bearing blog

Home care.

Megan McArdle has a piece on healthcare cost-cutting and hospitalization stay-length:

If you've been wondering about the rather light posting schedule, here's most of the explanation: two Saturdays ago, my mother's appendix burst.  It was a lengthy, draining saga that fouled up a rather full writing schedule.  We just brought her home from the hospital today; she'll be staying with us while she finishes a course of IV antibiotics.  Luckily, we're both writers with a great deal of flexibility about where we can work, and we have a spare bedroom, and the means to purchase a bed for her to stay on.

...Hospital costs were a huge political issue throughout the 1970s.  Jimmy Carter unsuccessfully tried to pass price controls, but ultimately, the government settled on a system that paid a fixed reimbursement for a given class of problem, rather than just paying the hospital for however long they'd care to keep patient. (A system known as Diagnostic Related Groups, or DRGs).  The length of hospital visits dropped like a stone--from an average of 7.5 days in 1980 to 4.8 today.  Most of that change was accomplished by 1995.

I know all the reasons why this is a good idea.  Hospital days are unbelievably expensive.  And hospitals are not fun places to be.  They're noisy and the amenities aren't too great.  They're also a great place to pick up a hospital acquired infection--and hospitals are the primary vectors for really nasty drug resistant bacteria.

 

But it's hell on the families--the web is full of people who are at their wits end because the hospital just dumped Mom on them even though Mom can't really walk or use the toilet.

...One way to think about it is that we made a policy choice to save money by turning family and friends into parahealth professionals.  In my case, I think that's the right choice: I'm happy to take care of my mother, and I understand the cost pressures that made this desirable.

 

  The problem is, most people didn't participate in that choice.  There was no public debate over whether we should send elderly patients home in terminal condition to families with no training as health workers.  We just said "let's cut hospital costs!" and everyone said "Yay!" and then some folks in a back room decided that this was the way to do it. 

 

So "one way to think about it" is that lately we have "made a policy choice to save money by turning family and friends into parahealth professionals."  Another way to think of it is that, long ago, we made a policy choice to spend money -- and ostensibly to provide better care -- by professionalizing convalescent, hospice, and recovery care, which used to be done (for better or worse) by family members.

 

This doesn't purport to be an argument for or against insurance coverage of longer hospital stays, just a musing on some unintended consequences.

 

I have no doubt that a lot of people would be better off cared for by hospital staff than by family members.  And many people have no one to care for them at all.  

 

But I think it's worth remembering that "sickroom care" was once a natural part of homemaking, and families used to have the skills to care for relatives who were suffering from a wide variety of ailments.  We're talking about something that is a lost art, not an impossible art.  Old homemaking manuals used to have chapters about it (here's one); sometimes even cookbooks would.  There was one around the house when I was a child -- heaven knows where it came from -- and I used to read the "sick room" chapter with fascination -- how to clean and sterilize a bedpan and wrap it in a neat package of clean newspaper to keep it read y for use, and the importance of giving the patient as much privacy as possible (even if that is only turning your face casually away) while he or she uses it;  how many visitors are appropriate; what to do with infectious garbage; how often to change the sheets; how to avoid bedsores.

 

Homemaking manuals don't seem to have this chapter anymore.

 

 It seems pretty obvious that when people grow to expect professionals to do the work of caring for the sick, both the recovering and the dying, then that work is no longer seen as the proper expertise of loved ones.  Either it is above them (and doctors and professional nurses should do it) or it is below them (and health care techs and janitors should do it).  

Maybe one way to lower costs, and improve care at the same time, is to invest in caregiver support rather than hospital stays.  

Is it better that hospital care be available?  Obviously so, at least for many cases.  It's hard, though, not to see some parallels to the home birth movement.  Sometimes people choose to forgo technology, professional health care workers, and a sterile environment, because they have an alternative:  human hands, loved ones who (unprofessionally) love them and desire the best for them, and a familiar home environment.  When it becomes the norm to professionalize a caregiving environment, surely a great many people have better outcomes (especially those who do not have the alternative) -- but there are also a large class of people who won't really have "better" outcomes and who will have lost out on a real opportunity for human connection, human relationship building, the experience of relying on others or of caring for others because that's what human beings do.

Maybe we need a home convalescence movement, or a home hospice movement, the way we have a home birth movement.   (If that's so, then we could use some "midwives:"  experienced and caring, but not necessarily professionally trained and licensed, women and men whose passion is to help people help themselves in their own homes.)  It's surely not for everyone, but it could well be -- for more people than realize it.

UPDATE:  Oh goodness, a McArdle-lanche.  Welcome to my hastily-tossed-off post.  You may be interested in other posts partly inspired by discussions at Megan's blog, many of which are in my weight loss category.  There is also politics (lately material about the HHS contraception mandate) and homeschooling.

Teens/tweens and sleep.

This isn't new material for me, but something to think about anyway:

 As adolescents grow, their sleep cycles change (Carskadon, 1999).  During adolescence teens tend to stay up later and sleep later. Some of these changes are explained behaviorally...But some of the changes are due to intrinsic, biological changes. Even more seriously, researchers, doctors, and teachers are realizing that circadian rhythms and school schedules are out of synch (Carskadon, 1999). The result is excessive sleepiness, inferior academic performance, and even accidents.

Pioneering research has begun to focus on circadian rhythms and circadian rhythm disorders ...Measurable by biological events, like melatonin, circadian rhythms control the timing of rapid eye movement sleep (REM). Research is beginning to show that circadian rhythms are developmental and change with growth from childhood, to adolescence and adulthood.

One of the most fundamental benefits of homeschooling is that it leaves families freer to choose their own schedules.  That includes sleep schedules.  Most days of the week, I could, if I chose, arrange things so that the children and I could sleep very late or take naps in the middle of the day -- at least in theory.  We have no buses to catch, after all.  

