Monthly Archives: January 2014

Terrible mother seeks redemption: dinner-time edition

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Here is my secret shame. Which I can only tell you about now that I’m doing something about it. Because up till now I’ve just been a bad parent, and no matter how much everyone pretends to blog about their terrible parenting, nobody really does.

Increasingly, totally, I’ve been feeding my children their dinner by bringing a plate into them while they watch TV. Dash, we know (bad parenting already acknowledged), has a sandwich on a plate. Mabel might have a bowl of pasta, which she would eat with her fingers although I definitely gave her a fork. There might be some broccoli in there. She might have had an apple or there might not. There might be some chicken, which I would offer and she would reject. It was all very terrible and reeked of atrocious parenting and yet I was powerless to change it. It made my life easier because once they were nominally “fed” I could make something nice for B and me and we could eat it in peace while they continued to watch TV. Mostly, I was lazy and blaming it on the children.

Two nights ago I decided I’d had enough. I was sick of being the waitress in the movie theatre of my home. I called a family meeting, got out my trusty notebook, and wrote a list.

This was basically how it went:

  • Aim: We need to eat dinner together at the table.
  • Difficulties: They don’t want to wait till 6pm. B can’t come home earlier than 6pm. How can I get them to wait longer, and then to turn off the TV and sit with us?

The answer, as usual, was bribery. Sorry, I mean a star chart. They now both have clear motivating factors – an Anna doll (from Frozen , that Anna, of course) for Mabel and more money for Dash, who likes acquiring money and has no immediate plans to spend it on anything.

I put forth my plan, as follows: That we all have dinner at 6pm every night; that we all sit together and eat our food with nice manners. That in return, I will provide food that people like, and also a hearty snack at after-school-time so that they can wait until six for dinner.

Then I got them to help me list food they like for dinner (Mabel, that is) and for snacks, so that I could go shopping. And we agreed on the star system, of course. They can earn a total of three stars per dinner: one for eating at the table, one for using good manners, and one for trying/eating a new food. (Definition of “trying” is at my discretion. Because for Dash sometimes a lick counts; for Mabel I expect a bit more than that.) And I get a star for every dinner-for-four I get on the table, because mums need motivation too.

Once Dash stopped shouting at me because he wanted to have the meeting in what he had decided should be the “meeting room” (aka the front room) and I wanted to stay at the kitchen table, the rest of the discussion went down a treat. They loved being part of the decision-making process, they really did.

Last night too, things went surprisingly well. I’m still making three (mostly) separate dinners, but first things first. Dash sat at the table while we ate cooked food that he could smell (quinoa, kale, chicken) and didn’t complain about it. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but for him it’s a big deal. Mabel ate her pasta and peas with a fork. They both tried some raw carrot: Dash didn’t like it and Mabel has found a new favourite food. (They have both had carrrot before, I promise.)

I made the table a bit more exciting by letting them both drink their milk out of small, sturdy wine glasses, which they loved. I’m thinking tonight I might put fancy napkins at each place, if only to stop Dash wiping his fingers on his sweater.

So we all got our stars last night. I have decreed that they will earn 5c per star, which doesn’t sound like much but works out to 1.05 at the end of the week, which effectively doubles Dash’s allowance and will get Mabel to her Anna doll a lot sooner than she otherwise would. I have not yet decided what my reward will be, but I’ll be making sure I get one.

Will it work? Will it fall by the wayside like so many others of our star charts? Will I be ferrying food back into the TV room in a week’s time? I suppose it’s up to me, really. I do feel better for having started it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a pizza to put together.

Children sitting at the table

Dash dictates exactly how much pizza he might taste.

Apricot breakfast muffins

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I like to make breakfast muffins. I whip up a batch containing something relatively healthy, thus guaranteeing that nobody else will want to eat them, and then I stick them all in a ziploc bag in the freezer. In the morning I can pull one out and 20 seconds in the microwave later I’ve got something nice to eat with my coffee.

