I just read an article about parenting in the New York Times: All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting. It got me a little weepy (but then, lots of stuff does that when I have a baby in the house.)  It’s a well-written and well-researched article, and I don’t have anything really interesting to add.  But I want to go on record now with the resolution that I *will* enjoy my years as a parent.  And I mean, right now, not just in retrospect.

It’s actually easy for me to be vibrantly happy with Alden, just as it was with Rosy when she was a baby.  I don’t just love the transcendant joy of his smiles and giggles, I love the whole lifestyle of nursing and wearing him and sleeping with him and soothing him when he cries–and taking life slow.  But I’m not going to lie, the constant arguments that come with a preschooler (Rosy is not a toddler any more) can wear me down.  I don’t like conflict and drama, and I don’t like to be in control of someone else.  Ha.  The books (yes I read a lot of books) suggest that a zen, non-attachment (take that Dr. Sears) method of parenting is possible, that I can leave the drama and conflict to her and not partake of it.  That I can give her the gift of self-discipline through reasonable choices and reasonable consequences, that I can make her happy and self-confident by letting her know how much she is loved.  And I *do* believe in all this stuff, I do think I can be a good parent this way.  But day-to-day, it still feels like all I do is make thousands of very insignificant decisions and then fight for them with my life and sanity.

So today, I’m going to focus on playing with her and having fun.  Because sometimes, it *is* fun and today is going to be one of those days.

Rosy knows *all* the Christmas Carols.  Even now, in July, she gets out the songbook and we sing them together.  I mean, she knows multiple verses.  Here is a solo act:

This meal is probably in more frequent rotation that any other in our house.  It’s healthy, vegetarian, uses up a lot of produce, and it takes 30 minutes start to finish, (assuming I managed to put the rice in our slow rice cooker earlier in the day.)  And honestly it’s delicious.

Serves two hungry adults plus a kid.

Ingredients:

• 1 block of firm tofu
• peanut oil (or some other kind but unrefined peanut is best
• shiitake mushrooms (you can make it without them, but why?)
• a bunch of different vegetables including at least one green
• a shallot or two, finely chopped
• some garlic (optional), finely chopped
• a tablespoon or two (or three) of fresh (or frozen) ginger, grated
• soy sauce
• vinegar
• white wine or mirin or some kind of stock
• sriracha hot sauce (“rooster”)
• sugar
• a little cornstarch

1. Press the tofu.  Split the block in half horizontally so you have two rectangles about 3/4 of an inch thick.  Put them on a pan over a paper towel, put another paper towel on top and another pan, weighted with a few cans or something.  Set aside.

2. Chop your vegetables however you like them.  You want them all ready to go when it’s time to cook because it doesn’t take long.

3. Fry the tofu.  After ten minutes it’s pressed enough.  (Sometimes I only give it five minutes, but up to 20 is OK.)  Chop it in cubes.  Heat some peanut oil in a (very) nonstick pan over medium high heat.  When it’s hot, add the tofu and then pour a tablespoon or two of soy sauce over it.  Stir with a spatula until it’s coated, then let it cook, turning every few minutes.  Try not to let the tofu stick to the pan.  When the liquid is all evaporated and the tofu is golden on most sides of each cube, turn off the heat.

4. While the tofu is cooking, start cooking the other vegetables.  In a large saute pan or wok, heat some peanut oil on high or medium high heat.  Add the mushrooms and toss to coat with oil.  Stir only every few minutes, until they are nicely seared and delicious but not dry.  Add the rest of your vegetables in order of cooking time: this can take some practice.  In my experience, green beans take way longer to cook than you think, add them first.  Carrots and zucchini and broccoli are next,  then turnips or radishes because you want them to stay kind of crisp, then the greens (bok choy or chard or even kale, especially the curly kind) are last.

5. While the vegetables cook, mix the shallots and ginger in a bowl with some peanut oil.  If I’m feeling kind, I don’t add garlic, because it can upset Nathan’s stomach.  If I’m feeling spicy, I add a clove or two.  When the vegetables are almost done but not quite, add the tofu to the pan and stir.  Then push everything to the sides of the pad, and spoon the shallot mixture into the middle.  It will fry up in the oil and smell delicious–stir it around.  After a minute or two of cooking, mix everything together.

