bearing blog

Milk, updated.

In May I blogged about a group of women who'd volunteered for several months to nurse a baby whose mother had died soon after childbirth.  

According to CNN:  That baby, Charles Moses Martin Goodrich, is now nearly a year old, and still nursed daily.

Just as these moms have cuddled and nourished Moses, their own children feel embraced in the Goodrich home and often beeline to where the snacks are stored. Husbands read to Julia while their wives nurse the baby, and Robbie bonds with families who've become an extension of his own.

Mothers who've stopped breast-feeding still check in and come by for regular visits. The group stays in touch on Facebook, by phone and over shared meals and walks. Friendships, outside the Goodrich household, have been formed. They all gathered to celebrate when Moses ate his first solids.

"It's a valuable gift for everyone involved," said Tina Taylor, 39, who prolonged the nursing of her own youngest child so she could continue feeding Moses. "It's taught us the importance of family, community and sharing."

Taylor and the more than two dozen other women who've nursed Moses know they cannot replace what was lost hours after he was born. But the father they've reached out to help says they've given his son something he could have never provided on his own.

"He's a healthy, happy, well-adjusted boy," he said, "who has always known a mother's love."

Nice to see such a great follow-up.

Art lesson.

Milo and Silas have been working together on art prints, Charlotte-Mason-style, for several months now.  Yesterday I took the  two of them to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for a brief visit, and a chance to see some "real" artworks up close.

I took them straight to the "Art of the American West" collection, because I thought they'd find it exciting.

 Milo picked Edgar Payne's "Canyon Portal" as his favorite piece in the room; here's Silas examining it.  

Meanwhile, Milo sat on the floor with a sketchbook to produce his own version.  Here it is: 

 See the two little men on horseback at the bottom?

Silas chose a Bierstadt as his favorite painting, but while we waited for Milo to finish his sketch copy of the Payne, Si was drawn to this bronze by Harry Jackson, "Stampede:"

He talked about it at length, pointing out the three cowboys among the rushing mass of cattle, and was especially interested in two details:  one cowboy who'd fallen off his horse, dragged by his ankle in the stirrup, and one steer's missing horn-tip.  I suggested that perhaps it was the artist's intent to show that some of the cattle were hurt in the stampede, their horns broken off, but Silas was sure that some mishap had occurred to the artwork.  "It is really old," he told me.

We moved on to the next room of American Art, where the boys studied two beautifully crafted flintlock rifles.  "Why is a gun in an art museum?"  I asked them.  "Can a gun be art?" and got some interesting answers, mostly revolving around the idea "Because they're old."   

The room after that was a bit of a mixed bag, with furniture, textiles, still lifes, and things.  I thought the boys would go for the ENORMOUS still life on one wall, or the striking painting of a tornado over St. Paul on the other -- but no; Silas grabbed the sketchbook and crayons, and made a beeline for a jewel-like little still life on the opposite wall, next to a marble bust.

It turned out to be a Peale -- Raphaelle Peale's "Still Life with Fruit, Cakes, and Wine."  Silas has an eye for the well-regarded, I think.

I don't have a picture of Silas's sketch, but it was charming -- sort of a linear left-to-right catalog of all the items in the still life.  A line across the bottom made the surface the elements rested on, and from left to right he drew a cup of wine, an apple, a leafy twig, a medium orange, another leafy twig, two "cupcakes," and a stick-straight vine with five grapes like beads on a string.

Meanwhile, Milo was entranced by a giant silver Tiffany urn.

 

I let the boys choose the last room.  They led me downstairs and decided on the Chinese pottery.  Each picked some items to draw, and then I had them both draw the same item to finish up:  a little Sung Dynasty dish that had attracted Silas.  "It's so little, I can make it little like it is," he said happily.  Milo shrugged -'s'OK - and dutifully they passed the red-orange and green crayons back and forth until they had finished.

On the way home they were immersed in a book of picture puzzles Milo keeps in the car ("can you find the twelve differences between the two photos?") and wouldn't talk to me.  But they were happy to be singled out together for a "special" lesson today, while all their siblings stayed at our house and did "the usual" lessons with Hannah.  And they both agreed that it is more interesting to see the "real thing" than to study a print of a painting.   

Sourdough bagels!

Wow!

An installment in the series "I didn't bother writing down what I did because I didn't expect much on the first try, but then the results turned out fantastic and I wished I had the recipe."

I think maybe bagels are ideal for sourdough, because sourdough breads tend to be denser and chewier, exactly what you're looking for in a good bagel.  It turns out that sourdough bagels may also be a more convenient choice for breakfasts, because you must shape them the night before.   Most recipes for yeasted bagels, on the other hand, call for shaping the bagels just after the first rise and only a few minutes before boiling; this works fine if you have a bread machine, of course (here's my recipe) but still the shaping step might add just a bit too much complexity to a typical weekday morning.

