March of kindness finale and, hopefully, a new season

This month Dionna at Codename: Mama put out a challenge – to spread kindness daily through March.  I was totally up for it so I made my list of kindness goals.  I ticked off most of them, or at least made dents in them.  But as it turned out, March became a month of trying to be kind enough to myself to get through the day.

We moved here from Calgary in October and since then it’s been a whirlwind.  We moved into a sublet apartment, then 2 weeks later bought our first house that we moved into just after Christmas.  So it’s taken until this month for the full effect of the move to really sink in.  And boy, did it.

I’m completely alone here.  I mean, we know people.  Every weekend we have relatives visiting.  But as a mom, I’m so desperately alone.  In Calgary I knew so many moms.  And not just any moms, but moms who didn’t look at me like I was insane for doing things the way I do them.  Moms who were actually just like me.

I also had places I could go to and things I could do.  Here, not only do I not yet know where kid-friendly stuff is located, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t get there if I did know.  This city is so huge that if you don’t have a car, most of it is out of reach.  The zoo is two and a half HOURS by transit.  Driving Mr. Fair so I can use the car means $30 in 407 charges… a bit steep just to get out of the house.

I’ve applied to the midwifery program for this September.  If I get in (I did get invited for an interview, yay!) I’ll need flexible childcare from someone I trust.  If I don’t, we’ve agreed I’ll offer childcare to cover some bills while I start doula/childbirth educator training.  In Calgary, thanks to those moms I knew and the fabulous local attachment parenting community, either situation would have been a snap.  Here… not so much.  I decided to put some ads out offering my dayhome services just in case I don’t get in.  After 3 weeks, I haven’t had a single reply.

I know I’m wallowing here.  I’m trying to focus on enjoying the time I have with Little Man.  If I get into school I’ll be thrust back into the world so fast I’ll probably be wishing for this quiet isolation.  But the magnitude of what I left behind just sort of hit me like a ton of bricks.  And add to that the fact that I have to sit here and wait for an admissions committee to decide my future.  I feel trapped, lonely and powerless.  So I spent March holding out for a new, better season.

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Real, live, real food

Disclaimer: If you’re a food-lover and prone to foodgasms like I am, the content of this post may be considered pornographic… although my photography isn’t wonderful enough to do the food justice.

This post could also have been titled “How to make a complicated recipe even more complicated” because that’s precisely what I did.  The recipe is Italian Bread and Cabbage Soup from Jamie Oliver At Home.  One of the best cookbooks in the history of cookbooks, in my opinion.  And this is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten.  But Jamie’s recipes aren’t exactly quick – at least not the ones in this book – so it’s a good thing it also feeds us for three solid days.

What’s so complicated about this particular dish is the number of times you have to cook and then set aside, which happens to be my cooking pet peeve because it uses so many extra dishes.  But anyway, away I went, boiling the entire head of cabbage and the bunch of kale and setting them aside.  Frying bacon, mixing in boiled cabbage and setting it all aside.  Rubbing garlic onto a bazillion slices of toasted bread… and setting them aside.

The giant bowl of greens (boiled then set aside) next to the delicious bread (garlic-rubbed then set aside).

But you might know by now I’m a bit picky about my food being real.  I’m positively anal about Little Man’s food being real.  One thing I’m really not ready for to him eat yet is factory bread.  The ingredient list on most bread packages makes me feel sick, so he only eats bread if I make it at home.  Thus, I spent the morning making lovely whole wheat italian bread that I would sacrifice to the soup.  That’s it on the baking stone.

I also don’t love commercial soup bases.  If you get the liquid versions, they’re disgustingly salty.  The bouillon cubes are not only disgustingly salty, but also full of hydrogenated oils and food dyes.  So I make my own.  In this case, 3 quarts of it. I keep a ‘stock box’ in my freezer to collect stems from greens, carrot tops, asparagus bottoms, meat bones…  Every week or so it gets full enough to make a little pot of stock that I stick back in the freezer for days like yesterday.  No salt, no food dye.