6. IMPORTANT: if you have a kid who doesn’t like spicy food, now’s the time to take our her portion.

7. Make the sauce and add it.  (Really you should have made the sauce in a spare moment earlier, so now you can just dump it on.)  In a bowl, put aboutt 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/3 cup vinegar (I use red wine, but rice is fine too or whatever), 1/3 cup white wine or mirin or stock, 1 tablespoon sugar, half a teaspoon of corn starch, and some squirts of sriracha to taste.  Mix it up and dump on the hot stir fry, stir around for a second or two, turn off the heat and serve over brown rice.

I recommend that the first few times you make this, you get everything all prepared before you start cooking (the sauce made, the shallot mixture prepared, etc.)  Otherwise you will be totally stressed at the end when things start happening fast.  When I first started making this, the kitchenwould look like a bomb went off in it after I was done, and I was so frazzled and stressed about getting things right at the last minute that I ate half my bowl in about twenty seconds.  But practice makes perfect I guess.  Now it only looks like a tornado blew through the kitchen.

Rosy’s first drop-off preschool ended in June.  Enchanted Garden was a sweet little Waldorf program for two and three year olds, in Jacqueline Houston’s home and run solely by her.  She went two mornings a week.  I’s mostly play-based, although they made bread once a week on Thursdays and had some other project on Fridays.  After a bit of a rough patch early on, Rosy seemed to enjoy it pretty well.  I liked it too, the environment and the teacher and the other kids, and I felt really good about sending her there.

But I was a little surprised to get her “report card” at the end–it mostly said she lives in her own world, and doesn’t listen at all.  Now, I can easily believe that she does her own thing instead of always participating in what the other kids are doing.  That’s just her personality, she observes before she acts.  But she does listen.  In fact, for a two year old she is a *great* listener.  Why would she ignore Jacqueline?  I still don’t know.  Maybe the environment was too chaotic so she withdrew.  Maybe it’s a pattern that got set when she started (she was barely two) and never changed.  Anyway, it made me glad she going to a Montessori based program next year where she’ll have a lot of individual attention; I think it will suit her personality to a T.

Rosy in the Enchanted Garden

Her other “graduation” was from her first real gymnastics class: i.e., the first class I didn’t have to attend with her.  She had Coach Tara at the Seattle Gymnastics Academy and she is just wonderful.  At first Rosalind was a little nervous about leaving me but soon enough she was completely comfortable, and what a kick it was to watch from the bleachers as she did her little girl things without me!  This class is how I know she’s really a good listener, not just from her interactions with me (but she does listen to me, too.)  Her wide, serious eyes as she gazed intently at her coach were plain to see.

Straddle bat hang

I abandoned my blog a good long time ago, but here’s an attempt to revitalize it!  So far I have: remembered my passwords, upgraded the software, and got rid of my spam comment problem.  Do I have anything interesting to communicate?  Only time will tell.

My plan, though, is to have weekly posts on various topics.  Here’s what I’m thinking to start:

Monday: Family Day.
What we’ve been up to, news about our lives.

Wednesday: Grandparent Day.
Photos or video or stories about the kids.  Probably totally boring to everyone else.

Friday: Recipe Day.
Something I’ve made in the last week, and it can’t be a recipe I’m copying from somewhere else, either.

Sunday: Outside World Day (optional.)
If I have anything interesting to say that’s NOT about the kids or what I’m cooking for them, here’s where it will go.  Chances are slim.

This is another post that never got published, that I’m just finding 14 months later.

* * *

I had a hot latte waiting for me when I woke up on Mother’s Day this year.  Nathan had gotten up with Rosalind an hour earlier, and they walked out to the little coffee stand together.  It was a lovely start to the day, but it got much better.

We drove out to Wallace Falls, a hike about 1.5 hours from our house on Route 2.  We found the hike in our current favorite book, Best Hikes With Kids: Western Washington. We both thought it sounded familiar, but we didn’t recognize anything when we arrived. Contrary to our expectation (and hope), Rosalind fell asleep in the car on the way over, sleeping the last half hour. There went her nap for the day and, we thought, any hope of making a lot of progress on foot. We didn’t think she’d accept being in the backpack for too long if she wasn’t asleep.