I went to this website for advice on the technique, and adapted the recipe in ways that seemed sensible given that I had a bread machine, a whole cup of starter, and a little bit of experience.  The website stressed high-protein flour, so I decided to use some bread flour rather than making 100% whole wheat bagels this time, and add some gluten to be safe.  I had just refreshed my starter and that evening, after pulling off some for the fridge and some for the next loaf of sandwich bread, I had a bit more than a cup left.

(Finally caught a clue and started refreshing the starter in a Pyrex 4-cup measure so I can see how much I have.)

(When I started doing that, I noticed something that should have been obvious:  Refreshed sourdough varies widely in density, a possible source in variation in my results considering that I typically measure by volume.)

I scraped most of the starter into my bread machine pan -- about a cup, as I said, of fairly bubbly starter -- and added one cup of bread flour and one cup of whole wheat flour.  I added about a tablespoon of gluten, three tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon and a half of salt, and a teaspoon of olive oil.  I was shooting for a "standard" bagel so didn't mess with honey or molasses or any other kind of flavoring.  I decided not to add any water at this point, figuring to err on the side of stiffness.  I put that in the bread machine and set it to produce dough, and then stuck around.

Yes, I'm aware that next time I should be weighing all these ingredients.  I really thought this would just be the "let's see what happens" bagel recipe.

The machine labored and when I took a look inside during the knead cycle, it was obvious that water was required.  I'm sorry to say that I just splashed some in.  I guess it was about two or three tablespoons.  When I came back the dough looked all right, denser than bread dough like it's supposed to, so I left it alone after that.  I suppose if you mixed and kneaded by hand or in a stand mixer you would be able to adjust the hydration as you went; in any case, read some descriptions of what bagel dough is supposed to be like so you can make the necessary adjustments.   

I stopped the machine after the first rise but before it could knead the dough down again, and turned the dough out.  I knew at that moment I had something that could very well be successful, because the dough was firm and elastic and not at all sticky; I didn't even have to flour my board.  I cut it into 7 pieces and shaped it into bagels by the "rope" method.  I had to work pretty hard to seal the ends because the dough was so un-sticky, and ended by dipping them in water and really squishing and kneading them together.

I put a sheet of baking parchment on a baking sheet, sprayed the parchment lightly with cooking spray, arranged the bagels on the parchment, lightly sprayed the bagels, and covered them with plastic wrap to keep them from drying out.  Then I left the bagels at room temperature overnight.  The thermostat was at 71F, and I just found it really hard to believe that they would rise enough in the fridge.  But I didn't want to warm them because the rise would be about 8 hours.

In the morning they didn't seem to have changed much, which I figured meant I had made the right decision.  I preheated the oven to 500 F and put a heavy pan on the bottom rack; meanwhile I set a pot to boil.  Then I took a shower and got dressed.  When I came down the water was boiling and the oven was preheated.  I added 2 T of sugar to the water, because the sourdough website suggested it -- I have no idea what it's supposed to accomplish -- and boiled the bagels in two batches.  They sank at first and floated within a minute just as they were supposed to. I floated them in the boiling water for 1 minute on each side and then transferred them to a lightly sprayed baking sheet.  When they were all on the sheet I put them in the oven on the center rack, and poured a half cup of water in the hot pan on the bottom to create steam.

They baked 15 minutes, by which time they were starting to brown, and then I transferred them to a wire rack to cool.

Beautiful, just beautiful, with a crisp exterior made even more lovely by toasting, and a chewy middle.  I don't know if you would be satisfied with them if, say, you were a native New Yorker, but they were miles ahead of grocery store bagels and in the same league, I think, with wheat bagels from a chain like Bruegger's.   (Not quite as pleasurable as a fresh-baked bakery salt bagel, uncontaminated with whole wheat flour, would be, but whaddayagonnado.)  I am resisting the urge to go eat another one just so I can tell you more details about it.  There is a nice tang from the sourdough, and it's really hard to believe there's no yeast in these.

I'm not promising perfect results the first time if you do what I did -- my measuring was really vague here, and as I noted, sourdough starter is fickle stuff -- but be willing to try it, and to experiment and tweak.  The fact that you can do all but a few minutes' work the night before is a strong plus with this recipe and method.  I will definitely try to repeat this the next time I refresh sourdough, and when I do I'll keep better records.

UPDATE:  In this post I repeat the recipe with careful measurements.

The quote not taken.

