Quality Time

Hi.

This is a difficult topic. I'm not sure I can do it justice, but here goes.

What is "quality time"?

I have a feeling it is a relatively new concept.

For me, it brings to mind the image of Andy Griffith fishing with his son. Card games. Board games. Talking around the dinner table with your family. Summer vacations at the beach.

Mom, if you're reading this, hi. I seem to remember my mom telling me at one point that something she was taught was that smaller quantities of "quality time" with kids would outweigh/overcome the fact that work/life/etc would get in the way a certain amount of the rest of the time. I think the idea that was for working parents, especially working mothers, the message was that as long as the time you spent with your kids was "quality," it was good enough. 

I wonder if historically in British/US culture, strict gender roles have deprived men of welcomed emotional expression (and emotional experience), leading many of them to cope by maintaining emotional distance, and/or drinking/raging. I wonder if the 1950s fantasy of Andy Griffith was in part a response to the absence of miserable fathers. I don't mean that they were bad fathers. I mean that they were miserable. I also wonder if the idea of "quality time" was invented as an antidote to the guilt parents feel for the times they are short with their kids, the times they are distracted. And when women started going to work, the conflict many felt over not being home with their kids may have been partially alleviated by the dream that sufficient "quality time" would fix any harm. The idealization of childhood may have also played a role in the development of the idea of "quality time." Financial success (and advertisers finding a huge market for the ideal lifestyle dream) led families to strive for perfection, not just in possessions, but in time expenditure, and the conflict between reality and the dream led to cognitive dissonance alleviated by the idea that sufficient "quality time" would fix any missteps.

I like to read about death. You know, when I need a pick-me-up (not really). But I seriously do read a fair bit about people dying. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a haunting yet powerful book about a man with locked-in-syndrome. He was driving to work one day, mid 30s as I recall (like me), had a stroke, and could suddenly only move his eyes and eyelids. That was it. He wrote the book by having a nurse point to letters and blinking when she pointed to the right ones. What I remember was that friends visited him at first, and then they gradually stopped visiting. I remember that he would experience the pleasure of being washed. Of course this is an extreme case, but what he focused on at the end had nothing to do with vacations at the beach. It was memories and experiences of the day to day, and love.

Another great read a few years back was "When Breath Becomes Air." It's about a neurosurgeon (again, my age, mid 30s) who got a brain tumor. He writes the book as he's getting sicker. Toward the end, it's getting harder for him to write, but he focuses on urging everyone reading the book to go and live while they can, to wake up from the stupor of sacrificing the present in hopes that it will lead to a successful future. For him, going through medical school was of course a huge sacrifice of life time. Was his time in medical school "quality time"? Was it worth the sacrifice? Did it "pay off"?

I took a bunch of psychology/education classes to get my teaching credential. Some of them were general, some of the geared toward special education. One class in particular, Adolescent Psychology, impacted me a lot. I remember learning two big ideas. One was that what kids need to thrive are 1) "unconditional positive regard" (love) and 2) consistent limits. The measure of parenting success did not consist of frequency of beach trips. The second big takeaway was that what kids need most is you. Simply for you to show up. It's not about what you do with them, it's about being there. I've got two little boys, and I've found this idea to be very helpful. When in doubt of what to do, I just sit down and look, listen, hold them. I don't have to take anyone fishing to be enough.

I'll tell you what isn't quality time, at least for me. Staying up late at night, sitting next to my husband, each of us on our phones looking at random crap online. I would say that 90% of what is done on my phone does not qualify as quality time, or even useful time. It is entertained time, but that's it. There is little to no personal connection occurring, no memories being made, no simplicities of life being savored. No boredom tolerated (and occasional boredom has been shown to be an important part of mental function, improving creativity, for example).

Sometimes when I want to evaluate something, I picture that I'm dying, and then ask whether I would want it. Like, is that paint color what I would want in my living room if I were to be lying in it next week, dying? I know it's a bit morbid, but it cuts to the chase sometimes for me to identify what I truly want.

One other thing I want to note- I remember learning in psychology classes that negative experiences stay with us much more than positive ones do. It isn't fair. But if someone you trust is trustworthy for 50 years, and then they lie to you, the one lie breaks the 50 years of trust. Parents who are patient, kind, patient, kind, and then yell or harshly spank their kid are remembered for their failure, not their success. I suppose it's a built in way to keep us safe- even if snakes don't bite us most of the time, the fact that they sometimes do bite us keeps us away.