But Rosalind blew away all our expections on this hike. Not only did we complete the entire route, 5 1/2 miles and 1200 feet of elevation, but she must have walked at least a mile and a half of it or more. She made tracks! And she enjoyed nearly every second. What a great hike this is for kids. We were never far from water, or from the rocks necessary for throwing into it. The trail itself was a little rough for a toddler, and there were certainly places where I guarded Rosalind when she walked to keep her from tumbling down a steep bank. But there was so much to keep her interest. She was astonished to see the grand middle falls. At first all she could say was “Uh-oh! Uh-oh! Uh-oh!” When she gathered her senses to explain: “Waters fall down!” (Very true, of a waterfall.) “Waters fall down! Splash! Waters hurt? Waters tying! (crying)” We reassured her that the waters were “O-tay!” and she repeated that to herself a number of times, to ease her mind.

When we finally got to the top, after several wonderful hours, Nathan and I got a surprise. There was a sign up there regarding some missing hikers from some years back. And with that sign, it clicked–we *had* done the hike before. But although today I was in a state of happy awe at its loveliness, the *only* thing I remembered from the previous time was mocking the old newspaper article. (In my defense, it is hard to imagine how those women were so helpless.) I’m quite sure that the last time we were on the trail we did the whole thing in a couple hours, probably thinking black thoughts at the slow families crowding the trail, and at the end I probably just wished we’d driven further out to something a little more off the beaten track. What a difference, now that I’m sharing Rosalind’s perspective, and her joy.

Enthralled by the waterfall

I just noticed this blog post in my “drafts” folder, 16 months later (7/26/2010.)  It’s not much of a post–I probably meant to include some video or something–but it’s part of the record so I’m putting it out there now.

* * *

I haven’t blogged in a few months, and now I have a completely different child.  I guess that’s how it goes.  At Christmas, she was saying some words, and she knew the names of the most important people in her life, and she would do signs that went along with a song.  Today she knows nouns and verbs and adjectives that she can put together in sentences, she can learn a name or any other word the first time hearing it, and she can actually sing recognizable songs herself.  Yesterday we went to the zoo and saw a bunch of animals, some of which frightened her.  This morning she told me me the whole story, about “zoo” and the “pea-tot” that we saw when we first got there, and the “ephant” (she was “scare”), and the monkeys and the lion that also scared her, and the bears.  She said “mama scare?” and when I said no, I wasn’t scared, she asked about her part-time nanny and her friend Nolan.  It’s not just that she has learned a lot of words.  She uses them to describe her experience, and even to express her thoughts.  It’s been such a ridiculously fast trajectory to this point, I am blown away.

When you don’t work full-time at a job, you have a lot of time to micro-manage your food supply. I am astonished at how complex it’s gotten to keep my pantry stocked. You’d thing, being that I can walk to about six grocery stores and one is Whole Foods and one is the local organic co-op, that that would be enough for me, wouldn’t you? Take a gander at the list:

