Light and Momentary

Whole 30, how I love thee

Mrs. Darwin was just posting about how she is not feeling the Whole 30 love. But that's okay, Mrs. Darwin, because I have enough Whole 30 love for the both of us.

Here is my deal: with the first three kids, the pregnancy weight disappeared painlessly in a few months. With the fourth kid, I was back to my pre-pregnancy weight at 4 months postpartum but I had to work at it. (Remember The Vegetable Project? I'm having a moment of nostalgia for the 2005 blogosphere.) And then with Stella, those last 10 pounds didn't want to go anywhere. I was briefly back to "my" weight when I started teaching here and was too stressed out to eat, but it all came back and it brought friends. I said, "Okay, I can do this. I've lost 20 pounds before; I can do it again." But these were 20 stubborn pounds, and I was over 40, and finally I threw up my hands and bought bigger pants.

Then one day in July of 2014, Nancy said, "Hey, who wants to do a sugar-free August with me?" I don't know what possessed me, but I said, "Sure! And I'll do a grain-free dairy-free legume-free carrageenan-free white-potato-free* probably joy-free August while I'm at it!" (*You can have white potatoes on the Whole 30 now, which, if you ask me, makes it practically the Hot Fudge Sundae Diet in comparison to that earlier version.) 

This decision was motivated chiefly by vanity, but it wasn't vanity that made it stick. Somewhere in week 3 of the Whole 30 I was taken over by a peppier peaceful-er productive-er version of myself. The kids noticed, saying, "Hey, Mom, you are weirdly mellow and understanding lately." I got that article sent off for peer review, the one that had been sapping my will to live. (And guess what? Published, TYVM.) It seemed almost ancillary that I lost >11 pounds in those 30 days, without feeling hungry.

With some trepidation, I added back forbidden food categories one by one, still mostly eating according to Whole 30 rules. (No sweets, though. I'm pretty sure I've only had dessert on Christmas and Easter since I started this.) More weight fell off my body, about another 10 or 12 pounds. I did the Whole 30 again in March of 2015, and again this year, right after Epiphany. It's not going to be a full-time thing for me -- it's expensive, I have a vegetarian kid, and honestly if I ate that way all the time it would be hard for me to find pants that didn't fall off -- but it's a great way to push the reset button. My weight is stable in the range that suits me. I don't crave sweets. I might need a few stitches to deal with the dagger-eyes that just came hurtling through my computer screen after that comment about pants, but aside from the impending stab wounds I've been feeling great.

The Whole 30 is a weird and gimmicky program. Are the lectins in legumes really responsible for the malaise and malfunctions that plague us all? I doubt it. My husband, who cooks most of our dinners these days, has been super-accommodating but he does get a little grumbly about the Whole 30. I can't blame him. At the same time, I'm sure I'll do it again.

It's another first world problem, friends.

Back in December, one of my college roommates asked if we would be up for a step challenge. There are five of us who lived together in various combinations throughout undergrad; we all shared an apartment when we were juniors and seniors. We get together every so often, even though we're spread most of the way across the country these days.

Back in June I had bought a secondhand Garmin Vivofit. I had been using Matt Fitzgerald's 80/20 plan (best! plan! ever!) to prepare for a 10K, and I was surprised at how far off my heartrate estimates were. I didn't expect to use the step counting tool, but it turned out to be kind of fun.

The roommate challenge unleashed my usually latent competitive streak, even though December wasn't a great month for walking. We've kept it going, though, with a new challenge every few weeks at Matchup. You can set up free challenges there, and they work across all our different devices. It's fun to see what my friends are up to, to imagine the routes they're taking around their own neighborhoods far away. And a little smack talk in the sidebar can be fun as well.