In the summer I made a batch of somewhat aggressively healthy zucchini-and-almond ones; more recently I was eating my old faithful (delicious) oatmeal streusel muffins ; but today I pulled a bag of dried apricots off the shelf, looked up a basic recipe , and messed with it to good effect.

Apricot muffin

This is how my version looked:

  • 1 cup (160g) chopped dried apricots
  • 1 cup (120ml) boiling water
  • 1 cup (100g) wholewheat flour
  • 3/4 cup (75g) AP (white) flour
  • 1/4 cup (25g) wheatgerm
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup (75g) brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 cup coconut oil (120ml) (in its liquid state)
  • a splash of orange juice (or some orange zest)
  • 1 cup (240ml) natural yogurt
  • 1/4 cup (50g) chocolate chips
  • 1/4 cup (25g) chopped walnuts

Turn the oven to 400 F (200 C). Put the apricots, roughly chopped, into a small bowl and cover with the boiling water while you get on with everything else.

In a medium bowl, mix together the flours, wheatgerm, baking soda and salt. (You don’t have to have wheatgerm, and you can probably use all wholewheat flour if you want to.) I like to use a balloon whisk for this, but a spoon will work too.

Measure the sugar into a smaller bowl and mix with the egg, breaking up any lumps with a fork. Add the oil (you can use vegetable oil if you don’t have coconut) and the yogurt, as well as the orange juice or zest if you have it, and mix well.

Now mix the wet ingredients into the dry ones, but don’t overmix. Lumps are fine. Drain the apricots and add them, along with the walnuts and chocolate chips. Obviously, at this point the mix-ins are totally up to you, but this seemed like a good combination.

Scoop 12-15 muffins into waiting muffin cases (or greased muffin tins) and bake for 15 minutes.

Muffins in freezer bag

Oops, I just had one for my elevenses as well.

This entry was posted in baking , food , recipes and tagged breakfast , freezer , muffins on by .

Glass containing some proportion of liquid

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All the things I have not done that were on my to-do list for January:

  • Made the children write thank-you notes for Christmas [hangs head in shame; no excuse for that]
  • Booked the summer holiday. [Was just about to do this last night when Mabel wet the bed and all the information I had just entered and selections I had made timed out. Then when I tried again the flights had disappeared. I gave it up as a bad job and will try again tonight.]
  • Contacted my so-called contracting job to see if they might ever again need my services, for money, that they would pay me, that I could use to go to the hairdresser, for instance. Or pay for expensive summer holidays.
  • Planned dinners, preferring to continue to fly by the seat of my pants and make a lot of something-with-pasta.
  • Made muffins, because I need to do that today.

Things I have, however, managed to do, so it’s not all bad, you know:

  • Gone to the chiropractor, which is an ongoing adventure but I’m glad to have started it because I do officially have a bulging disc and it’s good to know about that so that some day when I accidentally bend sideways to pick up a dropped pencil and it suddenly agonizingly herniates, I’ll know what’s going on. Now do I have exercises which will “take the pressure off my spine.” Which is not all that reassuring when you wonder where else you can lean the rest of your body if not on your spine. And it’s nice, you know, when they tell you that it’s great because it’s not your whole spine. Just one little bit of it. So yay.
  • Acquired an audition for Listen To Your Mother, as promised, which was very easy to do once I knew it was a thing, because I wrote my piece and then when they said auditions would be happening I just sent an e-mail and they gave me a timeslot. So that will be this Saturday and I will tell you all about it afterwards so that if you do it you can be forearmed. (But not four-armed.)
  • Got anything done at all, such as keeping milk and cereal and toilet paper in the house, considering all the snow days and polar-vortex days and two-hour delays we’ve been running up against for the past few weeks.
  • Continued to make a renewed effort to, if not exactly prioritize, at least not let fall entirely by the wayside, writing that is not on my blog. By which I mean I have done a little of it and there are more words on the page than there were before. Chipping away at all that white space, I am, sentence by sentence.
  • Oh, and I did do that moving to WordPress thing I had planned for. And my stats are looking more realistic and yet not totally non-existent, so I suppose that’s good too.

