bearing blog

Positive eating.

Christy sent me this article a few days ago:

Instead of Eating to Diet, They're Eating To Enjoy

That doesn’t mean they’re giving up on health or even weight loss. Instead, consumers and nutritionists say they are seeing a shift toward “positive eating” — shunning deprivation diets and instead focusing on adding seasonal vegetables, nuts, berries and other healthful foods to their plates.

It's nice to see people focusing on what they should eat, rather than what they shouldn't eat.   That principle has helped me a lot over the past six months -- mainly, I added enormous amounts of vegetables to my plate and let them shove all the other stuff to the side.

Along the way, I read lots of different diet books, but also a number of books in the category "how to eat and live well."  Real Food by Nina Planck.  Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.  The most recent one, which I thought would be kind of dumb but which turned out to be a fun little book to read, was French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano.  (It brought back some lovely memories, as I spent a college summer in Lyon.)

There is one big problem with all these books.  They make me crave expensive food.

Nina Planck's book had me dreaming of filling my cart with organic greens from the co-op, and lingering at the cheese counter at the good grocery store, you know, the one where they actually pay someone to put your groceries in a bag for you.  Michael Pollan's books -- well, ok, I've already drunk that Kool-Aid locally produced organic cider, my freezer is full of grass-fed beef that met its end in the glass-walled slaughterhouse of Cannon Falls, MN.  Guiliano's book had me wanting acacia honey stirred into my yogurt, and caviar and crème fraîche dabbed onto my boiled fingerling potatoes.

Not so good.  Well, I mean, it is good -- it's caviar and crème fraîche and POTATOES for crying out loud, how could it not be good?  But maybe not so good for me to be reading about.

Something I've learned:  You cannot eat all the good stuff there is in the world.  Certainly not all at once.  You must pick and choose.

Which puts the gummy bears I've been craving into some perspective.

Why does your little girl like to play "princess?"

Virginia Postrel at the very cool DeepGlamour.net wants you to find out.

Peggy Orenstein's 2006 NYT Magazine story is the most in-depth examination of the question (and the business) that I've found. It's a good read, but ultimately unsatisfying. Orenstein brings too many political preconceptions to the topic and, while she quotes her princess-loving daughter to good narrative effect, she offers almost no information about what girls who play princess themselves think it means to be a princess.

For my book research, I'd like to hear from the little princesses themselves. Ideally, I'd find some brilliant, scientifically rigorous research by a child psychologist. But I haven't so far. So, since preschoolers are not the easiest interview subjects, I'm enlisting adults who know little princesses (preferably those older and more articulate than Anna Margaret) to ask them for me--Why do you like to be a princess? What does it mean to be a princess?--and write down the answers. 

Because I think it's awesome that somebody actually wants to listen to children, rather than to grown-up pundits who assume they know what children think, I'm linking.  Go ask your little princess, tell Ms. Postrel, and pass it on.

This one goes out to Kim in Iowa for one reason.

It goes out to everybody else just 'cause it's awesome.  

John Williams is the man, although every time I hear one of his major themes I can't remember which movie it came from.  Or whether it was actually the Olympics.

(h/t Megan McArdle)

This post is really about media, family, and privacy, not politics.

It is way, way, way too early for me to be writing with any interest about the presidential election, so understand that my link to this post by Gateway Pundit is not because I think the information there is strongly relevant to who's-gonna-be-a-better-president.

I just think it's interesting that, after all this time and media attention, and especially after the increased attention that Senator Obama's candidacy has brought on the subject of racially blended families, that  this is the first time I have ever heard that Senator McCain and his wife have one daughter whom they adopted from Bangladesh in 1991.

According to the U.S. Department of State, last year Americans adopted more than 20,000 children from other countries; roughly four-fifths of those, from non-European countries.  Although the number has dropped recently, apparently driven by policies in China and Russia, the number has been around 20,000, plus or minus a few thousand, for the last several years.  That's a big increase from 1991; when the McCain family took in Bridget McCain, she was one of about 8,500 foreign children adopted by Americans.   There are roughly four million babies born in the U. S. per year, by the way.  

