Light and Momentary

Croissants: the bakery

As a parent, I have enormous power to influence. Huge, vast, colossal, humbling, heartbreaking power to influence. When I stop and think about it, it brings me to my knees. I could not see this when my children were smaller and my ability to influence them into commonplace civilized behaviors (like, say, wearing clothes in public) seemed inadequate. I see it now, and it makes me a little trembly: oh, God, make me the mother they deserve. Make me the example they need.

As a parent, especially the parent of a small child, I have considerable power to coerce. This power has its limits. I can tell you from long-ago but still vivid experience that the toddler who has sunk his teeth into your arm can keep them there despite vigorous attempts on your part to remove them. I am really grateful in hindsight that my firstborn was a take-it-to-the-mat kind of kid because he taught me something important: there's only so much good behavior you can compel, and compelling is costly. Compelling shapes the parent as well as the child.

This is hard to see when your kids are small, but compelling is a short-term strategy. If one of my teenagers said to me, "No, I absolutely refuse to do what you're telling me," I could not physically make him do it. They're both taller and heavier than I am. (I can still pick them up, but I wouldn't get very far.) I could say, "Then I'm taking your car keys" or "Then I'm grounding you," but my take-it-to-the-mat kid is still a take-it-to-the-mat kid, whose tendency is to say, "You go right ahead and see if I care." His brother is still the kid who crumples inside when an authority figure disapproves of his behavior, taking harsh words to heart long after everyone else has forgotten them. So that's not how we do things around here.

Coercing good behavior is a short-sighted strategy as well as a short-term one. Remember that thing I said a few days ago about two goals in tension? (You probably don't, because I'm writing, like, the Moby-Dick of blog series here. Middle paragraph of this post.) It's like I have an imaginary checking account from which I draw my mothering funds. If I spend my money on the snowmobile of BECAUSE I SAID SO AND HURRY UP DAMMIT, it might feel really good. I can rev my figurative engine and zoom down the hills at speed, feeling macho and invincible. The thing about snowmobiles, though, is that they're expensive. If I sink $15,000 into a snowmobile, I might not have the funds to cover the broken leg (i.e., the injured dignity) I get when it pitches me out. I might not be able to pay for the rescue operation when I trigger an avalanche (i.e., losing my kids' respect over time).

The croissant approach is like saving for retirement: month after month, you take the money you might rather have spent on snowmobiling and put it in your 401K. Sometimes it's painful, sometimes you'd rather buy plane tickets to somewhere fun, dernit, but you're taking the long view. (This analogy is probably offending every single person who likes Supernanny, but I'm going with it anyway.) If my daughter is being loud in church, as just happened on Sunday after a long stretch of better behavior ("BORING," she announced in an outside voice, as I withered inside), my short-term goal of getting her to straighten up THIS INSTANT IF NOT SOONER may be at odds with my long-term goals of teaching her to regulate her own behavior and learn to love the Mass. What I wanted to do, frankly, was seize her by the earlobe and hiss "NOT APPROPRIATE" in a Voldemortian voice. What I did do was remind her of our expectations, with clear disapproval in my face and voice, and give her a minute to collect herself. If she hadn't quieted down in that minute, of course I would have taken her out. But another thing I have learned is that inserting a pause is good medicine for an angry or embarrassed parent as well as a defiant child. Expecting instant compliance might make me look like a better parent. I think that acknowledging how often kids need a little time to pull themselves together has made me be a better parent. I also think it has taught them how to pull themselves together after a conflict, which is a life skill worth having.

(Here I pause for a moment of self-doubt. It is deeply ingrained in our culture, this idea that good parents say "jump" and good kids immediately say "how high?" I believe, I really do, that it is easier to find the joy in jumping if you are given a minute to gather your own momentum.)

Bribes and threats are attempts to compel. They are extremely motivating for some kids, but it's short-term motivation that actually erodes long-term uptake of the target behavior. (On which topic, see Alfie Kohn.) If your kid is not motivated by a given bribe or threat, you have to decide how far you're willing to up the stakes. If obedience becomes an economic transaction, your kid might choose not to buy in.

