Pesky Front Garden

For three summers now, I have fretted about my front lawn. Each year, I say ENOUGH! I will just plant food out there and be done with it. I suck at everything else. Then I cave and try to plant batches of flowers, which I neglect or hate or can't really afford. I've managed to kill a handful of hostas that were allegedly going to grow wild and look good year round.

I killed perfectly lovely fire bush.

I may have killed the lavender plant my friend stuck in the yard for me.

There are perhaps six tulips that have survived to grow again this year, and they look sprouty and lovely among the grass and weeds taking over the front bed.

This is the year where I say enough for real and I am planting food out there. Judge away, neighbors!

It was so gorgeous outside that I figured even my sick baby could benefit from helping me in the garden a little bit:

Look at his sad little water eyes! He breaks my heart.

I trucked him up front while I got the soil ready. Perhaps you can see in the background the brick border buried under gross grass and weeds? It looks like that year round, so we just hoed some compost into the soil and planted the vining peas along the trellis. Miles obviously just supervised and offered instructions.

Provided I can revive the lavender, I'll have that up there along with other herbs. I'm sticking mint, sage, basil, oregano, thyme, and rosemary in my front plot. Those are things I know how to grow, they are things that are useful, and they fit our budget for landscaping. Plus, most of them are perennial!

I know, you are thinking, but mint is invasive! It will take over your whole front lawn and eat the neighbor children! To this I say, good! Less for Corey to not mow, more for me to make tea.

Sugar Free: Day 7--Off the Wagon

My last day of the first week without refined sugar was a whirlwind. I ran a coaching clinic in West Virginia, so I was gone most of the day and didn't really remember to consume food, let alone food with sugar in it. This same clinic last year attracted exactly 12 girls, so you can imagine my surprise to discover 84 ready, willing rugby players in the Shell Building at WVU. I was overwhelmed! What a great problem to have! But it didn't give me much time to gorge myself.

Long after the event was over, I had all sorts of thinking to do about what had transpired, what it meant, how I might whittle that group down to the 23 I can take along to the Midwest tournament. So I didn't do any snacking. Corey and I just took Miles on a snow hike to see Mt. Snowmore down the hill, I ate supper, and was in bed by 8pm.

One of our neighbors got crafty with the shovel. Wish I had thought of it!

So that brought me to Monday, the first day of a new week. I had two choices: go for two weeks just to see if I could do it OR (and I think this was the harder choice, actually) go back to eating whatever I wanted, but try to do it mindfully and with control. For instance, I took Miles to the grocery store today. There was nearly a Fried Green Tomatoes, Kathy-Bates, Tawanda!!!!! moment in the parking lot. Such an event would normally drive me to eat an entire candy bar, what with having to walk Miles many blocks in the pouring rain since some jagoff took my parking spot.

But I didn't eat an entire candy bar. I bought one, then ate just one square when I got home. I didn't even ask the cashier if I could hold it immediately after it got scanned. I think that's progress. Mindfulness! Control!

The next big challenge for me will come on Wednesday. I am going to a literary event in the evening. I will be missing bedtime for the first time in my son's life. There will be a dessert table. If I were completely abstaining from sugar, this would be ok. I'd have a piece of cheese and get on with my life. But what will I do now? Can I make it just eating one piece of dessert at said event? Will the thought of my precious baby sobbing himself to sleep in his room, while Corey maniacally plays video games downstairs, drive me into a sugar coma?

I think I might have the sort of personality where, with junk food anyway, it's all or nothing. Either I eat the entire bag of Doritos in one sitting or I don't eat Doritos at all. One of each kind of dessert or just a slice of cheese. This is what I would like to work on. Moderation, mindfulness. It seems, I think, a greater (and more important) endeavor.

Sugar Free: Day 6

Man, today has been awesome. Today is one of those days where you can't help but look at your life and want to brag about how amazingly full it is, how damn excited you are to be living it.