So once I brewed up some stock, baked some bread, par-cooked everything else and set it aside, I assembled the whole thing in layers like a trifle.  Whew!  Like I said, luckily it’s a huge dish (as evidenced by the barely noticeable dent made in it by filling my bowl) and a delicious one (just ask Little Man, who scarfed it down)!  Yay for cooking from scratch

Glass of wine with that bowl of deliciousness? Don't mind if I do...

Don't you take my cabbage!

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Minimal Switch

A few years ago I started to see the light about our overconsumption.  At the time I was unemployed and broke so, admittedly, my initial reduction of consumption was out of necessity.  But money aside, there were some other daily occurrences that gave me an inkling that I had more than I needed.

Zen copyright of Josefe aka Hipnosapo

I never had JUST clean laundry.  This was in part due to procrastination, but it was also because of a major complication involved with having all of my clothes laundered: I had nowhere to put them.  I had a 4-foot wide closet, a chest of drawers, two IKEA Antonius racks stacked, coat hooks at the front door and a space bag under my bed.  But I couldn’t fit all of my clothes into this space.  I used my laundry baskets like storage.

It took me at least 3 full minutes to pick out underwear in the morning.  I had probably 50+ pairs of underwear (and that’s just panties, not bras!) and most of them I either didn’t like or they didn’t fit.  I had a pair of underwear given to me for Christmas a decade earlier.  A DECADE!  It took me so long to pick underwear because I had to sift through all of the ones I couldn’t/wouldn’t wear to find one of the select few that I could.

We lived in constant fear of friends dropping by on short (or no) notice.  Our house was a perpetual pig-sty.  All the time.  It took several hours of non-stop, team-effort cleaning to get it respectable enough for guests.  There was just so. much. stuff.  There was, in fact so much stuff that we also had to skip a lot of opportunities to do fun things with our friends out of the house.  We often found ourselves saying no to outings because we needed to devote the entire weekend to making a dent in our household upkeep.  We knew if we didn’t, it would only get worse by the next weekend.

But the thing that really nagged at me the most was how utterly immobilized I was by all of the stuff.  I didn’t enjoy my home.  I couldn’t use my space.  I couldn’t.  I couldn’t deal with any of it, so I would come in my door, walk the narrow pathway through the stuff to the clear spot on the couch and watch TV until bed.  I never wanted to cook a nice meal.  I had a sewing machine I rarely got out because I’d have to clear the desk first.

I decided it was time to make a switch, a minimal switch.

So when I got a job, I made sure our spending stayed reigned in.  In under 3 years, we’ve quintupled our net worth.  We bought very little for the baby before he was born.  In fact, our biggest single expenditure in that department was the $1000 lawyer fee to have our wills done.  I no longer sift through undies.  All of my underwear, bras, socks and cloth pads fit in ONE dresser drawer.  The remaining 3 drawers house the rest of my everyday (i.e. not fancy or special-function) clothing.

I’m working on getting my home to the point of containing things that make me feel happy, inspired, even a bit zen.  There’s no upper limit on how many things will be in our house, just as long as the stuff doesn’t take me past my upper limit of stress.  I’ve made a lot of progress so far, but there’s still a lot to be done…

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Why wallpaper paste?

One of the things that has plagued my highly rational mind since before we even had Little Man is the rampant preference of wallpaper paste as a first solid food for babies.  Countless times I’ve seen previously intelligent people stuff it into their babies mouths without a shred of thought.  When Little Man turned six months (actually, even before that) people asked me constantly if I was feeding him wallpaper paste yet.  Whenever I answered “no, actually I’m feeding him food instead” they look at me as though I had three heads.  One very wonderful mom with a baby only hours older than mine actually said “Vegetables?!  As a first food?  Not wallpaper paste?!” with complete shock on her face and indignation in her voice.

