On Not Going Back To Work This Week

As all my cohorts drag their sun-weary bodies out of bed and slog through their semi-familiar morning routine, I'm not going back to work today. I wondered how I'd feel about this, but right now I don't feel much except for fine. A tad anxious about income, but mostly fine, free, happy and like it's every other summer day. Maybe next week when all the students return to school, I'll feel a pang, or maybe not. Really, I think I'll be most affected my first day of subbing, when I'm actually returning, but in such a different way than I had been teaching.

I look forward to exploring the district from different perspectives, getting into new schools and teaching different ages. This also sounds a bit overwhelming, so I'll ease into it. Actually, the at-risk middle/high school (where many of my former students ended up) sounds more do-able than, say, kindergarten. We'll see. I think I'll work my way down to younger kids gradually. I'd like to try subbing at PACE, a place for pregnant and parenting teens, the Arts Academy, as well as charter schools and alternative programs that our district offers. I'll find the right number of days to work to pay the bills, and I'll make the adjustments needed for the nanny-share we are entering into, without worrying about needing to  leave O every day.

I will miss being a part of a team. The isolation may be hard for me, but I bet I'll reach out and stay connected with my old cohort. And I get to spend most of this year watching my son grow up--being the main influence in his life, like, most of the hours of the day. For that, I am incredibly thankful.

Experiments in Domesticity (with recipes) Part I

Shannon didn't marry me because of my potentiality as a housewife. I never really valued domestic skills, as I always thought they would be a trap into traditional gender roles that I rejected. Sure, I started to see the value of being crafty over the years, but I never fully embraced it.  But here I am, at home while he works, caring for our son and our home (and enjoying it while it lasts). 
Overall, the biggest teacher this summer is pacing. Every day I clean the kitchen, and every day it gets messy again. Some days I fight that and feel very frustrated, other days I embrace it as the zen practice it is. The high chair gets used every few hours, gets dirty every time and needs to be cleaned every time. I AM starting to create systems for myself, which is something I think has always made Shannon crazy: he has a system for everything, from recycling to keeping receipts, and I go over the same issue--losing something, cluttering a drawer, etc.--repeatedly without ever thinking I need a system. Finally, it's the sheer amount of "time-on-task" that is forcing me to figure out systems. And it feels great! 
There are some areas that I am getting better at, and while it feels a little silly to share my newly-acquired knowledge with people who figured it out long ago, I consider myself a student displaying my own work (and I suppose, the teacher facilitating the learning as well...) So while I have a long way to come in the areas of sewing, de-cluttering and ironing, here are some of my recent accomplishments, mostly in the kitchen: (OH, PS: I'd like to think that my life experience thus far has informed some of my creations, for instance, my time in Japan has definitely influenced my kitchen work.)

The O-Maki: a kid-friendly "sushi" roll that is fun to make and eat

Ingredients: 
1 egg
yogurt (whole milk, organic--for kiddos)
cucumber
rice (optional, small amount)

Directions: using a small pan (cast-iron works well) and some chopsticks, crack an egg and whip it smoothly as the pan heats. Use the chopsticks to pull the egg back from the edges, cover and cook mini-omelet on low heat.  Chop cucumbers into thin strips. Pick up little omelet with chopsticks and lay it on a flat surface. spread with yogurt. Spread cucumbers along the middle, all the way to the edge. Add small amount of rice (makes it harder to keep together). Tightly roll egg up. Slice into small sushi-sized pieces. 
Variations include almost anything: avocado, cream cheese, cooked carrots, canned tuna or salmon, quinoa, etc.)

Cross-cultural O-maki: 
Ingredients: 
corn tortilla (refrigerated versions do not contain as many preservatives)
cream cheese
avocado
1 egg

Warm tortilla, cook egg as above and slice into strips, spread cream cheese on tortilla, lay avocado in a strip through the middle, add egg strips, roll tightly, slice.