 

Avocados

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Avocados remind me of my mother-in-law.

I had never tasted an avocado. I was nineteen, and in Ireland in nineteen-ninety-three, that was not as ridiculous as it might sound today, now that we’re all starting our little snowflakes off on their baby-led weaning journeys with a nice piece of avocado. They were still called avocado pears back then, probably.

I found myself at my boyfriend’s house taking part in an assembly line of very sophisticated starters consisting of half an avocado with crab mayonnaise in the dip left by the stone, for a grown-up dinner party. (By which I mean we were not invited.) I tried a little of the smooth green stuff. The taste was clean and yet perfumey, but it was the texture that was so different from anything I’d had before – slippery like soap, but softer. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

(Only a year or so later I was blithely making avocados into guacamole and slathering it on tortilla chips. The Tex-Mex revolution came to our shores with delightful, deep-fried-chimichanga, speed.)

My mother-in-law’s chocolate mousse was the stuff of legends, made from large bars of Cadbury’s Bourneville. She made braised red cabbage that had me snaffling extra helpings of a vegetable I thought I didn’t like out of the serving dish with my fingers in the kitchen. She showed me how to make mayonnaise by hand, drop by drop of olive oil in Italy, and how to grind tomatoes to garlicky gazpacho with a Mouli. She usually had some Prosecco to hand, to sparkle up any celebration.

I showed her how to steam broccoli in the microwave: she didn’t know about that. I always had strawberry jam in the fridge if she was coming to stay, and maybe some nice emmental; though she was always nothing less than delighted with whatever we had to eat, whether it was a home-roasted chicken or the excitement of a cinnamon bun in IKEA.

It’s just coming up to two years since she died . Our guest room goes mostly unused, and when we go to Ireland there’s something – someone – conspicuously missing. In our minds she’s still on a long trip to far-flung places. But we miss her voice on the answering machine on a Sunday afternoon, and the children’s memories of her are more inspired by photos than what they really remember.

She will never not be missed.

Granny and Dash, 2011

November 2011

 

Eager reader

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Yesterday we went to a bookstore (and not to Columbia Mall, where we might easily have thought of going, but that’s another blog post entirely) because B had finished reading the last of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books to Dash (with appropriate substitutions/omissions for the mildly rude bits) and needed something new for bedtime. New toys are a Christmas-and-birthday (and star chart and dentist) thing, but new books can happen just because, sometimes.

For his own reading, Dash has been working his way through the Magic Treehouse books, which seem to be just the right level and just exciting enough for his abilities and his tastes. (They’re all in the library.) He’s only on book 7 and with number 52 in the series due out in May I think they’ll keep him going for a long time; but on the other hand if something else were to pique his interest I was happy to buy that for him.

So we found two books of a series called The A to Z Mysteries that looked intriguing, and I got him a National Geographic Kids book about butterflies too. I bought Mabel a Frozen easy reader so she can look at pictures of her beloved Anna and Elsa to her heart’s delight, and maybe sound out some words, because she can do that now, a little. And we bought The Mysterious Benedict Society for bedtime reading. It’s nice and long and won prizes and I think I’ve heard of it, so I hope it turns out to be appropriate, since I know that’s a bit of a shot in the dark.

Then we went to have coffee and share a giant chocolate chip cookie. Dash and Mabel were comparing the pictures on their little cartons of vanilla/chocolate milk. I suggested that Dash read what it said on the back, because there was some kid-oriented information about cows, or milk, or something. He glanced at it, and gave up instantly.

“Mom,” he said, “I just got THREE BOOKS.” The implication being that if I was expecting him to read all those words at some future date, he certainly wasn’t going to exert himself by reading the back of a milk carton now.

I was a little disheartened. If it’s that hard to read the back of the milk, I thought, how hard must it be? How much of an effort must he be making every evening when he sits down to read his chapter? What’s it like to look at words and not just instantly understand what they say?

This morning he sat down with his current Magic Treehouse and polished off the last three chapters, just like that.