It baffles me completely and like so many other things to do with parenting, it can only be called asinine.  But forgive me, because I probably have you pretty baffled by now.  Allow me to clarify: when I say “wallpaper paste”, what I’m referring to is “infant cereal”.  Of course no one actually calls it wallpaper paste, but that would be a much more apt description than cereal.  For starters, it looks, feels and tastes like wallpaper paste.  Furthermore, it’s about as nutritious as wallpaper paste even if you do consider the spray-on vitamins it contains nutritious, which I don’t.  But above all of this, the fact is that you actually could stick paper to your wall with it.  People have been using flour and water pastes for that purpose (not to mention papier machéing and kindergarten crafting) for ages and that’s all that infant cereal is: flour.  Refined, white, flour.

My dislike of infant cereal, though, goes beyond its nutritional inadequacy.  It offends me because it is a hallmark of the thoughtless consumerism that pervades every aspect of our society, including our parenting.  Parents feed their babies this stuff not because they think it’s a good choice, but because they don’t think, period.

If parents actually realized they were feeding their babies a bowl of flour, they would simultaneously realize that the little packets of it with the cute teddy bears is merely a highly overpriced doppelganger of the large sacks of unbranded flours available in the baking aisle and serve their babies from the big pack instead.  But parents don’t realize.  They see the snazzy nutrition claims on the little packet and simply believe it’s special.

If infant cereal were truly a culturally-based decision, then we would see more adults eating gruel themselves because it would be a culturally normalized food.  But I rarely see adults eat anything that resembles what they feed their babies.  In fact, gruel is so foreign to most adults that they probably wouldn’t know how to make it if it didn’t come in the little packet with mixing instructions.

If parents were feeding infant cereal out of a genuine belief of the healthfulness of processed flour, then they probably wouldn’t be spending a good chunk of their adult lives investing in low-carb diet literature.

If parents were following medical advice, then why are they choosing to ignore the section of the recommendations that encourages feeding iron-rich whole foods like legumes and meat?

No, I’m convinced that parents aren’t thinking about these things.  Instead they follow the product marketing of major multinational corporations whose first (and often only) concern is not infant nutrition, but profit.  Or maybe it’s something else.  Maybe our need to fit in in this new parenting role makes us more prone to following trends like sheep and too scared to apply the independent thought we’re capable of.  Either way it makes me sad.  Sad for the babies eating this crap, but also sad for the parents who love them and who will look back years from now when (I sincerely hope) real food will reign again and realize that they fed their precious babes wallpaper paste.

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Things that make you go… huh? March 18

I frequently have tidbits I feel like sharing.  They’re often off-topic to this blog, sometimes I’ve Tweeted them through the week, sometimes they’re too long for Twitter (but not long enough for their own blog post) and sometimes it’s just a recounting of the adorableness of Little Man.  Either way, I collect them all here and send them out for some Friday fun.

It’s been a long time since I’ve given blood.  Now that I’m eligible again, I’m really looking forward to it.  What I’m not looking forward to is the ridiculously invasive sexual history questionnaire.  Because really, if my ex-boyfriend had been a heroine-shooting gay prostitute in the Congo in the late seventies… do you really think he’d tell me?

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It was nice enough this week to spend some time playing outside with Little Man!  So far he’s tried to eat numerous wood chips, rocks and even a worm carcass.  Yup, definitely my kid.

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So last week we were making fun of Suri Cruise for having a pacifier in her mouth, this week it’s penis candy.  Poor kid.

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My heart so goes out to everyone in Japan.  But I do hope we’re not forgetting that there’s big-ass war brewing in Libya and that Egypt and Tunisia are currently sans government.  Things could go very badly, very quickly and I can’t stop thinking about the millions of already poor civilians who have very little capacity to tolerate this.

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Asininity

Today I heard a doctor on a widely watched Canadian TV show use one of the many asinine statements that I hear spewed at parents all the time.  Why is it that as soon as someone has a baby, we think we can tell them the most completely absurd things and they’ll buy it?  But more importantly, why do they so often buy it??

It infuriates me to no end when I hear the following things and I really, really wish they’d drop completely from our language.

“Human pacifier” This statement is the definition of moronic.  The pacifier exists to be a plastic human, not the other way around.  Anyone using this term is either a complete idiot or a complete a**hole.  (This is top of the list because it sparked the list.)

