More Things

Food

I have been cooking, and I've also been rediscovering food as pleasure. It never really went away on WW but it definitely took a back seat to points value. I'll admit to a tad of overeating...like the homemade peanut butter fudge someone brought in, and Cape Cod chips. But after a week of methodically eating through my "forbidden food" list, I began to long for more whole food type things. I had cherries yesterday morning, and they were fabulous. Tart and sweet on the tongue. I love the way the skin crunches between your teeth, and then the juice against your tongue. And the blood oranges I bought were sweet as well. There is nothing worst than a bad orange. All the work to get to the fruit just have to leave it a bad taste in your mouth. But these oranges were perfect...not too sweet but very juicy. I love the color as do the kids.

Last night I made a quinoa pineapple stir fry from the Veganomicon. We decided to make quinoa once a week as we love it and it is so good for you being a complete protein and all. This of course means stockpiling a large number of recipes. This is a definite keeper. First, the quinoa is made in half water/half pineapple juice which not tastes great but smells wonderful. The stir fry itself was delicious with red peppers, onions, garlic, edamande and ginger all smothered in a yummy sauce of soy sauce, vegetable broth, and rice wine. Add to this chunks of pineapple and cashews, and pure eating heaven ensued.

Sun

Winter Day Distractions

Snowballs against the window....

A laugh coming from in the cold....

A rousing game of dinosaur bowling...

Your own legs and feet in stripped socks.

Snow Day

We actually got snow in Charlotte. We were treated to a spectular midnight snow show:

And my perfect snowday breakfast....

Things

Going Home

Flight Itinerary

Depart 9:30 AM 03 Jun 2008

From Charlotte, NC
To Mexico City, Mexico
Arrive 12:20 PM 03 Jun 2008 Meal: Buy on Board

Class: Coach

Depart: 1:15 PM 22 Jul 2008
From: Mexico City, Mexico
To: Charlotte, NC
Arrive: 5:56 PM 22 Jul 2008
Meal: Buy on Board

Class: Coach

I bought our tickets tonight. I know I had to do it now or we'd find a million reasons to spend the money and not go. We're going home after almost seven years away. We showed the kids pictures of some of our favorite places, and I felt my heart kind of lift up. The D. F. is my home at least in spirit. It is the place I feel the most longing for.

And it is not the kind of romantic longing where everything is better: I remember the smell (chorline like on teh most polluted days), the way the smog crawls up into your nostrils, the povertry, the danger. But I also remember the beauty, the life that is so out there in the streets, the buildings, the coffee. And we will be with our family, and indeed H's family feels like my family now.

In five short months, we will be boarding a plane to bring our family to our home. The girls have never been to their other country. We will make them citizens when we go. And Umberto, well he was a baby. This is the first visit he will remember. H and I have already begun to plan all the things we want to show them. This is a part of parenthood...to show your children your world, and watch as they remake that world in their own way.

And of course this visit will be bittersweet. Mexico is not our home anymore. And we will be going to and leaving Mexico without a home. Before we leave our things will be in storage. And when we return...well at this point we have no idea. It is strange to have something so concrete planned when the future is hazy. And of course it is bittersweet for H as things have changed so much. This is the place of his birth yet there is much that he won't recognize or at least that is his assumption.

Mexico here we come...

Blur--Magical Us-Park Days

Playground

Leaves/Magic

Caution: Fat Girl Running

This is what a fat girl looks like before her run! I was pretty proud of the fleece. Light weight but warm, and best of all, on sale. I was trying to get H to bring it on but he feared my wrath.

So the fat girl is running, and loving it. I have always loved to run. I love being alone. I love having music blaring in my ears. I love the feel of the ground everytime I hit down. I love feeling the wind. Today, I ran in the rain, and I loved the feel of the rain. If I could capsulate freedom in an action, it would be running.

I stopped running in high school. I was on the cross country team. I loved it. Running in the woods is amazing. But...I was slow...really slow. And of course my team hated it. And someone took me aside and suggested that I needed to lose some weight because the extra weight was making me slow. I quit the team the next day. No one, including the coach, encouraged me not to . I went to the meets for awhile but it was kind of painful to watch. I believed fora long time that fat people just couldn't run. Everyone I saw running was always thin. The girls who ran track and cross country were always these tiny little things. The big girls played field hocky.

I didn't run for a long time. I rode my bike a lot as an undergrad. But I didn't run. Until I went to Mexico. H and his parents run at a park called Los Viveros. The first time we went I was assuatled with images. The venders with their wares, sneakers, sport's bras, shorts, tank tops, laid out on blankets. The fruit sellers, the peanut sellers (peanuts for the way overly friendly squirrels). H and I used to stop and get a coffee from this great shop, El Jarocho that had these huge sticky doughnuts. What I loved/hated about the place where the millions of bees that buzzed in and around the place. It was a slight terrifying adventure to venture in to get your coffee. But it was worth the terror. We'd leave with steaming cups of strong, sweet coffee, and huge chocolate covered doughnuts.