Kids generally don't get enough sleep when they have to keep to a school schedule that starts early in the morning and leaves no room for a nap:

Early survey research at Stanford University, showed that as pubescent girls matured they preferred evening to morning schedules... In other words, as the girls' bodies changed so did their sleep cycles. This is more than staying up late to have fun. Changing sleep cycles are biologically based. Furthermore, parent surveys and teen sleep diaries indicate that during the school year, teens average about 2 hours/per night less sleep than in the summer. The effect is cumulative. So losing 2 hours sleep each night adds up to a total of 10 hours lost sleep by the end of the week.

As adolescents' bodies change, they stay up later but still show afternoon dips in alertness. Previously believed to be a sleep pattern of younger children, who once took naps in school, this "siesta" effect is pronounced even into later adolescence. Changing circadian rhythms of adolescent bodies and early school schedules are out of sync. 

Looking back at my own late adolescence, especially my first experiences with setting my own schedule in college (my freshman year, of course, but before that I attended a summer credit-earning residential program for high school students)  -- I vividly remember how quickly I (and many of the others my age) re-adopted the afternoon nap that hadn't been possible since kindergarten.  Often, after returning from classes, I'd pass out on my bunk and not get up till the dining hall was about to open.

Looking specifically at my preadolescent son -- he is 11 -- I could let him sleep as long as he wished almost every morning, and let him set his own schedule for schoolwork most of the time.  He's proven himself responsible and capable of plowing through his daily to-do list with little supervision, and it is obvious that he has developed the ability both to self-teach and to know when it's time to ask for help learning something.

Typically, though, I haven't given him total sleep/work freedom.  There are a few pressures that work against the "everybody can sleep as much as they need to" model, at least in our family.  The challenge is in finding the balance.

(1) The rest of us may not have to be out the door early in the morning, but Dad does.  If a teen sleeps in late, he misses time with his father (or whichever parent is the breadwinner) that he could otherwise be having.  Of course, he could get more by staying up late -- but many families prioritize early bedtimes because it gives Mom and Dad a block of time without interruptions.  

(2) I like there to be a time in my day when I'm "done" with school.  I get a feeling of satisfaction when everybody has cleared out of the schoolroom early enough that I can straighten it up and leave it  in the late afternoon.  

I realize that a mother's schedule is not meant to conform to outside-world expectations.  But deep down I like the illusion of having something less like a vocation to which I give myself fully in my my every moment, and more like a JOB, because JOBS eventually have a quitting time, after which I can crack open a beer and put my feet up and chat with my husband about his day.

(3) A fairly predictable school schedule is the tool that helps me give time and attention to each child over the course of the day.   This is a big deal.  I have to have enough time in the morning, and enough time in the afternoon, especially to work one-on-one with my five-year-old and my eight-year-old.  (Thank God my five-year-old learned to read precociously early, because that is one less time-intensive activity I need to work on with her.)  We have a rule around here:  "You may not interrupt me if I am teaching someone younger than you."  If my oldest were completely free to set his own schedule, it would be trickier for him to work with mine.  

Still, the daily schedule may not be optimized; perhaps I should re-evaluate it with tween-sleep as a high priority.

(4) I try to do a couple of school subjects, as well as lunch, together as a family.  This means calling my older kid away from his own work -- or his bed -- and bringing him "in touch" with the rest of the children.  

(5) We aren't totally isolated from the outside world and its schedules.  There's Sunday morning Mass, for one thing -- and if we sleep in and go to late Mass, there's just so much less of the day left to play.  Two days a week we co-school with another family, and that means getting up early (at least when it's our turn to drive and car-pool) so we can start early enough to get the work done and get home to Dad.  When doctor's appointments and such need to happen, first thing in the morning seems best because it interrupts our day the least.  

(6) There is pressure to teach conformity with the outside world.  Someday he's going to have a job, and it might make him get up in the morning and keep a traditional workday schedule, right?  

In theory, I reject the "but he'll have to learn it eventually, so we have to work on it now" philosophy.  Most lessons can wait for developmental readiness most of the time, and there is much more natural motivation to learn when the natural need arises.  Still, all homeschoolers (I think) have to make decisions like this all the time.  Even though as homeschoolers, our children don't have to jump through the same hoops as all those "normal" people, when they are adults they will be expected to act like "normal" people some of the time, and we want to prepare them to be able to  conform by choice when it's in their best interest.  

Sooner or later most people will need the skill to arrange sleep schedules in order to meet somebody else's demands.  The question is, do they need practice with this more than they need... well... sleep?

It's yet another are where we must decide how best to strike the balance among the natural needs of each individual living in the family, all with one eye to the sometimes unreasonable but often unavoidable demands of the outside world.  This is never a simple question, and parents encounter it and answer it -- not always easily, and not always willingly -- again... and again... and again.

Keeping track of the freezer.

Mark picked up our half-hog order from the farm yesterday and stowed it in the basement freezer.  I went down there this morning for a pork steak from the fridge and, as long as I was there, I unpacked all the individually wrapped cuts and counted them,  then restocked them in some semblance of order.

Right now I know everything that's in there, but come March or April I'll be digging through the bottom of the chest freezer, wondering, "Have I already used all the ham hocks?"  I've tried, other times, making a list of the cuts that are in there, posting it on the wall, and crossing them off as each is removed.  It never seems to work for very long.  Mostly, I think, because I generally don't carry a pencil downstairs with me when I go to the pantry (and don't tell me to tie one to the wall, I promise you the kids will find a way to run off with it).

So I had an idea today.  This would work for all you people who have a giant freezer or pantry full of stuff they need to keep track of, whether it's cuts of meat, once-a-month-cooking casseroles, or homemade preserves.