“Self-soothe” What a load of bull.  Most adults I know can’t “self soothe”.  They can cope, because they are physically and mentally able to use a number of coping methods.  They exercise, eat, drink, take drugs, have sex, yell…  I’ve never seen an adult who is overwhelmed, terrified, furious, starving, or exhausted simply buck up and “self soothe”.  They certainly couldn’t do it while locked inside the very thing that is making them so upset.  Yet, we expect a baby who can’t even roll over, let alone run, shag or fix themselves a martini to do it.

“They’ll NEVER learn to sleep by themselves” Why is this skill considered to be so different than others?  People don’t walk around moaning that a 12 month old who doesn’t walk yet surely NEVER will just because another baby had already mastered it.  That would be ridiculous.  We know it takes time to learn to walk alone, and that every baby takes a different amount of time.  And why do we put so much emphasis on teaching the skill of independent sleep that we’re willing to do it so harshly?  I’ve never seen anyone put a preschooler on a 10-speed road bike without training wheels because otherwise they’ll NEVER learn to ride a bike without “props”.  Yet I hear parents talk proudly about how they lock their kids in solitary confinement in a bare crib upwards of 15 hours per day (62% of baby’s life!) for that very reason.  Ludicrous.

“Tit” Let’s get this one straight once and for all, people.  This word is VULGAR slang for a breast and it has a SEXUAL connotation.  If you use this word in connection to breastfeeding, you’re implying that the breastfeeder is engaging sexually with the nursling.  I do not “whip my tit out” to feed my baby, my baby does not “suck on my tit”.  We (breastfeeders) are not pedophiles, we’re just mammals.  If you don’t like it, feel free to join another taxonomic group.

How about you, what are the drive-you-crazy words/tips/terms you hear about parenting?

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March of kindness half-way mark

Luckily it’s not really the half-way mark since March has 31 days, but we’re still two-weeks in and I’ve got a ways to go.  Anyway, here’s a quick list of the commitments I’ve achieved already.

Kiva loan. Check.  Not only that, I convinced my Dad to get in on the action and he mad *wait for it* SEVEN loans!!

Give something away. The Goodwill box is full to the brim.

Sign up to glean. Check.

Reconnect. Two down, two to go.

I’ve also had a couple of unexpected chances come up.  I’ve picked up garbage around my ‘hood a couple of times, pet sat for friends and in-laws, and struck up a conversation with a neighbour.  All in all, not bad!

For some more inspiration, here some of the other participants:

1. http://www.urbanmoms.ca/multiple_musings/2011/03/kindness—day-1.html
3. http://brodogg.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness.html
4. http://www.gardenvarietymama.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness.html
5. http://momgrooves.com/2011/03/march-forth-into-kindness/
6. http://schmoopybaby.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness.html
7. http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KIYYIMKLWSOIJOBUPPOG6DIYVI/blog/articles/259796?listPage=index
8. http://www.ithoughtiknewmama.com/2011/03/random-acts-of-kindness-month-for-my-husband/
9. http://abeautifulmess-workinprogress.blogspot.com/2011/03/doing-what-is-best-for-my-family.html
10. http://notsoaveragehippiemommy.blogspot.com/2011/03/code-name-mamas-march-of-kindness.html
11. http://livingpeacefullywithchildren.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/29-days-of-giving-and-the-continuing-march-for-kindness/
12. http://www.anktangle.com/2011/02/march-of-kindness.html
13. http://tinyurl.com/4wxpmv2
14. http://mccrenshaw.blogspot.com/2011/03/whats-that-smell-march-of-kindness.html
15. http://touchstonez.com/2011/03/10/march-of-kindness-the-first-ten-days/
16. http://purpledancingdahlias.blogspot.com/2011/03/month-of-kindness.html
17. http://hybridrastamama.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness-some-ideas-for.html
18. http://jjgregoryfamily.blogspot.com/2011/03/code-name-mamas-march-of-kindness.html
19. http://talesofatiredmommy.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness-week-one-round-up.html
20. http://fineandfair.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness.html
21. http://monkeybuttjunction.com/2011/02/28/march-for-kindness-2/
22. http://reedfamilyjourney.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness-code-name-mama.html
23. http://becomingcrunchy.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/march-of-kindness/
24. http://redlegsix.xanga.com/742397794/march-of-kindness/
25. http://teslagirl360.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness.html
26. http://yayforhome.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-of-kindness.html