Here I am going to offend a bunch of people again (sorry!), but I think that steady reliance on bribes and threats is something like a steady diet of Noodle-roni and chicken nuggets. Noodle-roni is quick and easy and it's designed to be tasty, and we all know every kid in America eats chicken nuggets with alacrity. That approach is everywhere, but I am skeptical about its long-term benefits. The transition to a new menu takes time. If you serve a kid accustomed to Noodle-roni and chicken nuggets a dinner that consists of grilled salmon, sauted kale, and baked sweet potato, he's going to say, "...Are you kidding me?" He's not going to say, "I've been longing to eat this kale ever since I saw its beautiful dusky blue-green leaves at the CSA pickup." Tastes can change. I would honestly rather eat a bowl of garlicky CSA kale these days than a bowl of Oreos. But (here I go again) change is slow. A kid whose only exposure to pumpkin has been the pumpkin spice frappuccino (is there such a thing? I feel like there's pumpkin spice everything these days -- pumpkin spice library paste, pumpkin spice motor oil...) is going to be slower to perceive the sweetness of a wedge of roasted pumpkin. With time and persistence he can learn to enjoy it, though, just as he can learn to find the joy in duty.

I use some strategies that would look familiar to any mom. But I frame them differently than many sources do, and it makes a difference for me that I think my kids perceive. When my oldest kid was an indomitable toddler, I would put him in time-out when he did something wrong. He wouldn't stay in the chair, so I buckled him in his booster seat. Once buckled, he would kick his feet until the chair beneath him tipped over (his motto: "live free or die"), so I laid it back on the floor until the timer went off to let us both know he could get out. This was -- what's the word? -- insane, but everyone said he should get a time-out if he misbehaved.  Right? Right??? I believe I could have broken him eventually, but I think he is the kind of kid for whom the Pearls' plumbing supply line tactics would cause broken kidneys before they caused a broken will. It dawned on me slowly that I didn't want to break anything, didn't want to dominate my indomitable boy. The goal wasn't to overmaster him but to teach him to master himself. It is right and appropriate for 2yo boys to need support in the self-mastery department.

These days at my house if you can't follow the rules at the dinner table, you go sit on the steps until you can. But it's not "the naughty stair" and you don't stay there until I decide you're done sitting. You always, always decide for yourself when you're ready to come back. Take the time you need to pull it together, and then come join us again. No shame, no wrath (or very little wrath, very seldom), no worries. (This happens...maybe every three weeks or so? Less than that, now that I think about it.)

Sometimes I do things that look punitive; I do assign extra chores to kids who don't do theirs or do them badly. I explain it like this: when I have to get after you to do a job or to do it better, that takes up space in my head and minutes in my day and it makes me grumpy. Since you added something to my plate, you'll need to remove something as well. Usually there's an option, A or B. (This happens a couple of times a month.)

Sometimes I do things that could look bribe-y: I may offer kids something to look forward to after an unpleasant experience. But I always say after, not if. Getting your tooth filled is not negotiable, and I will not attempt to bribe you into compliance. But I will sit near you and hold your hand, and I will tell you softly about the outing I have planned for afterward when we can talk together about how we don't like getting our teeth filled. (This one I can't quantify.)

These are small differences, maybe, but they have changed me and the way I think about my children's struggles.

You guys, it's important to me that you know I am writing about my best self, who disappears with troubling frequency. But it boils down to this: Do I believe in the capacity of the human soul to respond freely to grace? You'd better believe I do. And my highest goal as a parent is to show my kids that grace is real, and transformative, and available for the asking.

Croissants: the cookbook that will never be

You guys, it's so nice to hear from you! I didn't think anybody was going to wade through that whole post, so thanks! This is making me nostalgic for 2005.

Alexandra said that perhaps I could write a book, which I appreciated very much. I do not think, however, that a book is in the cards. Here is most of what my book would say:

1. Think carefully about the good habits that are (a) important for your family and (b) suitable for your kids' ages and temperaments
2. Enforce those habits kindly and consistently
3. Repeat #2 for months or years until it sticks

This is why Jo Frost's website gets more hits than mine, right? This is me telling you that we started the croissants at 1 on Sunday and they weren't done until 7:30 and we washed a lot of dishes and wiped up a lot of flour in between. Even though I tell you how pretty and golden brown they were, and how delicious the kids said they were (which I can't corroborate -- thanks, Whole 30), I would be completely sympathetic if you thought a can of frozen crescent rolls sounded more doable.