Here's my list on the wall above the freezer:

But I don't need to bring a pen down to cross stuff off, because I took a cue from the flyers on the coffee-shop bulletin board I was looking at yesterday:

See -- now all I have to do when I get a cut of pork out of the freezer is tear off one of the corresponding strips.  What's left on the list is what's left in the freezer.

Tonight we had one of the pork steaks, thinly sliced, over a spinach salad with white beans and red onions, tossed in a dijon-cider dressing.  Homemade wheat rolls on the side.  Two kids opted for PB&J, so one pound of meat easily fed the whole family.  I have decided it's a good idea to let them choose a meatless protein alternative -- as long as it isn't too complicated -- whenever they want.

Portable: Pseudo-pain au chocolat.

On Tuesdays I leave the house by eight in the morning, to drive out to the suburbs so we can spend our co-schooling days with Hannah's family.  This school year I've been driving even a bit earlier, picking up the daughters of another family as well before swinging north.  The trip is not quite an hour long.

The kids have to eat, of course, and usually in the car.  Normally if someone won't eat breakfast I shrug and say "Guess you'll be hungry later, then," but I had to put my foot down some time ago about refusing to eat breakfast on Tuesday mornings.  Hannah is happy to feed hungry kids a snack, but I wasn't so happy about my children snarfing up all her bread and milk once a week.

Furthermore, my daughter is one of those people who can't bear to look at food before about 10:00, so her breakfast has to come along and be saved till later.  

The emergency food is granola bars, of course, which I keep in my car.  And if we are really desperate (defined by:  I somehow wasn't able to secure a cup of coffee any other way), I am not above hitting a drive-through.  But I really do prefer making a portable real food.

Now if it was  just me, it would be easy.  I love hardboiled eggs, that quintessential portable protein, or sticks of string cheese; and in the summer I would be perfectly happy to drop a pint jar of hulled strawberries and almonds into my cupholder (one of the cupholders; the other one has my coffee) and go.  Kids:  not so much.  Eating what's available because you have to get yourself fed is apparently a learned skill.

Muffins are one solution; they are a bit crumbly, sure, but there are already so many crumbs in my car that I don't worry about it.  At least they don't drip, unless they are chocolate-chip.  I used to make them fresh on Tuesday morning, but these days I tend to bake them the night before.   I used to be intimidated by muffins, but now I can make them practically in my sleep.

Another is quesadillas or their cousin, breakfast burritos.  I typically make plain cheese for one child, egg-cheese-salsa for another (and for me), and a pepperoni-and-cheese quesadilla for another.  They don't take very long and they are all right even after they have gone cold.

I don't favor peanut butter sandwiches because the crusts tend to get left behind in the seats and then get smooshed.  Also, then everyone wants milk.  Which is banned from my car.

Here is a new idea I haven't tried yet, and a new idea I tried this morning.

First:  stuffed buns.  Yes, I know, there is nothing particularly creative about what is basically a sandwich.  Still, I like her nifty method of sealing the bun to keep things from falling out of it.  Check it out at The Big Red Kitchen (where there be photos):

Go to your nearest bakery that bakes up the freshest and most tender Kaiser Rolls. Slice the rolls open leaving one edge intact- like a clam shell, and pull out some of the tender innards saving them for another recipe. Now here is the trick to getting those buns put back together and holding the filling inside. Ready for this?

Fill the bottom well with your filling of choice and pipe beaten egg whites around the lip of the bottom bun, close bun, press lightly to be sure that glue has sealed the bun closed, and top with a slice of cheese of choice. Bake in a 375 degree oven for about 8 minutes. The meringue will seal your fillings in the bun.... 

Brilliant.  Just brilliant.  I am a little bit afraid to try it first with a fresh, tender Kaiser roll, however, because I fear that if the kids get a hold of that, they will never eat one made of a leftover whole wheat dinner roll, which is exactly how I would do this for breakfast.   

Now, on to my other new thing, with a little background.  The bread machine is sniffed at by many "real" bakers, including, sadly, some otherwise inspiring cookbook writers (Mark Bittman, I'm talking to you).  Yes, yes, if you are the sort of person who tosses about  "poolish" and "sponge" without a thought, or even if you are a devotee of the considerably more convenient no-knead Dutch oven breads or Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, then perhaps bread machine bread will never be up to your standards.  But hey, if your family eats sandwiches or toast, especially if they eat a LOT of sandwiches and toast, it's hard to beat a constant supply of homemade sandwich loaves.  I think at this point I would do without my microwave, food processor, and blender all together before I would give up my bread machine.  

So, given that I have a bread machine, it's really pretty easy to have fresh breakfast buns of all sorts, because the dough can be ready to shape when you get up.  I stumble down the stairs, turn on the oven, shape the buns or what have you to the sound of the coffee maker starting to hiss and burble, set them on top of the warming oven to rise, and stumble back up the stairs (it's harder than going down; try it sometime) to get dressed or shower or nurse the baby or whatever.  Twenty or thirty minutes later I come down, pop the pan in the oven, and drink a cup of coffee.  Most yeast buns only take ten minutes or so to bake, so breakfast is ready.  And since that (and maybe a cup of milk) is all the kids need to eat, well, it's actually pretty simple.  I think you can maybe get a similar effect with certain doughs that will willingly rise in the refrigerator overnight, but it takes longer for them to do their second rise.

This morning I tried a version of pain au chocolat.   Yes, yes, it is traditionally made with croissant-type pastry, but my children don't know that, do they?  Milo was inspired to ask about it yesterday when we were reading a book called Let's Eat:  What Children Eat Around the World.  One of the children was a French boy, and a photo showed him and his restauranteur-parents sitting around the breakfast table drinking hot chocolate out of bowls.  "Why aren't they using a mug?" asked Milo, and I read the caption to him, which indicated that the family had dipped their pain au chocolat in the hot chocolate and then when the pain was done they drank the hot chocolate from the bowl, much as we order our kids to finish their milk after they have spooned up all the cereal.