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Dirty food habits die hard

I agonized over whether to fess up to this or not.  And to be honest, I was leaning quite heavily to the not side.  I didn’t want to reveal to everyone that I’m a fraud.  Can you blame me?  But I’m going to do it.  I’m going to come clean.  Yup, right now.  On three: one, two, two and a half… THREE.

As I was scheduling my post about cleaning up my diet, I was also cooking a box of Kraft Dinner.

There it is.

As I said, I was loathe to uncover my dirty little secret to everyone.  That is, until it occurred to me that there is no ‘everyone’.  In fact, there’s precisely ‘no one’.  At the time of publishing this post, I have exactly one reader, who I strongly suspect is my Dad.  So I need to get over myself.

Then I remembered something else: like I said at the start of the other post, cleaning up after 30 years of dirty food is CHALLENGING.  I can’t switch it off in a day, even if it is for the sake of my baby but I’ve made some serious progress in the last 20-odd months.  Pretending there isn’t still work to be done would only cheapen my achievement.

So in the interest of being honest – with myself and any future readers – here’s a list of my worst dirty food habits and why it’s so hard for me to let them go.

Kraft Dinner. Obviously, since it’s the inspiration for this post.  What can I say – like any good Canadian kid I grew up with this stuff.  It was also a staple of my university years.  It’s the one and only food I want when I’m sick.  It’s my special treat when Mr. Fair is away on business.  I even had my family mail me a few boxes when I lived in England.  But oddly enough it’s also the vice that I’ve had the most success in beating.  I used to eat 4-6 boxes a week.  The last couple of years, I’ve pared that down to 4-6 per YEAR.  I’m seriously proud of that.

The fake peanut butter. Again, the peanut butter of my childhood was the corn syrup and icing sugar variety.  We’ve switched to the real stuff in our house, but neither of us loves it and frankly, it’s a bitch to spread.  On a recent trip to my Grandma’s, I relished a slice of Skippy-coated toast.

Ice cream, especially soft serve. This one is mostly pragmatic: as much as I love making things from scratch, I’m not willing to make ice cream.  Aside from the time, I just can’t devote precious kitchen storage to a one-trick machine like an ice cream maker.  And even if I did, I still couldn’t make soft serve.  This will probably be one of the few industrial foods that will continue to appear in my diet.

Chocolate bars. Giving up Nestle for ethical reasons has helped a lot, but there are still lots of non-Nestle chocolate bars.  And let’s be honest, they taste good.

Pizza. We’re about to start making our own pizza (dough included) so this should progress pretty quickly.  But the thing with pizza is that it’s the food I go for when I’m fed up with cooking.  Even if I’ve got frozen shells, I’ll still have to cut up toppings and grate cheese and all that other stuff so the Delissios are still going to be tempting.

There you have it, my food Kryptonite.  I hope I’ll someday kick these in their industrial butts, but for now I’m focusing on the easier targets and (trying to be) proud of it.

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Things that make you go… huh? – March 11

I frequently have tidbits I feel like sharing.  They’re often off-topic to this blog, sometimes I’ve Tweeted them through the week, sometimes they’re too long for Twitter (but not long enough for their own blog post) and sometimes it’s just a recounting of the adorableness of Little Man.  Either way, I collect them all here and send them out for some Friday fun.

Went to IKEA last week and watched a woman spoon feed a whole lot of IKEA “ice cream” to a baby who was at most the same age as Little Man (i.e. 9 mos).  WTF?

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Is it just me, or is Charlie Sheen wearing a rug??

