Light and Momentary

"In Shape"

One of the things I want to do before I turn 40 is get in shape -- an amorphous goal. I have a friend who does Ironman triathlons, and I will never be in shape by his standards. I feel shy about writing this post because maybe I will not be in shape by your standards either. In hopes that it might be encouraging to someone else who is old and saggy and out of shape, I am posting it anyway. I can't do anything about the old and saggy, but I can get less out of shape. This is a post about my four markers for relative in-shape-ness.

I started jogging after my arrhythmia was diagnosed and treated, spurred by DoctorMama's series of posts. Per her advice, I was going really slowly. It meant that I could keep going for half an hour or more, which I had never been able to do before, but it also meant that I was only covering 2.5 miles in those 30 minutes. I have been an off-and-on runner -- I kept having trouble with knees and ankles, and I have these kids who need someone to watch them if I am going to run. When I first hit the treadmill in April of this year, after almost a year off, it was a struggle for me to run a mile and a half at my painfully slow pace. Sunday I ran 5 km in 32 minutes. My (dinky, slightly embarrassing but still hard-for-me) goal is to run 5 km in 30 minutes. According to this calculator, that would put me just barely above average for 40-year-old women running a 5K. Let's hear it for the 51st percentile!

All those months of pregnancy have taken a toll on my abs. Did you know that each pregnancy redistributes body fat from a woman's hips and thighs to her belly? That's probably why when I called Land's End last year for help picking a swimsuit, they told me my waist and hip measurements were three sizes apart. Swimsuits stretch, so I went with the smaller size. Pants are another story. In an effort to rebuild my abs and buy pants from the non-mutant rack, I am using a Denise Austin Pilates book (averting my eyes from the "Denise-ology" sections, which have awesome insights like "Positive attitude is so super! You should practice smiling really wide!" -- too cheerleader-y for me, prompting me to scowl JUST BECAUSE I'm supposed to smile). At the moment I am doing a three-week program from the book with the goal of actually doing The Teaser instead of my version thereof, The Cockroach That Got Knocked On Its Back And Is Struggling to Right Itself. (Hey! Maybe I will write an exercise book of my own for 40-year-old mothers of large families. It will have scaled-down versions of well-known Pilates exercises, like The Fifteen instead of The Hundred, along with my celebrated Cockroach Etc. and perhaps The Woeful Inverted Turtle Doing A Helpless Rage-Filled Backstroke. I will package it with my famous diet plan and be a zillionaire.)

Once in college I told Elwood that I had the upper body strength of an abalone. "Abalones," he pointed out oh-so-helpfully, "don't have upper bodies." (That was the point, Elwood.) I got tired of having the upper body strength of an abalone. (And, honestly? the underarm flab MUST GO.) On the days when I don't do Scowling Pilates I am doing the hundred push-ups plan. It is actually kind of fun. I started at zero, my friends. I could do ONE push-up. Today I did 55. It felt good. (Note to anyone else starting from zero: the plan as written was too hard for me at first. I did knee push-ups every other day until I got un-abalonified enough to do the regular program. I aimed for at least 2-3 times as many knee push-ups as the program called for, since knee push-ups are supposed to be about half the load of real push-ups. It worked for me.)

I am also keeping a wary eye on the scale. I decided to focus on fitness over poundage for right now, but I am going to spend the next three weeks doing my vegetable project thing and see where the number on the scale winds up. Lower would be nice.

The summer I turned 25 my mother sent me a cute sundress that I still like a lot. When I tried it on a month ago I could still zip it up, but it sure doesn't fit me like it did when I was 25. I guess my shorthand goal is that I want to wear that dress when my husband and I go out for my 40th birthday.

Super-good

Last night my husband put beets and potatoes into the oven to roast, right before the woman hosting a birthday party for her 5yo said, "Oh! I forgot to tell you! Everyone's invited to have pizza and birthday cake later." So we ate pizza and birthday cake and put the roasted veggies in the fridge when they were cool.

Tonight Elwood peeled them and I cubed them: four medium beets and approximately the same volume of potatoes -- oh, and a tiny little minced roasted onion too, but you wouldn't notice its absence. I made a speedy pesto out of basil, Parmesan, flaked almonds, and olive oil. I added two heaping spoonfuls of pesto to the veggies along with mayo to coat and the juice of a quarter of a lemon.