Well.  Hot chocolate with chocolate-stuffed bread sounded like a fine breakfast to Milo, so that's what's on the menu this morning.  And I mention this in the "portable" category because without the hot chocolate, the chocolate-stuffed bread is indeed quite portable, as you will see.

(A side note before we go on:  Why haven't I ever thought before about serving, say, cookies and milk with the milk in a bowl instead of a cup?  Whenever they're going to dunk something in the milk?  It would be a lot less messy and it doesn't impede the drinking afterwards.)

I searched for "bread machine pain au chocolat" and found this lovely British recipe, with the flour measured in grammes, and adapted it.  (The quantity of yeast looked ridiculously small, so I used the amount of yeast I would normally put in a cinnamon-roll type dough).

Here's what I put in my bread machine for six pains.  Next time I'll increase it by fifty percent, I think, and try using a bit more whole wheat, since it turned out nicely with 40% whole wheat.

• 2 eggs beaten (right in the machine pan) with 3 Tbsp milk
• 2 Tbsp sugar
• 2 Tbsp butter
• Pinch salt
• 150 g bread flour (sorry; I have a scale, so I went with her grammes)
• 100 g Dakota Maid whole wheat flour (DM is a finely ground, hard winter wheat that is excellent for bread.  I don't think this would work with a coarse whole wheat)
• 1 tsp bread machine yeast

I cut the dough, which was smooth and elastic, into six pieces, rolled each gently out into an oval, and deposited eight Ghirardelli 60%-cocoa chocolate chips (that's a quarter of an ounce; I think a bit more would have worked okay) into the center of each.  Then I folded them over (like a business letter), pinched them to seal, and tucked the ends under like a little loaf of bread.

I put four of them in mini-loaf pans as suggested in the recipe, and put two on a baking sheet to see if that worked okay.  Then I covered them and let them rise 20 minutes before baking 10 minutes at 425 degrees F.  

Results:

Aren't they cute?  They looked just a teeny bit overly browned; I might try 400 degrees next time.  And I don't really think that they needed the mini-loaf pans, as they all look about the same.  

(Slight mistake:  I probably should have put them seam side down.  I was worried about the chocolate leaking.  I think seam side down would look nicer, although mine turned out kind of interestingly rustic-looking.)

Of course anytime you have something stuffed with chocolate, you should have an interior shot.  Here is one that I managed to catch with my cell phone before Mark ate the other half.

 

I thought the rich bread was lovely, but the chocolate was a bit much for seven in the morning.  Chocolate is good for you, insisted Mark, as he ate one and a half buns plus the chocolatey middle of mine.   Maybe next time I will fill my little bun with something else, like plum jam or cream cheese.

Once they cool completely, the chocolate will solidify, and it will be a very nice, not-messy, quite portable breakfast bun.  

 

UPDATE:  Oh yes.  Well-received.  And not perfectly un-messy, but not bad either.

 

Co-schooling: making them do a bit of the work.

Last Thursday, Hannah and I found ourselves with not much school to teach and two fewer children than usual, so we tried a dry run of one of our new plans for next school year: inaugurating the concept of "servers" at the lunch table.

Until, now, it has seriously seemed like more trouble than it's worth to have any kids actively assist us with some of the tasks at lunchtime on our co-schooling days. There is a certain investment of training required before the "help" pays off. So while we have had kids (for example) clear their own dishes from the table and such, we haven't had them do much more than that. It has been simpler and more peaceful to get the kids fed, then have lunch ourselves, then clean up, then return to schooling. This is more efficient than it sounds, because I generally need a mental break from teaching in the middle of the day anyway, and it worked fine for that to happen while cleaning up the lunch table.

This year, however, Hannah and I looked at the schedule and realized it wasn't going to work. There just isn't enough time in the day. It is now time to enlist the kids to help us serve and clean up after lunch.

We don't want a free-for-all, and we don't want fights over who will do what. So we decided that each day we will have two servers, one drawn from among the biggest kids and one drawn from the middle-sized kids. Each will wear an apron. Hannah and I will fill a sink with soapy water, we will assemble the plates with the first helpings on them, and we will set up the rest of the food with cups and the milk jug and a pitcher of water on a countertop nearby. Then, the server kids will be responsible for

- calling the other children to the table
- offering the prayer
- bringing the plates to the table
- pouring water or milk (the bigger child only)
- fetching condiments
- fetching second servings
- slicing bread
- making sure spills get wiped up
- cutting stuff up, spreading butter, etc. for the very youngest children
- reminding everyone to scrape their plates and put them in the sink
- returning condiments, milk, and leftovers to the fridge
- clearing the table, sweeping under it if necessary, and readying it for schoolwork.

At the end, the server kids can take off their aprons and be excused only after we've checked that the table is ready to go. Then Hannah and I will get the dishwasher running (it would take too much time to train all the different children how best to load our different dishwashers).

On Thursday, I had made BLTs for lunch, which turned out to be a fairly high-maintenance sort of lunch to kick off the kids-serving-kids program, but it worked pretty well. It was very enjoyable to hear "Mommy, get me some milk" and to get to say, "Remember to ask the 9-year- old." As for Hannah and me, we got to enjoy our lunch sitting down for the first time in a while.

Looking forward to trying it again next week!

More on Benedict for families: Prayer, work, and study.

I'm totally buried in school planning this week, so blogging has gone to the back burner.

 Scratch that:  I'm immersed in school planning.  Planning is absolutely my favorite part of homeschooling.  It's summer, I only have to teach a little bit of "remedial" stuff (or let them teach themselves; for example, my 10-y-o's special summer subject is intensive typing practice with Mavis Beacon), and to top it all off, two of my kids are visiting Grandma and Grandpa for two or three weeks right now, so I have tons of time.  And I'm pouring most of it into lesson planning NOW so I won't wake up some morning in February 2012 and say "I don't know what I'm going to do today so I guess we'll just watch movies."

