Light and Momentary

Sunday Night Strategizing, Vol. 5

Have you noticed that my lists have been getting longer? This is the hazard of list-making for me: it is such an effective strategy that I overuse it.

Confessions of an Impure Mom

A friend of mine mentioned that she'd been reading The NDD Book by Dr. Sears, and so I put it on hold at the library. It had been a few years since I picked up one of his newer books, and I was curious.

Oh my goodness, I am not a fan.

He says NDD stands for "Nutrition Deficit Disorder." I think it's actually "No Detente! Destruction!" This book is undiluted biblio-napalm in the Mama Wars, because in it Dr. Sears separates the "pure moms" from the rest of us. He tells us we can know we're on the road to pure mom-hood if we hurt inside when we see a child -- not our own child, any child -- wolfing down a Twinkie (p. 68).

And do you know what? If that's what it takes to be a "pure mom" in his view, then I am going to wallow in my impurity. Because really? I should get bent out of shape if someone else's kid enjoys a Twinkie? I'm supposed to be opinionated about other families' food choices?

It will not cause me inner pain if your child enjoys a Twinkie.

I will not strike you from the guest list if you don't feed your family wild-caught salmon twice a week. (Page 14 tells us that pure moms associate with pure families, so they can all eat 12 servings of produce a day (really! 12! who does that? 9 is hard enough!) -- with a side of smugness.)

If you are kind enough to care for my child while I am away, I will not excoriate you for offering mainstream snacks -- like, say, Ritz crackers. Relationships with extended family/friends/babysitters are complicated enough without adding in demands that they stop sabotaging my child's health with those evil sleeves of crackers.

I am so glad that this book was not in print when my oldest child was little, because I would have used it to hold myself and the mothers around me to an unreasonable standard. I went through a pretty hardcore stage in which my pantry contained no white sugar, no white flour, and no white rice. Instead I had a case of tempeh and ten pounds of blueberries in the freezer, and CSA vegetables overflowing the crisper drawers. Strangely, I cannot say that my children's health and well-being have deteriorated since then, despite the -- gasp! -- chocolate chips in the pantry and the ice cream in the freezer.

One of my longstanding hesitations about Dr. Sears is his tendency to overstate the implications of correlational research. You've all seen this cartoon, right? It's natural to look for causal relationships. It's also terribly easy to get it wrong when you look for causal relationships, sometimes with painful consequences. If your child has autism, it's unlikely that a little more wild-caught salmon would have rendered him neurotypical. If your neighbor's kids are annoying, it's probably not just because they need more vegetables. If you wrap up your kid's identity in a circumscribed set of food choices (we're instructed to say things like "In our family, we don't eat candy because it can make us sick"), what happens when he discovers that he really REALLY loves candy?

I am 100% convinced of the need for more n-3 LCPUFA in American kids' diets, and 100% convinced about giving kids opportunities to enjoy whole foods frequently. But OH the hortatory tone of this book just doesn't work for me, because I'm also 100% convinced that sanctimommies do more harm than good. Does the world need more Judgmenta McSmuggersons expressing their concern that you put M&Ms in the oatmeal cookies? I think not.

If you are looking for a book on feeding your family, try Ellyn Satter instead. If you've been reading Dr. Sears, you might need to brace yourself for the part where she tells you that Tuna Helper is okay.

Have you read The NDD Book? What did you think?

Weird weird weird

I am writing a paper about one of my dissertation analyses, the one that most clearly distinguished the two groups in my study. It looks at kids' use of unusual words, including specimens like "ziggurats."

One of the hassles of studying discourse-level language -- conversation and storytelling -- is dealing with the argument that your work needs more standardized test scores to back it up. Because hey, maybe you're using "ziggurats" appropriately in conversation, but without those standardized test scores we can't know much about your language skills. [snort]

It might surprise you to learn that standardized test scores don't actually hang together very well with discourse-level language measures: the kids with complex sentences in conversation might freeze up in a test scenario, or the kids who are good at tests might tank in conversation. Even though I knew this, I was optimistic that my shiny new measure would correlate well with the test scores available to me.

I looked at standardized test scores and pulled out a group of high-scoring kids and a group of low-scoring kids. There was, like, an ocean of difference between their scores on that test. Next I got raw frequency counts for their use of unusual words. I was astonished to see that the mean was the same to TWO decimal places. I looked back to see if I'd made a dumb mistake, like entering the same information twice: nope.