At the last meeting of the homeschool co-op, someone suggested using audiobooks on CD in the car to expose the kids to poetry.   I thought that was a great idea of the "why didn't I think of that?!" variety -- they have had little patience for poetry as read-alouds, but they have loved classical music CDs in the car.  I  had an order almost ready to go at Rainbow Resources anyway; I immediately added A Child's Introduction to Poetry and sent in my order, and when the box arrived we put the disc in the car right away.

Success!  The kids love it and have been reciting snippets of sonnets and haikus.  I will be getting more poetry CDs for sure.  It has been nice for me, too, to listen to recitations of famous poems, many of which I remember from high school English, while driving.  When they come in through the auditory channel, it's really quite a different experience from reading them off the page, even reading them aloud.  You're more of a passive receiver, rather than using your own voice to modulate and interpret the poem, and you have to receive the poem linearly instead of visually taking it all in at once, knowing which lines are long and which short, and when to expect the end.  Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandburg, Robert Browning -- it's a nice collection, mostly of well-known favorites.

Listening to the recitation of Frost's "The Road Not Taken," I was reminded of my favorite rant about quotations out of context.  By the time I got to tenth- or eleventh-grade English literature, I had read the famous quotation from this poem about eleventy-thousand times:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This quote is always, always, always used to support the thesis that the wiser, better man will take the "road less traveled."  Have you ever seen a place where it is not used as an implication that the road less traveled is the one that leads to happiness?  Something about being unconventional, I suppose.  You will see people writing, for example, that the poem offers "good advice."  That sort of thing.

I remember being really annoyed and angry at the quoters when I encountered the whole poem, finally.  Because of course the poem as a whole implies nothing of the sort, offers no advice at all, contains no judgment about the relative merits of the two paths.   The last stanza contains a whiff of mystery and not a little regret alluding to the consequences of the choice, but to me most of the regret is contained in the line "I could not travel both/And be one traveler."  

It strikes me as a simple meditation on the tragedy of reality:  that you can't experience everything.  Listening to it again, maybe for the first time, in a purely audio format, I was even more strongly struck by it.

But I have always been irritated at the quoters who take the last three lines, not even the whole last stanza with its "sigh," and use it to imply the inherent superiority of the road less traveled.  Hey, sometimes it's the right choice.  Other times it's not.  Logic, people.

It's the hair.

Yesterday evening at the grocery store I finally caught a clue about something that's been bugging me.

With this pregnancy, as with the previous three, complete strangers have been coming up to me and asking "what I'm having--"  you know, what's the baby's gender.  One thing that's different this time is that I know the answer; I had an ultrasound a few weeks ago, my first one.  

But another difference has been the frequency -- I hardly ever appear in public without someone coming up to me and saying, "I just have to ask you -- do you know what you're having?"  And I'll say yes, a boy, and they'll shake their head and smile.   Why so much?  Have people gotten more forward in the past three years?    I don't get it.

And then yesterday a woman who asked me the question supplied the missing piece:  after I said "A boy," she said sympathetically, "Wow, four boys!"

And I realized that all these people have been looking at Mary Jane and assuming she was a boy too.  Therefore it is necessary that I be interrogated to determine if I will be saddled with the fourth boy.  This explains the questioning, and also the sympathy.

*I* don't think she looks like a boy.  She was wearing a red and white striped dress yesterday, for pete's sake.  But... I guess I can see where someone might think "boy" looking at her.

From left to right:  XY, XY, XX.

Wow.

Hat tip to the Agitator for linking to this clip from the Ukraine.

The audience members are transfixed.  The Agitator says, "She's portraying the German invasion of the Ukraine in WWII."

Six.

Hannah suggested that 3yo Mary Jane draw a garden of flowers.  She said she couldn't.  "Then draw just one flower," suggested Hannah.  

"I can't," insisted Mary Jane.

"Well, what can you draw?"

"I can draw myself," she told Hannah.

"Then draw yourself," Hannah told her.  But she said:  

"No!  I will draw my WHOLE FAMILY."

From right to left, she reports:  "The new baby in Mommy's body... Daddy... Sister (me)... Mommy... brothers."

Conformity.

Jen's post today is a must-read.  

The ride home from the airport after we picked up our Kidsave child Rita was a little tense. We quickly found out that when they said in her bio that she speaks some English, by "some" they meant "not a single word." A Colombian social worker named Maria was with us as well, and she didn't speak much English either.

"Is hot too where you live?" I asked in broken Spanish.

They barely managed to nod and smile. They had arrived a day late after getting stuck in Atlanta overnight, and were too exhausted to strain for conversation topics. Rita was so tense and stressed by her strange new surroundings that she'd developed a bad headache. In the forty-minute drive back to our house we made some other efforts at chitchat, but it was hard work. Our group consisted of a suburban American family from Texas, a young career woman from the bustling city of Bogota, an orphaned child from rural Colombia, and we were all tired. It was pretty quiet for most of the ride home, the main sound being the air conditioner straining to beat the sweltering heat.