I am blessed in the following ways:

Miles did some wonderful sleeping last night, which means Corey and I did, too.

Then, I got to go to Crossfit all by myself and do a super workout, almost as prescribed.

Then, my whole family took a kick-ass walk to the coffee shop for lunch. I can't prove that my bagel sandwich didn't contain refined sugar, but I would like to hope so. It was amazing. Miles saw some fun friends, who held him so I could eat with both hands. We had the best time!

Family hike to the Mo-Glo!

It was nearly 50 degrees in my neighborhood, so I finally (with the help of the sun) unearthed the Nissan. And the battery was in fine shape. And it had gas in it.

Then? To finish it all off I am getting my belated Valentine's dinner cooked and cleaned up for me. I just get to sit here on the couch and someone else is going to cook the food and then clean up the mess. What will that feel like? It will feel like eating a slice of ripe peach dipped in whipped cream on a sunny Caribbean beach with muscled men fanning me while they refill my girly drink. That's how good it will feel.

The point of this is to say that I didn't crave sugary junk food one time this entire day.

Sugar Free Day 5

The word of the day is persevere. This is the kind of day (or, rather, pair of days) where I would eat an entire dark chocolate bar to take my mind off what's going on in front of my ears. Maybe 2 bars. You see, Miles is getting a tooth up top and unlike the last time he got a tooth, he is a screaming mess of a human being in pain.

This means that he is up every 3 hours for at least 2 hours at night, screaming bloody murder, and spends his days cranky and also crying. Today, as MW and I drove back from a run to Babies R Us, he screamed and screamed for 45 minutes as I sat with my foot on the clutch waiting for the light to turn green on 130. I wanted dark chocolate and a cupcake like I have never wanted those things before. The car reverberated with his shrill, breath-holding screams and I couldn't help but scream right back at him in frustration. I almost threw on the e-brake to run into CVS on the corner. Lord knows, only one car was getting to move each green light and I would have had time.

But I didn't. I clenched my jaw and dealt with it. And when I got home, I didn't have time to scrounge for candy because I had to feed that baby and then feed myself and by then, it was time to put Miles to bed. Which makes me really, really want something sugary. I feel like I "earned" it. During the first 100 or so days of my son's life, when every day was spent like this one, I treated myself to sweets whenever I felt proud for making it through an hour or a minute or a 15-second stretch without spontaneously combusting.

Well, by God, I made it through nearly 24 straight hours of crying and fussing, and I want some fucking fudge. But I don't have it in the house and I don't have the energy to procure some. So instead I am drinking a beer and breathing deeply, slowly, purposefully. And really? It's just not the same. I feel an almost crippling craving for something sugary.

Sugar Free Day 4

Corey made himself toast for breakfast this morning. The smell of it was terrible for me to resist as I sat on the floor feeding Miles mushed up bananas and oatmeal. Luckily, it took me so long to coax this meal into my son that the smell of toast had dissipated and I could eat a bowl of bran/flax flakes with no lingering cravings.

I find that temptations are everywhere for me this week because I am on deadline. I have always felt stressed by deadlines, but was always the sort of person who turned things in a week AHEAD of deadlines. Now, with limited and specific hours dedicated to work, I find I need every instant of the time allotted to complete an assignment. And so my mind will not settle.

In the evenings, when I would like to be writing, Miles is very clingy and I have to carry him around the house. As I do this, I think how wonderful it would be to hike to the new bakery and eat biscotti. If I can't be writing, I reason, I should be eating a delicious treat!

My hands just can't be still when I have unfinished business, so if I'm not shaking a molecule rattle, I am folding laundry or washing dishes or frantically picking cradle cap, all the while wishing I were eating M&M's one at a time.

I remember when I was working my loathsome corporate job. I found the work so boring and soul-sucking that I ate almost constantly throughout the day. In contrast, when I am deep in the vortex of a piece of writing, it takes the neighborhood church bells screaming their 6pm hymns to remind me that I haven't had a scrap of food in many, many hours.