So speaking of being immersed in work, did any of you go and read Fr. Longenecker's Saint Benedict for Busy Parents that I recommended a few posts ago?*

I found myself unable to stop myself from creating a three-by-three matrix:

	Prayer	Work	Study
Obedience
Stability
Conversion of Life

...and trying to fill in all the cells, or at least some of them.  Do I practice obedience with regard to prayer, etc.

Because that's the kind of response a girl like me has to a piece of spiritual reading.  (You should have seen my notebook after I finished The Interior Castle.)

Of course, I immediately ran into another question, because while some of the stuff I do every day is undoubtedly prayer, and some of it is surely work, and some of it is arguably study, there's a lot of other stuff that isn't clearly any of them.   It's not hard to classify, for example, driving to the grocery store as "work."  What about going for a swim?  What about eating dinner?  And for that matter:  what about hanging out with friends or just sitting down with a cup of coffee in the morning getting ready to face the day?  I noticed a distinct lack of "just chillin'" in St. Benedict's trinity of how you spend your time.  And yet the monks were expected to have recreation time.   So do you suppose St. Benedict thought of the free time the monks had as part of prayer, part of work, part of study?  Or is free time some kind of fourth thing outside of prayer, work, and study?  Or is free time spent doing things that all can get classified as either prayer or work or study?  (If scrubbing the floor can be a form of prayer if it is done with love, I suppose finally getting that cup of coffee can be prayer if it is done with gratitude.  "If?"  Who isn't grateful for that cup of coffee?)    

Or maybe there really is no such thing as free time and the reality is that whatever we're doing, we are working, or studying, or praying, whether we realize it or not, and maybe we should sit up and pay attention to what it is we're making, or learning, or saying to God.

But anyway, I made a stab at classifying all the things I do as either "prayer," "work," or "study."  

Prayer wasn't too hard.  Attending Mass is prayer (even if I'm too busy attending to children to pay much attention to it, I decided).  Prayer is prayer.  Going to Confession or Adoration is prayer.  No problem.  

So you could say it was pretty easy to classify everything I do into "prayer" and "not-prayer."  (Subject to the caveat about all activities being a form of prayer if you do it in love, à la St. Thérèse.)  It was trickier to decide what to do with all the "not-prayer."   

In other forms of "what do you call what you do" classification, "work" is divided from other things, like "leisure," by monetary considerations.  Does it create wealth?  Can you get paid for it?  This won't work here.  It's more essential than that; it has to make sense whatever the context of economy.  And anyway, we're not distinguishing it from "leisure," but from "study."

So, in this system, "work" is something you do (I decided) that participates in creation:  remakes the physical world somehow.  It "co-operates with God in the redemption of the world," to quote Fr. Longenecker.  "Study" is something primarily interior that involves taking in the world as it is, and shaping it in the mind.   

With that in mind, I decided that teaching children is work; that preparing lessons is work.  That all the aspects of life that I could call "homemaking" is work.  For the purpose of dividing life up into this trinity, writing is work, even though I do it almost entirely for fun.  Traveling of all kinds is work, even driving to the grocery store.  Physically caring for other people, like nursing this child on my lap right now as I type, is work.  Physically caring for myself is work, too, and that includes getting the exercise I need and want.  And so having dinner with my family or friends is work.  Indeed, interacting with other people is almost always work, even just hanging out, because through our interactions with each other don't we remake the world in a small way?  Don't we have an opportunity to co-operate (if we are kind and prudent and open to the spirit) in redemption?

That leaves a number of things that can be called "study."  Scripture study and spiritual reading seem like they could be either "study" or "prayer," but fortunately, St. Benedict himself called them "study," and that is a bit of a guide to help us define the category.  All kinds of scholarship and research are "study."

Now, if you work as an academic, or a scientist, or a teacher in or out of the home, the distinction between "work" and "study" may be a little difficult to pinpoint; I, personally, make the classification based on whether I am remaking my own mind or something outside my own mind at the time.  When I skim through a stack of history books to decide what I will teach the children, I am studying.  When I put pen to paper to make a list of points I plan to teach, I am working.  

I have worked in laboratories, and I think I can figure out how I would classify as work or as study the various tasks: planning experiments, building apparatus, running experiments, collecting and analyzing data, writing up results and presenting them.  There is some prayer, of course, too:  I suspect that even if you include all the atheists, it's a rare researcher who hasn't uttered "OH PLEASE LET THIS THING WORK" at least once.  

Much leisure is study.  All reading for pleasure, and by extension all media consumption of any kind (this includes reading Facebook -- but not updating your status, which would be work, since you are creating content for others).   Developing skills of your own through reading or watching others  is study (although practicing them may be work).  Self-examination is study, even when prompted by prayer.

+ + +

Speaking of self-examination:  here is where I explain something about myself, because I can hear a voice asking "What's the point?"  The point is, I find a peculiar entertainment in continually examining my life, interior and exterior.  I find a meditative peace in the act of simplifying and filtering it.  Creating a blank table in a spreadsheet, all crisscross black lines, and empty  -- like the one above, before I started filling in the cells -- rakes the sand in my little mental Zen garden.

And I like the exercise of "What if I thought of --say-- getting to the gym as part of my work?  How would that change my attitude toward it?  Would it affect how I see it interrelating with the other things that are part of my work?"

Actually, the bit that felt most satisfying when it clicked into place was the concept that for me, hanging out with my friends, insofar as I am capable of "hanging out"  -- being with other people in general -- what I called "Fellowship" in my spreadsheet -- was to classify that as "work."  Because really, I am a classic introvert, and even though I enjoy other people, it wears me out.  Calling "fellowship" "work" lifted a bit of weight from my shoulders. 