As I've mentioned before, we live in a walking neighborhood. I usually walk Stella most of the way to school and then walk myself to work. That gets me 4500 steps or so before 9:00 in the morning. I've been working out faithfully lately (10K training season again), so I've been averaging about 16K steps daily. Sometimes, though, I'm telling you: it's easier to walk all those steps than to get them in the right places. The Garmin doesn't want to sync with the computer. The Matchup site gets picky about how frequently I've synced. The Matchup site burps and my missing steps reappear. The Garmin appears to sync but then the steps don't actually show up. It all makes me a little twitchy. HOW can Matchup be saying that I had zero steps yesterday? That was a particularly exhausting set of 14K steps! Credit, please!!

I'm reading By the Shores of Silver Lake to Stella right now. I'm guessing Ma got in plenty of steps, don't you figure? And she probably didn't complain about her Vivofit, either.

Links I like looking at

Look at this nifty map that shows how the wind is blowing across the US! I like watching it, even if it keeps telling me that my wind is blowing down from the NE and not up from the SW. I'm pretty sure I could run out to my north-facing porch after my shower and not get frostbite. Wait. This was going to be a quick and easy linky post and suddenly somehow I am writing about flashing the neighbors.

 

This video, spotted in Eve Tushnet's Twitter feed, makes me smile. When Elwood and I were first married, we used to rent Fred Astaire movies with some regularity to watch on our VCR. That is kind of a weird hobby, I know, though not as weird as standing on the front porch wet and naked. 

I don't pay much attention to fashion (though I do usually manage to get something on before I exit the house, especially if it's snowing), but this dress caught my eye. The idea of knitting a dress with fingering weight yarn is pretty much preposterous, especially with an estimated yarn cost of ~$180 for my size, but wouldn't it be gorgeous in those greeny gold shades of Loft?

iPod Haiku

Wifi on the train / Bare fields, pale November skies / Cranky kids nearby

Not a vlogger

I was going to share a video post, even though the Venn diagram of people who like video posts and people who like this blog is, like, an 8. This morning I woke up with somebody else's voice coming out of my mouth. Stella said, "Mama, I don't mean to be rude but it sounded like there was an old man in your bed." No old man, just a croaky version of me. So I tried to do a little video post talking about how the voice works and why smaller people usually have higher voices and how very cool your larynx is. When I listened to it, though, it seemed like a weird blend of esoteric and narcissistic and I just couldn't bring myself to upload it. Now I am wondering: was it really as dismal as it seemed? Do people who vlog regularly sound more polished than I do on video, or are they just less whipsawed by perfectionism? 

My croaky voice and I are going to bed.

November 1

Guess what, everybody, it's November! Have you been saying to yourself, "I wish Jamie would post more often"? Your wish is granted!

I don't think anybody else in my Feedly is going to do NaBloPoMo besides maybe Lilian, but it's always fun to blog like it's 2004.

Thirty days, thirty posts. Ready? 

(Now tell me what to write about.)

Dispatches from the House of Geeks

The kids' take on The Martian: "Too much action. Not enough science."

This cracks me up. What Hollywood really needs is more equations, obviously.

P.S. We liked it despite the oversimplifications.

Sure, I'll answer you this

I'm linking up with Kendra for the first time.

1. How did you celebrate the 4th of July?

With Shakespeare, like all the patriotic Americans. I got up early and ran 6 happy miles, after which we went to a lovely accessible outdoor production of a kid-friendly Shakespeare play. In the afternoon we hosted some family and went to the kids' museum. We have a deep divide in our family about fireworks; the people who like them set some off while the people who detest them stayed inside. My husband made chicken jalfrezi with komatsuna for dinner, because we were celebrating the melting potness of this fine country. (Actually, it was because our summer meal plan features Subcontinent Saturday and this week's CSA veggies included komatsuna. Which wasn't going to eat itself.)

2. Do you sunburn easily?

I am a redhead. If I even think about the sun for too long, I will sunburn.

3. Hot dogs. Yay or nay?

I'll eat a hot dog. Just not a Chicago-style hot dog, because YEA VERILY the Lord did not intend for people to be putting tomato wedges on their hot dogs.

4. Have you ever personally set off fireworks?

Do sparklers count?