I thought, well, that's weird but I bet it will shift around a bit. I removed all the low-scoring kids whose parents weren't concerned about their language use, because some kids just don't want to be bothered with a standardized test that goes on and on. And I recruited two of the lab crew to go through the transcripts and look at word use in context. I wondered if the low-scoring kids might be more likely to throw in words that didn't belong: maybe a sentence like, "and my cousin's pet bunny is named ziggurat or --wait, Sigmund." They don't get credit for a word unless they use it with a measure of semantic appropriateness.

This morning I went through and incorporated the students' judgments. I re-ran the calculations and was astonished -- FLOORED -- to find that the group means both dropped by exactly the same amount. They're still identical, to two decimal places. It's definitely not a computational error, or a stupid mistake like giving the spreadsheet the wrong range of cells.

That is just plain freaky. Language is a strange and slippery beast.

Union

In college I took a class called Language and the Text, taught by a professor who seemed to be attempting to resolve her ambivalence about leaving her Catholic upbringing behind. We read bits of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin and Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and we were instructed to apply their ideas to texts that included Augustine's Confessions and St. Teresa's autobiography. The cover of our edition of the latter featured the marvelous Bernini statue.

"I am not the first person," our professor informed us, "to think that Teresa's expression looks like sexual ecstasy." Discussion ensued: obviously it's hazardous to repress one's sexual desires, etc. I was 20 at the time, the only believer -- or at least the only person willing to identify as a believer -- in that class of a dozen comparative literature majors. And I wanted to speak up. I wanted to say, "I believe that God created sex to teach us about deeper joy: union with Him. I believe that even the best sex can offer a person only a pallid foretaste of the delights of heaven."

But I didn't. And even at the time I was ashamed of the reason: I didn't want that roomful of black-clad artsy types to think "That Jamie Most just needs to get laid. That'll teach her about pallid foretastes." I had found it hard going that quarter, trying to say that perhaps we should let Ss. Augustine and Teresa speak for themselves instead of dissecting their purported delusions.

It's been almost 20 years since I sat in that classroom, but I was thinking about it yesterday morning. We went to my in-laws' church and I was struggling. I have a hard time with the liturgical innovations there and I usually spend Mass arguing with myself. Is it ostentatious to kneel after the Sanctus if no one else does, or is it disrespectful to remain standing? It was a good place for me to hear yesterday's gospel, because I may be a slow learner when it comes to spiritual things but even I can see the dangers of sanctimony when you tell me about the publican and the pharisee. I was secretly relieved when Stella needed to be taken out after the sign of peace.

So it was a shock for me to have one of those jolts of recognition and deep gladness when I received the Eucharist -- a brief taste of what union with God might be like. If I were a different kind of blogger I might say more about the parallels between Eucharistic and marital communion [.pdf link to John Kippley's essay comparing the two], but I'm not. I'll say instead that sometimes I fumble for analogies to describe an experience that is profoundly right: it's like sunshine, I might say, or it's like an organ chord. (I'll also say that another thought occurs to me about the Bernini sculpture: if you ask a sculptor to depict blissful union, what's his referent most likely to be?) Maybe, though, all my experiences of profoundly right things are meant to remind me not of other profoundly right things but of the profoundly righteous One -- the "full-of-right" One.

Maybe it's no coincidence that I encountered God more powerfully than usual during a Mass when I was working hard to eschew self-righteousness. It's hazardous to think we can explain encounters with God, or, worse, summon them up, but it makes sense to me nonetheless: when we are resolute in saying "God, have mercy on me, a sinner" (instead of "Aren't you glad you have someone as awesome as me on the team, God?"), then we can see real awesomeness.

For almost twenty years it has niggled at me that I didn't speak up in that class, and for such a pathetic reason. Yesterday it finally dawned on me: I could take it to confession and then let it go. Life's too short, too full of glad surprises-in-waiting, to cart around regrets like that. And the best part of being a Christian whose petition is "God, have mercy on me, a sinner," is the assurance that when we ask, He always does.

Sunday Night Strategizing, Vol. 4

All last week I kept noticing the difference in my productivity: posted goals = more resolve. Aim at nothing and you will hit it, and all that. So. Back at it.