But I do want to write a bit about establishing good habits. If you can teach the kids to internalize your "do it now and do it right" voice, then you rarely have to use it. I only have ten minutes before my self-imposed blogging cutoff (that's the habit that equips me to be more patient with kids who need patience), but I'm going to throw out some thoughts and pick them up again tomorrow.

Here's an analogy that occurred to me: in teaching our kids to take on adult responsibilities, we are teaching them a foreign language. Fluency in another language takes years. No one ever hears a 5yo say "I satted down" and snarls "WHY are you STILL adding -ed to irregular past-tense verbs? What is WRONG with you?" (We would hope that such a person was taking anger management classes.) And yet we expect kids to get it quickly when it comes to responsibilities and adult behavior. I have said it myself: how many times do I have to tell you? 

The answer: a lot. A lot a lot a lot a lot. You don't notice all of the English (or whatever language you speak at home) you're modeling for your kids. You don't notice all of their errors, because you have absorbed the truth that kids make mistakes with language. It is every bit as normal to make mistakes, to sound babyish, as they learn Adult.

I used to underestimate the bandwidth that was required from me for habit formation. I had told them we were going to do this every day. I had made it clear that this was their responsibility. End of story, right?

Nope.

If I can't muster the follow-through, I'm not going to see the habits form. Good habits are another of the Golden Keys to authoritative parenting: they can carry you through annoying chores, previously soul-sucking sibling conflict negotiations, responsibilities like piano practice, you name it. But kids need support to get to the point where it's all automatic and they wouldn't dream of flaking out -- the point where they spontaneously apologize and offer to do one of your tasks* if they happen to forget one of theirs. They can get there, and you don't have to bribe or threaten or yell along the way. But you have to have the bandwidth to make it happen.

Oh, rats, I got excited and missed my cutoff. More soon!

*That's a rare occurrence. Apologies are common; voluntarily taking on more work is not.

Croissants, in the wild

Part 1 Part 2

Your requests for more details were well timed, since I had to kick into "inhabit the authority" mode twice yesterday. It was a crazy evening, CRA to the z^th power, and we needed to have done a little more planning yesterday morning. (You know the parts in the Aubrey-Maturin books where they re-enact Trafalgar with biscuit crumbs? My husband and I joke about doing something similar to plan movements of cars and drivers. Last night we wound up a few ships short of a fleet.)

I was at the gym and I needed to get Stella (a NOPE girl) into the car immediately. She's often dawdly when it's time to leave the childcare room, and I did not have time for dawdly. I said, "Stella, look at my eyes. We need to go right now or we will be late." And she came. She cried for a minute in the car because she hadn't finished her picture and she wasn't sure we had the right blue at home to match the section she'd been working on, but she did not give me a single second of pushback -- she got right up, walked willingly to the car, and fastened her own seatbelt even though she was sad. 

There were a few important things hidden in the interaction. I called her name with a falling intonation: this is not a question but an declaration. My tone of voice was deliberate; it said, "This is important. Not panic-inducing, but important." When I say "look at my eyes," it means "you have my full attention, and I need yours." (<-That right there is one of the Golden Keys of parenting with authority. In those moments I was lamenting at the beginning of yesterday's post, I was busy chatting. Inattention fuels limit-testing.) I pulled out a couple of big-gun phrases: I try not to say "right now" unless I really mean "right now," and "we will be late" comes with an unspoken "and that's serious." Both of those nuances, for what it's worth, have taken a long time to cultivate.

Some broader context: I am a huge, HUGE fan of giving my kids autonomy and modeling flexibility. Stella usually needs a minute to wrap things up in the childcare room. Sometimes I will offer the option of popping back in a little bit later. (We're usually waiting for her brother to finish his karate class, so it's no big deal to me if she hangs out with me or with the other kids.) Sometimes I will say, "Go ahead, watch the end of this scene" or "Finish using that color -- I'm not in a rush." I believe that my usual willingness to give her time contributes to her reciprocal willingness to listen and obey on the rare occasions when I say "right now, even though you don't want to."

When we got home, my NOPE teen had made plans to meet his girlfriend at 7 (and OH does he hate to be late) but I needed him to run me to church. "No," he said, "that's not going to work." I said, calmly, "There's a room full of people waiting for me. I know you're disappointed, but I have to get to church on time." He paused. Politely, he said, "Okay. Let me send a message to M."