5. Have you ever jumped off the high dive?

Yes. It's been a long time, though.

6. Do you do anything weird in your sleep?

Not in recent years, as far as I know. But I used to dream frequently that I had to communicate something important even though I was banned from speaking English. One night, early  in our marriage, I dreamed that I needed urgently to get a message across to my husband but I was only allowed to use the word "bougainvillea." (At this time I did not know the definition of bougainvillea, but apparently my dream-brain thought it was a cool word.) Elwood awoke to my shouting "bougainvillea! BOUGAINVILLEA! BOUGAINVILLEA!" in house-on-fire tones.

Tapped out, apparently

I am sitting with my 15yo, who is full of blog post suggestions.

When he saw that I had typed "All The Things" in the title box, he said, "Are you going to lament your inability to get things done around the house?"

When I said I wasn't sure what I was going to write about, he said, "Maybe you could write a post about mothering inadequacies that you don't actually need to worry about."

I said, "Do I do that often?"

"Enough that I notice," he told me. "What about a rant on the importance of a free-range childhood? Or how people need to support public breastfeeding? A review of a book you loved by an author who's been dead for at least a hundred years? A recent interest observed in one of your children that's somehow a metaphor for parenting?"

So...then...I just transcribed the conversation and prepared to shut up the laptop. My husband is reading us the new ICD-10 codes and I'd hate to miss out. Did that injury occur because your boat was on fire, or were your waterskis on fire? Those ICD-10 codes are not the same. And if your doctor uses W59.2 when you were actually bitten by a tortoise (not a turtle), your insurer might not reimburse.

PS In the interest of accuracy I said, "Wait, which one is tortoise-induced injury?" There was a choral snort from the 15yo and his father. "How many times do we have to tell you?" they wanted to know. It's a tough crowd here, I'm telling you.

Life-changing magic, headed this way

I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, because this post made it sound irresistible, and tonight I was seized by the urge to get started. The author instructs her readers to start with clothes, and to keep only the items that inspire a spark of joy.

There goes most of my wardrobe.

We moved downstairs in...let me think...late 2012, but I still had a bunch of clothes in the upstairs closet. I brought them all down, and as you'd expect I put >90% of them in the giveaway pile. The discards included my Up The Down Staircase T-shirt, from my high school's production of the play in 1984-1985. (I was Sadie Finch, the unpleasant secretary: "Hand in on time!") Also in the pile: the pleated-front Guess overalls I bought in 1987 with the earnings from my first job, which I guess I was saving for that future date when pleated-front overalls will reclaim their place on the runways.

I was trucking along on the downstairs clothes until the handknits stalled me out. I put an ugly cowl in the giveaway pile (ugly pattern + ugly superwash yarn = Goodwill bound, baby). I put a too-short curling scarf upstairs to frog and re-knit. And then I opened the sweater bin.

The camo cardigan does not bring me joy. Too much learning curve on display there-- the button bands are an object lesson in why one should feather in hand-dyed yarn, and the underarms are Exhibit A in the case against classic raglans, and the colors scream HAND-DYED HANDMADE NOT IN A GOOD WAY to me every time I wear it. Also, dear 2008 Jamie, you don't want to cable a busy yarn like that.

Even so, I can't bring myself to send it to Goodwill.

Maybe I could start a Ravelry thread for people who are working the life-changing magic of tidying up, in which we could re-home less-loved handknits with people who would know better than to machine-wash them. Because what does a person in the middle of a time-consuming cleanup project really need? A new source of social media distraction, that's what! And what else does a person in the middle of a time-consuming cleanup project really need? Bulky new stuff winging its way to her courtesy of strangers on the internet. Obviously.

It was funnier in the Lego Movie

 

My review of Laura Vanderkam's 168 Hours sounds a little grumpy, but it was very much worth the read. Although I walked through her core competencies exercise skeptically, I still remember the frisson of understanding that hit me when I thought, "Folding laundry is not one of my core competencies." I have been working ever since on teaching the boys to share the load(s).