1. Jubilee Farm: This is where I get my CSA most of the year.  In the summer time, I pick up a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables from the farm every week; it’s barely challenging to keep up with but I love it.  Last summer I froze or otherwise preserved some things that we are still eating.  I also get a weekly box delivered to Seattle the rest of the year, although there is a hiatus for most of December and January.  Although it’s a lot of fresh produce, it’s not enough for 5-7 home-cooked meals, so I supplement from other souces.  However, the off-season box comes with a dozen farm-fresh eggs every other week.  Farm fresh eggs are GOOD.
2. Spud: This is a weekly deliver service that focuses on local and organic foods.  I get some produce from here–almost all of it, right now, and I’ll still get some when the CSA starts back up again.  More importantly, Spud is my source for the best local milk.  This is where I’m really going to show off how insane I am.  They have a brand that is vat-pasteurized, where the milk is only heated to 145 degrees and kept there for 30 minutes, instead of the more common high-heat-short-time pasteurization where it goes to at least 163 degrees (often higher) for 15 seconds and then is rapidly cooled.  Don’t even talk to me about ultra-pasteurization, where the milk heats to 280 degrees for two seconds.  That stuff is gnarly, I can’t drink it.  Yes, I have a very highly attuned milk palate.
3. Amazon Fresh: This is the latest addition to our household food supply, and let me tell you: it’s the bomb.  It’s unkind of me to gloat about it, since it’s only available to a select few Seattle zip codes and nowhere in the rest of the country.  In fact 98115 was only added a week ago, after a very competitive voting with four other zips.  I received at least three emails from neighbors urging me to make my voice heard: such is the longing for this service.  The deal is basically this.  Your order groceries from a huge online selection, which includes frozen, refrigerated, and dry goods as well as produce.  The user interface is as elegant as you’d expect Amazon to be.  Then you hit submit, and your groceries are delivered.  I believe you can get them within a few hours if you want.  I have chosen to place my order by midnight and have them on my doorstep by 6 am the next morning, which is easiest since I can only spend time on the computer after Rosalind has gone to bed, anyway.  There is a $30 minimum and $75 minumum to avoid the $5 shipping fee, but that’s not difficult.  Can I say it again?  I *love* Amazon Fresh.
4. Thundering Hooves Pastured Meats: After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I realized my happy thoughts when buying “free-range” meat at the grocery store were misguided to say the least.  So I did a little online research and found Thundering Hooves.  For my first order, I got a truly free-range turkey that we ate for Thanksgiving, four pasture-raised whole chickens, and a family sampler pack of pork products.  (Luckily we have a trunk freezer.)  Holy Moly this meat is good!  It’s incredibly flavorful compared with even the “organic” meats you get at the grocery store.  And it doesn’t hurt the tast to know I’m not contributing to either the animal suffering or the environmental problems that go along with factory farmed meat, either.
5. Grocery/Whole Foods: OK, so I still do go to the yippie grocery store fairly regularly, although you’d think I wouldn’t need to after all that.  For one thing, we don’t have a local fish market, and we have trout, catfish, or salmon at least once a week.  And then there are the store-brand items I’ve gotten attached to, particularly cheerios.  The bulk foods are also nice, not just for rice and lentil and the like but also herbs and spices.  Whole Foods has good espresso, too.  And we have some coupons.

There you are, that’s where the bulk of our food comes from.  It’s not completely the whole story–we still eat strawberries out of the freezer that we u-picked over the summer, for example.  There’s even still a little tomato puree in there from my own pathetic garden.

You may wonder why I felt the need to explicate all this in my blog.  Frankly, I’m wondering that a little myself now that I’m done!  But I feel a great satisfaction in contemplating all the places I gather healthy food for my family, just as I love putting it all together into meals that nourish us, body and spirit.

Rosalind is 16 months old now, and last week she has started sleeping through the night. I thought I would be enveloped in a rosy haze of well-rested joy by now. But instead I’m just baffled and frankly, still kind of tired. Here is some (a lot of) history.

Ah, sleep. It’s an eternal topic of conversation among parents or infants and toddlers, even preschoolers. Is he sleeping through the night? How many naps does she take? What is your bed-time routine like? Etc. For the first eight months of Rosalind’s life I was completely bored by all variations on this topic. We practiced 100% cosleeping, and although Rosalind would breastfeed who-knows-how-many times a night I mostly slept through it. I never felt fatigued, and when bleary-eyed new mothers complained to me I just smiled pityingly and thought, “She should really just take the baby to bed.”

And then suddenly I was done with cosleeping. Part of it was Rosalind becoming mobile–I couldn’t safely leave her alone in bed any more. Part of it was how much Nathan and I missed our time together at night. Sneaking quietly into bed under cover of darkness, no conversation allowed, was getting old. In any case, it was time for Rosalind to go into her crib. And ever since then, getting enough sleep has been somewhat of a battle.

At first I still nursed her to sleep and then shifted her into her crib. She’d sleep there until Nathan and I were in bed, and then I’d bring her in with us the first time she woke up. At first She was up at least every hour until she got into bed with us, always wanted to breastfeed in the rocking chair, so we never got any peaceful evenings. A big change was when Nathan started putting her to bed, and comforting her when she woke up before we were in bed. It was a very traumatic adjustment at first, but it didn’t take long until she accepted and even liked the new routine. She was getting really kicky and disturbing in our bed. I started creating artificial times before which I wouldn’t take her to bed. We had some more trauma when she realized I wouldn’t nurse her every time I went in, although I still rocked her back to sleep for a while. Eventually I could just put my hand on her inside the crib, but I still always had to stay there until she was sound asleep. Meanwhile I kept making the time when she could come into our bed get later and later. These changes happened so slowly, over the course of months, that it often seemed to me we were making no progress at all, and I had to constantly remind myself that indeed, things used to be worse. All I knew was, my tolerance for being out of bed was increasing faster than her sleep independence!