Elwood said, "??????" He said, "That is going to be very weird." I just planned to eat the leftovers myself with a big spoon, because it looked delicious to me. But then he tasted it, and suddenly there weren't as many leftovers. I gave some to all the boys. The big ones liked it and the little ones thought it looked radioactive.

"Why don't you want to eat your potato?" Elwood asked the 5yo. "It's super-good." And it was.

One more post about Dickens

Sarah and Lissa and Lilian asked for a little more information about my Dickens project, so here's an outline of how I did it with some notes on the books. As I mentioned in my first post, I had already read Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist before I decided to read them all. If you've never read any Dickens, start with those.

2000: I started with David Copperfield, and it remains one of my very favorites. It's a great way to start on the longer novels, because the characters are so engaging.

2001: I picked Martin Chuzzlewit because it was the only Dickens novel on the shelf at the branch library, and I spent nine long weeks battling through it. It was fun to see Dickens' perceptions of America and Americans since we had just returned from two years in the UK. I also remember being struck by Dickens' emphasis on illness as transformative (for both patient and nurse), and by the glimpses of 19th-century midwifery. It was mostly a slog, though.

2002: Little Dorrit had been on my shelf for years, and I decided to finish it before the arrival of our third son. (Lesson learned from 2001: don't drag it out.) This one taught me to pay close attention, because I was still puzzled about Mrs. Clennam's prevarications when I finished the book.

2003: OH! Bleak House! Love love love puffy heart love. Might be my favorite. This year I also read Great Expectations to my oldest son, which took some determination. Well worth it -- I'll always remember sharing that beautiful ending with him. "Mom," he said quietly, "that gives me a funny feeling inside." Me too, sweetheart.

2004: The Old Curiosity Shop was hugely popular in its day. I am not a fan. I wished Little Nell would hurry up and die already.

2005: Pickwick Papers is most likely my favorite, but it arrived at the top spot by a circuitous route. I tried to read it in college and gave up after 20 pages. I tried to read it in the winter of '05 and gave up after 60 pages. I set my teeth and dove back in at the beginning that summer. About 150 pages in I was completely hooked. Of all his books, this one is the most fun: whimsical and deliciously preposterous in places, with the bathos confined to stories told by the characters. I knew it had to get better, because why else would the March sisters have loved it so? It did -- oh, did it ever. Persevere, Lissa! I promise you'll be glad you did. (Note to any Dickens newbies: I do think it's helpful to have read some of his other stuff first.)

2006: Our Mutual Friend is in the Little Dorrit class -- not one of his very finest but a good read anyway.

2007: Same for Barnaby Rudge. Remembering the eerie feel of this one still gives me a pleasant shiver.

2008: Dombey and Son is obscure for a reason. Evanescence of riches, fragility of life, importance of family, all presented in a way that made me say "blah blah blah" instead of nodding in recognition.

2009: Hard Times must be his shortest novel. It's a quick read that hits on a lot of familiar themes.

and 2010: Nicholas Nickleby, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I'd love to hear about your Dickens adventures!

In which Jamie completes a task begun ten years before

I finished my Dickens project Friday night. It was SO satisfying.

For a long time I didn't talk about the project because it's kind of pretentious-sounding. The thing is, once you get into his groove, Dickens is really fun and not drudgery at all. Some of my favorite things about this project:

1. The earnest young men, like Pip, David Copperfield, and Nicholas Nickleby. They mean well, they try hard, they make a hash of things, they rue the hash-making, they learn some things, they make more hash, they [insert plot meanderings here], and then they find true love as wiser and more prudent men. I love watching them grow out of callow youth and into honorable manhood.


2. The crazy plot twists. Sometimes they are wildly implausible, but I eat them up anyway. When Dickens takes those dangling threads and wraps them up neatly, it speaks to the part of me that hopes this messy life is a tapestry and not just a tangle. Dashed hopes, lost loved ones, unrighted wrongs -- when you read Dickens you remember that injustices can be made right in unexpected ways. It's not over until the fat lady sings, or perhaps until she finds a suppressed will that allows the heroine to live in comfort the rest of her days.


3. The antidote to internet-induced-rabid-gerbil-brain syndrome. You know how Google is making us stupid and all that? Dickens is a great remedy. I have turned into an inveterate skimmer and it frustrates me. This project compelled me to read every word on every page for 800 pages at a time, a welcome and rewarding discipline. If you skim a Dickens novel you'll wind up badly confused, and I hate being confused.