Some aspects of this plan work better than others. To tell the truth, I often wind up re-folding pieces of my clothing so they will fit more neatly in my drawers. Perhaps a sterner mother would crack the whip and make them keep doing it until it was done properly, but I am not that mother. I can live with that.

The thing that's more exasperating is the mis-sorted laundry. I often hear someone asking, "Why is this in my pile?"  The more pressing question for me has become: "Why was this not in my pile?" I don't usually find kids' clothing in my own stack of laundry, but over recent months I have noticed a worrisome exodus from my bottom drawer. My khakis? Vanished. My nice black pants, the one with a size clearly printed in the waistband that makes no sense for any child in this house? Disappeared. My comfortable jeans? Ether-ified. 

I wonder sometimes if it's a conspiracy. I picture the three oldest boys huddled together, whispering, "If we abscond with all of her pants, maybe we won't have to fold any more laundry!" I keep thinking that I should bite the bullet: march upstairs, pull out the dresser drawers, and sort masterfully into "keep," "hand down," "toss," and "MINE, DERNIT, AND DID YOU REALLY THINK THESE WOULD FIT A 12-YEAR-OLD BOY?" I bet that stern whip-cracking mother, the one who doesn't tolerate lumpy sleeves, would have tackled this problem already. Maybe she would have a better system to prevent mis-sorting, like color-coded laundry labels in the waistbands. Maybe she would have monthly dresser inspections in which holey shirts and too-short pants are confiscated and turned into rags, or perhaps memory quilts bound with her hand-sewn bias tape and excess industry.

Probably she would not be playing the clip from The Lego Movie for her easily amused children, while they insist that her missing pants must have been eaten by the dust bunnies.

The horror! The horror!

Tonight I hauled up the Advent box from the basement. I put fresh candles in the wreath. I set up the fragile Nativity set on the server (not a computer server -- maybe you call it a sideboard or a buffet instead of a server?) and the Little People Nativity set in the floor. I pulled down the breviaries and asked Joe to help me move the markers.

"What's that?" he asked, gesturing to the fat spider hauling its oversized belly along the table away from us. 

"It's a spider," I told him calmly. "Grab a tissue and dispatch him." 

I wondered for a moment what that spider had been living on, but I was focused on getting ribbons in the right places.

I was surprised to see a tiny bug crawl away from the breviary in my hands, but I didn't worry until Elwood squashed another. When a third and then a fourth appeared in short order I said, "This is not good."

You guys, I think we have book lice. I also think I might prefer head lice, because I know what to do about those. (Attention, Gladlyville head lice, or at least the Gladlyville head lice who read this blog: that is not an invitation.) (This paragraph is making my head itch.) (Maybe I wouldn't actually prefer head lice.)

But! Book lice! You guys, do you know how large a book louse population we could sustain in this house? Here, I will give you a glimpse from where I'm sitting.

This is one wall of our dining room. There are many, many more books in this house.

We said Evening Prayer together, and it was very nice and no book lice nibbled on my fingers while we were praying (which is good, because the peace that passeth understanding might or might not be the peace that withstandeth creepy-crawlies on my actual body), and then Elwood said, "Let's put the books in the oven."

I was not sure this was a good idea, because the last time I thought about using the oven for pest control I was dissuaded. But! Book lice! So into the oven they went, where they exuded a faint smell of melting plastic but no actual smoke or flames. (Is it bad that I have taught my children that the beeping of the smoke alarm is their cue to chant "It's not a party 'til the smoke alarm goes off!" in unison? I suspect the fire marshal would disapprove.)

Now I don't know where to put them, though, because I am still suspicious. I don't want to put them back in their original spot in case any escapees are still lurking there. I don't want to put them in with the other books, because failure to quarantine is exactly how bubonic plague devastated Europe and do I look like a person who wants bubonic plague? (or book lice?)

Perhaps I will put them in the toaster oven overnight and wait for you all to suggest a better plan. Surely there aren't any book lice in the toaster oven. I'm counting on you, internet pals. This could be ugly.