I should lay off worrying, I think.

 

Squid sandwich (not actually a food post)

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While on the outside, this week has been about snow, and concomitant school closings and late openings, on the inside for me it’s been about having a back problem. Not that my back is any more painful than it was last week or the week before – in fact, since that first visit to the chiropractor it’s been a lot less painful in bed at nights, and the rest of the time about the same; a twinge here, a nudge there, bending at the knees not the waist; doesn’t everyone’s back hurt when they sneeze?

No, I suppose everyone’s doesn’t, but this has just snuck up on me so gradually that it really felt pretty much normal. Not something I should be whining about and certainly not going looking for medical intervention over. The chiropractor and then the nurse at the MRI both asked had I done something to it – an accident, I suppose, is the most common reason why someone relatively young like myself (don’t shatter my illusions) would need such treatment. But there wasn’t anything. It just sort of wore on.

I didn’t think I was fretting about any of it overmuch, but the night before the MRI I had that classic anxiety dream that my teeth were falling out. I was brushing them vigorously and then I leaned over the sink and several enormous molars just popped out. I thought “This is a dream thing. Maybe I’m dreaming.” So I poked a tooth to see if it would wake me up and it didn’t. I was disappointed but not very surprised, and annoyed that now I’d have to go and see the dentist as well.

The MRI was fine, though it did go on for EVER – they made me as comfortable as I could be while lying on my back and I listened to NPR on the headphones, which was moderately distracting, and every now and then I’d feel my shoulders and hips tensing up and I’d have to consciously relax. The noise wasn’t as bad as I’d anticipated after all the warnings from kind readers – I think if it’s an MRI on your head maybe it’s a lot louder.

Afterwards the tech showed me on the screen where the dark shape of my cartilage was pushed out on either side of the vertebrae in the affected area. I had been envisaging it like a sandwich with the jam pushing out on either side, but of course cartilage is solid stuff so it’s not dripping away into the rest of my interior; it’s just sitting there and maybe being squeezed a bit more as time goes on. I have no idea what they do with that, and so far I haven’t googled to find out. I’m sure someone will tell me soon enough.

B suggested I should envisage the cartilage more as a squid, but I said it would have to be one with no tentacles. So now I’m seeing the head of a squid sandwiched between my two wholewheat vertebrae and wondering if it would just break in two and drop off on either side at any point… but it’s probably connected to the bone better than that…

At least I still have all my teeth.

This entry was posted in being grownups , self-centred and tagged chiropractor , MRI , my back , sick adults on by .

Cheeses

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Actual conversation I just had with Dash, aged 7.75 tomorrow:

Him: Why do you get more popcorn than I do?

Me: Mine has parmesan on it. Cheese is good for you.

Him: I don’t like cheese. And I can say that even more than usual, because I’ve tried cheese.

Me: Really. When did you try cheese?

Him: Twice. One time at the park.

Me: Yes.

Him: And a second time in late 2013.

Me: Oh. That’s very specific.

Him: Yes, it was October or November. And I didn’t like it.

Me: Okay then.

There is nothing more to say.

Dash balances on a bollard

Fully documented non-cheese-eater

Snow way snow how

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Time for a bullet post to clear my head of the thoughts jumbling up in here.

  • Snow. We have it. Also coldness. Coldth. It is very. Tomorrow it will be less so and we are fervently hoping that there will be school. Also my MRI is tomorrow morning and I already rescheduled it once.
  • My favourite warm fuzzy brown cardigan that I like to wear around the house disappeared at new year’s. Three weeks later to the day I found it exactly where it should have been (maybe a little further over) in the closet. I think this is indicative of nothing except how rarely I actually hang things up where they belong.
  • Sometimes your seven-year-old isn’t just shouting random math questions out the bathroom door at bedtime, he’s actually trying to calculate how many inches long the roll of toilet paper is. For which you must give him some sort of credit.
  • When you tell that same seven-year-old to put on his swim shorts under his regular clothes while getting dressed, remember to check that he did so before you drive in the snow to the pool, because otherwise you’ll have to drive back home again to get them because he will swear that you never said any such thing.
  • If by any chance you’ve forgotten any of the words to Do You Want To Build a Snowman? from the Frozen soundtrack, I have a five-year-old here who will knock on a door/wall/window and sing it all, in a different voice for each verse as Anna gets older, wearing a specially selected dress, sitting down with her back to said door/wall/window with her legs out exactly as happens in the movie. So that’s comforting to know.
  • Also, if you’ve forgotten the names of the fifty states of the USA, in alphabetical order, I have someone here who can sing them for you, many many times, so long as you don’t mind some tunelessness to go with the belting out and the particularly dramatically drawn out last line.
  • Finally, if you have any aspirin I’d be obliged.