I am delighted that I finished up with Nicholas Nickleby, because I am especially fond of the whimsy that surfaces more in early Dickens novels. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny. I saw the big revelation coming, which also delighted me because I can't usually predict his plot twists. It made me think to myself, "I get it! I can anticipate where he's going with an idea now!"

My supervisor in my first job out of college talked about being really sad when she finished all of George Eliot. I wondered if I might feel that way when I closed Nicholas Nickleby, but I didn't. I have spent hours and hours wandering the streets of London and the English countryside with Mr. Dickens as my guide. We have passed through woods and fields and slums and palatial estates, with stops abroad as well. I am not sorry to have visited all the places he has to show me. I am looking forward to passing through again someday, and saying to the people there, "It's good to see you again!"

The Softest Armor

During the years that we were moving around constantly I did not realize that the moving was a blessing in disguise: it compelled us to keep our possessions stripped down. (Those of our friends who helped us move boxes of books during that time are snorting at the idea that there was anything stripped down about our possessions. We like books, okay? I'm happy to live indefinitely with five pairs of shoes, but I also want five translations of the Iliad right here where I can grab them.)

In recent weeks I have been going through my house room by room and looking at each item therein. Does this belong in my house? If not, does it belong in the garbage or at someone else's house? If so, does it belong in this room? And so on. Recently I've been working in the guest room and the Horrible Office^TM. It is mostly a drag, but I get a frisson of pleasure from the empty spaces that result. I had a week's worth of happy feelings from walking by the door of the Horrible Office^TM and seeing two feet of clear baseboard where there had been junk piled since approximately the time of Diocletian. (Or since 2007. One of the two.)

A couple of days ago, though, I did something that was unexpectedly fun: I moved my fabric stash from its storage container into a flatter one so it could fit under the guest bed.

Sounds dismal, right? I would have thought so too. I wasn't expecting the welter of memories.

We got your patron saints right here.

Ladies! Are you trying to lose some weight? Do we have a patron saint for you!! Thursday is the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. It's the first day of your slim trim life!

You might ask why, and sensibly so. Was St. JtB tearing up the runway in first-century Jerusalem? (You can't go wrong with camel hair, he'd tell you.) Was he the fitness consultant to the stars of his day? (We knew he was the forerunner; we just didn't know it was the forerunner of Jillian Michaels.)

No, St. John the Baptist can be your weight loss patron saint because of his famous quote: "I must decrease!" Me too, St. JtB; me too. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is leading me to write a bestselling weight loss guide, to be called You Must Decrease: Ancient Weight Loss Secrets. Here's a sneak preview of its foolproof strategies:

1. Find desert.
2. Eat locusts.
3. Also honey.
4. No, silly, you can't buy the honey. You have to chase it down and arm-wrestle the bees for it.
5. Eat more locusts. Admit it -- they're growing on you, aren't they?
6. Use the leather belt around your camel hair tunic (appealingly retro, am I right?) to record inch loss. Tape measures are scarce in the desert.
7. [Optional] Provoke sanctimonious religious authorities of the day.
8. Repeat steps 2-5 until desired results are achieved.

NB: St. John the Baptist is justly famous for his stunning loss of 11 pounds in one fell swoop. We urge readers, however, not to try that one at home.

What are you waiting for? Go forth and decrease!

Memoranda

TO: my daughter

Sweetie, I know you are teething. I know your mouth hurts. But that biting pinching thing you have started doing when I nurse you? Has to stop pronto. Also, that thing last night with the waking up at 11 and being up past 1? Not a fan.

xoxo
Mama

***

TO: my neighbor

Really? 6:40? You think it's a good idea to fire up a CHAINSAW at 6:40 in the morning? Guess what percentage of my children you woke up. Did you guess 100%? Because that's the right answer.

I wanted to come out and present an opposing point of view about civilized hours for chainsaw use, but I thought it might be unwise to confront a person wielding a chainsaw while sleep-deprived. [See above re: cranky toddler, up past 1.]

***

TO: my 8yo

Thank you for being kind to your crabby mama. Of all the things you could have said in response to my Tsunami of Grumpiness, that was about the nicest.

***

TO: St. Thomas More

I'm going to take your word for it when you say "I cannot mistrust the grace of God....His grace shall give me the strength to bear it patiently, and perhaps even gladly." It's pretty nifty that a letter you wrote to your daughter almost 500 years ago could speak to me this morning. Would appreciate your prayers for holy patience today.

