Cheryl Katz

Hold the sunshine, please!  It’s 900 thousand degrees outside, so the outdoor activity segment of our day has been suspended.

But nonetheless, a good day.  I realize that from reading my blog one might think that I hate being a mom and that every day is thoroughly excruciating.  That isn’t really true, though I’m more likely to blog about the frustrations than I am to write about the normal moments.

Today we made whole-wheat orange muffins (recipe courtesy of the Tassajara Bread Book, thanks for the rec, Jess!)  I fill the measuring cups, Sami adds the ingredients to the bowl.  There’s always a little tension when it comes to the eggs, because of the way Sami likes to stick her fingers unpredictably in her mouth, having them covered in raw egg makes me nervous.  Ditto for licking the spoon after the wet ingredients are mixed.

But we get by, and total cliché though this may be, it seems like the more fun we have in the baking, the better the muffins taste.  These ones turned out really well, especially considering that they’re made with 100% whole wheat flour.  Usually it doesn’t rise very well, but these are moist and fluffy the way you’d want from a muffin.  Orange juice seems like a decent replacement for milk, and meant that I could dramatically reduce the amount of added sugar.

Sami was practically chewing the paper liner, she liked them so much.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, all my localicious life.

Despite the anomaly that occurred this past weekend, I don’t get to Hillcrest on Sunday mornings very often, even though Hillcrest is widely thought to be the best farmers’ market in San Diego, and at such a convenient time.  It’s always crowded, and parking is an issue unless we get our butts in gear (haha) and haul out the bikes, which is completely temperature- and weather-dependent.

So you can imagine how stoked I am to learn that Adams Avenue Market will be opening on Wednesday, September 9 to bring locally grown produce and foodstuffs to the park right on the corner of Adams and the 15!  (This link is the best review I could find on the new market so far.)

It’ll be every Wednesday from 3-7 PM.  How will I love it?  Let me count the ways!

It’s easy walking distance – so easy, I’ll probably walk it together with Sami, sans-stroller, and happily carry back the spoils of a good marketing trip.

It’s got a playground – an asset of inestimable value, considering the blatant lack of children’s entertainment at Hillcrest.  Yes, yes; the children can watch the band – but my three year old tires of that pretty quickly, heartily disapproves of set breaks, and also doesn’t come home from a half hour of erratic dancing as tired as she comes home from the same time spent on a play structure.  Adams Avenue for the win!

It’s on Wednesday night!  (This one is totally personal.)  That’s my down night.  What better way to tire my kid out than to pick her up from an exhausting day of play at school, to march her right up the street for a grubby farmers’ market street food dinner, let her lug around a few onions, and march her right back home?  Bedtime made WAY easier.

My only quandary now is rethinking our CSA membership.  I’m pretty sure I’ll leave things as they are, though, since I get all the veggies I need every week in a small box, including most of the staples. I still need to get things like onions and extra fruit to supplement what we receive.  Basically, our CSA leaves us just enough wiggle room to have fun at a farmers’ market without needing to spend a whole lot more than we already do.  Now I can do it at our own market instead of having to go to the supermarket every now and then.  (Another win for the Wednesday 3-7 time slot – it’s at a time when I’m already out of bed and can, in fact, be bothered to drag myself over there.)

I am eagerly awaiting the grand opening – and Sami is, too, but she just doesn’t know it yet.

The real, honest, relevant truth about me and motherhood is that I need to be alone.

I’m exhausted. Numbers are transposing on my computer screen before my eyes. I’m saving documents and then losing the latest copies and sending people incomplete files. Less empirically, I feel like tangible knowledge is leaking out the back of my head as it melts in the heat from my overworking brain.

Someone once told me that introversion and extroversion have nothing to do with the social situations you enjoy and everything to do with the type of environment that allows you to recharge your batteries.

My batteries are nearly empty from three weeks spent more or less with at least one other person at all times.  And the one person I have been spending most of my time with is a little tempest of unpredictable irrationality who has taken up kicking me for sport.