Guest post by my favorite and most abominable brother

Dear ladies of Most Gladly,

I am here tonight to talk to you about waxing your moustaches. Are you into moustaches? Does moustache actually have an "o" in it, or is that a Canadianism? If you are working on a fabulous handlebar moustache you will find that once you have achieved a certain length you will need a little touch of wax to keep it out of your mouth. Most of the commercial products actually have a hint of rosewater, a wonderful surprise known only to people who kiss you.

I have also been tasked with discussing flannel shirts. I am in fact currently wearing a flannel shirt, which is at least third hand and terribly comfotable. The exceptionally nice thing about flannel shirts is that they are very warm, which is useful if you have come to visit your sister in the frozen wastelands of the American Prairie. (My editor wanted me to write "the frozen north" but that would offend our Canadian friends, who are wearing at least two flannel shirts each.) Are you cold? Burn your moustache and wear a flannel shirt.

Do I need another paragraph or am I done? This type of meta discussion would normally be conducted outside of the typist's box, but that would be dreary, like the plains of the frozen American prairie. Which are actually wonderful and beautiful and full of delicious food just growing right out of the ground. Also flannel. And wax. My sister said that she could grow anything in her garden but I did not believe her at first.

My nephew thinks that you might also like to know about the quantum Hall effect. I remember during Jamie's PhD days how the readers of Most Gladly eagerly awaited her discussions of R and statistical miscegenation so that they would finally have the time to read another blog instead. [Brief interlude in which the control-freak sister wrests back the laptop to type "HEY DON'T MAKE FUN OF MY BLOG I'M STILL OLDER THAN YOU and then hands back the keyboard to perpetuate the illusion of maturity].,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, There are a large number of commas in this paragraph about the quantum Hall effect because the comma key is damaged and I was afraid it was food and tried to scrape it off without anyone noticing. We'll just keep it to ourselves, shall we? Anyway, the quantum Hall effect is exactly like the classical Hall effect, where there is a force on a current whose direction depends on the sign of the charge carriers inside the material, except that like everything else in quantum mechanics the quantum Hall effect comes in lumps.  It's named for Mr. Hall. There's even a fractional quantum Hall effect which comes in smaller lumps; that was the subject of an excellent book by Nobelist Robert Laughlin whose title I cannot remember at the moment.

Moustaches. Jamie's is not coming along very quickly. Oldest boy has one on his chin which will look quite fine in a few more years.

Monday Night Bullets

• Tonight I was browsing through Crescent Dragonwagon's cornbread cookbook when I saw that her caldo verde recipe calls for a cup of garlic cloves. HOW did I not notice this before? HOW have I not made this soup already: chorizo, kale, white beans, and -- did I mention? -- a CUP of garlic cloves. I think I was born to eat this soup. I think that once I make this soup, all I will have to do if anyone gives me crap about anything between now and January is breathe on him.
• Crescent Dragonwagon is about the only person on the planet who could sell me on a cornbread cookbook. We have a compact kitchen, and my cookbooks are confined to a little shelf. If something new comes in, something old has to go.
• Here, look, I will post a picture or two, even though nobody is reading this blog for the photography. I realized after I posted last night that my sampling error was pretty conspicuous in hindsight: anyone who loves video posts is probably going to skitter quickly away from this blog with its 1000-word screeds on... who knows what. 
• When we moved into this house, Elwood built shelves all along one kitchen wall, stretching all the way up to the ceiling. Underneath the butcher block table he also jury-rigged a cookbook shelf that keeps the cookbooks handy but relatively free of spills. Isn't that clever? 
• I am also putting in a picture of the cookbook spines, because I love to see what cookbooks other people keep on their shelves.
• Remember when I mentioned that I was making a cookbook for our favorite babysitter? It wound up costing, like, twelve cents more to have a second one printed up. So I did -- it's one of the black comb bindings, unhelpfully. It's been unexpectedly fantastic. If the kids want to know how mom would make pancakes or brownies or palak paneer, boom -- they have an immediate answer.
• Tomorrow: Knitting As Metaphor. You know you can't wait.