T - 4 weeks

You might remember that I am TURNING FORTY this summer -- in four weeks, to be precise. You might also remember that I had set myself a list of things to get done by that date: graduate, finish the novels of Dickens, get all the pictures into albums, declutter the house, and get in shape.

I was going to knit socks for all the kids too but I decided I didn't want to go overboard or anything.

So. I graduated. I have read the first 600 pages of Nicholas Nickleby, which means I should finish the novels of Dickens unless I get hit by a bus in the next couple of days. Actually, I would even be okay if the bus driver, like, broke my legs. As long as I don't sustain a traumatic brain injury, I'll finish my ten-year Dickens project. Hurray!

I am caught up on pictures through Christmas 2009, which is not horrible. (But ME OH MY do I hate making albums.)

Getting in shape and decluttering the house are harder tasks to define. Getting rid of clutter in a house with five children is like bailing in an boat made from an upside-down picnic table. No rest for the weary, man.

I'm going to write a little more about those two things. But first I'm going to do some pushups. Four weeks isn't very much time.

Forward

All right, identity crisis over. Thank you for your comments and encouragement! I was reading bits of my archives today and thinking about how much I enjoy having them. Much better to post something quick and goofy than to wish for time or inspiration to write something better, I do believe.

The first few weeks after school lets out are always a big transition. (<-Euphemism alert.) The kids are getting used to being together all the time again; I am getting used to the noise; we are all getting used to the hot weather. We have central air but I play a little game with myself, seeing how rarely I can turn it on. Ceiling fans forever! What's a little sweat between friends?

I have been thinking that I need to build some consistent times for quiet and adult conversation into my day, because otherwise I find myself glued to Facebook playing endless games of Scramble. (Watch out for Tracy the Scramble pusher, y'all. She's the one who got me started.) I just saw a link to this summary of this article, and oh my goodness that's so me -- right down to the caffeine sensitivity.

I found an exercise class that I like a lot, with a funny instructor who welcomes students with a range of abilities. (<-Further euphemism alert, translation being "I don't feel totally hopeless even though I have the abs of a crate-raised veal calf at this point.") Stella hates the childcare room there, though, and I hate leaving her where she'll be sad. On Tuesday I asked Alex to play with her in the kids' area of the track, because she loves to play ball there with him. When Alex went to the front desk to ask a question, they told him he couldn't take care of a younger sibling in the building until he was 18.

18!

I get that there are liability issues and just plain hassle issues, that there are lots of volatile sibling combinations in the world. But it's unfortunate that they insist on keeping the baby in the childcare room, where she will require the full attention of one of the workers and still not be happy, instead of allowing her to play with the older brother she loves. Any tips for helping a reluctant 18mo get comfortable in that setting?

Floundering

So you guys, I am having a little bloggy identity crisis. My tagline is something like "five kids, one dissertation, and the bootless battle against entropy," but there is no more dissertation. I always felt a little guilty posting about the dissertation, because did you care about the cool new use flag in my disambiguating software or the nifty factor analysis package? That would be an emphatic no, am I right? But now that it's the five kids and the bootless battle, I'm never sure what to write about.

Do you want to hear about the bootless battle? Are you interested in before-and-after pictures of the Horrible Office^TM or the garden?

How about the five kids? Does it amuse you to hear that yesterday I came home from dropping off the 8yo at camp and found the 10yo and the 13yo explaining capitalism to the 5yo. "So the government forbids Ponzi schemes," Alex was saying. "Remember what a Ponzi scheme is, Pete?" It might not surprise you to learn that Pete was vague on the particulars of a Ponzi scheme.

What about the whole get-in-shape-by-40 campaign? Want some veggie recipes? or some workout results? That would be helpful for me, actually, but I am not persuaded that it would be interesting for anyone else.

I need a little inspiration. What do you want to see here?

In My Dreams

One of the reasons I've been quiet lately is that I've been stewing. I have this long-haul prayer intention that I've mentioned here occasionally, and lately the situation has been making me crazy. Crazy crazy. I started a post about it that I called "My Little Pony," as a reminder to myself that I need to not be the little girl wailing to her father "But I neeeeeed a pony RIGHT NOW." If God is sovereign, and if God supplies our needs, then I need to trust his timing. My grace is sufficient for thee, and all that.

But I have to tell you-- I went back and re-read another post on the topic that I drafted in April of '09 (but never published), and I was a little shocked to see how much grimness had crept into my thinking. The waiting has sucked a lot of hope out of me.