The most useful insight for me, though, is that when you classify everything as either prayer, work, or study, no time is wasted.  It's either spent for good, or spent for ill.  

When I attend Mass, or pick up the breviary, or stand in line for confession, or even utter a voiceless "please!", I'm praying.  Am I referring to God or to myself?  Am I aligning my will with God's or against it?  Am I a channel for grace or an obstruction?  Am I opening my heart or trying to conceal it?

When I watch a video, or check comments on a news story, or listen to music, or read a book, I'm learning something.  Did I learn something true or something false?

When I write a blog post, or clean up a mess, or assign work to the children, or go for a run, or go to sleep, or spend time chatting with my friends, I'm participating in the creation and redemption of the world.  Did I help it or hinder it?

 

 

________________

* I forgot to mention on that post that I owe a hat-tip to Rich Leonardi for linking to it.

Imagine a spreadsheet...

...with time down the left hand side, divided up into fifteen-minute blocks, for a whole day.

Not every day, just Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And imagine across the top, column headings for me and for Hannah and for ten children.  Ages 13, 12, 11, 9, 9, 8, 6, 5, 3, and 1.  (No, they aren't all ours.  That is a somewhat long story.)

Scratch that. Imagine a dining room table. And a whole lot of index cards. And some post it notes. And clothespins to hold some of the cards together.

That's how it started.

+ + +

You may remember that I co-school with my friend Hannah, and her children, and two or three extra children, two days a week.  We don't cover all our school subjects on those days, just some of them:  Latin, English, history, and some assorted craft and art and music.  

Monday-Wednesday-Friday, separately, we teach our own kids all the other subjects.  Math and such.

Four of our kids were off visiting various grandparents, and the remaining ones were mostly playing happily, so we started off listing every subject and every kid.  Then, while I made lunch, Hannah transferred the information to index cards.  "I thought of cutting them up into different lengths to represent different time blocks," she said later, "but then I thought, 'That's insane.'"

Later we decided:  insane is sometimes more useful.

Cut to the long dining room table.

Time runs from left to right across the table.  We commence moving index cards around. 

There are constraints, of course:

• The same child cannot be taught two subjects at the same time.
• Each child can only be trusted for so long to sit and work independently.
• I am not, personally, capable of teaching two of my subjects simultaneously.    
• Someone has to be responsible for the toddlers at all times.
• If you row to the other side of the river with the bag of grain, the fox will eat the chicken. Or something like that.

 We can loosen things up by deciding to teach some stuff on Tuesdays and other stuff in the same block on Thursdays.  Hence the clothespins:  if these two things are each done once a week, and they each take 45 minutes, and they entrain the same children, they could occupy the same time block.  So they move around as one.

Eventually the cards and clothespins stop making intuitive sense to me, and I am worried that a child will disperse them, so I start trying to freeze them in place in a spreadsheet.

At this point we realize that we have failed in our first attempt:  In two places, both Hannah and I are focused on intensive teaching at the same time.  This means that the preschooler and the toddler are, hypothetically, running feral for an hour and forty-five minutes (although to our credit, we did plan to feed them lunch in the middle).

We have tried the "feral preschooler" solution before.  It ends badly.   We shuffle things around again.

It turns out that we cannot -- literally cannot -- free up one of us at every hour of the day to care for the preschoolers.  We cannot even free up one of us to "keep an eye on them" while teaching something less intense.  So we do our best to minimize the overlap, and assign simultaneous responsibility for teaching and preschoolers where necessary.  

So, for example, I have a half-hour block where I am reading history books aloud to three elementary-school kids, but because Hannah is teaching middle school English and she needs to concentrate, I must also be responsible for the two preschoolers.

I'll figure that out as I go along.  Maybe I'll give them some playdough at the same table, maybe I'll be reading a picture book and I'll have them listen, maybe I'll put on a DVD for them, maybe I'll assign an eight-year-old to entertain them while he listens to the reading, maybe I'll strap them in a chair and feed them chocolate chips one at a time.  I'll do something.  But what I won't do is assume that Hannah will take care of them while she assumes that I will. 

Hannah has a similar time block later in the day, where she has to teach elementary-school Latin and I have to go over history homework with middle schoolers.  So at least it's fairly fair.

Finally we had a spreadsheet that made sense to me.  Hannah had to absorb it and check it over for a while.  I left her alone with my iPad and some tea.

.

And I think we have something that will work.  We have to start school by 10:15, which gives us time for a vitally important cup of coffee together before we start.  Everyone gets an hour for lunch (and this year we will be rotating "server" assignments among the bigger children so that Hannah and I can actually sit down and eat our lunch instead of fetching cups of water and slices of bread).  The elementary school kids finish at 3:45.  We're done teaching at 4.  The middle schoolers have until five to finish up their independent work.

Are we going to follow the schedule slavishly?  Is that the point of this exercise?

No, the main point is to find out if our ideas about all the things we would teach next year were even possible.  Are there enough hours in the day?  How many times a week can we do such and such a thing?  What do we think we will have going all at once?  

So, we have a plan.  We even have a "what if we start an hour late" plan.  We can be flexible, but we have to start with a plan first.

Tidiness and efficiency are not always correlated.

It used to be that the "find files" or "search" option on a personal computer, or in an email program, wasn't very good.  Remember? 

Cue the wayback machine.  Once upon a time,  if you had a lot of documents and you wanted to be able to pull up an old one quickly, you'd better have your documents folder organized.  Folders within folders:  Spreadsheets > taxes > 1994.  Or at least you should be good about putting enough details in the filename that you could pick it out of a lineup. Remember that?  It was especially hard back when you had to name a file in eight characters or less.  (Now I'm really getting nostalgic.)