There were three important things in that interaction: first, calm is critical. The authority I invoke if I get het up is not motherly authority; it is the dubious authority of the impending explosion. It invites a NOPE kid to explode right back, because in that scenario the bigger explosion can carry the day. Second, and this might be the single most important thing I know about mothering, compassion makes everything better. Letting a kid know that you hear and respect his feelings, even in a moment when you can't do anything to make them better, allows him to move past them instead of clinging to them. This was life-changing for me as a young mother, to learn that I shouldn't try to argue my toddler out of his feelings. Instead I could say kindly, "You really wish we could stay at the library. [slipping his arm into his jacket sleeve] What would you do if we stayed? [other arm] Maybe if we stayed we could build with the wooden blocks. [zipping up the jacket] Wooden blocks are super-fun, [taking his hand] and they have so many of them here. [heading for the elevator] I know it's a bummer to go. Would you like to push the button to call the elevator?" It was magic. And decency, all rolled into one. (On that topic, be sure to read Carol's lovely comment from yesterday. Carol is my dear friend and mothering mentor, the person whose prayers I request when I am feeling really stuck and uncertain.)

This thought really belongs in the previous paragraph, but it's a long paragraph already. (This is a long post already, and I have so much more to say!) The third important thing in my interaction with my son last night was that pause. Everybody -- everybody -- makes better choices and makes them less resentfully given a little time to own the decision. I did not leap in and say NO, RIGHT NOW, and I feel certain that contributed to the peaceful outcome. I got to church on time (although further scheduling FAIL moments meant that Stella wound up coming to the ladies' retreat team meeting a little bit later), and when I apologized afterward to my son for the interruption to his evening he said, "Nah, it's all good."

I keep thinking about Our Lord with the rich young ruler. He asked something huge of the man, something crazy, as he "looked at him and loved him." He gave the man space to choose freely. We also ask something huge, something crazy, of our children. In effect we say to our newborns, "I know you can't hold your own head up, but your task is to live independently in a fallen world and make it a better place. Ready?" So, too, we must look at them and love them, seeing how genuinely hard it is for them to learn to do what's right again and again. We know that sometimes they will choose the wrong thing. We know that free will is one of the greatest gifts of genuine love.

Last night as my daughter was drifting off next to me she said sleepily, "I love God. And you remind me of Him." Although my knee-jerk response was to think, "Oh, honey, I am SO not God," I am trying instead to be grateful for her words. I am thinking about all the freedom God affords me to serve him in ways that bring me joy. I am thinking about how uncommon it is for God to compel immediate obedience, and about how much I want to do the right thing in those moments.

I am thinking that's the kind of mom I want to be.

---

OH MY GOODNESS, nobody reads 1200-word blog posts in 2015. For Miriel and Rachel in particular I have some thoughts on the links between parenting authority and professorial authority. I have some more thoughts on the contexts that facilitate mothering with authority. But I will pause here for today. Tune in tomorrow...

Croissants, the follow-up

I woke up at 4:00 this morning and writhed -- writhed, I am telling you -- at the thought of the people who might read that post from last night and think, "Perhaps a better strategy than inhabiting your authority is in order, Jamie." I remembered the day I met Kira, when my daughter beaned her daughter on the head. (More than once.) I thought about the times that my daughter bit my brother's little boy when they were both smaller. She was not the sort of toddler about whom people said, "She's so well-behaved!" 

The point I wanted to make in yesterday's rambly post is that a short-term goal of instant compliance across contexts may be at odds with a long-term goal of thoughtful self-discipline. Like adults, kids need space to feel the consequences of their actions and respond appropriately. (Surely I am not the only one who needs a little time to offer a heartfelt apology, even when I am wrong.) Like adults, kids do better when they feel better. (Ergo, post-swim-lesson preschoolers might take some extra wrangling.) It may seem overly obvious to point out that day by day, kids are turning into adults. It's particularly clear to me given the spacing of my children: if I wouldn't say it to my 18yo, should I say it to my 15yo? to my 12yo? to my 9yo? to my 6yo? They are all heading to the same place, and while they need different responses from me those responses should have the same overarching goal.

I have two children who are temperamentally meek and pliant, and three whose default response to authority is NOPE. We prize meekness and pliancy in preschoolers, forgetting that those kids are more vulnerable to bullying and peer pressure as they grow because they're accustomed to saying yes. There is a place, a critical place, for saying NOPE. So I am muddling through, doing my best to teach the meek kids that there's a time to be less meek and the NOPE kids that yes is usually (but not always) a better response. Some days I still worry that I look like a bad mother. Some days I still worry that I am a bad mother. Some days I still wish it were faster.