Last night I dreamed that it was the beginning of Lent and I was deciding what to give up. In my dream the voice of God said to me, "Give up worrying about that pony." I said, "Really?" -- and oh, the peace that washed over me.

I am a worrier by nature and it is a worrying state of affairs in itself, but I am going to try it for forty days. I'd appreciate your prayers.

Placeholder

I came home from the conference ready to whip my house into shape. This week I have cleaned the house, dealt with all the paper (a mountain -- nay, a mountain RANGE -- of paper, my friends), folded or supervised the folding of all the laundry (bottoms visible in both hampers, huzzah, and a veritable cordillera of clean clothes folded and put away), and bagged up the baby's too-small and right-size-wrong-season clothes.

I am tired.

The Sound of One Small Virtual Violin

Oh, you guys, it's not the best afternoon I ever had. The baby's in that crazy toddler stage where speed is more important than balance, and she has smacked her forehead hard three times in three days, with the results being one ugly green bruise on the right, one ugly graze in the middle, and one ugly flirtation with stitches, just now.

I took the kids to the park and she was having a blast, running back and forth across a little bridge. She miscalculated, fell, and hit her head. I ran and scooped her up. She wasn't crying terribly hard, but she had an ugly purple line across her forehead, more than an inch long. As I watched, I could see the goose egg forming. Almost instantly it was huge -- she looked like a baby Klingon. (My very own beautiful baby Klingon, you understand.) At the point of impact the skin was taut, shiny, deep purple. I said a little prayer of gratitude, because if that skin had split we would have been off to get stitches for sure.

The icy calm version of me took over and announced that we were leaving immediately and going to get ice for the baby's head. We drove to the Culver's a few minutes away, where I figured the boys could be distracted by ice cream while I applied ice and sympathy. The woman cleaning tables had a lot to say about the situation. "That's really bad," she volunteered helpfully. "How are you gonna bring that down?" Stella regards the application of ice as an Eighth Amendment violation, and as she tossed her head trying to avoid the ice pack, she managed to get a fair amount of ice cream in her hair.

It looks a lot better but it will be another nasty bruise. Poor thing.

The end of school is always a bumpy transition, where the boys get used to being with each other full time again. By the end of the day I am ready to take my introverted self into the nearest closet in order to get some quiet. I know it will just take a couple of weeks for us to settle into a good groove, but they may be a long couple of weeks. The teenager is being teenagerly; the sensitive boy is being very very sensitive. But do you know, the baby just stopped nursing so she could smile and wave at me. You take your consolations where you can get them, I guess.

May 32

Hi, I'm still here! Did you miss me? I have been a busy bee, trying to get all that May stuff done.

Successes: morning routine taken care of every single day without fail. That's progress. I only have nine months' worth of pictures left to put in albums -- also progress. I finished reading The Lord of the Rings to my two middle boys, after months of nibbling away at it.

Fails: evening routine = BUST. I am tired by evening and it is hard, so hard, to be consistent. Yesterday the Office of Readings for the Visitation was talking about how great it is to reflect on the Magnificat in the evening when we're tired. It's less great if you're the one who has to spur the reluctant smaller people in your household to reflect.

Actually, that's the only thing that I'm really bummed about: I wish we had a consistent family prayer time in the evenings. Well, that and my ongoing difficulty with computer drift, which is going to require perpetual tweaking. I am almost done with most of the unfinished things that I care about, and the veggie project went really well between May 5 and about May 26. (Then I catapulted off the wagon in fetching half-gainer fashion, but there's always tomorrow.) Finishing the dissertation has mostly killed my knitting mojo, but I'm all right with that. I think I needed something that was within my control while I was working on the dissertation, you know? I didn't know if I could learn multilevel modeling, but by golly I could knit socks.

Putting in a garden was more work and more fun than expected. It makes me feel positively maternal, watching my little beans sprout and admiring the marble-sized green tomatoes. "Look at you grow!" I tell the tiny beet sprouts. "Aren't you clever?" (I tell them this very softly, because my garden is right under the neighbors' living room window.) I tell you, if my family could eat creeping charlie, we'd be feasting every night.

Tomorrow I am going to move pictures from the camera to the computer so I can do a few short picture posts. I am also going to post a Plan for June, because it is so motivating for me to have my plans posted. I think, though, it's going to be a less ambitious plan. May made me tired. All work and no play (or not very much play) makes Jamie a dull blogger.