Thank heavens school starts back up next week.  I think I’m going to spend the weekdays sleeping.

Maybe I’ll just go to sleep.

City Brights: Rich Lieberman : Hello ‘Michael Jackson news’–goodbye ‘Health-care debate.

I saw this link and just thought, hmm, what does ‘medical homicide‘ have to do with our health care system? I don’t know how the prescription drug abuse problem factors in to a national health care debate, but I think it should.

I think it’s a sign of how jacked the American relationship is with health care that Jackson died due to a prescription obtained from and administered by a physician, but no one sees it as related to health care at all.  (Okay, maybe in this case it should be called “health manipulation.”)

We have a system where the very rich can pay for custom medical requests, to the point where celebrities die every so often from misuse of “legally” obtained prescription drugs.  And on the opposite end of the earnings spectrum, people who can’t afford health care at all.  Health care vs. Money, a struggle that’s killing patients at every pay scale.

I truly believe that just because one has a medical license, is paid and follows technically correct procedure for administering drugs doesn’t mean it’s right, ethical or legal to do so.  Doctors have an ethical and legal responsibility to protect the lives of their patients, and I think this includes even when they are paid highly to fill patient orders.  If I ask for a drug just because I saw a cute ad on TV, I expect my doctor to advise me of potential risks and to refuse my request if it puts my life in danger.  Call me crazy.

No wait, call it the Hippocratic oath.

I abhor that every time a movie is made from a book, suddenly the book is re-released with a new cover featuring the actors from the movie. (I don’t hate movies made from books, I just can’t go that far, because I believe that adaptation is an art form in itself and, if done well, can be amazing.)

I’m particularly grumpy about this as it pertains to Julie and Julia, the film based on the book by Julie Powell and My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme.

BOTH books have been re-released with movie-tie-in covers, so that instead of Julia Child on the cover of her own book, now there is a spitting image of Meryl Streep (whom I adore, don’t get me wrong) playing Julia Child. This has to be some sort of postmodern meta-media experiment gone terribly wrong. Or something.

Anyway, this comes to my attention because I was writing a post at my new blog: Jew and Julia: an experiment in Kosher French cooking. I wanted to link to My Life in France and on principle I refuse to link to the movie-tie-in one. It took me some time, but I found the standard copy.

I know that the book stands to sell more copies in tandem with the movie (in all cases, not just Julie and Julia, but something about the whole movie-tie-in hoopla just smacks of horrible corporate calulation. I don’t like to think of books as corporate packaged products, so I suppose this is from whence comes this squicky feeling.

I’ve registered for the full-length Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in Las Vegas, December 6.

My training is flagging a little bit due to the exhaustion of being with Sami all day, every day, but also for other reasons.  First, it’s hard to find the time to run, since any time she’s strapped into the stroller she is the opposite of burning off her daily energy stockpile.  Thus making napping dubious.  This is a problem for me.

The bigger problem is that running with 50+ lbs of stroller is just unpredictably hard.  It changes my posture to place more strain on my lower back.  Only one arm can be swinging at a time, which throws my balance slightly off.  It’s harder, and so I get less speed payoff for my perceived exertion.  I overheat faster.

As I’m learning with just about everything one does at home full time with a kid, it’s JUST HARDER.  I’m making strides at taking it easy, not worrying too much about mileage on my short-run days and just getting my 45 minutes in, but darn is it hard.  So hard that when I stopped for a few moments yesterday, I experienced firsthand why you’re not supposed to go from high exertion to no exertion.  I got lightheaded and a little nauseated, had to lie down and kick my legs to raise my heart rate a little, and once recovered I noted that I shall never do that again.

When Sami goes back to school, I’ll have 3 months in which I can actually focus on my training, and I plan to make excellent use of them.  Maybe all this stroller-pushing cardio will give me added strength which I can parlay into speed and stamina later.  Here’s hoping.

