE FLUKE. Go away, evil viruses. I don't have time for you right now. Who is the patron saint of families facing down stomach bugs? There's probably some martyr in the calendar who was disemboweled and now intercedes for those beset by gastric woes, don't you figure?

Jody, recipes soon. Sarah, please do share your tofu recipe. (Have I told you all that when Marty was four he called it "toe food"?)

To Be Continued

I have been composing blog posts in my head while I cook dinner, mostly laments for the Grand Ideas I once had about feeding children. Once when my two oldest sons were little, for a weeknight fall dinner I made butternut squash-apple soup and served it with pea souffle. The colors were stunning. The kids didn't eat much but I knew someday they would.

Five years later, I'm still waiting. Marty just saw tonight's soup in the blender and said, "What's that?"

"Fall soup," I told him.

"Foul soup?" he echoed.

I don't even want to know what the others will say. Maybe I should go to Sam's and get a giant bag of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets to save myself the headaches. Right now the biscuit timer is beeping. Update to follow.

I Tried

I wake up early this morning because of the time change, and decide to make muffins for breakfast. Two cups of whole wheat pastry flour, half a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of baking soda, a quarter-cup of brown sugar. And what else? I know: there's half of a zucchini in the vegetable drawer. I shred it finely and toss the shreds with the flour. We're out of ground cinnamon but we have some cinnamon sticks, so I rub one over the tiniest nubs of the box grater, feeling quite domestic as I do. In my glass measuring cup I beat an egg with about three-quarters of a cup of plain yogurt and half a cup of orange juice (those are ballpark figures, so if you are intrigued by this recipe despite what follows, be advised), and add oil, about 3T. Mindful that my children will probably not say "zucchini muffins! our favorite! thanks, Mom!" I toss in a handful of dark chocolate chips. (Chocolate: it's not just for breakfast anymore.)

(Oh! While they are baking I remember a culinary misstep from years ago: when we first moved to Edinburgh we invited our priest to come for dinner. For dessert I baked a carrot-zucchini cake, moist and dark and flavorful. I didn't realize until a long time afterward that zucchini is just not a dessert component in the UK. Because they don't have our crazy August zucchini proliferation, they do not have the born-of-desperation-but-actually-pretty-good recipes we take for granted here. For the priest, it must have been as if I'd said, "Here! Eggplant cake for dessert!" [or aubergine cake, I suppose it would be in Britain.])

Anyway. The timer beeps; the muffins emerge from the oven pale gold with flecks of bright green. I call the boys to the table and they dig in as soon as we say grace. The boy from next door knocks. "Look!" Marty tells him. "We have M&Ms in our muffins." Compulsively honest fool that I am, I say, "Oh, no, there are chocolate chips in these muffins, but no M&Ms."

There is a silence while the oldest two look at each other. "What are these green things?" they want to know. "My secret ingredient," I hedge, but it is no good. "We're not eating them until we know what's in them," they declare. I tell them. "We're definitely not eating them now," they say.

They are steadfast in their refusal. The two younger boys are enjoying the muffins; the neighbor kid (who thinks our family's food preferences are nothing short of bizarre) eats one and declares it non-toxic. ("Pretty good" from him is the equivalent of four stars.) But Alex and Marty are resolute; green vegetables in a muffin are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, and they are determined to remain ritually pure.

Once upon a time I thought disdainful thoughts about mothers who served chocolate before noon. These days I think I should have let the illusion continue. Next time they think a zucchini piece is an M&M, maybe I'll keep my mouth shut.

Hogwarts Express Swings By Gladlyville

It has been a day chock full of busy at the end of a crazy week, so this will be short. Here's Harry Potter with Mad-Eye Moody. Mad-Eye, you'll observe, is drinking out of his hip flask. Note also the block rubber-banded to his shoe (for the dull clunking with every other step) and the Sculpey claws extending from the wooden leg. We just read HP4 together -- can you tell?

Here's Sir Petely before the preschool Halloween parade. I didn't get a picture of Alex in costume (he went trick-or-treating with a friend (and the friend's mom)), but he wore the same costume as last year.

All right, I told my husband I was staying up to work. I'd better get cracking, because "falling back" is a different experience when you have kids. (To wit: the kids wake up according to their body clocks, an hour earlier than you think they ought to by the wall clock. You, having stayed up to make the most of your "extra hour," will be tired and cranky all day. Unless, in your eleventh year of motherhood, you wise up and go to bed on DST. We shall see if I can be disciplined enough to do so.)

If...

...I were going to post more often in November, what would you want to hear more about?

A Couple of Tips for Newbie Users of R

(Note to the usual crowd: sorry for the boring post. Halloween pix soon.)

In looking for helpful documentation on R, I was surprised by the unwelcoming tone of many of the resources ostensibly intended to help new R users. On one mailing list, for instance, I found a higher incidence of RTFM and STFW than I've ever seen before. Believe me, I wanted to RTFM. Unfortunately, the FM seems to be written in --I don't know, Klingon. Some language that uses an English sound system but is utterly unintelligible to me, some language spoken by a clever but apparently cruel race of beings who scorn the idea of intelligent life outside their demesnes.

To anyone who arrives here via Google, similarly battered by attempts to learn R, I suggest that you start with this friendly tutorial. If you want to copy a graphic from R to another program (like the Word document in which you are chronicling your maiden voyage), do it like this:

> png("file_name_here.png")
> plot(x1,x2) [or hist, or whatever else]
> dev.off()

I hope this saves you the many hours it took me to figure that one out. Oh, bummer, I was going to credit the web page where I finally found the magic sequence but I closed that tab and I have no hope of finding it in the moment. I am being instructed to hop off the computer so that Pete can watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos on YouTube.

Before I do: swimmermom asked me about my results at Freerice.com and I have gone back and forth about whether to reply because was it boasting to put that on the web? And maybe it is, but maybe an admission of weakness (see: the rest of this post) cancels out a boast. So I will say that I can get to level 50 pretty easily: the last time I was there, I missed 2 out of the first 47 words I was given. Then I stopped, because I wasn't sure about the word on the screen, and I have this compulsion about finishing at level 50, AND I have a statistics assignment that is (have I mentioned?) due tomorrow. So in sum: English vocabulary strong, Klingon vocabulary dismal.