Germ Alert

I was waiting at the pharmacy this evening, flipping through Real Simple while they counted out my beta blockers. There's an article this month on staying safe in hotel rooms. Did you know that hotel rooms contain [shock, horror] germs?

Am I the only one who thinks the advice to spray down a hotel toilet with Lysol is a little odd? I mean, sure, I'd be worried if room service were going to lay out my meal on the toilet seat. I'm not so worried about using it for its intended purpose. One wonders-- does the author carry his own toilet seat to work every day? Does he spritz restaurant bathrooms with Lysol? What about when he's visiting friends' houses? (And does he hire out?)

Also weird: pre-cleaning the shower before you climb in. Dude, if I have to clean a bathtub it is NOT a vacation. I might prefer to contract foot fungus than to clean a bathtub on vacation.

Even weirder: do NOT sleep under the bedspread. Gather it up in your gloved hands and toss it in a corner. Tell the housekeeping staff NOT to put it on the bed during the stay. While I don't think I'd want to look at a hotel bedspread under a black light, surely it's overkill to treat it like the cloak of Hercules.

I wondered if I had picked up Real Simple For The Immunocompromised And Deeply Paranoid, or perhaps a print version of The Onion, but it seems to be an actual story intended for actual readers. Did they run short of Faux Simple Things You Can Serve For Thanksgiving To Wow Your Guests And Jack Up Your Stress Level? It would seem so.

Haste makes disgraced

Disgraced is too strong, I suppose, but let me know if you have a better rhyme.

I am going to do this NaBloPoMo thing, dernit, but I am a busy lady and I am squeezing blogging into the window between tucking in the younger kids and my self-imposed off-the-computer deadline. I was looking back at my post from Saturday to see how hasty it sounded, and I caught myself in a mistake.

Brachiopods, it turns out, may have turned up around the same time as the herrerasaurus, but there's an important difference: brachiopods aren't extinct. They are alive and well in an ocean near you. If I was aiming for "a thing that has been dead for a long time," I should have said brachiosaurus. You can tell it's been a few years since I had a 4-year-old boy. Next thing you know I'll be forgetting how to spell compsognathus.

Light & Momentary: come for the nostalgia, stay for the zoology.

Time to switch to decaf

Greetings,internet, it's Caffeinated Jamie reporting for blogging duty.

You would think that I would no longer be surprised by the way the end of the fall semester kicks me in the pants and puts me behind on Christmas preparations, but guess what? The fall semester kicked me in the pants and put me behind on Christmas preparations! Who knew?

I am so SO SO grateful for my job, and at the same time I am feeling the difference between the assistant professor gig and the NTT lecturer gig. Last year, when I was done with grading and letters of recommendation, I was really DONE until January. This year I have to submit a productivity report on January 6, and I am hoping to squeeze a few more items in there between now and then. Even as I am typing this, I am wondering how much effort to expend. They will tell me I've made adequate progress whether or not I get those things done, and it might be better to make more gingerbread men than to read more articles on morphology. We shall see.

BUT! (Caffeinated Jamie loves the caps lock key.) I am not yet at the point of making decisions about optional activities. I have to finish the letters of recommendation. Today, my friends, the letters of recommendation are going down. Also slated for demolition: the teacher gifts, a belated TA gift, and an attempt to recover from an exasperating Etsy shopping fail. (By demolition I mean only that I am demolishing that part of my to-do list, not that I am going to smash the gifts into bits.) And even if the shopping doesn't quite get finished, I am going for a run. Do you know when I last went for a run? It was Saturday the 7th, and it was a pitiful little run at that.

