Back on the Weight Watchers track

I knew this time was coming. Pants becoming progressively tighter aren’t very subtle. And, even though I avoided stepping on the scale for as long as I could, one day I did it. It wasn’t pretty. And why did we ever teach Duncan to read letters and numbers, anyway?

I still don’t know what caused it. I was staying pretty stable at my body’s set-point (which is, of course, at least 10 lbs more than I’d like it to be). I don’t think I got less active. I don’t think that’s possible. I conserve as much energy as possible, all of the time. Did I manage to conseve even more somehow without realizing it? Probably not.

But, for some reason, things started shifting upward (my weight — on my body it shifted outward). Maybe it was reducing Duncan’s nursing before his 3rd birthday with that valiant aim of weaning him come late July. The boy likes his milk. He was probably drinking a lot.

In any case, no matter what caused it, it happened. And now I have to deal with it. I’ve been waiting for “the right time” when things aren’t too stressful. That time will never come. But, school is well underway for both Duncan and me and our recent lead hazard reduction home makeover efforts are (almost) over. So I figured it’s time.

Last Sunday, weighing in at 170.8 lbs, I signed up for Weight Watchers online. I weighed myself mid-week — and to my horror, I’d gained weight. Apparently, I may still be nursing, but not enough to warrant an extra 10 points in my daily food allowance. Once I realized that, I altered things a bit and ended up weighing 2.2 lbs less this morning.

I also switched to the CORE plan this week (as opposed to the FLEX plan where every food is given a point value). On the core plan, there are certain foods you can eat as much as you want of. They’re mostly vegetables, fruit and fat-free, sugar-free stuff. Since I don’t eat artificial sweetner, that limits my options.

Just to complicate things, you get some FLEX points to use each day/week and you also earn activity (or nursing) points. I use those to “buy” sugar. Seriously, I can’t live totally sugar-free. My sugar choices aren’t that bad, either — honey, maple syrup and raw brown sugar. No corn syrup here.

So we’ll see how it goes. I dream of dieting without feeling hungry — the only time that happened was when I did high-fiber, high-protein (ala Atkins), but that was such a pain in its own way. This way, presumably, I can eat all the fat-free cottage cheese I want — should I want to, of course.

Going to a new church

At playdates this summer, a couple of my Mommy friends have talked about their church - book club meetings, Women’s retreats, that kind of thing. I miss going to church. Mostly I miss the fellowship, the healing that takes place, the communing with Spirit / God / Infinite Intelligence / the divine within each of us.

I asked them what it is they like about their church. The said they like the fellowship and knowing that they were working on their spiritual lives in some small way.

So today, after an invitation from one of those friends, I went.

Going somewhere new is always a bit of an uncomfortable experience. You’re out of your element, don’t know where anything is and worry about making some awful faux pas in front of strangers. Fortunately, one of my friends pulled up right behind me as I was parking and getting Duncan out of the car. So we followed them inside and they showed us around. I quickly got lost in the maze of this place.

The way the service works, everyone - parents and kids - sit down in the church for the first part of the service. Then the parents take the kids to their rooms for the remainder of the time. Duncan was in a 3-year-old pre-school room with his 2 playdate buddies and Berry went to the nursery with the siblings of Duncan’s friends. (Nice that we all had kids at the same time.) Then the adults go back to the service.

It all went well. Berry consented to being left and didn’t even notice me leave. I left my cell phone number and kept my phone on vibrate. Duncan got to play with his friends, so he didn’t care.

The service itself was fine. I have to say that I wish I liked it more. Because all the other things were really great - child care, my friends, a beautiful big building. But, while I do love Jesus, I just don’t have a Lord & Savior kind of relationship with him. I want to talk to God myself, directly, not through his son. Besides, we’re all God’s sons and daughters. To me, worshipping one person misses the fundamental point that Jesus was trying to convey to us all in the first place.

I will say that the hymn at the beginning of the service (not that I can name it, but it was a familiar tune from my childhood) made me start to cry. I was sitting there with two squirmy kids and no tissues - not the ideal time for an emotional religious moment. Besides, I hate to cry in public.

On the way home, I asked the kids if they liked it. Duncan said he did. He said he’d like to go again (i.e. he responded affirmatively when asked directly if he’d like to go again). Berry did not shake her head no when asked if she’d like to go again, which I will take to mean that she enjoyed it, too.

When asked what he did, Duncan told me that he “sang songs and played games.” Apparently the teaching was something about Moses. On the way out of his room, he was handed a “Take-Home Sheet” entitled, God Calls Moses, that has a coloring activity, a bit of bible teaching and an explanation about the whole thing (presumably for me). Which is a bit of an issue for me.