Mostly I know that good things take time.

Croissants

One of the blessings of having a large family is that I can see more clearly where I'm going these days.

I knew, intellectually, that I was raising children who would one day live on their own out in the world, but it was so hard for me to feel that truth when my first few children were small. The idea that preschool discipline strategies might shape a future relationship seemed implausible.

It is the worst parenting cliche to say it goes so quickly, but WOW does it go quickly. My firstborn was just 3 years old, like, last week, and he is moving away from home in May: a summer job far from home, and then his freshman year of college. As I see his strengths and weaknesses and the places where we struggle, it shapes the way I am mothering my youngest. I know it's true now: it will actually be 12 years before she goes to college, but it's going to feel like I blinked and it was over.

These thoughts are brought to you courtesy of swimming lessons. Twice a week I find myself in the locker room with parents who are trying to wrangle their little swimmers into dry clothes and out the door. There is a fair amount of unhappiness in the accompanying cacophony. 

I think it's easy to forget that some kids find swimming lessons particularly exhausting. The noisy echoes of an indoor pool make it harder to hear the instructor, amping up the work of listening and following directions. The shallow end is not so shallow for preschoolers, and some of them find it stressful to be immersed there. Skinny little bodies are not as buoyant as well-padded adult bodies, and they may need to work harder at staying afloat. Small kids get colder faster because of their unfavorable volume-surface area ratio, and the locker room can feel like Siberia in January. The noisy echoes of the locker room make it harder to parse a parent's instructions, and the bustle of bodies in various stages of undress is highly distracting. I myself am not at my most cooperative when I am cold and tired and hungry and overstimulated.

These are the things I have been thinking about in the locker room. I am remembering evenings when I was so frustrated after swimming lessons that I could have cried, or punched somebody. I am also observing my own reactions to the Hulk Smash version of Jo Frost, who pops up there with some regularity.

Recently I watched a woman hissing at her slow-moving daughter: "You have CHOSEN to sit on the naughty chair when we get home. Are you going to CHOOSE to sit in the naughty chair even longer? Are you going to CHOOSE to forfeit all your videos? Are you going to CHOOSE to lose your American Girl doll until you learn to behave?" At this point my shoulders were up around my ears and I was twitching. (NB: I have issues -- big, ugly, old old issues -- with adults saying to kids "It is your fault that I am out of control.") I have thought about it again and again, and the thing I keep coming back to is that threats and bribes are not good long-term solutions.

One of the gifts of fifth-time motherhood is that I have learned to inhabit my authority as my daughter's mother -- to say "That is not okay" and expect to be obeyed. I have seen that kids do eventually learn: it feels better to do the right thing than the wrong thing. There is joy in duty, as implausible as it sounds. I have also learned, alas, that there are no reliable shortcuts. Threats may change behavior in the short term. (Or they may not, as I learned from my firstborn. He's the one who said to me, at age 5, "it was one of those 'better to reign in hell than serve in heaven' moments.") Threats don't change hearts.

Today I made croissants with my 12yo. It's a slow process: mixing, rising, turning and chilling to make the flaky layers, cutting, baking. "They were awesome," he said enthusiastically. But I think it is a frozen crescent-roll kind of world, in which we want tips and tricks to get the 2yo up from the locker room floor RIGHT NOW, to make her stop gawking at the naked lady next to us RIGHT NOW, to compel her into her clothes and out the door RIGHT NOW. If I were still in the intransigent 2yo stage I might be annoyed by this post. "What do you MEAN, I should inhabit my authority as her mother?! I just want to eat my DINNER before the next geologic AGE rolls around!"

And I do not mean to say "Moms of America, you're doing it WRONG!" I only mean to say that it will get better, it really will, and that love, and motherly stubbornness, can conquer all. Or at least most.

(O-kay, this post could invite a slew of unhappy comments. If I had not planned to blog daily this month, it would go straight back to the drafts folder. I stumbled across this post earlier today, which contains many of the same thoughts from the perspective of a younger me.)

Follow-up post here, and another with specifics here.