You guys, I am in rabid gerbil mode as I type this, flitting from one tab to the next, and I clicked over to Facebook when I heard that little BOO-OOP that means someone did something I might be interested in. I have a Facebook friend from the UK who was talking about large families. I clicked through to one of the commenters' pages, thinking she sounded like someone I might like to know. Her FB page pointed to her blog, where I was surprised by a content warning. "She must be writing about birth and breastfeeding," I thought. "Stupid Blogspot." Only-- SURPRISE! It wasn't about breastfeeding; it was a blog promoting her "romance" novels. While I did not linger there, I have to say the content warning appears to be well-deserved. That will teach me to make assumptions about nursing moms with large families.

OKAY, she said as the caps lock key pled for mercy. I am going to SIT on the rabid gerbil and bang out these letters. It's the last day of preschool for Stella and I must use it well.

If you are looking for something less desultory, may I suggest an old post on today's O antiphon?

All is vanity

Before this year I didn't have any gray in my hair at all. I'm 43, so I knew it wouldn't last forever. 

I mean, I sort of knew it wouldn't last forever. 

As a kid I had a horror of going gray. Someone reliable (maybe my mother) had told me that when redheads went gray their hair turned an unattractive pink color, and that dye for redheads was hopelessly unsatisfactory. I remember being relieved that I wouldn't have to worry about it for a long time. At the same time I dreaded the future in which my hair would be irremediably ugly.

I had persuaded myself that I wouldn't go gray for a while, because my dad's hair was hardly gray at all even in his mid-sixties. More recently, I read somewhere reliable (it was on the internet, so it must be true) that red hair turns an intermediate color before the gray begins its inexorable takeover. My hair is pretty much the same color it's always been, so I thought I had some time.

All this to say: I've been a little bummed to discover some gray in recent weeks.

It's not like me to be bummed about getting older. For years I've tried to quash tendencies toward vanity. I've always been a little scornful about our culture's veneration of youth. I am candid about my age and I don't mind the lines around my eyes. (Mostly.) Maybe it's because being a redhead has always been part of my identity. Maybe it's because I've never done anything chemical to my hair, aside from turning it gray or blue for high school plays. 

Last summer I was talking to my 8-year-old about getting older. I can't remember how it came up, but I said, in what I thought was a calm and pleasant way, "In a few years my hair will fade and then it will turn gray. That's how it goes when ladies get older." Petely, who is usually a go-with-the-flow kind of guy, was emphatic. "No," he said, "you can't let that happen. How will I find you in a crowd if you don't have red hair? You're my mom and you have red hair. You're going to have to dye it."

Part of me thinks I should go read Ecclesiastes for a reality check. At the same time I am checking out the Just For Redheads henna selection.

Are you going gray? How old are you? Do you camouflage it or just roll with it?

JamieBot

Simcha FIsher's link is cracking me up.

taught her an amputee who is the new breastfeeding study

Seven days when I asked a room that holds >400 people. Yikes. I have the schedule wrong, Epiphany carnival until the finished product needs a bath now.

Gestating babies are breeding when I'm not going to announce that one.

You're taking on from her current obsession with grated cheese like, eight or a big number.

is looking unsuccessfully for me while my married name was a scant quarter-teaspoon of baking powder, and Andrew played electric guitar.

Baby needs a funeral tomorrow and they needed a mudfest?

Pandora insists on breastfeeding duration and 700 on getting pictures into albums, the spring semester!

needs ideas on decontaminating her dolly, who changed his bday!

highly recommends some chipotle Tabasco for breakfast with my knuckles.

Psyching myself up for the Mongolian death worm?

I sing that Henry VIII wasn't satisfied with destroying the way to symbolize the fire of the CSA greens can get group projects graded and pie Make a long run and a Cubs or 'sperimental.

Housekeeping

Some people seem to be naturally endowed with the motivation to keep their homes sparkly clean.

I am not.

For a long time I just lived in messy spaces, but when my oldest son was born I felt terribly guilty that I "wasn't working" and still wasn't keeping my house clean. I read Don Aslett; I read Confessions of an Organized Homemaker. I remember thinking, Dude, that lady vacuums her house twice a week. That's not normal-clean; that's OCD.