Garden-Fresh Recipes: 

Eggplant casserole
Eggplant (from someone's garden)
1 fresh tomato
tomato sauce (with some flavor, either made by you from last year, or store-bought
lunch meat or proscuitto
polenta (easy option: the polenta sold in a tube in various flavors)
fresh basil
mozzarella
salt
olive oil
Optional: ricotta, provolone, or cream cheese to fill spaces)

Slice and "sweat" the eggplant--very thin slices, possibly with a mandarin slicer. Salt it on a rack and let it sit until it starts to sweat. Wipe dry. Layer ingredients in an oiled pan, starting with polenta (already cooked), then eggplant, then other ingredients how you choose. Most tomatoes will make it watery, so use sparingly. Top with cheese.  Bake at 400 degrees, covering with tin foil halfway through. Eat when eggplant pieces feel cooked, no longer rubbery. (Option: grill or saute eggplant first, then cook for a shorter time.) 

No-Cook Hot Day Asian Noodles

Ingredients: 
Rice Noodles
Bottled Peanut (or Pad Thai) sauce
2 cups rotisserie chicken, shredded 
2 cups fresh spinach
green onions or cilantro, depending on taste
sesame seeds (optional)
fish sauce, soy sauce, hot sauce, whatever you like to enhance your bottled sauce. 

This is a no-cook dish if you boil water in a kettle and pour it over the rice noodles in a glass bowl, then let it sit for 7-8 minutes. Put spinach in just before you strain the noodles. Toss noodles with spinach, add peanut sauce, add chicken, add green onions/cilantro. Serve warm or cold. 


Other domestic discoveries: 
These tricks I have learned are probably quite obvious to most people. But maybe there is someone out there with domestic inclinations as hopeless as mine, and maybe I am saving them a few minutes or one more frustrating day...

•  I try to have times that it is OK for the kitchen, living room, house to be a bit cluttered. Mid-project cleaning is for the birds! While I'm learning to be less messy, I get too distracted when I worry too much about the mess while I'm in the midst of something. Cleaning up right before my husband comes home or before going out feels more satisfying.
• I have a number of "yes" places for a toddler. A balcony can be a safe place with proper supervision and the right things to do. One or more kitchen cabinets can be a lifesaver to just say yes to (there are tupperware lids under our rug every day. We just look for them there). A small broom can come in handy as a toy... Allow more help than is really helpful. 
• I have learned to plan high chair time strategically. Recently, I've discovered that O can spend much longer than I had thought in his high chair if he has fun foods, a toy, or just music on in the background. I don't leave him here forever, but if he's content, it allows me to clean up the kitchen after a meal, finish unloading the dishwasher, or finish cooking something.
• I start prepping dinner at lunch time. Never thought I'd say that. It relieves the hardest part of the day: pre-dinner, when O is getting tired or hungry, I am too, and Shannon has just come home to feel torn between snuggling his kid and getting some down time after a hard day. 
• I can clean the bathroom or fold laundry while O is in the bathtub. 
• I have started to save the salad greens plastic containers for future salad greens, toys, bathroom organizers, outside scoopers, etc.
• Other people have told me that in the kitchen I should try these things: prep more than one meal at a time, double recipes and freeze half, clean while cooking (you know how I feel about that), keep a bowl for garbage/compost on the counter to make less trips to the trash/compost, shop smart and have the ingredients for some basic meals at all times. Also, someone's suggestion was pre-shift cocktails. That one sounds dangerous to me, but I should probably test it. 
• Please feel free to comment here on my blog (smileyface) and leave your suggestions for domestic success. 

Summer Vignettes Begun

Vignette is a word that originally meant "something that may be written on a vine-leaf." (Wikipedia) --followed by about 15 varied uses for this little French word.

For me, it's a way to capture what may be stream-of-conscience, little thoughts that I don't want to slip away. Now that summer is here, I might actually have the time to hold onto these thoughts. A post on Facebook feels too self-important, personal, or trivial (and I don't want to end up as someone's example in an "are you THAT kind of Facebook poster" survey). For example:

*I love how, upon getting down from his high chair, O will survey the damage he has caused, pointing and saying NananananNANAnana, and occasionally picking up an especially nice morsel to re-eat. 