Saturday Shakespeare, Vol. 10

I've been thinking about what makes Shakespeare different on the page vs. the stage, and part of it, of course, is the pace. I have a vague memory that I have posted recently about how much deeper a reader can dive into a metaphor -- in the theater it zooms past and is gone. But a reader, who can go back over a line as many times as she might like, can get bogged down in a way that's just not an option for a viewer. The actors will be moving on, no matter how much you might like to ruminate.

I have decided that I'd rather see Shakespeare's more lyrical stuff on the stage, because there's just too much parsing to do as a reader. (This insight occurred to me in a conversation about the merits and failings of Richard II, which I found to be rather a painful read.) That might be why I hated the sonnets when I read them all in a row. But it also pops up in comedies: there's lots of rhyme, which is always harder to untangle, and so a person with a certain bent (determined, let's say, instead of obsessive), can slow down too far.

So I am moving slowly through Comedy of Errors despite its brevity, thinking that I might like to watch it when I'm done. Any favorite productions you can recommend? Any Shakespeare in your reading pile this week?

Placeholder

I started a post about parenting tonight -- it's been kicking around in my head for weeks now. And then I dozed off tucking little ones in bed, and now I am out of time and brainpower. Tomorrow, I hope.

Tonight I will tell you that it's the first night of my spring break, and that I think I've done a reasonable job of keeping my to-do list for the week out of superhuman-time-compressor territory, and that my eyelids are still so heavy that I might...not...get...very much of the book du jour that I will read when I click publish.

(And by the way: have you read Everything I Never Told You? Would love to chat about it with pals.)

This is a quick one

I am reading Everything I Never Told You at the moment, and it is calling my name. So I am heading off to bed with my book in just a minute here, but I am leaving you with a recipe. Delicious, easier than most Indian recipes I have attempted, and it works just fine for the Whole 30. Win! It's from my Madhur Jaffrey book.

Chicken in a sweet red pepper sauce

Peel an onion and chop it coarsely. Chuck it in the food processor with an inch of peeled ginger, also coarsely chopped, 3 cloves of garlic, and an ounce of blanched slivered almonds. Add 12 ounces of red peppers which you have trimmed, seeded, and cut into big chunks. On top of the peppers you'll add 1 T. ground cumin, 2 t. ground coriander, 1/2 t. turmeric, 2 t. salt (though you might want to dial that back a wee bit), and cayenne to taste. Blitz it all into a paste.

What you are supposed to do is fry the paste in 7 T. oil for 10-12 minutes. What I did in a moment of recipe-reading oopsiness was to add the oil to the food processor, where it made the paste lovely and smooth. It fried up just fine despite my absent-mindedness.

To your fried paste add 1 kg chicken parts, a cup of water, 2 T. lemon juice, and freshly ground black pepper. Simmer until the chicken is done -- maybe about 25 minutes depending on the size and boneliness of your pieces. Serve over rice unless you are Whole 30-ing.

In praise of easy

I'm using a Matt Fitzgerald plan to get ready for an April 10K, and I love it. It's from his book 80/20 Running, which I find to be a welcome antidote to the attitude that anything worth doing is worth doing in a more painful fashion. In a world where everybody's talking about high-intensity workouts, Matt Fitzgerald's approach is a breath of fresh air.

The thing is, a steady diet of high-intensity workouts contributes to burnout and injury. (This is where I pause to thank the Run Less, Run Faster guys for my plantar fasciitis.) I didn't really need a book to tell me that. But the thing I didn't know about lower intensity workouts is that you get better at running more rapidly when your body doesn't have to devote quite so many resources to maintaining your chosen pace. In other words, if you run at a gentler pace, your stride gets more efficient and you make faster gains. 

He's not talking about an occasional foray into slower running, either. His book title comes from his contention that fully 80% of your workouts should be low-intensity, with the remaining 20% at moderate and high intensity.

The plan appealed to me in part because I am so stupid injury-prone. It turns out to be a super-fun and much more humane plan than any of the others I've tried. Run Less, Run Faster was too much for me, although I still feel a twinge of guilt admitting it. I appreciate the stepwise nature of the 80/20 plans, in which you build for a couple of weeks and then take it a little easier in the following week. And I really appreciate the admonition to keep listening to your body and be flexible, because I've used a couple of training plans that made it sound like the wrath of God would blaze forth and melt your face off if you missed a particular workout. So when I didn't eat enough carbs in the first two days of the Whole 30 and felt like I was running with the parking brake on, I did a reasonable facsimile of the scheduled workout and called it a day. I nailed the hill workout tonight (on a treadmill -- icy walks + freezing temps = grateful for the incline setting on the treadmill) and I'm still riding the happy endorphin glow.