Basically what this means for me is that quantity is more important than "quality," and if the striving for money to take the kids on vacation or the striving for the perfectly clean home or the striving for whatever else we're striving for makes me snap at the kids, it is definitely not worth the trade off. Irritability due to overwork or perfectionism will not get fixed by a trip to the beach. What my kids will remember about me is how I wake up in the morning, how I treat them day to day, not whether we played board games or not. It's sobering, but important.

The present is often not worth sacrificing for the future. There is a strong argument for enduring the stress of higher education; I'm not against that at all. But I think the focus should be on improving the experience of higher education so that it isn't so stressful. Having a sucky job to pay the bills is often necessary. We aren't elated all of our lives. But how can we improve that? How can we make jobs not be so sucky? How can we make the suffering we endure in order to reach our goals into a pathway that someone could die in the middle of and not feel that their limited hours had been wasted?

And can we all just turn off our phones?

Meal Planning

Hello.

So pretty much every homemaker blog/how to get your life together list/ etc etc that you read will tell you that you're supposed to plan your meals. That this will help you save money, eat healthier, manage your time better, etc.

So we've tried a number of methods. When Alex and I first got married, he knew how to cook, and I didn't, plus our grocery budget was like $150 a month, so most of our meal planning consisted of, "buy flour, canned tomatoes, and pasta." We would bake bread, bake pizza dough, put toppings on both, and vegetables were little luxuries we enjoyed. So planning was basically to have the staples, and then figure something out.

Then I got a job as a teacher and we moved, and started spending maybe $250 a month, so there were more vegetables and things in cans. I bought a little binder and started writing down recipes from the Internet on different pages. I had learned how to cook by this point, and we had moved beyond bread and pasta to Indian food, more interesting Mexican food, and found a French Lentil Salad recipe that has become very important to us. But we were still largely cooking based on what we happened to have in the kitchen, and often ate in the middle of the night, and it wasn't the most peaceful part of our lives, because there were always so many dishes to wash (and, remember, we were eating super late).

I've tried looking up recipes on the NYTimes website, and I've got a bunch bookmarked. I've also found a few on Pinterest. Any attempt to plan meals, however, was overwhelming due to the number of ingredients per recipe, and it just never really happened.

The first big step forward for me was to get an old-fashioned recipe tin with recipe cards a year ago for my birthday. I got cute little flowery cards that I wrote all of our main recipes on. The beauty was that I didn't have to touch a screen in the middle of cooking, could easily make notes about changes I was making, and could physically look through them and set them out for something I was planning to make. But the best part of all was that I could physically take out the meals I wanted to make in a week, and physically carry them to the kitchen and see what we had and what we didn't. There wasn't any clicking.

I tried getting the "official" "Homemaker" meal-planning pieces of paper and an "official" 3 ring planner to stick them in. It was all very official. It didn't work well at all, because it took forever to write it all down, and then we'd need to change plans mid-week, and I'd spent so much time making it pretty and planning it within an inch of its life, it was just too difficult. Plus, every time I'd sit down to plan for the next grocery run, it would take 3 miserable hours.

I recently made a discovery that may very well change meal planning in our household as we know it. Google Calendar. I've picked 20 meals or so (some repeat), and put them on a certain day a month, with a day built in for leftovers, salmon once a week, and inexpensive pizza every other Friday. I tried to think about nutrition and the USDA recommendations. It automatically populates out for the rest of our lives. ;) Of course we can change things, add different recipes, etc. But now there is a DEFAULT automatically in place! So, I just sat down to meal plan. Rather than 3 hours, it took me 10 minutes. I looked at the calendar for February, tweaked the automatic meals a little bit, then looked at the meals for this week, jotting them in my non-official-meal-planner calendar. I could tell in my head that we already had ingredients for all of them, just needing a couple necessities (we made a big grocery run last week). If I needed to, I could pull out the cards.

Anyway. 10 minutes!! And I have a list for tomorrow. And the plan is pretty healthy, which is good to know now that we have kids to take care of who should ideally eat more than bread.

10 minutes.

And this is why Google wins the "best at everything" prize. They should just rename Google "Big Brother." They know everything about us, anyway. Including what we're planning to have for dinner on March 17, 2075.

How to Lose Weight- Forest over Trees

Hi.

So here's something that drives me crazy.

Every year in January (well, year round, but especially now), everyone tries to sell you things to make you healthier. The biggest thing I see being promoted for weight loss is getting a gym membership.

There are lots of other things you can buy, too. You don't need me to list them all. But to make sure you're 100% fully outfitted, make sure to buy some protein shakes, new exercise clothes, a subscription to an app on your phone that sends you at-home workouts for the days you can't make it to the gym, and a million other things.