While I’m quite able to sort out my own personal beliefs from those of the person in the pulpit, I’m not sure I’m ready for my kids to be exposed to Presbyterian religious doctrine. On the other hand, I want them to grow up with something. The silly thing is, one of the main reasons we don’t go to my church - the one in which I am an ordained minister - is because they don’t have childcare. So either I leave them at home (with their Dad), hire my own sitter, or don’t go.

I think I’ll go to my friends church again. And maybe visit some others in the area. I like seeing how other people do things, but I don’t want to be a spiritual gypsy for too long.

Laboring over the weekend

My blogging friend, Christa on Vocational Duality, often writes about balancing work life with mothering life. I’ve been fortunate in managing the two somewhat separately most of the time. But not this last week.

When Duncan was a baby and I leapt into the freelance life, I could put him in a playpen next to my desk and get work done. That lasted until he was a year old. Then I started taking him to an at-home daycare a few afternoons a week. Daddy looked after him some mornings, I worked during naptime and those three afternoons when he went to Kayden’s house.

Then Berry came along. Working with 2 kids is next to impossible. One of them always wants something - usually both of them want something, at the same time, in the loudest possible manner.

Because of this, when I went back to work shortly after Berry’s birth (too soon, I now realize, but that’s another story), I found someone (a wonderful someone) to come to our house to look after the kids. This keeps them close, yet I still get to escape to my office in the attic. I’m around, yet not. We eat lunch together, I put them down for naps, then I go back to work until dinner time. Really, it’s ideal.

I get to enjoy the flexibility of working from home, while maintaining working hours. Generally, I refuse to work evenings or weekends. I’m not a machine, after all. However, every so often, there comes a project with a looming deadline, that requires some after-hours work. I had one this past Labor Day weekend.

Oh boy. It would have gone OK if things had been “normal.” But we were all sick. I was sick. The kids were sick. Even Kevin was sick, although he did a fabulous job of not complaining about it.

So there I sat, one sick kid on my lap, the other sitting in a chair next to me or playing with trains on the floor, working away at the dining room table. We must have been a sight. They watched so much TV I think their brains may have melted and dribbled out their ears (at least they’ve been acting like it). But I kept plugging away and we somehow got through the weekend. My project got finished (finally, yesterday) and we will all eventually feel better. I can’t tell you how glad I was to see the sitter on Tuesday morning.

It’s interesting how we all manage to balance our lives one way or another. If I didn’t have a pressing deadline and I didn’t adore the client, I would have packed work away for the weekend and got on with it on Tuesday. Family and health tend to come before work in my balancing act. Time may be money, but time is also life. Somehow it’s important to find the equilibrium between the two.

My garden helpers

It’s not easy to find time to tend the garden with two little ones. Or do any singular activity, for that matter. They like to be involved.

Our backyard, tiny as it is, is now strewn with kids toys. The turtle sand box, basketball hoop, water table, little slide and see-saw. I love it, honestly. It makes me happy to look out the back window and see all those things for them to play with. We can’t fit a swing set back there, so we do what we can with what we have.

Even with the toys, the lure of What Mummy’s Doing is too strong. Inevitably, I get interrupted with “help,” often in the form of digging in inappropriate places — such as where things are growing. Duncan, at least, has learned the boundaries of the vegetable garden and walks along the pavers, but not in the soil. Berry caught on quickly this year, but occasionally manages to somehow fall into my garden beds and took out a pepper plant earlier this summer.

One form of “help” we’ve found that they both enthusiastically get into is watering the garden. We collect rainwater from our garage roof in plastic tubs. Kevin has grand ideas about building a water barrel, but so far we’re just using totes with lids and it’s working well.

The kids love filling up watering cans (or at least pretending to in Berry’s case) and watering the vegetables. Duncan likes watering one particular square foot of the garden which quickly turns into a mud puddle. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell him it’s had enough water already, sooner or later he returns to that spot and sploshes some more on.

Explaining that the garden doesn’t need watering when it’s just rained - and everything is clearly still wet - also falls on deaf ears. It’s just too much fun. Why wouldn’t the plants want another drink? It tickles them, after all. I love him.

So here’s some shots (with my cell phone) of the two of them helping out. I will say that their participation is helpful when getting them to eat veggies at dinner. By watering them, Duncan has buy in. I mean, they’re HIS veggies. Why not eat them. I even got him to eat a raw green bean the other day - and he liked it!