The first time we stood drinking our coffee and watching the runners, I realized that a lot of them were kind of fat, like me. At first, I started walking. We'd wheel Umberto around in his carriage, playing around on the side paths, taking pictures, looking for cara de ñino bugs. But I was watching those big people run. No one acted offended. No one laughed or commented on how slow they were because some of them weren't slow. In fact, a lot of the thin women were much slower than the fat women.

Within a few weeks, I began to run. I loved it. This time it didn't matter if I was slow. No one cared. I didn't run against anyone but rather ran just because I loved it.

I don't know why I didn't keep running once back in the U.S. I think it was that shame about my fat. But I started to pay attention to who runs here in Charlotte. There are a lot of fat runners in Charlotte. I started off in quiet...running in my home. Then I ventured out onto a secluded trail not used by many. Next I ran a more populated park, and took encouragement when meeting a seasoned runner, and who nodded at me as I belonged there too. Today I ran on the street for the first time. I made a conscious decision to not spend time worrying about what others would think. I ignored the cars, and concentrated on the pavement.

And as the rain poured down, I wanted to laugh, and I found I had this huge smile on my face. The faces that looked back at me from the cars were filled with sort of admiration but also that "What a crazy person" look. But I didn't care. I wanted to yell "Hey this is what it looks like when a fat girl runs. This is freedom. This is a fat body moving so get the hell out of my way." And today I realized that this running was freeing me.

The fat girl exhausted by her run...note child doing stretches in the back...

Enchanted Paths

Herron

Now After Our Scheduled Interruption

Okay so it wasn't scheduled. But I'm baaack. Basically, I felt like I was spending too much time on my blog and not enough time on my thesis. I told H I was taking a week off, and he said "Oh there's no way you can do that." This lead to a friendly wager. Which I won. But it didn't help me work on my thesis because I ended up reading blogs. Sigh. It's so an addiction.

Anyway I am back. I have to TA today...need to hit the shower soon. I have, naturally, a ton to write about. But for now some brief updates:

I am running. I found that the program was a bit too easy at the early levels so I upped. Yesterday I ran on a beautiful greenway through the woods for a half hour. I'm doing 2 minutes intevals of running/walking. I'm slow but consistent. It feels good, and I'm enjoying it.

I quit WW but that's a whole other post.

Yesterday I bought a new set of Kitchen Aid knifes that were half off!!!! And I now have a beautiful red crock pot on my kitchen counter. I am anticpating lots of yumminess soon.

Wrapping Up an Old Year

We have survived another year of homeschooling. And survive does seem the appropriate word this year.

For one, I learned that I can't push Umberto into learning. I'm not as giddy about unschooling as I was in the beginning but I do see value in the idea. I really became a tad psychotic about Umberto reading, and pushed him hard over the summer. I had to back off, create an environment in which reading was an option but not the only option. I think that unschooling is not really about just letting your kids do what ever they want but about making learning something other than what happens in school. I don't believe in natural so it's impossible for me to argue for one "natural" way of learning. I think that different learning styles create different kinds of thinkers, and I don't want Umberto to be a militant thinker. And that is what I did when I pushed him. It all crescendo with a very bad parenting moment that left Umberto and I in tears, and me thinking that he might be better off in school.

I backed off. And no he's not fully reading independently yet but he's closer than he was last year. More importantly he enjoys it. I bought the Oak Meadow curriculum which he loves, and which I love. We settle down to "do school" with a lot more joy than we used to. He's learning a lot about nature, reading, fairy tales, etc. And the approach is very gentle and compassionate.

In addition, Umberto now loves to be read to. We're having some wonderful pleasurable moments with that as well.

But what I also learned is that sometimes homeschooling is not the only option, and there are times when it may be much better for a child to be in school. I know in the homeschooling community what I am saying is sacrilege (I had someone tell me that all parents who put their kids in school don't care about their kids). I hate extremism period so this has always grated on me. But this year when I struggled with Umberto I realized that parents are just as likely to damage their children as schools. I know many homeschooling parents who seem to inflict more damage than good. Just as I know many schooling families who do damn well by their kids. There is a wisdom in knowing what works for your family and in being flexible enough to let go of what you thought was working.

For us homeschooling works not just because we don't like the kind of people Southern schools seem to produce. It works because as a family we hate schedules. We'd be the parents whose kids missed a lot of school and who fell asleep when they were in school. But on the other hand, there is a big possibility that school may be the only option once we start a Ph.D program. I have come to accept that this will not be a bad thing. And despite what the community thinks, putting the kids in school is no reflection on my parenting skills or my love for my children.