I have no idea whether I will finish the 10K any faster this year than I did last year. I don't have the same sense of urgency about hitting a particular time target, and I really don't want to hurt myself again. So far this feels like a win-win: pleasantly hard workouts that anticipate my progress almost perfectly, and a reasonable hope of a PR. I'll keep you posted.

From my hands to his

Once, long ago, a boy who loved dragons asked me to make him a pair of dragon mittens. I posted about them here. Such a relief that he loved them in spite of their oddities!

When his dragon-loving younger brother asked me for a pair of dragon mittens, I might have whimpered. It turns out, however, that there are a number of fun dragon mitten patterns available. I don't know if I needed to wing it (ha! see what I did there?) in 2010, but I certainly don't need to improvise in 2015. 

The pattern is purchased; the yarn came in the mail today*; I haven't yet seen the Downton Abbey finale. Time to cast on, my friends.

*I was going to declare 2015 the Year of Stash Knitting, but dragon mittens called my name. It's two 50g skeins of Knitpicks Palette -- cheap and compact and I am going to use them up starting rightnow. My husband** will totally find that persuasive, right?

**My husband is not in any way an anti-yarn ogre, but he is still recovering from the day earlier this winter when an internet pal sent me >20 pounds of yarn. It is awesome, beautiful yarn and so far I have used a bunch and shared a bunch, but it turns out that >20 pounds of yarn is a lot of yarn. Who knew?

Rejected

Remember a few posts ago, when I was waiting-waiting-waiting for a decision on a manuscript I'd revised and resubmitted?

Rejected.

At first I was sad -- so sad that I closed the door to my office and cried for a few minutes. But now I am annoyed. Because do you know what the editors said? I'll tell you what they said. For round 2 I added in three new sections based on the first round of comments. And this time? They said, "There might be too many things in this manuscript."

I am thinking about appealing the decision, because DUDE: don't tell me to add more things (things which, by the way, took hours upon hours of my life to add) and then say, "gee, what a lot of things there are in here." I think I will give myself a couple of days to settle down, and then a few more days to draft a polite query that does not say DUDE NO FAIR or suffer from a surfeit of exclamation points. (But in my heart I will be thinking "DUDE NO FAIR!!!!!!!")

I think an appeal is not very likely to succeed, though. And then...?

It is a clinically focused paper. (And may I tell you, just between you and me and oh yeah the internet, that I am really proud of it? May I tell you that two of the three sections I added at the reviewers' behest contain the best academic writing I have done so far? (Lest you think I might be suffering from a swelled head, the third one could use some work.)) So I would like to get it in clinicians' hands. The journal that rejected it is really the only one that is read by clinicians and academics both. If they'd accepted it, it would have been a significant step toward tenure and a way to advance the long-term career goal that is closest to my heart.

The best way to get it in clinicians' hands is to submit it to a publication aimed at professionals, not academics. It would be much less useful for tenure, and it would require a fair amount of revising now that it's so dang long. Clearly, that's not a perfect solution.

It could go pretty much as is to a different academic journal, but how many clinicians would ever see it there? Not very many, is what I'm thinking.

So: BUMMER. BUMMER BUMMER BUMMER. Not what I was hoping to hear. And I don't even have anything philosophical to say about moving onward or finding something better. BUMMER.

Whole 30, Take 2

I mentioned offhandedly last August that I had just done the Whole 30-- 30 days with no grains, legumes, dairy, alcohol, white potatoes*, or sugar. Slowly and cautiously I added some of everything except sugar back into my diet. I did eat three pieces of chocolate on Mardi Gras, but that was the only time I'd eaten sweets since July. Come to think of it, I haven't had any alcohol since July either. But drinking is not my vice, so that one is no trouble at all to maintain.

*(when I looked up that link I discovered that they green-lighted white potatoes last summer! who knew?!) 

It is tricky to avoid grains and legumes and dairy consistently, so it was a relief to add them back in. I kept losing weight gradually, but I lost that fantastic Whole 30 glow, the mental focus and emotional equilibrium that took me by surprise last summer. So I'm declaring March to be another Whole 30 month. Day 1 is in the books.