Cheryl Katz

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!

I try not to be too much of a yeller, so to speak.  I know that volume doesn’t make my words any more likely to be heard, and more often come across as condoned tantruming.

But, dude, yesterday was a helluva challenge to my self control, and I’m here to admit that I lost it for a few minutes.

I sent Sami to the bathroom to wash her hands.  Sami + running water have in the past led to problems, but mostly minor problems like Sami deciding to wash her cup over and over in the sink with hand soap.  I try to put a stop to such things within one minute, seeing as we’re in a water crisis.

Well, I gave her the requisite one minute, and at such time that my dinner prep could be abandoned to check on the progress of her hands, I went in…

to find the entire bathroom splattered with water, her head under the sink faucet covered with – you guessed it – hand soap.  Dial, to be precise, for the curious.

I cannot tell you the lengths to which I’ve gone to explain why we shouldn’t waste water.  In one ear and out the other.  But mostly I was irritated because this pattern of slathering things on her head has in the past come to no good, and in this case could have lead to a grievous soap-in-the-eye debacle.  (Luckily for all parties, it didn’t.)

I picked her up like a football, under my arm, supported by my knee, head under the faucet so that I could thoroughly rinse out the soap. (Hey, at least her hair got REALLY REALLY CLEAN.)  When she started kicking and squirming and screaming, that’s when I lost it.  I tightened my grip, so she wouldn’t fall and break her neck nor continue kicking me in the spine, got the rest of her hair rinsed out, dried her and myself off, and (loudly) sent her packing to her bedroom for a two minute cooldown.

Through which she proceeded to scream at the top of her lungs from beginning to end.

I went back to get her, and she wouldn’t even let me get a word in edgewise – if such a phrase applies to perceived interruptions of wordless screaming.  I told her that I don’t talk to people who are screaming, left, and came back to repeat myself.  Finally I yelled it at the top of my lungs, and that’s when she seemed to finaly stop to take a breath.  Given a ten second window of silence, I managed to pick her up and get her calmed down.

Poopy diaper time!  (Man, I cannot wait until potty training moves right on along.  This is killing me.)  Well, diaper change is an Olympic sport today, and it’s all I can do to maintain potential-mess-crisis management.

Having written it out, it doesn’t sound that bad. But when I yell, I’m loud.  To me, in perspective, it now doesn’t sound so bad, but I wonder what the neighbors could have been thinking, since all our windows were open.  Sigh.

Like I said, I strive to maintain control, and I generally keep my voice low, even if it’s sometimes fraught with frustration.  Sometimes the sheer irrationality of it all gets to me.  Grrrrrr.

Of course, guilt factor is magnified when Sami calms down and tells me, hug and all, “Mommy, I don’t like it when you yell.”

She might as well have just said, “Mom, you suck.”  And no, telling myself the buttons she pushed to make me topple off my pillar of self control is no comfort.

I’m looking forward to her third birthday, when this will all magically disappear and I’ll be left with a cheery, helpful child who loves for me to read long stories to her.

A mom can dream, right?

On Monday we all stumbled home, tired from an early morning getting into the airport, and we snagged some Thai food at Saffron when we were back in San Diego. I had some tofu salad rolls, my favorite, and Sami had chicken satay skewers and plain rice.

Needless to say, we had most of the chicken, most of the rice and a splendid abundance of peanut sauce left over.

When dinner rolled around, Ben an I decided that rather than be completely lazy, we’d be mostly lazy and just have pasta for dinner.

What ho! We actually were out of pasta except for a bunch of somen noodles lying about. I cooked them as little as possible, though apparently a 3-minute boil was too much, even so they were a little too sticky.

Next comes the magic. I sauteed up some cabbage, leeks and grated carrots, tossed in the chicken and peanut sauce, and cooked it till it bubbled. then I tossed the noodles with it.

It was way more food than you’d expect to get out of a couple of chicken skewers and some plastic to-go cups of peanut sauce. Slower and more involved than takeout, but probably tastier than the fastest takeout as well. Plus, takeout averted means less money spent and less styrofoam waste generated!

Yum.

In other food news, last night I pseudo-grilled chicken breasts to (dare I say it? yes!) perfection. Pseudo-grilled because, well, we don’t have a grill at the moment. I whipped out the handy, well-seasoned cast-iron grill pan, which has been used for all meat purposes from rendering chicken fat to lean-and-meaning steak and burgers. Nary a dairy product has touched this baby, and it’s full of delicious seasoning.

Well, when I get to downloading the pictures, you will see that these were perfection in chicken breasts – down to the blackened grill marks! Tender and juicy to boot. And I served them with cubed beets and potatoes tossed in a vinaigrette, and fresh salad of Persian cucumbers and heirloom and yellow pear tomatoes from my own wreck of a garden!

My body has quit its most strenuous complaints against general motion, and today I got off my bum and ran an easy 3.1 miles.  Way better average time than in the half, OR in the first 3 miles of the half, go figure, on an equally hilly course.  Guess that’s what a good night’s sleep will do for you.

Clearly, it’s back to the grind.  Having picked up and gone back to running actually has helped to ease tension and relax me, and in the heat following my jog I stretched well.

And now that I’m not substantially increasing mileage for the forseeable future (there might be a marathon ahead, and DEFINITELY another half, but not for a little while) I am shifting priorities for a while back to overall fitness with an eye toward weight loss.  Who knows, maybe running a half marathon 5 pounds lighter will make that much difference in my time and energy level.  Never can tell until I try.

I’m coasting on the “Holy crap I did it!!!” sentiment.  I’m now further chuffed having dragged my sorry butt on a run I didn’t feel particularly inclined to do until it was already under way, and really proud of how good I feel RIGHT NOW.

Taking full advantage of the endorphin boost, I’m counting calories again, I am completely ditching my “chocolate for lunch” attitude of the last few weeks, and I’m gearing up to be cooking a lot – hot kitchen be damned!  I have a very interesting food project on the horizon which you will be hearing about in due time (sooner rather than later, I hope.)

Right now, I’m scanning my to-do list (yes, I have one!) and seeing that I need to get busy.  Daily grind, here I come.