Tomorrow we’re going to a hilly place, where I very likely won’t be able to maintain a run even half the time because of the weight of the stroller.  The workout should be worth it, and it’ll be a 5-miler, so a worthy endeavor.  And we shall just not speak of my speed, until such time as I can get back to running solo.

the title would be called I Am So Not Cut Out for This and it would be filed in that section with all the truth-is-weirder/funnier/more entertaining-than-fiction female-interest novels get filed, the ones where protagonists agonize over gaining or losing 5 lbs, getting a date for the weekend, and how they’re going to become self-assured and fabulous.

But my magnum opus would be about the three weeks I’m currently in, where Sami is on school break and I am spending all day, every day keeping her entertained, running out all her energy, geting her to the potty like clockwork, and wrangling/bribing/negotiating her into a nap(-like situation) every day.

Suddenly, weekends *actually* have absolutely no meaning, as opposed to back when school was in session, when the days didn’t all blend endlessly one into another.

Suddenly, I’m awash with an entirely different set of reflections than the usual.  Now I’m thinking about how it seems like most mothers, presented with an “opportunity” to spend three whole weeks with their child, might be surrounded by happy feelings.  While at any given moment I absolutely love Sami, at any given moment I am also feeling one of a handful of feelings that are definitely not love.  How about frustration, boredom, anger, exhaustion… just to name a few.

I guess it’s normal to feel this way when days really do start bleeding into each other at the edges.  I fall into bed a lump of worn out caregiver, read for a little while until I fall into a restless, dreamless sleep, and start it all over way too early when Sami jumps on me in the morning and whisper-yelling, “ARE YOU AWAKE?”

They don’t make baby gates tall enough to stop her from climbing out, and even if they did, she’d just stand at the gate and yell, “Moooooommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeee,” over and over until I came to let her out.

While I’m not on the playground getting Sami good and tired, the intricate process of determining what she wants to eat and making it, dealing with pile after endless pile of laundry and washing the infinite supply of dishes we somehow burn through… then I have a few practical committments I’ve made with my time, and then the nagging question of what do I want to do next and how am I going to do it always hovering over my head.  (Hmm, why would I be worn out?)

I think I have all the critical elements of a pretty good first-person-self-effacing truth-is-humor novel/memoir right here.

I’m tired of just reading books for fun. Even in well-written and high minded literature, I find copy errors and other mistakes that in theory should be handled in editing. Frustrating mistakes – typos, misplaced apostrophes, and bigger grammar problems – take me out of the story and make reading less fun.

I want to be a book editor (or some kind of copy/content editor. Online would be fine, too.) At least then I’d have the satisfaction of correcting those problems.

Now, how do I do that?

For all the relief of Friday finally coming, to be honest weekends often turn out way more stressful than weekdays.  Sure, I have a heaping helping of laundry and other mundane tasks during the week, and of course the ever-enjoyable cooking.  Those are pluses.

However, on weekends it becomes MY job to convince Sami that she wants/needs to nap, and though she still desperately NEEDS them, she’s not so sold on the “want” part.  So this becomes an entire afternoon’s stress for me.  I got lucky yesterday, and said some magical combination of words in response to which she picked up and said, “I’m putting myself to sleep,” and marched to her room directly.  She played for a while, but then quiet ruled the house for at least two hours, and I was able to get my batteries at least part-recharged in that time.

This weekend we were exceptionally busy – and we didn’t even meet all our obligations!  We thoroughly spent Sami in the sunny backyard at a friend’s baby shower, and by the time we got home she was in complete melt down.  It took a long time to get her to that desperately needed nap, and by the time we did it was already well past the start time for the 3-year-old’s birthday party we’d been supposed to attend.  Le sigh.  We can’t win them all.  Truth be told, all three of us were run down by 5 pm Saturday.

Yesterday was kind of a challenge for me in the parenting arena.  We attended an adult’s birthday party, heavily attended by children in the 3-8 year range.  It was a lovely time, and the hostess even thought to rent a jumpy castle to entertain the tykes.  All went well until at some point I thought to glance out at the kids in the jumpy and saw a fellow 3-year-old boy just whaling away on Sami.