The kids get cooking

I’m not the only one who likes to cook in our house. We hauled the play kitchen up from the basement and put it in Berry’s room. It was a hit with Chef Berry and soux chef Duncan. There has been corn eating, pie making and lots and lots of tea drinking. Hmmm…. where do you think they get the idea of drinking cup after cup of tea?

Feasting from my garden

There’s something so satisfying about cooking dinner with food from my garden.

Dinner tonight - currently bubbling away on the stove — features tilapia (from who knows where) cooked in a tomato and pepper sauce. The tomatoes, red pepper and herbs all come from the garden. The green pepper comes from our CSA (I love getting organic peppers in my bag each week!) and the garlic is from Seven Bridges Farm from the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. The only other seasonings are salt and pepper — I brought back the salt from a trip to France and the pepper is freshly ground from organic black peppercorns.

It will be accompanied by brown rice and broccoli (conventional, both - but at least broccoli is now on the “12 Foods You Don’t Have to Buy Organic” list.)

I’d better get back to dinner, but I snapped a couple of pics with my camera phone.

Here’s dessert - home made peach pie. The pastry is an oil pastry recipe and the peaches, while conventionally grown are at least from a local farmer, bought on Saturday morning at Gro-Moore Farms in Henrietta.

What do I do with the worms in my compost?

I love my compost bins, tucked away behind the garage. It’s so quiet and private back there (a big thing in a city backyard) and smells of leaves and rain and the forest.

I finally got around to screening my compost. Oh, what beautiful stuff. It’s not such good work for my back, but good for the rest of me (thigh muscles, spirit, etc.).

This was the best batch of compost I’ve made yet. Full of worm castings, hummus and rich black stuff. And worms. I’ve never seen so many worms (except maybe on RIT’s sidewalks after a heavy rain).

What am I supposed to do with the worms in the compost? Put them back into the pile? Put them in the garden? Eat them for dinner?

I tried hard to sift the compost lightly, to reduce the likelihood of grinding any worms on the hardware cloth. I probably cut a few in half as they desperately tried to wriggle through the holes into the lovely black screened compost beneath. Most of my worms went into the screened compost and then into the garden. I figure the garden can always use them. And, since I didn’t put any worms in the bin to begin with, they migrated from somewhere on their own and more worms will find the bin again for the next batch.

In order to answer my question — so I know what to do next time — I turned, as always to the Internet. Not, say, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a reliable source of knowledgeable information. Why do that when you have Google at your fingertips?

What I found? Not much.

In worm composting (where you have a couple of pounds of worms in a bin!), you put the worms back in the bin. Gives me the heebies just thinking about it. I can touch worms, with gloves on. But I don’t want 2 lbs of the them in a container, thanks.

According to compostinfo.com:

Screening Compost

Your composting system may not break down all the larger materials, such as corncobs or wood chips, in the first batch of compost that you make. When you screen your compost, any material larger than your screen size can be removed. These materials are called “overs” which can go back into the compost system the next time that you build a pile. The overs provide bulk for aeration and microbes attached to these pieces will help jumpstart the new composting process.

Yes, nothing about worms.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has directions on how to build a free-standing compost screen, but, again, no worm info.

Surely I can’t be the only person with this question? I guess I’ll have to ask the Co-operative Extension folks at the South Wedge Farmer’s Market this week after all.

Putting a number on the earth

We (finally) hear and talk a lot about global warming and carbon footprints. But it all seems very vague and nebulous. I know my impact on the earth is larger than I’d like it to be. I know, as a society, we’re living way out of balance. But what exactly do we need to do to get back into balance?

350.org puts it into perspective:

The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

There are three numbers you need to really understand global warming, none of them very complicated. For all of human history until about 200 years ago, our atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide (that’s the first number).

Beginning in the 18th century, we started to burn coal and gas and oil to produce energy and goods. … By now—and this is the second number—the planet has 387 parts per million CO2 – and this number is rising by about 2 parts per million every year.

In the past year, some of the world’s leading climate scientists have told us what the highest safe level of CO2 is: 350 parts per million. That’s the last number you need to know, and the most important. It’s the safety zone for planet earth.

Wow. Seems like we have some work to do.

How to peel a hard boiled egg - use your hands

My mum sent me a link to the “Four Hour Work Week” guy peeling a hard boiled egg by blowing through a hole in the top. It sounded very interesting.