*I love how he scrunches up his face when he's trying to smile, when he's aware that he's smiling, rather than just smiling out of the joy of new discoveries. 

*Everything is temporary. When a child goes through phases, it's sometime hard to see them as a phase. I tend to think "Oh, he's grown out of sleeping in the car" or "oh, I guess we're done with macaroni and cheese." I need to remember to be flexible, and try these items again, not give up on them. Today, we had a one-nap day that went from a few hours at the zoo (THANK YOU TIAs for our membership that makes a few hours reasonable), to falling asleep in the car (what? He can still do that?) to me going through a Starbucks drive-through to kill some time, to a successful transfer from car seat to bed! I'm thankful that he can grow in and out of these things.

*When I'm woken up early in the morning, I easily decide to take a nap at the same time as my toddler, but in order to get successfully to nap-time, I must ingest enough caffeine that a nap becomes out of reach. Elusive. A mirage. (Easy solution= go to bed earlier. Easier said than done.)

*I'm not one to covet. But I'd like to have a gene or magic trick, whatever it takes, to make my house even an iota of the clean-level of our superhero (pregnant) moms' group host. It might take a whole personality augmentation. Recently, we've had a fruit fly outbreak. I've become cleaner, for sure, and obsessed with my super-secret guilty pleasure, the counter wipe (Seventh Generation, but still surely killing all the good bacteria with the bad). But I cannot seem to achieve even a bit of the shiny floor, glistening (and clutter-free) table top, or fly-free environment that I experience at her house. Now I don't actually want to be a neat-freak, I'm glad that my priorities are 
on fun, flavor and, well, occasionally blogging, but it would be nice if the hours I spend cleaning up the kitchen and the same high-chair messes actually produced a cleaner home. Ah, well.

*Ollin keeps getting more fun. I used to think it would be sad to leave behind baby-ness, but every day is a new adventure with a cooler, more interactive, more intense, expressive, amazing little boy. I cannot get enough. From increasing sign language, to dancing, to singing, to watering the garden, to understanding exactly what we are saying and responding (to the point that we realize we need to really watch what we are saying), it certainly doesn't allow me time to miss the tiny baby that I started with. 

Okay. Those are your paragraphs-on-a-grape-leaf. 



Upcoming posts: The Garden Mafia, Summer Recipes, Toddler Adventures...

A Simple, Hard-To-Say Truth

Hi. I'm a working mom. Even though I worked part-time last year, I still worked five days a week. Even though I just decided to take next year off from my regularly scheduled work, I will still be working. Amazingly, as a teacher, I have most of the summer as a reprieve from working to focus on time with my son. Working moms have a hard balancing act, obviously, but I never really understood how hard until I became one.

The choices we make. Are very personal. Are easy for others to judge. Are really, truly our own. Are not always the best ones, even when we try really hard. Do I wish I had the ability to stay home the first three, four, five years of my son's life? Sure, in many ways. The idea scares me, too, as much of my identity is wrapped up in my career. Or even just interacting on a professional level, if I had a different career. So, if given the choice, I don't know that I would want to stay home full-time for that long.

But here's the truth I recently admitted: my son does better when I'm home. Don't get me wrong, we've had some wonderful care-providers who have loved him fully, but I'm Mama. He has gradually transitioned to not having milk while I'm gone. That's fine, and maybe even natural, though I fought it by pumping even when it was hard and unproductive and getting his nanny to push the milk whatever way possible--sippy cup, in food, etc. But now I'm home, and he gets as much milk as he wants. During the hours I used to be gone, he nurses at least twice. So, he's getting the nutrition from milk AND food, and many may say he doesn't NEED the milk, but it's certainly healthy for him.

And sleep. He's finally getting on a schedule that was not happening while I was working. The only way for our nanny and my parents to get him to sleep was by going for a long walk. This made for an interesting winter. It made for a frustrated nanny many times, until she just succumbed to it and planned accordingly. My mom just looked at it as a way to get in all of her daily steps.