Not so anymore, right?  (Except maybe for photos, which as of this moment aren't very searchable unless you name them carefully.)  Here in 2011, if I want to find some old document  on my Mac's hard drive, I type a few words into the search field, and it appears.  Knowing the filename may help; often it doesn't matter because the search terms can come from the contents.  I don't have to remember if I called it  "new grocery list" or "shopping items" or  "Highway 7 Cub Foods"  -- if I type "triscuits" I'll find what I'm looking for. 

So now I don't spend a lot of time dragging files (except photos) in and out of folders just so I can "find" them later, or thinking carefully in which folder to save a particular file.  I occasionally group documents for some other reason -- such as uploading related files simultaneously -- but not for retrieving them.  I save most files right into the default "Documents" folder, and I trust the operating system  to search for it if I ever need it again.

Makes you wish you had a search engine for paper, doesn't it? 

Some time ago I needed to get some information from the list of covered items in one of our insurance policies.   I didn't need the information particularly quickly, but it was important.  The insurance policies are something that Mark, rather than I, usually deals with, so I went upstairs to the desk where Mark pays the bills, and started looking.   I checked the filing cabinet first -- not there -- then started going through the stacks and baskets of documents and papers on the desk.  I expected it would take me a while, fifteen minutes or so, but I wasn't worried, for several reasons:

•  I wasn't actually in a hurry
• I was motivated to find the policy, so I knew I wouldn't give up
•  I knew I would recognize it the instant I uncovered it
•  and I knew it was here somewhere, in one of the piles.

And I did find it.  I copied down the information I needed, left the policy where I found it and went off to do my work.

So the piles ... worked.

+ + +

That was on a day when there were a lot of tall piles on and around the desk.  Sometimes they're fairly well corralled:

    

The filing system will never get that upstairs home office a photo shoot in House Beautiful or Real Simple. 

 

They sometimes look as if there's nothing systematic about it.  

And it's too bad that they cover up the beautiful built-in desk tops that Mark built to fit perfectly into the tiny niche at the end of the hall. 

 

But the truth is that whatever state they're in, they function adequately for us as a document-retrieval system.  Here's why:

First of all, we rarely need to find any of that stuff quickly.  In fact, we rarely need to find anything in there at all.  Especially now that so much information is stored electronically, of all the paper we have to save, most is there only "just in case" we need to look at it or produce it later, not because we expect  to need to refer to it often.   Tax documents from one to five years ago.  Insurance policy numbers and coverage information.  Our college transcripts.   None of that stuff needs to be at our fingertips.  I can count on one hand the number of times I, personally, needed to search for a document in that office in the last two years.   I assume Mark has some system for keeping track of the tiny fraction of files up there that are active for him.  (I keep "my" stuff somewhere else.  This is probably a key feature!)

Second, there isn't a whole lot of junk there diluting the important things.  Oh, there's some things in the "maybe we should save this" category, but Mark's pretty good about recycling paper we won't need.  So the stacks aren't so large and stuffed full of irrelevant material that I know it'll take forever to find something.  It will take minutes. It will not take hours.  

Third,  when he or I puts a file in a stack up there, it stays put until he decides to do something with it.  The papers in the stacks are safe there, or at least, safe enough for us.  The upstairs office, tucked at the end of a hall, is out of the way of daily living; the stacks do not get knocked over, nor do they accumulate much irrelevant junk.  I do not mess with the stuff except to look for things from time to time.  The children know they are not to touch "Dad's papers."  So, to put it succinctly, if it's up there, we know if it's there somewhere.

Fourth, it's easy to put a document into the system, because it doesn't much matter exactly where it goes.   And that's important, because all the documents have to get into the system.  On top of the nearest pile is good enough, or in my case, into a particular wire basket downstairs that serves as an "in-box" from me to him.  

(Note wire basket inbox, containing -- besides mail -- Chapstick, a bicycle headlamp, the packaging from his new heart rate monitor, and always -- always -- several screwdrivers)

(If your husband's household inbox does not have room for random screwdrivers, then there's a big part of your problem right there, I'll bet)

(Because there's also no search engine for screwdrivers yet)

(No comment shall be made on any similarities that might be found between the stacks upstairs on the desk shelves and the stacks of recipe books on the kitchen shelves)

 

Ahem.  So the system, though not pretty, works.  The basic reason why conventional organization isn't necessary here -- and maybe would even be a hindrance -- is that, given the kind of files we keep, quick and easy file storage is much more important than quick and easy file retrieval. 

 If you want to find something, it must still exist somewhere.  If you don't put it away promptly, an important document might sit around in an unsafe place -- like the kitchen counter or a schoolroom table -- long enough to get damaged or lost.  Putting it away where it's safe is obviously a prerequisite.     But it has to be easy.   If it was a lot of trouble to put a document into the system, chances are that we would procrastinate on the filing.  There just isn't much intrinsic motivation to proper filing.  

   Even if, like me, you already own a really cool label maker.

 

On the other hand, if I need to find something, well, that is a fairly strong intrinsic motivation.  I trust I'll be motivated to riffle through the piles of paper until I uncover the one I'm looking for. 

So it's okay that it takes a while to find something.  It's not okay if it takes a while to put something away.  

(This is not true for every household or every function -- but it happens to be true for mine.)

If it obeys this rule, an untidy system works.  It might even work better than if it were tidy, because keeping it tidy -- just so I might be able to find something a few minutes more quickly later -- would cost us time.  I'm not sure that time would be a good investment.

+ + +

When I realized this basic need, it changed our paper-handling in two important ways.

First, I stopped bugging Mark to clean up the papers on the desk.   The system works, and at least until we decide we need to clear more space for writing, there isn't a reason to find a different place for the piles.

Second, it opened my eyes to how I, personally, handle paper -- and many other items -- in the homeschool.

 More on that in another post.

 

Retrieval.

It's the end of the school year, almost, which means I'm already thinking about the next one.  Right now, that's mostly -- gosh I hope I get a better handle on my schoolroom cabinets.