1. Schedule a meeting with potential spiritual director. Try a weekday Mass with kids. Be diligent about after-dinner prayer.
2. Try a gentle run. (Apparently it's just the same old (benign) thing that's going on with my heart, though I am supposed to follow up with an electrophysiologist.) Make a Naptime Plan. Build some purposeful relaxation into each day, either making music or worthwhile reading -- keeping a watchful eye on the zoned-out computer drifting. Blog about twenty-year-old regrets re: the St. Teresa statue and the burning question of whether Dr. Sears is trying to foment the mama wars.
3. Cheerfully plan and execute one birthday celebration and four Halloween costumes. Try a family gym night with low expectations. Read daily, however briefly, with the three youngest.
4. Home: move forsythia bush. Finish another Christmas present. Clean house. Sort out The Dreaded Back Steps, with before-and-after pix.
   Work: revise ms. Draft intro, however roughly, for paper #2; integrate new results into dataset. Follow up with legal office about study idea. Finish Chapter 7 in the multivariate book. Figure out how to introduce research assistants to Vlad.

October yumminess

I just republished an old post with two of my favorite fall recipes. We're having that salad tonight!

Dust

So I was standing on the dining room table a few days ago, having a pocket-sized existential crisis. I had just squashed a second tiny spider easing his way down from the blades of the ceiling fan, and I was having visions of an egg sac hatching out up there. Which, no. Just no.

Mercifully I saw no arachnid families plotting parachute parties over our dinner table. What I saw was dust aplenty. I do clean my ceiling fan blades periodically, but for pete's sake: it hasn't been that long since I was up there with a pail of soapy water. August, maybe? Shouldn't I be able to get by with the feather duster for a measly two months?

In the moment it was overwhelming: the cleaning, the laundry, the never-never-but-never-ending paper. I had just put down the day's mail, thinking I didn't have it in me right at that moment to deal with the pile yet again, knowing that one day's undealt-with pile turns into a fanged and fire-breathing heap of time suck in no time flat. (I expect all y'all even-tempered types are thinking a soupçon of Zoloft might be appropriate. Welcome to my peaked-and-valleyed inner landscape.)

And then I thought about what that dust was, exactly, those tiny bits of skin and clothing fluff (and, okay, the carcasses of dust mites if you must be buzz-killingly precise about it). I was surprised a few years ago when I realized that unused rooms don't actually get very dusty -- the dust piles up where the people are. My house gets full of dust because it's full of life.

One year we had a Christmas tree that shed needles to beat the band. I think it waited until I wound up the vacuum cord and then did a brisk shimmy, showering the carpet with a fresh crop. I did not want to be ranting about our Christmas tree. Better a slightly prickly carpet where peace is than an immaculate floor in an apartment where Mom is ranting about how the Christmas tree is out to get her, to...um...totally mutilate Prov. 15:17. I knew that I wanted a live tree and not a fake one and so that Christmas I kept telling myself something I've been saying ever since, "Life is messy."

It's a good mantra for mothers, I am convinced, and I used it again to talk myself down from my perch on the dining room table. This is where my family gathers, I said, to share meals and play games and finish homework. Ergo, dust. The bedrooms get dusty because they are full of people, who pray and sleep and dream there. The living room gets dusty because of the children who sprawl there happily to talk about their elaborate Lego civilization with its own currency and constitution, to read the books that pile up relentlessly on the end tables, to wrestle until a parent says "Take that game outside!" It's good dust.

This is the season for stripping and shedding. The trees are telling the glory of God; I cannot walk outside without praying, "Me too, Lord: when I go to lay down something you have given me, let it shout out your glory. Teach me how to let go, to trust that you can make something beautiful of the letting go." The detritus in my home -- the cast-off papers, the flaked-off skin, the fallen hair -- it all reminds me that this life is given us to be laid down.

Those could be gloomy thoughts, remembering that the children whose bodies I have tended so carefully will leave them behind someday. But they don't have to be gloomy. I am thinking about the privilege of carrying an immortal soul in a mortal body, about the truth that shocked Wormwood into heresy: "For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left."

Spoilers

Yesterday I finished the chapter in Treasure Island that ends with Jim in the apple barrel, just about to have his world turned upside down, and I said, "I have to run and get dinner on the table so that Pete can get to soccer practice on time."