I buy free range organic eggs, usually directly from the farmers (rather than the supermarket). Their yolks are so rich they’re almost orange, they taste delicious and they’re very fresh. Being very fresh makes them hard to peel. So any technique that will help me retain the most egg — instead of the outer layer of white staying stuck to the shell — sounds good to me.

Of course, I had to immediately try this out. We had 4 eggs left in the fridge, so egg salad sandwiches for lunch it was.

I put the eggs in cold water and set it to boil. I then promptly went back to whatever work I was doing and forgot about them until the sitter reminded me. Not to worry. I turned them off, put them into cold water and added some baking soda.

A few minutes later, we all gathered around as I attempted to make little holes in either end and blow the egg out of it’s shell.

No go.

I assure you that I blew well and hard. I created suction around the top of the egg (and got little bits of shell in my mouth. Yum). The egg did separate a little from the shell. But they didn’t pop out like in the video.

Oh well. They were much easier to peel the regular way, though (with your fingers). It’s the baking soda that does that trick — and a tip I will remember for every subsequent hard boiled egg I make. So I learned something useful after all.

Keeping birthdays naturally colored

I had so much fun at Duncan’s birthday party that - as exhausted as I was - I had a hard time falling asleep last night. This morning, even though Kevin has Berry downstairs and Duncan is still sleeping, I can’t get back to sleep for thinking about it.

All considered, everything went well. It rained practically all day, then stopped for 1hour and 55 minutes of the party. Pouring recommenced at 5:55 p.m. But it worked out OK as almost all the kiddos left, a few people and family stayed and we opened presents. Opening presents took an entire hour. Were there a lot of presents? Yes. Was he totally focused on thoroughly playing with the present he’d just opened, showing no interest in opening the next one? Totally. Bless him.

So Duncan is now 3 years old. Both he and Berry have a love of the Little Einsteins TV show, so we decided to use that a theme this year. In prior years (both of them) we went for a small, family party with “birthday” as the theme. But, as Kevin says, “you’re only 3 once.”

To go with the Little Einsteins table cover, plates, napkins, party hats and balloons I decided to make a Rocket cake. There were several obstables to that.

1. Um…a cake that’s not just round? That defies my cake making abilities.

2. How do I get red and blue icing without using Red No. 40? Artificial food coloring is banned in this house (along with MSG, artificial sweetners, high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil *).

So Kevin and I (mostly Kevin) set about experimenting with natural food colors. For Berry’s birthday, I found a bottle of natural food coloring at a local health food store.

Seelect 100% Natural Food Coloring, Red/Strawberry, 2-Ounce Bottle (Pack of 4)

But it didn’t turn the icing strawberry red. It make it…well…kinda purple-y red. The cake was good, anyway.

For Rocket, I wanted RED red.

First Kevin tried boiling down some rhubarb from our garden. Then he added lemon juice to…um…change it from a base to an acid or something. There was an actual scientific principle at play.

(Must pause here, Duncan has woken up.)

Rhubarb made a pink color. Rhubarb + lemon juice made an orange-y pink color. Crushed cherries made a nice dark red shade — but cherry red (duh!), not Rocket red.

Next I tried melting and reducing a strawberry fruit pop. According to the ingredients, those are colored with the strawberries themselves, beet color and turmeric. I guess the yellow of the turmeric is supposed to turn the purpleness of the beet color into red. In any case, boiled down a bit it turned into a murky brownish orange. Not something I want to frost a cake with.

Finally, I decided to simply puree some strawberries. Mmmm…a nice red at last. Unfortunately, when mixed into dairy-free buttercream icing (earth balance margarine instead of butter), it turned a lovely shade of pink. Since it had a bit of an orange tinge, I added our red-purple natural food dye. It darkened it up a bit, but remained quite pink. The icing was also a bit soft.

The blue (for the windows and belly) was fairly easy to figure out. Crushed blueberries. I can’t remember if Kevin cooked them a bit first. Then he added baking power (or soda) — again to do something chemtastically scientific with the adic/base composition. It made a nice light blue/grey.

To actually make the Rocket cake, I found these instructions online (they’re down at the bottom of the page). I went one step further and made a bottom for Rocket as well. Since I wasn’t about to buy Twinkies, I used some extra cake for the engines.

And here it is - the edible, melting, pink finished product. Not as good as the creations on Andrea’s Recipes (her husband made it, no less), but did I mention that it was edible?

* Disclaimer: there are some MSG-containing soups in our pantry, but I will not be buying any more after a recent declaration (I believe I proclaimed: MSG is evil! at the dining room table). Kevin still drinks soda. Ugh. And, occassionally, we eat foods with hydrogentated oil, but as little as possible.