It was about the only time, other than the diaper cream incident, when I’ve seen red, but I did manage not to fly off the handle completely.  I strode outside, stopped all the activity in the jumpy, and said to the kid that it’s NOT OK to hit other kids, and if it happened again I’d have to talk to his mom.  Sami was, naturally, unfazed.  I think the jumpy experience was rough in general, due to the complete lack of control over her own motion, so a small beating from a peer didn’t sink her spirits.

From then on the kid’s older brother monitored him, and the rest of the afternoon was spent pleasantly.

Man, I never knew I’d be the crazy mom.  I mean, I know they’re little and I know most kids grow out of it, but I also know that Sami isn’t a hitter, and doesn’t even generally make waves when other kids hit her, which when it happens is well-attended by her teachers, and usually is a single-blow incident.  This kid targeted Sami and went after her a few times, and when he did he was literally whaling on her blow after blow.  Future anger management?  Maybe. Or hopefully he’ll learn to manage his emotions and grow out of it like most of us do.

This prompted Ben and me to discuss how we should teach her to handle future such incidents.  Ben’s opinion was that she should learn early to kick hard, once, for retaliation purposes only, in sensitive areas.  You can imagine where this would be, since in our case all of the culprits have been boys.  His other suggestion was that she should tell the predators, You hit me because you mother doesn’t love you.

Naturally, I don’t like either of these tactics, but on the other hand saying, “Stop hurting me, I don’t like it,” isn’t an effective solution unless the altercation occurs in a classroom.  (OF course, the emotional tactic had to be refined, more like:  “Oh, poor thing, I know you only hit me because you don’t feel loved at home;” but that level of manipulation wouldn’t really be accessible to a three-year old, even one as verbal as ours, and also I DISAPPROVE.)

I never was the brunt of any sort of bullying – I was the nose-in-a-book sort through grade school and had a pretty healthy social life in high school, all things considered.  Kept to myself, managed to avoid trouble.  But I remember that my brother, being a boy and therefore more susceptible to physical threats, used to get picked on and pushed around on the Catholic-school playground.  And I distinctly remember my dad telling him to push back, don’t let the other kids push you around.  Push back once, show them you’re not afraid, and they’ll leave you alone.

I don’t know/remember if it worked, but I can see the logic in it.

So I don’t want to teach her that violence begets violence, exactly, but I can appreciate how giving a kid a taste of his/her own medicine can easily remedy such a situation.  We also kind of resist the idea that telling a teacher/authority is the way to go, since self reliance is important, conflict management is important, and knowing WHEN to report offenses is also a valuable skill.

Obviously we’re not coaching Sami yet in anything but Tell them you don’t like it, say STOP and then walk away.  But what would you teach your kid, in a similar situation, at age 3 or age 30?

I know I don’t have a “day job,” and so the idea of a “work week” is therefore “meaningless,” but it is late Friday afternoon and I am feeling the relief that comes with knowing I don’t have to pack myself and Sami off to school tomorrow.

The laundry is all finished, the dishwasher is clean, errands for the weekend have been run, and for the next two days I’ll be flying with a copilot parent.

Yup, that alone makes it all seem more manageable.

In other news, this was the week of creative throw-togethers.  Last night’s dinner was spaghetti with veggies and pesto sauce.  Pesto from the plethora of frozen Costco jars in our freezer.  (For a while they were buried in the back and so every time I went to Costco I’d buy another one because I couldn’t see that we already had a few.)  The stuff is pretty rich (270 calories per 1/4 cup serving) so I cut it down by adding a half-cup of it to sauteed onions in olive oil, with salt and a hearty dose of black pepper.  The fresh yellow-pear and heirloom tomatoes (from our garden!) offered the extra fluid that took the sauce from being too thick to being just saucy enough for 8 servings of pasta.

Yay leftovers!

Here endeth the scrappy-but delicious week of kitchen creativity.

TGIF, people!