(Naps, meanwhile, are a whole different issue. I have always been almost irrationally opposed to a schedule that would tie me town to the house, and I did manage to avoid it for over a year. Rosy would sleep when she got tired, in the moby or sling or ergo, or the car, or the stroller, wherever we happened to be. But finally I had to accept that she needs a dedicated time to nap, and if not a consistent place, at least a consistent opportunity. Still, I haven’t gotten her into a routine that involves her crib–she has hardly ever napped there. Almost every day, I take her out in the stroller around the block a couple of times, and then bring it in to her nursery. She sleeps in it anywhere from half an hour, to two and a half, it’s completely unpredictable.)

You can see my disdain for the sleep conversation has been reduced, and now I am just as tedious as every other mother. The truth is, I even bore myself when I talk about all these details. Still, I can’t always help it, and since this is (I hope!) the one and only blog post that will be dedicated to the issue, I won’t spare you.

As of last week, the state of things wasn’t too horrible, but far from perfect. Nathan was putting Rosalind to bed every night at 8, and it was taking between 15 and 45 minutes to get her down. She was waking up 3-5 times a night, generally requiring only 5-10 minutes of shushing and patting to put her to sleep. I was bringing her into bed between 5 and 6 for some breastfeeding and a couple more hours of sleep, and we’d get up for the day between 8 and 9. And then, on Thursday night, something random clicked in Rosalind’s brain. Nathan put her down as usual at 8:30. The next time I heard from her was at 6 am, her normal time to breastfeed. Now, *I* was up before then, multipe times, listening at her door to make sure she was still breathing! But she was just doing her thing. The next night, same thing. And then next. Last night she did wake up a little earlier, at 4, but it was due to nasty congestion. It seems, for the time being at least, that she has learned to sleep in long stretches. Whether she’s not waking up at all, or waking up but drifting back off on her own, I am astonished.

And here’s the black lining on the silver cloud. It seems she doesn’t need as much sleep as I thought. Instead of going to sleep at 8 and waking up at 8, she has been staying awake until nearly 10 and getting up at 7:30. So now Nathan and I are staying up later than we should, to have a little time together at night, and also I’m getting up earlier than I used to.

Argh!

When I imagined having a daughter, before I did have one, I pictured a wild spirit. I thought this girl would be fearless, climbing on everything, not too interested in other people. I thought she’d have a knack with blocks and legos, she’d be fascinated by fantastical stories, and she’d be always original in thought, word, and deed. In other words, I imagined her as an idealized version of myself–the way I wished I was when I was actually growing up.

Rosalind is not that girl. She is not fearless, although not timid either; she thinks about things before she does them, even at this young age. Block toys are of moderate interest to her, but she shows no signs of being an architect later in life. Instead, her focus is on other people. Some of her first words were the names of her little friends, and she talks about (and wants to talk to) distant members of her family all the time. (I can’t tell you how many times a day she points to the laptop or the phone and starts repeating, “Nanna? Nanna? Peez?”) She is also constantly surprising me at how nurturing she is, almost maternal. I got her a plastic baby doll a few months ago when I saw how she was developing, and she *loves* that doll. She feeds her with a spoon, she dances with her, she washes her hair in the bath tub. Here she is giving her a ride on her horse Rody:

Rosalind and Baby go for a ride

Plastic dolls are all well and good–at least it’s a realistic baby instead of a Barbie, lord knows–but in typical hippy/pioneer spirit, I would much rather Rosalind be playing with a soft, natural, hand-made doll that she can keep her whole life. So I decided to make her one for Christmas. Not being very fluent in sewing patterns, I ordered a kit for beginners for a Waldorf Doll with pale skin, blue eyes, and red hair. It took more hours than I really want to think about, but it was pleasant work; usually I made progress while I watched the Colbert Report or Columbo with Nathan. Here is now it turned out:

Doll in her Christmas outfit

The doll, au naturel

Does Rosalind like the doll? Well–somewhat. She is no Baby in Rosalind’s affections. But I like to think that she’s gaining some fondness for her. It’s a little hard for me to watch her spill stuff on the doll, or try to pull the hair out that I so painstakingly sewed in–but I grit my teeth and smile, because my best hope is that someday she’s a dirty, raggedy, loved object.