Mixed-race families -- whether made that way by ordinary marriage and childbearing, or by adoption -- are growing in number, and they are going to be of growing importance in our national struggle to make sense of race.  I think it's interesting that I'd never until now heard of Senator and Mrs. McCain's adopted daughter.  You'd think that it'd have made an interesting two-candidate story when paired with the well-publicized narrative of Senator Obama's parents and grandparents, but I've never seen any story that mentioned both candidates' blended families.

Association and community.

Darwin has a thought-provoking post about chosen and unchosen communities, and their relationship to things like insurance.

One of the things I found most interesting about Marglin's analysis was his distinction between "community" and "association". By his definition, community is not merely a place where one finds companionship, society and mutual aid, but also a group which one cannot leave without fairly serious cost. According to the old adage that you can chose your friends but you can't choose your family, community is much more along the lines of family than friends.

An association may seem to have nearly all the same benefits as community: companionship, society and mutual aid. But an association is a group which one joins based on some sort of identified commonality and which one may leave at any time with fairly little cost.

Marglin argues that many structures which used to be communities in the past have become associations. While people used to experience serious costs if they left their occupations or neighborhoods, society and societal expectations have changed to make these relatively painless moves. Similarly, people now church shop with relative ease, while in the past leaving a church was a nearly unthinkable move.

Boy, this distinction has really clarified something in my mind.   I have an acquaintance, a woman, another mother at home with small children, who says when you talk to her that she's very committed to finding a "community" or "tribe" of mutual support and friendship.  She has gone about it, though, in a way I've always characterized as community activism.  She is forever trying to found new mother's connections, attachment-parenting support groups, homeschooling support groups and the like.  It seems every year she's got some new support group running.  "What this woman needs isn't a support group," I was telling another mom the other day.  "She needs a FRIEND." 

She's mistaken "associations" (as defined above in Darwin's quote) for "community."

Even if you choose a community rather than having it chosen for you by birth or social class, the essence of community is risk.  Risk of becoming attached.  Risk of being hurt by being left. 

There's more in that post... read the whole thing. 

I laughed out loud when I got to the words "professional babyproofer."

"Some parents wonder whether having children will mean an end to their high-design dream."  From the NYT, who else?

Simcha deconstructs Thomas Kinkade.

Go Simcha!  Don't apologize.

Punk?

In praise of the minivan:

The other day, I posed a question to a few of my co-workers--if you needed the people- and cargo-carrying capacity of a large vehicle, would you really penalize yourself by selecting something less useful than a minivan just to save your ego? And if that's true, just how sad is that? How much are we letting what others think dictate a fundamental part of our everyday lives? A surprising number said they would never drive a minivan, no matter what.

Popular culture is so anti-minivan today that driving one is so counter-culture, so in the face of popular biases, so keeping-it-real, that it's almost punk rock. In a utilitarian way, anyway.

I've driven a Toyota Sienna for a bit more than a year.  It's fantastic to drive.  It seats eight.  Pretty good mileage.  And it can haul 4x8 sheet goods.

(In the comments in the above thread: 

I feel sorry for you. Keep trying to fool yourself. You're married with 2.5 kids, but you're still cool! Really! F'n boomers.

"Boomers?"  The boomers are retirees now, dude.) 

My own personal mommy gap.

I did something very unusual for me last week:  I scheduled a playdate with another family.  Oscar had made friends with the oldest boy at a co-op function a couple of weeks ago, and I knew the mother just well enough not to be intimidated by the possibility of trying to make conversation, so I swallowed my social anxiety and drove down to Bloomington for the afternoon.  At least twice on my way there I had an attack of "gosh I hope I don't really embarrass myself by saying something stupid" but of course I had a perfectly lovely time, had to tear myself and the kids away, and nearly made Oscar late for his catechism class. 