(Parenthetically: one more evening of soccer practice. One! More! Evening!)

Joe said, "Nooooooooooooooo! Don't leave me hanging like that!" He asked his oldest brother to help him out. "What does he hear in the apple barrel?? What does Long John Silver say??"

Alex answered, deadpan: "Luke. I am your father."

We all cracked up -- his delivery was perfect. He kept going. "And the ending? Rosebud is a sled."

Stealth Pumpkin

If ever I write a book on how to feed vegetables to young children, it will not include any strategies like "Pureed chard is really awesome in brownies! No one will ever know it is there!" It will include only boring strategies, to wit:

1. Cut veggies in small pieces, because it's easier for a kid to try a bite of something that he suspects to be a hunk of demonic gum scraped from Satan's own shoe (in reality: maple-glazed roasted butternut squash) if it is only a little bite.
2. Don't forget to add a little fat and a little salt. This is supposed to taste like food to be enjoyed-- not like penance, not like wallboard.
3. Serve veggies regularly, eat them with unfeigned gusto (and if you can't, then work on your own issues first), and never get into power struggles with kids about what they're eating. Make it appealing, and then detach after you serve it up. If they hate it, that means more for you to enjoy tomorrow at lunch.
4. Repeat for 8 to 10 years. Patience, grasshopper.

So a post on super-secret vegetables is kind of a weird post for me to write, but I am writing it anyway. If you happen to make that pumpkin-tomato soup I posted about last week, and then a few days later you decide to make that macaroni and cheese from the Like Mother, Like Daughter blog, then you might like to know that you can add a cup of pumpkin-tomato soup to the macaroni and the kids will not have the faintest idea. I bumped up the cheese a bit, because I thought they might complain about the weirdness of pumpkin soup in the mac and cheese if they suspected it was there. Kids mostly expect mac and cheese to be the color of a nuclear fireball, so pumpkin fits right in. It was an easy way to slide some veggies into our dinner on a soccer practice night.

Also, if you happen to make a batch of pumpkin-tomato soup in the same week that you make a batch of sunshine soup, you can mix them together after you get tired of eating them individually and wind up with something new and delicious. I served it tonight with grilled cheese sandwiches and my standard carrot-heavy cole slaw. It made for a very orange dinner but it's the right season for serving very orange dinners, wouldn't you say?

The only bummer is that now I'm all out of leftover soup for lunches.

 

...and still more Sunday night strategizing

You guys, this is working so well for me. I hope it's not too boring for you and I encourage you to give it a whirl. Two weeks in a row I've knocked all the stuff off my list. Going for three in a row, with some recurring goals...

1. Persevere with the nightly Sacred Heart prayer. Get to a weekday Mass.
2. Invite some friends over for coffee and knitting. Do some gentle exercise at least three times. (I have been advised not to run for the time being because of this annoying but probably benign heart stuff. Grumble. Tests coming up.) Blog a couple of times about non-list-related stuff.
3. Embark for Treasure Island with the bigger kids. (We just met Long John Silver -- he still sends shivers down my spine!) Make time daily to read with Petely. Finish a Christmas present. Print out chore charts and get them laminated.
4. At work: Sort out vexing benefits situation, as far as it lies in my power to do so. Get an ID card, finally. Identify groups for new study and get some quick and dirty numbers to compare them. Revise manuscript and send to reader. Make a big dent in Chapter 7. (The book is getting harder so finishing the chapter would be optimistic.) Keep reading book on qualitative research.
   At home: Clean this grubby house. Read up on what to do with a vegetable garden over the winter. Empty inbox and deal with disheartening pile of paper on desk.

Seven Quick Takes: Seven Weeks In

I realized today that I've been working at my job for seven weeks now. Time flies when you're having fun, I guess. Here are seven quick(ish) thoughts about those first seven weeks:

1. Kids are adjusting fine. I am here to send off the elementary boys three or four mornings a week, depending on the week, and I pick them up from school four or five days a week. Stella stays with my husband for my  half-day out of town, which is fine by her if exhausting for him, and with a college student who comes to our house for the morning on the days that I work from home, and with a family in the town where I work on my long day over there. I go and nurse her down at lunchtime and she seems to be happy with the arrangement. She was excited to go back today after a week away. "Teessa! Zaa!" she exclaimed when I told her where we were going. (That's "Theresa! Sarah!" for all y'all who are not fluent in Stellish.) She's having a lot of fun with their princess costumes and sparkly shoes, because sparkly shoes are thin on the ground at our house.