I am realizing more and more how much of my eating comes from my nervous, fidgety hands needing something to do. If I am not fully present in what I'm doing, I eat. Being snowbound and learning to adapt to life as a stay-at-home mom will certainly free up my hands! This is something I must work on. Wouldn't it be nice, after I am done with this experiment, to eat a cupcake and absolutely savor every morsel of its deliciousness rather than scarf it down because I have nothing better to do?

What started as something sort of competitive (let's see if I can go without sugar just to say I can do it!) has really made me take stock of my lifestyle. I am coming up with all sorts of mini-goals: control my quantities of all foods, drink more water, eat mindfully, and now I am thinking it's probably good to really engage with Miles and expose him to the world. He has a waterproof snow suit, after all. Why shouldn't I just put Lansinoh on his cheeks and take him outside for long walks instead of watching him roll back and forth on the carpet as I yearn for banana bread?

I keep telling myself that, come summer, I'll definitely do more activities with him, be outside, go places. If I keep that up, I'll never run out of reasons to postpone leaving the cocoon. Really, my mindless shoveling of food is just a symptom that something else is off kilter. Next up for me: slip into the vortex of ACTIVE motherhood the way I used to disappear into my work. Time to see if my snowpants still fit!

Sugar Free Day 3 (1 again?)

Something terrible happened yesterday: I cheated and ate sugar by accident. I wasn't even thinking and popped a whole wheat pita in the toaster, ate the whole thing, then read the bag. Ingredient number 3 on my frou-frou whole wheat pita? Sugar. I guess this means I have to start over?

The slip up got me thinking again about mindfulness and eating. I know that the main "meals" I eat each day are very healthful and balanced, because I cook them all myself from 90% "whole" foods (i.e. nothing packaged, nothing my grandmother wouldn't recognize as a food, etc.). But I eat a lot of snacks in between those healthy meals. A lot of snacks. Miles is old enough now that I don't get to use "I just had a baby!" as an excuse to shovel in the food. He is starting solids, too, so I am not nursing as much and need to cut back.

Despite my best intentions, I'm not getting in a lot of working out, either, so my caloric needs are just not as high right now. And still I snack. I snack and I snack and I snack. The cheat-a pita wasn't even actually breakfast. It was second-breakfast (I think of meals like hobbits do).

So today, I am looking not only at the contents of my foods, but at my quantities. I don't want to spend my life worrying whether the whole wheat pita I toasted contains refined sugar (beyond the confines of this 2 week experiment, obviously). But I do want to know that I am eating the whole wheat pita because I am actually hungry and not because I smelled toast and felt like I should eat some.

I don't have a whole lot to focus on right now, being snow-bound with a baby and all. Thus, I spend a LOT of time thinking about what I put into my body and even more time thinking about what I would like to put in there. Today was a rough one for cravings. I want a cupcake or a chocolate bar something fierce! I hope that pita didn't throw me into a terrible downward spiral and that I can overcome these urges with a nice, juicy pear.

Sugar Free Day 2

I have been thinking about food a lot lately. Corey and I finally got to watch Food, Inc. this weekend and I am fixated on the one couple who feeds their family entirely from dollar menus at fast food restaurants. They say in the film they have only $1 to spend and they can get a meal at McDonald's for this but not at the supermarket. In the film, the family spends $8 to feed the four of them dinner.

Later, they go to a grocery store and hold up a head of broccoli sadly, lamenting that it costs more than one dollar, that it costs more than a burger...and broccoli alone does not dinner make. I thought and thought about their situation. If they are spending $8 per meal per day, that gives them $168 per week to spend on food. When you think of it that way, they are spending $38 MORE on food than Corey and I spend each week. And we buy expensive food!