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Mike Huckabee thinks Natalie Portman is glamorizing single motherhood, eh?  Bristol Palin, on the other hand, is a hero for not having an abortion, I suppose?

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Is there anything cuter than baby bed hair?  I think not.

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There’s another mad cow case in Alberta. Seriously, can we stop grinding up dead herbivores and feeding them to the not-yet-dead herbivores?  Is that really too much to ask?

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From the Twittersphere:   “The person was giving me stink eye {for BFing in public}, while she poured ice coffee in her infants bottle.” via @mama2_3penguins

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Small Steps to a Cleaner Diet

Cleaning up your diet after years (or decades) of industrial, processed foods is a challenging endeavor.  It won’t happen overnight and sometimes you won’t know how to navigate your way.  These are five of the things I found really useful in getting started on this journey.

1. Switch your Salt. Table salt has nothing but sodium chloride and iodine.  It’s refined, gives no health benefits and even though it’s salt, it’s bland!!  Salt is supposed to contain a variety of minerals, many of which are important for health but are lacking in the Western Diet (zinc, iron or magnesium anyone?).  Switch to a raw sea salt and you’ll immediately notice a difference in the flavour of your food.

2. Give in to your weakness. I used to have a huge struggle with every winter grocery trip.  I wanted to eat good whole foods AND I wanted to eat local foods but, being Canadian, there’s only so much available in the winter.  And being a foodie, I can only take so many nights of turnips.  I found I was buying the “boring” winter vegetables but I’d put off including them in a meal until the end of the week, then I’d talk my husband into ordering pizza because “there’s nothing in the fridge.”  When I got pregnant with Little Man, I realized I had to put my own health first and the planet’s second.  And then I had an epiphany – in terms of environmental impact, I’m positive that it’s better to eat the completely unprocessed peruvian asparagus than to eat the frozen pizza filled with manufactured chemicals that’s still topped with Californian tomatoes, and Chinese pepperoni.  The moral of the story: buy and eat the real foods you want, when you want them.  Get used to real first.  You can tackle the rest later.

3. Make hay while the sun shines. When it’s asparagus season in Canada, I eat it DAILY!  Maybe even twice a day.  Even at the office though I knew the consequences for my next trip to the ladies room!  (Or is that TMI?!)  By filling up when it’s there, I’m less likely to miss it in November when the Peruvian stuff comes out, thus helping me with point #2.

4. Ditch the dressing.  A clean diet is sure to include a lot of green salads, so don’t go and ruin it by pouring xanthan gum, hydrolized soybean oil and diglycerides all over it.  It’s ridiculously easy to make your own salad dressing.  Here’s how: Olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice, salt – all in proportions to taste (Jamie Oliver says 2 parts oil to 1 part acid… I prefer a 1:1 ratio).  Want some variety?  Switch the vinegar flavour.  Throw in some oregano.  Add a clove of garlic.  Or half a shallot.  Or mustard.  Or mustard AND garlic.  You’ll never think salad is boring again.

5. Chew the fat, literally. If you’ve tried to be healthy (or to diet) within an industrialized system, then you’re probably used to skimping on natural fats only to replace them with artificial flavour enhancers.  If you try to switch to a clean diet while keeping your industrialized ideas that chickens are walking breasts without skin or bones, you’ll be disappointed by a seemingly flavourless menu.  So while you get the hang of it, you should taste the flavour that nature has to offer.  Try a chicken thigh instead of a breast.  Switch up a fat level (or three) in your milk.  You might find that if you do, you won’t want the ketchup for your (homemade) nuggets or the sugar for your cereal.  And then you won’t be as tempted to go back to the corn-starched, salted, fake-fragranced products.  Trust me.

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These little changes really helped me to let go of some of my old food habits and to get the ball rolling.  They worked because they were EASY for me and I think that’s very important.  I firmly believe in starting with the little steps and building up when it comes to such a major undertaking.

I’d love to know how others tackle this task.  Where did you start?  What was the ‘low-hanging fruit’ in your processed diet?

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