Lost and Found Memories

Over the last few days, I went on a frantic search. While looking for my new Smiths album, I found some cds which contained old pictures. I spent an hour looking through pictures of baby pictures of Camille, and toddler pictures of Umberto. But I paniced when I realized I was missing the cd with Piper's baby pictures. I spent days looking for every unmarked cd we possessed. Finally, the day before New Year's Eve, I found it. This is what I spent the last day of the old year looking at....

The Solace of Trees

The tree was impossible. It stood boldly beside the playground with parents milling about nearby. Fathers on their cell phones paced the cement path that curved around the massive roots. It was a public tree. Impossilbe as well was the lowest branch which was much too high. This was an old tree with a trunk so wide it would take three adults to encircle it. These were the trees that were the bane of her childhood. Trees that could not be climbed but which taunted you with thier wide berths high up from the ground. These were the trees that only the strongest could scale by wrapping their legs about the trunk, and shimming up. Or if you were lucky you could persuade a parnet to nail flat slatted wood boards into the massive trunks.

She watched the tree with a kind of weary speculation. She wanted up that tree with a kind of passion she thought she no longer possessed. It had been a long time since she had climbed a tree. Climbing trees with a paperback tucked into one pocket, and an apple in the other. She would climb so high that she became lost in leafy canopys. Sometimes she would actually read but mostly she would watch people below or day dream. Reading in a tree was a dangerous occupation for someone dreamy like her. She had fallen a couple of times because she was so wrapped up in her book she forgot to hold on, and shifted. Luckily she hadn't been too far up for those tumbles but they still hurt and they were scary as hell. Today she wanted to conquer that tree. She wanted to climb to the highest branch and just stare out over the city.

There was a soothing solace to climbing trees. To be lifted up and way from the ordinary towards the sky was an extraordinary experience. There were days when mundane life threatened all promises of magic. And on those days she longed to force time back to those days of childhood when belief seemed much easier--when magic had only to be taken. She felt that if she could climb that tree she could reclaim magic. She could push back the gray ordinariness of her sad life.

Resolutions Anyone?

I'm not a resolution maker. My mom, of course, called me last night to ask my resolutions, and got the usual answer: None. Then she proceeded to tell me hers. This is a ritual now. Every year she calls me and I tell her I have none but I still have to listen to hers. The real kicker is that hers are pretty much the same every year. She does this with my grandmother who also always has the same resolutions.

My thing this year is that I made my resolutions before New Year's Eve:) And I did quit smoking...and I lost 30lbs.

But this year I thought that instead of being pissy about the whole thing, I'd rethink resolutions. They tend to be about self-improvement but usually in rather physical ways: lose weight, quit smoking, etc. And of course I'm not knocking those goals. It's just that, at least in my family, these are the same goals year after year. Obviously something is not working. I thought about it and decided that I wanted to work on some bigger things. I don't want to really see some kind of concrete outcome but rather I just want to know that I worked on these things throughout the year.

Thus this year:

1.) I want to embrace the joy in my life instead of pushing it away. This is not easy for me. I have a hard time being happy, and tend to be gruff when something wonderful or joyful happens. I want to work on being able to accept those feelings.

2.) I want to work on learning to love my body. It's a good body and deserves better treatment.

Happy New Years

This is what my New Year looks like...

This morning I spent a moment foolishly wishing for something different. I wanted to go out. I wanted to be childless so that I could go out. I couldn't remember the last time we celebrated New Year's with a crowd of people, and I felt quite deprived.

Of course my past included few truly fun New Year's moments. I had a wonderful time celebrating First Night in Boston with my friend Wil. We walked the streets of Boston, freezing with only a silver flask filled with 100 year old Scotch to keep us warm. We watched dancers in the store windows, and bands playing on the corner. We made it back to his condo to watch the fireworks at midnight from his roof. On the following night, we went to a party where I got to drink real Irish whiskey, and made out with a stranger thanks to an orange stuffed with cloves.

This year topped that...and it was wonderful unexpected. We played in the park all afternoon. We swung. We saw a hawk. We swung. We ran around playing ponies. We ate Mexican food at one of our favorite restaurants. We came home. We received an surprise IM visit from a loved friend. We drank wine. We played. The kids went insane at one point. At midnight we had a group hug and kiss. I realized at that moment that this was the most wonderful New Year's to date. I spent the whole day surrounded by love and by joy. These are the people who make my world spin now, and to spend the last day of an old year and the first seconds of a new one was a privilege and an honor.

Happy New Year's to my dear readers. You have become part of my community this year. You have inspired me and pushed me. Thank you. May 2008 be filled with joy, love, intensity, passion, and experience.

Love and peace.