There were long stretches in college where I existed on dried beans, rice, and other cheaply made soups. I made huge batches of them on Sundays while my body recovered from rugby and ate them again and again all week long. Yeah, it might cost more than a dollar for a bag of beans or for a handful of carrots, but those food items last more than one meal! I am certain I was eating for $30 a week for just me.

But that brings me to the other troubling leg of that family's problem: they have no time to plan out a week of meals, drive through the sprawl to the closest grocery store (in their area of Texas, there are only fast food restaurants and no close stores that sell fresh produce), and later prepare the meals. The family works, I recall, several jobs to make ends meet and I can say from experience that making healthful meals on a budget is a time consuming endeavor. While it might be possible to stretch dollars more efficiently, there is not a way to add more hours to a day.

Surely there is a solution for this family. Have they seen the dried legumes in the bulk food aisle? Perhaps the elder daughter can chop carrots after school for soup or they can use their time in the car to plan out meals instead of waiting in line at the drive thru? Can someone buy them a crock pot?

I can only imagine that it's hard to concentrate on such things when you are scrambling to live check to check, exhausted from working multiple jobs at a low wage, and stressed that people keep telling you your "choices" are making your kids sick.

As I begin my refined sugar fast, relying instead on expensive, protein-rich snack food I don't technically "need" to eat, I try to be mindful of how very fortunate I am. I am lucky to have both the means and the time to give up sugar and concentrate on the food that fuels my family. With that in mind, it's easier to walk past the candy aisle when I trek to Rite Aid.

Sugar Free Day 1

Totally not bad. I got a little hankering for something sweet after dinner, which is totally normal, so I had berries with agave nectar, plain yogurt, and a little pumpkin flax granola. Rather than eat a huge bag of candy for daytime snacks, I ate things like an apple or some chips with hummus. All in all, I think my first sugar-free day was a little too easy. Which tells me the worst is still to come!

A Bold and Terrifying Endeavor

Starting tonight, after I finish the last of my Sweetheart Box from Dozen Cupcakes, I am going to begin a truly scary experiment. I want to see if I can make it one week, perhaps even two, without consuming refined sugar.

I read once that our sugar addictions are far more powerful than even a heroin addiction, that my body might completely revolt if I try this. I did a preparatory sweep of the house (which means I consumed all the candy) and read all the ingredients on our non-candy things. I was shocked to discover how much refined sugar we have, and we make great efforts to eat healthfully. Heck, our hippie corn chips have refined cane juice in them! Even Corey's beloved Peanut Butter & Co products have been "newly improved" to include cane sugar--the ingredients used to be just peanuts and salt. Luckily I stopped using "regular" toothpaste, or I'd have to cut that out, too, what with the saccharine and all.

In order to make sure I survive, I wanted to ensure I could still eat desserts while I detox. Fruit and yogurt parfait, here I come. Honey and agave nectar are totally cool with me and I made a concession for cane syrup only so that I could eat the wheat crackers I bought to accompany my snack foods (cheese and hummus). But no ketchup. And no dark chocolate. That's what's killing me.

I can forgo all other things without difficulty. But dark chocolate? What will a day be like without eating a square of that?? I shudder to think, but will soon be able to report.

Why am I doing this? I was inspired by the Rookie Moms, who did something similar a few weeks ago. And, after a few weeks confined to my house eating junk food, I feel the need to cleanse my insides. I feel sluggish and gross and I know that my days spent staring angrily at the snow, consuming muffins and candy, are largely to blame.

So, for the next fortnight, I attempt to go where I have never gone, and that is a place without artificial sweetener, without refined sugar. Hopefully I will emerge refreshed and with sparkling teeth!

Evangelical Post About the Fruit of the Vine

I am preaching the gospel of spaghetti squash. Yes. Squash. Until yesterday, I had not eaten this particular vine fruit. Acorn and butternut squash are regulars at my house, but not typically spaghetti squash. Then, this girl from the gym suggested eating meat sauce over spaghetti squash for a Zone-friendly, balanced meal.