2. The work is really fun. I have a manuscript almost ready to hand off to some readers before I submit it to a journal, which is exciting if nervous-making. I am expanding one of my dissertation analyses to see what it looks like in a different sample of kids, and I'm jazzed about that too. I was invited to participate in a qualitative study, which is a new methodology for me. I have two postdoc mentors and they have been so SO helpful and encouraging. Today I was talking with one of them about a slightly obscure interest of mine (okay, it's probably fairly high on the obscure scale: I want to take a crack at writing code to evaluate the emergence of pluperfect in school-aged children). When I got home there were two articles in my inbox from her about emergence of present perfect in slightly younger children. So there's lots of support and enthusiasm for my work, which is invaluable.

3. A small part of the job is admin stuff, which is not my favorite thing to do but I can't complain. I have to track down the previously funded people to make sure they're fulfilling their service obligations, for instance, but most of them are friends of mine and I am looking forward to checking in with them. If the yuckiest part of your job is still something to look forward to, that's a pretty good job.

4. I got a nasty letter from a publisher last week. Remember when I wrote a grant in the spring? I've been planning a study that looks at the reliability of an instrument widely used by clinicians. I wrote to the publisher requesting permission to use part of the instrument in an online study and got a response that blew my hair back. (Addressed, infuriatingly, to Dr. Moist Gladly -- come on, guys, you can spell my name correctly when you make veiled threats in my direction.) I am talking to the university legal office about the situation, because I think (a) the "fair use" clause covers me and (b) the publishers are mostly trying to cover up the author's dearth of reliability data. I don't have my heart set on doing the study -- this started as a way for me to get some practice writing a grant and getting IRB approval for a project -- so I'm mostly interested to see how it unfolds. How will copyright law and academic freedom intersect, especially given the university's desire to cover its figurative butt? Stay tuned.

5. Occasionally I wish I were a little more involved on campus. There are a million cool ways to be plugged in and I keep reading about them on the email list for postdocs affiliated with the neuroscience program. There are lectures to attend and well-known speakers to take out to pre-lecture breakfasts and research chats and neuroscience-oriented outreach to kids in the community and lots more. There are also, however, five kids in our community an hour away from campus, five kids who need their mom. So.

6. I am thinking uncertainly about next year already. I can probably renew my contract for a second year. There's some expectation that I'll be applying for faculty jobs for next year, but [whispers] I don't think I want a faculty job for next year. I am very happy with my low-stress no-tenure-clock no-teaching-responsibilities job.

7. One of the bits of Laura Vanderkam's book that I liked was they way she writes about finding your dream job: what kind of work would you do even if you didn't get paid for it? Academics get flak from many different quarters: commentators on Fox News say academics are a bunch of godless liberals; pragmatists say academics are ivory tower denizens who couldn't hack it in the business world. This week I am all filled up with a happy vision of my purpose at work: I get to investigate my ideas about how kids learn to communicate, one of the things I am most passionate about. I get to solve the puzzles involved in getting computers to do the stats and the boring bits of my language sample analyses. (I should revisit this post the next time I am exasperated with my stats program. I will not be saying "I get to solve the puzzles" at that point.) I get to write about my ideas so other people who are passionate about children's communication can keep nudging our understanding of human language forward.

And I get paid for it. It doesn't get much better than that.

More quick takes.

In which I prepare to feed my family a spotted dog

On this day in 1571, the outmanned Holy League won the Battle of Lepanto, protecting Rome and halting the Ottoman Empire's advance across Europe. They attributed their victory to the intercession of Our Lady, and it is commemorated today in the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

On this day in 2010, my thoughts turn inexorably to eating spotted dog. And sunshine soup.

Spotted dog is a steamed suet pudding popular in the Royal Navy during the age of sail. (That linked post contains the pun that cemented my online-pal-ship with Lauren.) I will not, of course, do the whole storing-and-feeding-with-brandy rigmarole I described in that earlier post since I have misplaced my time machine AGAIN, but I will soak raisins in apple cider all morning and steam my pudding for a good couple of hours this afternoon. This morning I drove way way out to the boonies in search of a place that would allegedly sell me suet, but no dice. I am going to grate a frozen stick of butter and hope it works. If it doesn't, I'll tell the kids to pour more custard atop and be glad they don't have to row to soccer practice in a sixteenth-century galley.