People on lots of different platforms, and especially in magazines, talk about weight loss like it's a very personalized thing, like it's a mystery. Most people I've heard talk about it talk like it's a challenge they aren't sure how to win, like it depends on the individual, on their age, metabolism, activity level. That there are certain foods that make you lose weight, and ones that make you gain.

The thing I find most humerous about it all are the ads. You know, a really fit, sexy person doing exercises. The implication is that the way they got hot is by exercising.

I'm not saying you shouldn't exercise. Of course we all should exercise. Based on my latest reading, a 30 minute walk a day is enough. Getting your heart rate up is extra credit. This is for minimizing bad health conditions, but in general, it will not make you lose weight.

Also, there are ways, minimal ways, in which individuals differ. It's true that the more muscle you have, the faster you burn calories. However, the effect of this for most normal people is not as big as the hype. If you're a body builder, sure.

It's also true that the older you get, the slower your metabolism moves. Breastfeeding burns calories, too.
Overall though, the way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than you burn. There will always be subtleties- tiny individual variations, times of day that do this and that, avoiding "starvation mode," etc, etc, etc. But don't lose the forest for the trees (most of it is click-bait). The way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than you burn.

It doesn't really matter what type of food the calories come from, as it relates to weight loss. (It does matter as it relates to nutrition, but that's something else entirely. It also matters as it relates to how you'll feel and your energy levels, but that's something else entirely. Those are trees). You can gain or lose weight eating broccoli all day, or eating cake all day.

I learned this based on my experience using MyFitness Pal, which, unlike a gym membership, is free. It is a tool that estimates how many calories you are eating (as you log foods), and estimates how many calories you are burning (as you log activities). That's it.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I gained 75 lbs (peak pregnancy, including having a baby inside). Using MyFitness Pal, I got 65 lbs down, then got pregnant again.

With my second pregancy, I gained 75 lbs again (why? Because I ate more than I was burning. I stopped logging foods because I was pregnant. I don't judge this decision).

It's now been 9 months, and I've been logging on MyFitness Pal since around August, with some months on, some months off. I'm approximately 50 lbs down from peak pregnancy weight.

There are lots of tricks out there, lots of methods- elimination diets, diets where you fit food into physical boxes, etc. The point of it all is to estimate the number of calories consumed, and making that be less you can be expected to burn.

Before I found MyFitness Pal, I had tried to lose weight (when I was younger, was a fine weight, but just wanted to look hotter). This consisted of me jumping on treadmills/ellipticals, injuring myself by overdoing it, and then giving up.

The irony of all the gym hype is that you can workout really hard for several hours, burn maybe 300-400 calories, and then eat that much extra food to "reward" yourself in about 5 minutes. Like, yeah. Unless you have a way of making sure you don't eat more calories than you burn, exercise does NOT make you lose weight.

What exercise DOES do it give you a little bit extra that you can eat WHILE you are losing weight (having already measured your food to achieve a calorie deficit).

One other note- another app, along with MyFitness Pal, that is helping me this time around is Happy Scale. You naturally have some weight fluctuations as you live, due to water intake, salt intake, and for women, the time of the month. Seeing every up and down can be discouraging. Happy Scale basically calculates a best-fit-line of all your data points so you see gradual trends, rather than a bumpy mountain range. It shows you the forest.

One other note- if you are going to do an elimination diet to lose weight, go team. Just know that it's not a sustainable method, and for many people leads to binging. Also, if you don't have another way to monitor your food intake, as soon as you're done losing, you're likely to gain it right back again, because you won't have a method of measure your caloric intake once living like a normal person. Most people who lose weight end up gaining it all back again, and then some, because of fat cells excreting hormones in an effort to re-fill themselves. So you will need an external method to monitor calories in, at least for the first year, for most people, according to my research.

One other note: I drink coffee with chocolate sauce and half and half several times a day, along with chocolate throughout the day, and am still able to lose weight due to logging calories. There are few joys greater than eating something super fatty and grinning at myself in the mirror as I know I will still weigh less the next morning. It's like a budget for your food intake. AND I know I'll be able to keep up my way of eating after losing, since I'm not eliminating anything altogether, so I don't become obsessed with what I'm missing.

Down with gyms! ;) Just kidding. Go to the gym if it makes you happy. But not to lose weight on its own.

One other note: if you try calorie counting and exercise counting and you still aren't losing, it's not because the method won't work for you- it's because the math problem's wrong. Maybe you're eating more than you'e logging, or maybe you're burning less than is estimated based on human averages. The math problem may need tweaking.