That's a metaphorical handle (mostly -- The pull on the bottom right does keep coming off).

This is my command center during the school day.  It's funny, in many ways I am a laughably organized person, but I can't keep this countertop clear to save my life.

The drawers are even worse, since they are out of sight.  From time to time I just must clear off the counter, because it is crushing all my psychic energy under the weight of the bits that are piled on it; but the drawers attract every possibly-useful-in-the-future item in the entire first floor.  

Also adapters to devices we don't have anymore.  Also broken pieces of saint statues.  But I defy you to find a rubber band or a paper clip or a pencil sharpener in there ... that is, if you want one.

 

It's not too hard to find a pair of scissors, but that's only because I deliberately salted all the drawers with about two dozen pairs at the start of this year.   

I have cleaned it out before, but I find the same stuff mostly just goes right back in where I put it.  This year, however, I achieved 25% success:  The leftmost drawer was designated "the drawer that holds scrap paper and crayons and colored pencils," and it stayed that way all year.  It finally found its calling.  Good for that drawer.  I still have three more to go, and I still can't find any paper clips.  Maybe by the time my oldest is in high school I will have a working set of drawers.

Never stop trying, though.  This is my latest attempt:

Ah yes, the "What am I looking for?!?" clipboard.  We shall see.  The idea is that every time I come up to the counter top to try to find something or use something, I will write down what item I am searching for.  Then, maybe, after a week or two, I will figure out what I actually need to keep here.  Maybe then I will feel better about stowing everything else somewhere I don't have to paw through it every time I want an eraser.

Now's the time to do it, while school's still in so the data will be good, but with summer -- re-organization season -- just around the corner.

Acceptance #7 - Just doing it.

"So would you mind terribly much if I started to talk your ear off about gluttony and weight loss again?  For a little while?"

That was me, asking my husband if he is willing to step once again into the roles he willingly played while I was losing the weight.   (Here's the guest post he wrote last year to tell his side of the story.)

Of course he said yes.

Check.  One off the list.

+ + +

And of course I'm blogging about it.  Check.

+ + + 

Another list item:  to think critically about gluttony, at least for a little while, so I can recognize it when it tempts me.   I need a condensed version of this post in the form of a question.   Something like, "That thing you're about to put in your mouth?  Is there some reason you ought not to eat that, charity or manners or money or plain common sense, but that you're ignoring because you Just Want It?"

An example I was thinking of when I wrote that post:  I like to eat pinches of shredded cheese out of the food processor (or these days, plastic resealable bag) while I'm waiting to flip the quesadillas.   This isn't so much a problem because of the cheese calories.  Instead, it's that I always drop some on the floor while I'm elegantly sprinkling the cheese into my upturned mouth.  And then somebody steps on the cheese and tracks it into the living room.  

Clearly plain common sense would say I should not sprinkle shredded cheese into my mouth while trying to cook quesadillas.  The virtues of multitasking only extend so far.   And yet, despite being aware of this for several months, and despite knowing what will happen at the very moment my hand snakes into the bag, I reject self-restraint, I continue to snarf shredded cheese by hand whenever I make quesadillas, and I continue to find inch-long yellow smears on the carpet.  

That, my friends, is gluttony.

+ + +

In the maintenance blues post (#4 in this series), I catalogued which of my habits are still working, and which aren't.  Now I'll take that one step past a catalogue and see if I can nail down what's going on.

A couple of the items have to do with availability:  there's more of what I don't want, and less of what I do want, coming home from the store.  That's pretty easily fixed, in our family that already knows how to make a list and stick to it.

1. Note on the grocery list, "no sauces or flavors on the frozen veg."  If I don't tell Mark what to buy, he has to guess what I want.  
2. Ask each verbal child to pick his or her favorite packaged cookie and buy only those three kinds for a good long while, rotating through them.  Variety in real food is good; too much variety in junk food or treats is bad for everybody, not just me.
3. Before cookies enter my pantry, preportion the big bags of cookies into Ziploc bags.  Because I have four children, I don't have to make the bags single serving; I would guess, for example, that a standard bag of Oreos should be halved.   And it's okay if there are a couple extra Oreos and I eat them.  The thing I want to avoid is the open bag of Oreos sitting around waiting for the next snacktime.  Because you know what?  It never makes it that long.

These three commitments ought to be near effortless, as the decision point is at grocery shopping time.    Not at a "will I eat this, or won't I?" time.

The remaining items are more about respecting my own pre-decided limits even when I'm tempted to ignore them.  I've learned that I feel much, much better if I stop eating while the available food still promises me a little pleasure; and yet, the thought of the pleasure still attracts.  I suffer, while sitting at table, from the illusion of being unsatisfied; after I get up from the table, I can see in hindsight that I have been satisfied.  "Satisfied," indeed, is something I am only sure about in hindsight.  Never "I can stop eating because I am satisfied," but later, "I stopped eating, and I have been satisfied."

(One reason why the "Eat till you're satisfied" admonition in Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family (reviewed here, here, here) leaves me shaking my head.  For me it's more like "Eat till you guess you will feel satisfied.")

Anyway, these are the items that I should re-test, to see whether they help me regain respect for my own chosen limits:

1. Stick to the mealtime/snacktime schedule.  (The schedule itself may need tweaking.)
2. Stop eating food that somebody else wasted.  It's amazing how often I have to recommit to this one.
3. Put the food on a plate so I can see how big it is and enjoy it more.
4. One (1) plate.  One!

Boy, I could print this up and put it in a fortune cookie and have room to spare.  Remember the simplicity of "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants"?  

My fortune should say "Eat meals.  From my plate.  Then stop."

Check.

+ + +

I think that takes care of all the thinking.  The next step, of course, is do.  Or (thanks, Yoda) do not.