According to Patrick O'Brian, the men of the Royal Navy ate dried peas three days a week. They were called "banyan days" after the vegetarian Banyans of western India. I am declaring it a banyan day and cooking up a batch of sunshine soup for dinner.

To make some sunshine soup of your own, saute 2 chopped onions, 2 chopped carrots, and a small rutabaga*, peeled and diced. Add 1/2 t. each cumin seeds and marjoram leaves. Pick over a pound of yellow split peas and pour them in with 7 cups of stock. After you've brought it to a boil, turn the heat way down and simmer until the peas lose their shape. This will take 2 hours or even more -- keep an eye out toward the end of cooking so it doesn't scorch as it gets thicker.  Add 3 T. cider vinegar and a bunch of salt (like at least half a tablespoon and maybe more) and pepper to taste.

We'll have cole slaw on the side, with a healthy squeeze of lime so nobody gets scurvy.

*If you have never eaten rutabaga, fear not! It is mild and sweet. Substitute another carrot or two if you must.

Cue the kazoo fanfare

I was going to say "cue the trumpet fanfare" because MY HEAVENS it felt like I spent forever making those socks, but really: they're just socks. A kazoo is more appropriate. I finished weaving in the ends over the weekend and I am free -- whee! free! -- to move on to greener knitting pastures. A sweet little doll for my daughter, a fun hat in a yummy angora blend for my oldest, a skirt for me with some discounted Kureyon that popped up on eBay in just the right colors and just the right quantity after I'd been hoping to find bargain Kureyon for weeks.

My oldest asked for Rick socks. [NB: anyone can view that Rav link, not just Ravelers. But if you're even remotely into fiber arts, you should get a Ravelry account.] These are made from Knitpicks Stroll, which is so soft that I wonder if it will sprout gaping holes by next Tuesday. The first ball barfed all over itself when I pulled it from the center, and between the yarn-barfy nightmare tangle and that tricky decrease on the right leg, I thought I might never finish these socks. But [kazoo tootles again here] I did.

My 8yo kicked off the whole sock fiesta by asking for a pair of Pomatomus socks. I needed to adapt the pattern to fit an 8yo and it took me three tries to get it right. He asked me to use Poems sock yarn, which was beautifully colored and beautifully soft but OH MY HECK I will never buy it again. It breaks if you sneeze on it. It breaks if, like, tectonic plates shift in Taipei. I don't even know if Taipei is near a fault line but I do know this: Poems sock yarn is not for me.

My 10yo wanted Switzerland socks, and I coaxed the 5yo into accepting plain vanilla socks made from some cool sparkly Berrocco yarn. You can be like a knight, I told him, with cloth-of-gold socks. It's a pretty safe bet that no actual knights wore sparkly socks, but his first choice was a pair of Pomatomus socks like Joe's and I was already wondering if anyone ever died of twisted rib.

The toddler, of course, didn't have much to say about sock selection, so I made her some straight-up top-down socks in a great Knitpicks yarn which I cannot link to at the moment. Great colors, and so blessedly non-splitty non-breaky after all the Poems hassles that I could have ordered a dozen hanks.

I am making this sound like it was all hopelessly arduous and I shouldn't do that. I love that they were excited about getting socks I'd made. It was really fun to watch them deciding what they should choose -- they didn't take it lightly. And when I handed them out on Sunday night and listened to the exclamations, it was worth all those miles of twisted rib.

Joe's favorite part is that he can slide all the way across the kitchen when he is wearing his new socks. They're much better than commercial socks, he tells me, because they double as skates. If he enters a sock figure skating competition, I will play the kazoo for his long program.

The nicest day, with recipes

Oh, you guys, it was the nicest day. My friend Carla, my first internet-pal-turned-real-life-pal, came for a visit with her two youngest -- such a treat to see her. (We met on an email list in early 2000 and then in person that fall. I was so nervous about meeting someone from the internet.) It's the feast of St. Francis, one of my very most favorite saints (there's a connection there with the virtual-friend-turned-real-true-friend idea but I am typing in too much of a hurry to nail it down -- know what I mean, though, about saints whose lives become something more than a story you read in a book?). I have been cooking a bunch today, and I present you with 3.5 recipes.