Then Maria started to say something, hesitating to make sure she chose the right words. "I hate to trouble you," she said apologetically, "but it's very important that Rita and I go to Mass on Sunday."

When I told her that we are Catholic too, everything changed.

In one moment we went from having nothing in common to having everything in common. 

Read the whole thing;  it sums up succinctly one of my favorite things about being Catholic, namely, the blessed conformity of the Mass, and why it's so beautiful to know what to expect, no matter where you are.   I wrote the word "conformity" just now having only skimmed Jen's post, and went back to discover that she, too, used that term with affection.

You can learn more about Kidsave in Jen's post here.  

Milk.

Christy sent this along with a warning:  "Your heart may melt."  Okay, you've been warned.

From the Mining Journal:  "Women step up to breastfeed motherless infant."

Charles Moses Martin Goodrich was born at 3:26 a.m. Jan. 11 at Marquette General Hospital. Eleven hours after giving birth, his mother Susan Goodrich, 46, died of amniotic fluid embolism - a rare obstetric emergency that is not age-related, Goodrich said. Moses is the Goodrich's second child - Julia was born in 2007 - and Susan's fourth. Still in shock over his wife's death, Goodrich realized he had to figure out a way to feed his newborn son...

"I wanted the baby to be nursed. That's something that Susan would have wanted."

One thing led to another when family friend Nicoletta Fraire of Marquette began organizing a group of women who may want to help feed Moses.

Read the whole thing.  I bet there are a lot of women who would step forward in a minute to help volunteer to feed a baby whose mother couldn't nurse him, if only they were asked.  I know I would.  

I do wish milk banks and such were better supplied, with better distribution, so that human milk was available to any baby whose mother can't feed him.  But even though that was the first thing Moses's dad tried to get, before turning to the community, I can't help but think that this very human, very personal, community response is better in many ways than anonymous bottles of government-approved, pasteurized and screened, donor milk obtained for a fee or paid for by insurance.  Little Moses isn't just getting real human milk (though even that is a vast improvement over artificial milk); he's being nursed.  Poor baby, to lose his mother.  Lucky baby, to receive so much human kindness.  

UPDATE:   Here.

Use your imagination: Induced exercise, part 10.

(Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6  7  8 and 9)

Begin with the thought experiment I alluded to in post #9 about motivation.  Imagine a person who is not you, but who is like you in many ways:  the same age and gender, the same number of children; the same kind of daily work; the same challenges; if you're married, a spouse with the same sort of temperament and work schedule.  All the things that control what you can and can't do, and when:  she is like you.  This person is like you, that is, in every way but one:  she is an athlete.  She is the kind of person who makes sure she gets regular exercise, of some kind, a certain number of times every week.  Perhaps you imagine she is the kind of person who loves it, too.  She hardly ever misses a workout.  It's a habit, part of her daily rhythm.  The rest of the family accepts it because it's part of who she is.

How does she do it?  This imaginary person?   

She probably has to choose to do some other things differently from how you do them, I suppose.  Maybe she doesn't spend as much time cooking dinner -- maybe her family eats sandwiches for dinner twice a week.  Maybe she leaves her kids in the gym child care while she exercises.  Maybe her house is messier than yours.  Maybe she has fewer other hobbies.  

She's probably been doing it for a while, of course.  You don't get this way overnight.  She's been making sure she gets her daily or weekly doses of exercise for long enough that she's confident.  Wherever she goes, she's at home there.   Yeah, sometimes the schedule gets a little hairy, she and her spouse have to plan ahead a bit to make sure everybody's needs are met, but for the most part she doesn't need to ask permission from anyone.  She grabs her bag and goes.  Everybody expects that it's part of the schedule.   It is part of living with this person.

Watch her, in your mind's eye, as she heads out the door with her gym bag or her running shoes or whatever.  You have imagined the choices she's made.  What is your reaction to her?  Is she a "bad mom?"  Are you judgmental of her?  Or are you envious of her?  

If you just can't see how she can be a reality---this person who is like you, except that she is practiced at taking care of her own needs for physical exercise---please, spend some time contemplating her.  See if you can imagine her clearly enough---her schedule, her appearance, the stuff she carries around with her in the car, where the children are while she exercises, what kinds of activities she does....  See if you can imagine her clearly enough that she begins to seem like a possible real person.  A character in a novel you could write, and have it make sense.  A friend you might be able to meet for a real cup of coffee.  Imagine her until you see that she could, she really could, be real.

Because the truth is, she can be real.  Trust me on this one.