(Side note: Corey is basically doing the Zone now, which makes me irritated because the last thing I need is extra time requirements to weigh each ingredient I throw in the dinners I prepare...or restrictions on the ingredients I can use! I just want to cook things, ok? I don't KNOW how much a handful of spinach weighs!)

So after searching in several stores, we located a spaghetti squash. Not sure if we are off season or if there has been a rush, but it was hard to come by. I roasted that sucker in the oven, carved it open, dug out the guts with a fork, and LO!

The resulting meal had the same mouth-feel as spaghetti, tasted yummier, and was incredibly more satisfying and delicious. Let me explain to you how I love me a big bowl of pasta. I love it. Corey and I have, on many, many, many occasions, eaten an entire bag of pasta in one sitting. I LOVE pasta. I usually make big vats of sauce so I can eat bowls and bowls of it over the course of a week.

Spaghetti squash tastes awesomer than pasta. I am totally sold. Corey later informed me of the exact Zone components or block whatevers of the meal and didn't even irritate me. I heard him say I could eat twice as much of it and shoved him out of the way for more helpings. Do I feel glad squash is good for me? Sure. Do I love that I have uncovered a new favorite, versatile food? You betcha!

You heard it here first. Spaghetti squash is the new dark chocolate. So go, children, and buy thee some spaghetti squash, roast it, and eat it with good cheer.

Fish Monger

Yesterday, Jennylui and I went to the seafood market to investigate the strange things we found inside the lobsters. Tricia discovered a long skinny thing that resembled sliced red pepper. She and J-Lui each ate some and I abstained. When we got to the market, we learned the following things from the delightful Chinese man working at the counter:
1. Lobsters pee out of their faces
2. The red stuff was "delicious roe" and should be eaten
3. All the other stuff in there was "shit" (a word the man used liberally) and lobsters have shit in their heads.
4. According to Chinese legend, lobsters have shit in their heads because the waves of the ocean tumble them upside down and shove the shit into their heads
5. All of the stuff in the head is ok to eat as long as you boil the lobster long enough. We will probably all abstain from eating the things inside the lobster head next time regardless of its safety.

Can you imagine how weird it would be to pee from your face? The pee comes out right above the lobster mouth. The whole demonstration was very strange. The man walked us over to the tank and pulled out some lobsters. He took us on a little anatomical tour of the lobster body. Best trip to the Strip ever.

Lobsters Are Delicious

After my friends Diana and K-bod documented their lobster feast on Facebook, I decided I needed to steam and consume lobsters. I decided that Jennylui's visit to Pittsburgh would be an ideal time to steam lobster with other Penn State rugby people. I went to the market and purchased two little critters, who proceeded to LOOK at me in the kitchen while I waited for Kelly E and Tricia and Jennylui to show up.

Kelly said she would happily plunge the lobsters into the pot of water (head first, as the Joy of Cooking suggests) so I hid my face and she dropped them in. Only then, Jenny freaked out because we hadn't killed them humanely so she extracted the crustaceans from the boiling water and stabbed them in the brain with a butcher knife before sticking them back in the pot. At this point I was beside myself and shrieking like a baby while Tricia took photos and Kelly just giggled. At least we didn't have to listen to them scream.

It was very interesting to sit down to dinner at a table set with butcher knives, hammers, mallets, meat forks, and melted butter atop a cloth of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Friday edition).

I think I decided that the meal, while delicious, was more work than it was worth. The killing of the lobsters was far too traumatic for my weak stomach. I wonder if this makes me some sort of hypocrite? Should I force myself into vegetarianism because of my inability to kill my own food? As KK's son James reminded me, 15-year-old boys are more than willing to trek into the woods and shoot food for me. Maybe Jennylui and James would move in with me and just take care of that for me. I don't know what to do, but those lobsters sure were good.