Easy Pumpkin-Tomato Bisque, from Crescent Dragonwagon

Saute a chopped onion in some butter or olive oil. When it browns lightly, add 3 cups of stock along with a 28 oz. can of tomatoes and a big can of pumpkin puree (is that 28 oz. also? pumpkin cans in my grocery store come in two sizes and I get the big one for this recipe). Add a tablespoon of maple syrup or honey and a fair amount of salt. Bring to a boil, and then simmer until you have walked around the block with three toddlers to pet the neighbor's cat and admired the pile of rubble from the other neighbors' driveway project. Or until the onion is tender; your call. Just before serving add a splash of cream and whizz with an immersion blender until smooth.

I've posted before about the dilemma with celebrating the feast of St. Francis at the table. You don't really want to get too fancy with dinner when you're celebrating the man who embraced Lady Poverty. Tonight I served cabbage soup with bread and butter and the boys ate it right up, enjoying the fact that they were eating something simple in memory of St. Francis. In fact, they thought we should take the difference between the cost of the cabbage soup and a more typical dinner and donate it to an organization that feeds the poor. We finished dinner with a rousing chorus of All Creatures of Our God and King. It sounds kind of implausible to me as I'm typing it up but that's exactly how it went down.

Caldo Verde, modified from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups

Saute 2 chopped onions in olive oil. Add a quart of stock, a cup of wine, three potatoes (peeled and cubed), and half of a head of cabbage (chopped). Salt to taste. Don't skimp. Simmer until about 15 minutes before you have to race out the door for soccer practice. (The monks recommend an hour, perhaps because they are free of the whole cleats/shin guards/minivan ball and chain.)

I read a long time ago, in a book by...um...that famous hagiographer Tomie de Paola, that St. Francis had a noblewoman friend named Jacoba who fed him almond cakes as a special treat. I made macaroons for dessert, suggesting to the boys that it was a good day to think about enjoying the pleasures of the world with temperance. Four out of five kids thought they were scrumptious.

Almond Macaroons, from Monster Cookies

Combine a cup of ground almonds with a half-cup of sugar and a generous pinch of salt. Add 3/4 t. almond extract and the finely grated zest of a lemon. Stir in a lightly beaten egg white until you have a mixture that looks like cookie dough. (You might not need all the egg white.) Line a cookie sheet with a Silpat or parchment paper or foil. Form dough into heaping-teaspoon-sized balls and flatten them slightly. You can put half of a maraschino cherry on top if that floats your boat or tickles your stigmata. (Is that horrible and blasphemous?) Bake for 15 minutes at 325. Let cool briefly before easing off the foil.

And the half-recipe: to your favorite banana bread recipe, add drained pineapple tidbits, dark chocolate chips, and halved maraschino cherries. Bake in muffin tins and serve up as Banana Split Muffins. So yummy!

More Sunday Night Strategizing

Do you know, I got everything on last week's list done except for scheduling the eighth-grader's  parent-teacher conferences. His school was only scheduling sixth grade conferences last week, so I'll have to try again later this month. Here's this week's plan, again based on the 5 Ps from Holly Pierlot's book:

1. Plan something fun for this week's feasts: St. Francis! St. Bruno! Our Lady of the Rosary! Put the Sacred Heart prayer on the dining room white board and pray it every evening after dinner.
2. Find some time for adult conversation with friends x 2. Blog a couple of times about non-list-related stuff.
3. Schedule an evening babysitter for a night this week.
4. Pick Treasure Island back up with the bigger kids. Make time daily to read with Petely. Start Christmas knitting for oldest and youngest.
5. At work: draft study proposal and work through Chapter 6 in the multivariate book. Look again at goals for the year. Find conference hotel.
   At home: send sympathy card + customer service letters x 3. Put in irises and other bulbs and weed the horrible west bed. [NB: Please send out posse armed with machetes if no post follows in the next couple of days. It used to be a jungle but now it's beyond that. I need a new noun to describe the jungliness of the west bed. I know I need to get in there and hack but I fear the anacondas.]