 

This entry was posted in lists , random thoughts and tagged Frozen , Snow on by .

Weather permitting

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It’s clearly unfair that in America the concept of the snow day – when work or school is cancelled because of too much snow for your particular part of the country to handle – even exists. Ireland needs some days. I came up with a few you might like to try using on the establishment.

  • Rain days, for when the rain was pelting so hard against the window all night that you couldn’t get a wink of sleep.
  • Wind days, for when the wind is blowing your front door shut so you can’t leave the house.
  • Sheep days, for when the wind and rain are blowing the sheep sideways across the roads, causing a traffic hazard.
  • Mist days, for when you can’t see as far as the car in your driveway, let alone a bus stop. It would clearly be dangerous to venture out looking for it.
  • Radiance days, for when you’re blinded as soon as you go out by a strange shining orb in the sky. You’d better go straight back inside and take it easy in a darkened room.
  • Temperate days, for when it’s much too nice to go to school and you just have to play hooky.

Let me know how you get on with that.

Snow, trees, cars, houses

Proudly nerd parenting

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I was going to write a long and edifying post on the trip to the art gallery we took this afternoon, but then I decided that the salient points were neither the wonderful free museums nor the exorbitant prices of the food in said museums nor even how the children did not express a newfound love and appreciation for art, but simply the following two episodes.

I took Mabel into the bathroom and had a proud moment as she remarked, in her clear piercing voice as I hung out in the two square inches available in her stall, “Mummy, it’s hard to decide who the main character in Star Wars is.” Then we discussed whether a baddie could be the main character, how there aren’t often girls as main characters, and how (and whether) both Anna and Elsa could count as main characters in Frozen . If you have to have a long conversation with your pre-schooler in a public bathroom, all this rates a lot higher than a repeated chorus of “Have you finished?” “ Now have you finished?”

But my nerdly pride was not yet satiated.

After a quickish look at the French Impressionists and some other British and American artists (not too bad considering we mostly let the kids direct what we looked at and how long for), it was time for lunch. After sustenance we were planning to go on to the modern-art side of the museum (though it turned out to be mostly all closed, so we didn’t) and I was trying to explain how this would be different and, you know, interesting.

“After a while artists stopped trying to paint what looked real and started painting other things,” I said. “So you could look at a picture and say what you think it looks like, but there’s no one right answer.”

“Oh!” said Dash, not quite getting the point, but ready to apply it to something he had heard about recently from his father. “Like that thing in Star Trek when there was a test the captain couldn’t get right because there was no right way to do it?”

Now, your nerd quotient might not be high enough to recognize this as a description of the test in Star Trek II ( The Wrath of Khan ) called Kobayashi Maru , but I’ve been acquainted with my husband long enough to know exactly what Dash was talking about, even though I couldn’t swear to you that I’ve seen the movie. (Not while awake, anyway.) But I pretty much brimmed over with vicarious pride (B had gone to the bathroom when this happened, so he couldn’t do it himself) in my well-schooled little nerdling.

I like to think we’re just keeping that whole discovery-of-art thing  fresh for them  so they can impress the opposite sex with their sophisticated prints of Dali and Klimt on their college dorm walls. Whereas knowledge of the Star Wars and - Trek universes will stand to them much earlier.

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