Thinking over the encounter, I noticed something.  We're new-ish, maybe 2 years, as members of  our bursting-at-the-seams parish.  I haven't had time to make real friendships, it takes me a while.  But there are a handful of families I gravitate towards, people I'd like to get to know better.   I could tell you right away which ones I mean because I remember names, ages of children, things like that.  At a gathering of many of the mothers I instinctively seek these women out because I really hate mingling and with these I've already done at least some of the hard work of making small talk.  Or maybe because I genuinely like them.   The family we visited yesterday was one of these.

I realized that all these mothers have two things in common, the ones I feel I could be friends with maybe, if I got to know them better, the ones I find myself saying hello to.  The first is that they all have more children than me (the number 5 pops up frequently).   The second is that I keep assuming they are about my age -- I mean, I can really tell I'm subconsciously identifying with them somehow as "this is a person who is like me, whose experience and history are similar to mine"-- and then some conversation about pop culture will reveal that actually they are five to eight years older than me.  I'll realize that their high school years were late-eighties, not early-nineties.  And I am always surprised.

Not that the age difference matters too much.  Homeschoolers are more aware than most of the societal obsession with age-grouping, and of its errors.  (Although in mother-years, we might expect a deeply felt difference between 30 and 40.)  No, I just find it remarkable (a) that I keep gravitating towards, and identifying with, slightly older moms who have a few more children than I, and (b) that I keep being surprised to discover the age difference.  Why do I do this?

At first I thought, maybe I'm instinctively seeking mentors? But it doesn't feel that way, and anyway, you'd think I would feel more like "O wise one, enlighten me" and less like "hey, you're like me, maybe we could get along."  And then I thought, maybe I'm fascinated with bigger families, since I didn't come from one?  But that doesn't seem right either. But as I think about the families, I realize that for most of them, the oldest child is in the 9-10-11-year-old range.  And I think that's the key to understanding it. 

I've written lots about my "tribe" -- the other families that we spend so much time with.  It wouldn't be far off to say we've helped each other raise our children.  For seven years I've spent two days a week, and many weekend hours too, with these other families.   It so happens that the two other mothers I spend the most time with are all about the same age, within 2 years, and I am in the middle.  And the oldest child in our tribe, who is not mine, is nearly ten.  There're 10 children in all.  You know what?  I think I instinctively am gravitating towards mothers whom I perceive as having a similar level of experiencing and knowing children.  Obviously I am not the parent of ten children, I am the mother of three and I happen to be getting to know seven others really, really well.  Maybe it's because of these other children who are such a strong presence in my life that I instinctively seek out the mothers of more children than I have.  They "feel" more like me than other mothers-of-three do.

Well, that's an awful lot of meta-analysis, and it definitely isn't the only reason why I had such a good time, and felt so comfortable, and hardly anxious at all, while visiting yesterday with my children.  Sometimes I think too much!  Now I can turn to being anxious about reciprocating the invitation...

Simple art.

Kind of a neat article about Ed Emberley, writer of children's drawing books, in the Boston Globe.

The idea for the drawing books had its germination in the early 1950s at the Massachusetts School of Art, where the budding artist was required to draw countless variations on simple geometric figures. One day in class, an instructor claimed he could draw a face in two seconds.

"There's nothing more cocky than a sophomore in art school," Emberley jokes. "I could paint a nude from a model like nothing." But when the instructor made a curling line that went from nose to crown to chin, adding a dot for an eye and a line for a mouth, the student found himself smitten.

"I couldn't help but smile," he says. "That's magic."

In time, he came to believe that there was no less intrinsic value to the symbolism of a stick figure than an immaculately rendered life study.

I have to agree with that last sentence:   Surely concise expression of the essentials of a subject is a worthy artistic goal.  Anybody out there ever use Emberley's books, either as a fun activity or as bona fide homeschool art?  I've been intrigued by them but never actually bought any.