I was a FlyLady early adopter; a friend shared the link in late 1999 or early 2000. I didn't tackle the whole program, but for a few years I was pretty rigid about my FlyLady routines. Christmas fell on a Monday in 2000 and I was genuinely at a loss. But I'm supposed to clean my house on Monday! What will I do?? For reasons I can no longer fathom, cleaning it on Tuesday seemed like an impossibility. Any Flybaby can tell you that Monday, not Tuesday, is weekly home blessing day.

It's mostly a good thing that I've become less rigid, but my return to grad school and the workforce (coupled with the growth of our family, and our move out of a 650-sq ft apartment) has meant that our home has never been as clean as it was in 2000-2002. When I started planning for life with a tenure-track job, I announced that we'd probably try to find some cleaning help.

My second son thought this was a terrible idea. "Why," he said, "would we buy clothes from Goodwill and then hire a maid?!" I did not process his meaning at first. I said, "Are you saying you'd rather have new clothes?" "No!" he exclaimed, full of disdain for the idea of paying perfectly good money for clothes that he'd then have to break in himself, without even knowing if they'd wear well. He said, "It's good that we live simply. It's good to buy secondhand clothes. And we should clean our own house."

I said, "Well, I'm going to need some help with that." (First I said to myself, "That is not something I ever envisioned coming out of a teenaged mouth. But hey-- live and learn.")

Our current strategy is an amalgamation of ideas. We sat down and assigned points to every item on our standard housecleaning list. Cleaning the glass is worth 2 points, because it's quick and easy and nobody minds doing it. (That's just mirrors and doors, not windows.) Mopping is worth 10 points, because it's a drag and our kitchen floor is so ugly that it doesn't even look better when you're done. (I am probably the only one who needs the Demoralized Calibration, actually.)

At first I told my second son that I'd pay him to ride herd. The hard part for me wasn't doing the actual mopping. It was dividing the work in a way that worked reasonably well for all parties, and making sure it was done to a reasonable standard, and reminding people that whining is unbecoming of Christian boys, and reminding people's mothers (who should know better by now) that yelling doesn't really teach Christian boys anything good about how to respond to situations that make them unhappy. Having someone else run the show worked phenomenally well for me, but he was pretty tired at the end of it all.

So we're doing it differently. We used to pay skinflint-level allowances, and we announced that we would be doubling them with the expectation that every kids would step up his (or her) level of responsibility for the state of the house. The new jobs are supposed to work like this:

Oldest: folds Monday laundry, cleans a bathtub, vacuums own room and little upstairs hall, helps 4yo to pick up toys from her floor and dustmop it afterward (he does an AMAZING Tom Sawyer routine with her: "What are you doing with that dustmop? I am the only person allowed to dustmop in here! Put that down!" as she giggles hysterically and dustmops frenetically).

Next oldest: folds Tuesday laundry, cleans a bathtub, vacuums own room, empties all trash.

Middle: folds Friday laundry, vacuums living room/dining room, takes out recycling, dustmops own room.

Youngest boy: sorts all socks, dusts, cleans glass, vacuums office/music room.

Mom: folds Wednesday/Saturday laundry, collects and washes sheets, dustmops bedroom, allegedly mops kitchen (but don't pin her down on this one), deals with accumulation of clutter from flat surfaces while wishing for a secretary.

Dad: cooks most dinners these days.

There are some holes in this system. The steps rarely get vacuumed, and right now they look like a moribund dust muskox (something much larger than a bunny) hauled its sorry soon-to-be carcass down the steps while pulling out great tufts of its belly fur en route. The kids say, "Already? I just vacuumed a week ago," which is a sad testament to the previous state of affairs.

But despite the change in my working hours, people have clean clothes and the flat surfaces are not piled high with junk (though OH MY GOODNESS is that a relentless unsung struggle) and the kids are pleased to have a bit more cash in hand. We'll call it a win for now. How does it work at your house?