Now I'm able to work out the sleep issues that have built up, from bedtime to nap time. One informs the other. The chicken and the egg. Not that we are done. Currently I am going back and forth between a one-nap day and a two-nap day, depending on when he awakes. 

That my son does better when I'm home must be the most obvious statement in the world to some of you. But we who work, while we try hard to see the situation for what it is, do everything we can to soften transitions, and see the big picture as well, sometimes justify our need or choice to work over what is best for our kid. I am still grappling with this and I'm not done. Down the line, there are probably elements where I'll be proud for O to see me with a career, see my values played out in my work, when he has a teacher, for him to recognize that his mama is also a teacher to other kids. Down the line, maybe without knowing what I'm missing, I'll recognize that O is more well-rounded when his mama is well-rounded, intellectually stimulated and in touch with the world, not isolated or unfamiliar with how to talk to adults. For right now, I am simply going to enjoy every moment of these three months being at home, for him and with him.

Summer Begins... With a Solid Plan for Next Year

It hasn't really hit me yet, but I am finished with teaching for three months, and finished with five-day-a-week, responsible for my own classroom and curriculum gig--for a year! Next year, I'm taking leave of absence to be home with O more, and I'm planning to substitute in the district. The goal is to work two or three days a week, mostly in my own school, and still make as much money as I made last year, after childcare expenses. Finally, the solution to my work-life-balance with child dilemma.

Subbing will be a great challenge for me. I say "great" because, while I never intended to sub--it always sounded miserable, I hate seeing the way students treat a sub, my strength has always been with building longer-term relationships with students--I believe it will make me a better teacher. The areas of weakness I currently recognize in my teacher-self are the same aspects I will have to nail to survive as a sub: being concise, making a strong first impression, letting go of what is not important, and being entertaining. Since I value my teacher-identity, I really do want to improve in these areas.

You see, a good teacher shouldn't only entertain, but kids certainly remember, relax, and learn more from a teacher who is funny and easy to listen to. Therefore, my public-speaking skills will need improvement, in the same way that people work to improve on them when their success does not rely on a captive audience. I want to be FUNNY, but I'll shoot for entertaining. Some students told me a long time ago that I'm funniest when I try not to be. Even though it may have been a jab, no one, aside from stand-up comics or SNL cast members, is really funny when they are trying too hard.

I want to make a strong first impression. I read that the first 10 words out of a sub's mouth will set the tone for the whole day. This won't be too hard for me, because I know how to be the alpha in the room, but I usually develop that over a longer period of time, so I will be very conscious of how this goes.

Being concise. I hate hearing myself talk too much when I know that kids are tuning out. When I tell stories, or get animated, or get off-topic, they refocus, of course. I want to keep it short and make the words I say COUNT. That is a skill for every aspect of my life, but here's a chance to practice and receive immediate feedback.

Letting go the little stuff and focusing on what is most important will be essential as a sub. I'm not very good about this in general; I dwell on the wrong things or accidentally get into power struggles that serve no one in the class. Without knowing everyone's names, their actual assigned seats, the general tone of the room, I won't be able to worry about the little things. I got some advice from a professional sub to present my three expectations at the beginning, then stick to those three things and let the others go. What are my three things ...

Last, or perhaps first, I think that a good way for a sub to make an impact is to have some stories ready to share, and use them strategically. When the students are at risk of tuning out, as incentive to get 15 minutes of work done, as a way to hook into engagement, etc.

Really, what I want is to be as engaging as a TED talk presenter! Does anyone have more great wisdom for me?

Baby Gift Guide for the Eco Family

Someone recently asked me what to get for a new mom. I checked out a list on another blog, but noticed that her post was full of product endorsements. I think it's more helpful to give tips and advice about what kinds of gifts are useful to us, and other new parents with an alternative, eco-minded approach to parenting and life. While I only have one child, I still count--I mean--have done a lot of research and feel qualified to give the following advice.

First, let me mention again that Portland, OR is an amazing place to be an alternative, eco-minded parent. If you are reading this from elsewhere, you might have different resources available. I'd be interested to learn about your options and choices. Also, if you can help the overwhelmed parents get organized, sometimes it's nice to create a system where people can contribute to a big purchase item. 