I'm not saying it's easy, because it isn't. I have often told my husband that weight loss is the hardest thing I've ever attempted- and I used to teach middle school! ;) But, it really is the hardest thing I've ever done, because of the voluntary time and effort it takes, day after day, month after month. Pregnancy is hard, but you typically aren't making a daily decision to remain pregnant, and there's a whole "creation of a baby" beautiful thing happening at the same time to get excited about amid the challenges. It's very difficult to voluntarily choose to work, and to suffer (because, let's face it, choosing not to eat when you want to isn't pleasant), day after day, with an end goal that is 100% optional and not required of me by anyone else.

That being said, it does come down to math. It's math, not magic!

Non-Trump Supporting Christian

Hello.

So this was interesting. It took me forever to even locate this blog. I haven't written in it for 8 years. That's a long time. 

Along my search, I realized that I've created like 5 blogs. 

I'm not really sure what I want to say. All I know is that I would like to take the time to articulate some thoughts, and to have a place to share them, along with a link, to anyone I want to. 

What a great irony it is that, with jet travel and Facebook and text messaging- heck, I can video-message anyone I want in the entire world, pretty much, at this moment- the ability to have an uninterrupted, real conversation with another person seems so far off.

I left 90% of social media few years ago, and it was a very good thing. But it's sad that it was a good thing. Here's what social media should be:

Cute puppies!!

Aww, how cute!

Cute kids!!!

Aww, how cute!

And then it became 

Cute puppies!!

What? Are they rescue puppies? You're not telling me you BOUGHT a dog?!! A pure-bred?! SOCIALIST!

Cute kids!!

You are being insensitive to everyone out there who is unable to have kids! You should only post miserable things about your family, to make sure you are being REAL and AUTHENTIC and not making anyone else feel bad about themselves!!

:/

Jokes aside, here's what really happened:

I posted about teaching our babbling baby to say "Obama." It was funny, because all he was really saying was "Ba.. ba.. ma ma." It was cute. 

And someone I ACTUALLY know, in real, life, like, a human, took it upon themselves to ask "Wouldn't teaching him to say 'Jesus' be more beneficial?"

????!!!!

And this is a human that I know, that we go to church with. Like, really??

That's just one example of five million.

I was on Instagram. I followed people. Suddenly, lots of people I know started posting about "Make America Great Again." They started posting videos of their kids wearing red hats, chanting the slogan. Another friend posted pictures of her family at barbecues, wearing matching MAGA hats with someone else.

And I'm not saying I can't be friends with a Trump supporter. I absolutely can be an I am, in fact, with many, many.

But.

I was not capable of not judging them. I was not capable of seeing it, then seeing them in person, and feeling like I was happy to see them. It made me sick, almost nauseated, to see what I considered racist and homophobic and WRONG on so many levels being promoted by children.

Basically, I felt the same way the "Jesus" word person felt when she saw me post the word "Obama."

And I decided that the pain wasn't worth the fake intimacy. That it would be better to just NOT see the MAGA hats online, but to wait for someone to wear one next to me. Then, I can ask them why they want to MAGA, and why they're wearing the hat, and I can listen to them. Because those cute little kids wearing hats, and their parents, are humans worthy of respect and the dignity of not being judged before knowing.

And there was no way I could look at them the same way after seeing pictures. I thought about having in-person conversations with each and every one, but I'd have to talk to like 80% of our church, it seems. In fact, I do not no a single person other than my husband in our church who we have talked to who has NOT supported Trump. I'm not saying they aren't there. But that's my experience.

Being a non-Trump-supporting Christian is lonely.

Hokay.

Yeah, I guess that works as a post.

Turns

Life has been taking some interesting turns lately. I would like to say that I'm excited about what God is going to do next, Hakkunah Matata, that the past is the past, and that I'm so happy and content and could basically be a blueberry pie if I were a dessert. But the truth is that I'm devastated, depressed, conflicted and guilt-ridden. If you know me, you know the latest.
On the upside, I am now teaching music again, which is always good. Just trying to stay positive amid the grief.

God is good, and I know that he has me in his hand, and I know that all things work together for the good of those who love him. I know that is true!! He does encourage me. It's just like trying to keep a sinking boat afloat.

louvre

I am in love with my husband.

-C

One more day till I'm DONE WITH JANUARY!!

I just wrote a rant about how frustrated I am with the credential program, how stressful it is, how I have no time for anything or anyone (basically), how I feel like a machine, and how this is like medical residency (I never made it to that point). But I need to adjust my attitude. God is blessing me with the opportunity to learn through trials, to work with students (yipee!!!), to learn from a supervising teacher who is very different from me, and to grow closer to Alex as we face life together. I am rejoicing. Let's try and keep up that attitude. I am beyond exhausted.
-C