There are great sites online to make registries where you can just check off the items and buy them wherever is convenient/sustainable/local. Here's a link to another blog who already did the research so I don't have to: http://www.mom365.com/Wisdom/Pregnancy/Second%20Trimester/5%20Best%20Registry%20Sites.aspx

Consider these ideas if you're buying a shower or new baby gift for a family that wants to live as sustainably as reasonable (for them). 

Clothes
Hand-me-downs are amazing. Check with the family to see if they are receiving hand-me-downs before buying a lot of clothes. Find out if they are getting just a certain age range, then get a different one. 
If you do choose to buy clothes, second-hand shops are wonderful. The clothes are chosen carefully and a great deal more affordable than getting them new. Babies grow fast; some clothes never even get worn! There are also some eco-friendly shops that sell sustainable or fair trade baby clothes, if you must go new. A good pair of shoes for a 6-12 month-old is wonderful, as well. Try to avoid the cutesy clothes from the big box stores, as new, cheaply made clothes are sweat-shop made and just plain not necessary. Also, please avoid annoying gender-presumptive sayings all over the clothes that do not fit with the family you are buying for. "Daddy's Little Slugger", "Future Quarterback" or "Mommy's Little Princess" will most likely end up in the recycle bin, since second hand shops don't even want to go there. 

Diapers
Find out what the family plans to do about diapers. There are hundreds of options and it's a pretty personal choice. Almost everyone will be doing a little bit of disposables, for example overnight or traveling times. There are chlorine free disposables, as well as more eco-friendly options as well. Many cloth diapers have a size minimum, so most babies will wear the itsy-bitsy newborn diapers for the first few weeks. 

Cloth diapers are a big initial investment, but can save a family thousands of dollars over time. Most people choose one system and don't mix and match, because of the washing instructions and fitting combinations. If they are totally overwhelmed, a nice gift might be doing some research for them or buying a few single options for them to try out. There are some shops that sell just diapers, or online shops that will deliver. I asked my co-workers to each give me a diaper, as they were $17 a piece, and I got a perfect set of 20-25. Another helpful option is to contribute to the cost of a diaper service. 

Craigslist 
We bought all of our baby furniture, from a beautiful co-sleeper, dresser, crib, changing table, on Craigslist. I felt it was worth the effort. I'm not sure how logical it is to get a shower/baby gift this way, but it certainly is a wonderful marketplace of baby items. Always take precautions for safety and always ask about the working order before you set up the purchase. 

Big Box Stores
Even the most sustainable parent will venture into a big box store from time to time. It's inevitable. We tried to have a registry at Target, but found that most items were only available online and limited. Babies R Us is made for baby gifts, it's laid out logically and it makes things easy. They do sell some organic products as well. On the other hand, everything is made in China, many of the items are cheaply made, and they are not likely to worry about what something is made of beyond safety recalls. I put Amazon.com in this category, too. There are more items available, but it works in much the same way. Items to get at a big box store: 

• car seat (not recommended second hand)
• breast pump and accessories (also not recommended second-hand, but if you get one from a friend, that is ideal)
• furniture when you're over-budget and don't have time to browse craigslist
• baby gates, baby-proofing gadgets

Spring

Wow. I had a whole week off and I didn't even write a blog post. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy watching my baby boy grow up in small, incremental steps. How can I slow down time and still get to summer vacation ASAP?

Here are some of Ollin's latest achievements:

• Standing without realizing it
• Waving his hand across the span of area to his right or left in a Vanna White gesture
• Scrunching up his face and smiling in a flirty way
• Obsessing over books for long periods of time, making humming noises the whole time he turns the pages
• Skipping his afternoon nap
• Sprouting four molars months ahead of schedule
• Saying "giggle giggle giggle giggle"

Some of Mama's achievements: 

• Applying for six jobs online
• Going to the zoo with my family (Papa's achievement: braving the crowds and the shuttle bus)
• Three play dates for Ollin
• House cleaning
• Refreshing myself with a break from middle schoolers
• Three days of gardening with my family