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The new ground rules.

For a couple of years, 2008 or so, I wrote frequently about exercise and eating strategies.   Sometimes I wrote about how those intersect with theology of the body, or Thomist morality.  I returned to the topic sporadically, but not steadily, since then.  It's been a while since I've written much.

I wrote all that because I was in the midst of two major life changes.

• First, that year when my third child was a toddler, I was prioritizing regular exercise for me for the first time.  Having taken lessons before that pregnancy, afterwards I started swimming twice a week, later adding running.   In order to keep it up, I thought, I had to be obsessive and inflexible; for better or worse, I was obsessive and inflexible, and I did keep it up.  Still am doing it today.

 

• Later, after the shock of having sustained this new habit for several months, I began restricting calories, and over the course of about six months I lost 27 percent of my initial body weight.    Having thought of myself as perpetually dumpy and sedentary since childhood, I found myself now active, and also, not fat.

Note the causality:  My writing about this didn't bring it about.  I wrote because I was having what I called success, and I was desperately trying to make sense of it.  I needed to understand why it was happening, was because I was afraid that if I didn't figure out why it was happening, I would not be able to keep from going back to "the way I was before."

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Ha.  As if I could slip back accidentally to "the way I was before."   Back to my early thirties?  I am older!  Human beings are not reversible.  For one thing, my windows of possibility have shifted.  For another, I understand more.

I've learned that the effort required to track calories closely enough to override the body's own cues is seriously intensive, tends to push out other satisfying activities, and requires a constant input of motivation.   And I've learned that I don't want to live in that kind of monomaniacal relationship with myself.

It may seem odd, but motivation itself is part of the problem.  I do lift myself up with messages that are true and encouraging, and celebrate with rewards that are both pleasant and good.    That's great when they work.  But if those don't do the job, I've often been tempted to use any mental means to the end of self-control:  shame, fear, dwelling on bad memories, threats of self-punishment; contempt for my body, contempt for other bodies.    Those thoughts still pop up, even though I understand better the damage they can do.

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Sometimes I betrayed those thoughts in my writing.

Writing has been a way to motivate myself, maybe spread a little motivation to others who might enjoy it.  I think this is, in principle, a worthy endeavor.   I've always used writing to to see if my ideas make sense and to improve them, and the promise (threat) of a small audience raises the stakes enough to make it meaningful.    I feel reward when a reader comments that something clicked, gave them an idea, helped.   

But when you write, in part, as a tool to root out error.... a corollary is that frequently, the error spends some time noodling around on the page.  And one might not catch them all.    It's not inherently wrong to try to work out ideas in public that way.  But there are limits. 

First of all, I have to be clear about what I'm doing (sometimes, literally, making it up as I go along).

Second:  when the topic is one that has been as historically fraught as exercise and diet and body image and fat loss, one about which many people carry a great deal of internalized harm... I need to be selective about setting down those first drafts of my thoughts. 

Because I also carry internalized messages that have power, and maybe not just over me.  Some of my thoughts are not great, especially some that in the intervening years I've learned to recognize as intrusive thoughts.  It might help me to exorcise them by giving voice to their content, but will it help anyone else?  If I'm going to straighten myself out by writing about those, best to write them longhand on one of the yellow pads I buy by the case, at least in first draft.  And maybe just keep them to myself, or share with a therapist instead.

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It's hard for me to precisely sort my previous writing about this stuff into "definitely okay, maybe even good" and "definitely problematic."  I've considered going back and editing, but the task is too overwhelming.  I've considered deleting stuff, but I think there are kernels of insight there worth rescuing.   For now it's still all there, waiting for me to decide what to do about it.

Meanwhile:  I'm changing up my lifestyle once again.  I'm committing myself to strengthen patterns of thinking that are much more compatible with good mental health and body care.   I would very much like to clarify them by setting them out on the blog. 

But:  when I blogged about fitness and nutrition before, expressing what I was going through 10-12 years ago, I wanted to write conversationally and frankly but that really amounted to being careless:  careless about language, careless about the words I used relative to the philosophy of the human person; careless about how pouring all my unfiltered thoughts out on the page might affect people who have a history of eating disorders, or of scrupulosity, or of difficulty caring for themselves.   I don't want to make the same mistakes again.

Would it be better just to... not write about this sort of thing at all?  I'm open to that possibility.  I'm not sure I can find out unless I give it a try.

What if I could write about it without making those mistakes?  What would it look like?  

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Ground rules.

 

1.  I will not conflate weight, fatness, or appearance with health.   

It's not just that these, as indicators of health, are poor and incomplete—though they are.   

It also means no more blithe writing about "desire for health" as a nobler-sounding euphemism for desires to look better, be less fat, or weigh less.  Pretended concern for "health" has justified many rude and abusive people.   Let me call things what they are.

A crucial reason to carefully acknowledge the difference:  Fat people frequently report that health care providers become fixated on fatness as the primary indicator of their health, the sole probable cause of pain or other symptoms, and the first problem that must be "fixed" before they are allowed to access other levels of care.  (See this recent commentary by Aubrey Gordon.)

 

2.  I will acknowledge other biomarkers of general health that are better-supported by evidence.  

Anyone can self-assess the time they spend physically active, the number of alcoholic drinks they have per week, the hours they sleep, the number of fruit/vegetable portions they are able to serve themselves each day.   These behavior-based markers are much more often under an individual's direct control (although the range of available choice varies).  Hydration can be assessed by checking if the urine is consistently a pale yellow color.  Blood pressure,  lipid panels, and blood glucose testing are accessible to those who can afford at least annual basic preventive care.   

As for body-size-related markers of general health, my understanding is that neither body-fat percentage, nor weight, nor BMI work well at all as a predictor of eventual development of cardiovascular or metabolic disease.  The one exception may be waist circumference.   If I find myself casting about for a NUMBER, perhaps that one will work; otherwise, maybe I need to write something else.

(Two examples of papers with this finding; two examples don't substitute for a careful literature review, of course.  Note that adjusting the results for BMI does appear to improve the correlation.  This is possibly because it brings in a dependence of height; naturally short stature is itself an attribute that raises the risk of developing these diseases.)    

 

3.  I am not a fitness professional.  I am not a health care provider.  I am not a registered dietician.

I have my own experience.  I have scientific training; it is not in this field, but I have good scientific literacy and am able to assess the general usefulness of papers and applicability of research.   I know where to go for more information, and I know how to identify the difference between a broad scientific consensus and a matter with competing viable theories.   I also know how to take a piece of popular science writing and pick it apart, if I want to, or use it for entertainment purposes, if I want to do that instead.  All these mean that I can form an educated and reasonable opinion (you will not catch me scoffing about "Dr. Google," any more than I would scoff at public access to medical libraries), and I can write commentary about it if I like.  These are not, however, substitutes for authority.  I'm an educated amateur, not an expert in any of these areas, and I have an academic responsibility to remain clear about that to anyone who stumbles across my blog.

(This isn't a ground rule about which I really needed a reminder.  I try hard to live by it anyway.  But I thought it worth mentioning for completeness.)

 

4.  No biomarker, and few health-related behaviors, imply a specific moral conclusion.

Yeah, I know myself (imperfectly).   I might be able to tell you when I've made a poor choice, or developed a poor habit, or experienced a consequence, for lack of some virtue.   I know where I have agency, and I have some ideas where my agency has been damaged by circumstances.  I don't know that about others.  I can't speak for everyone else.

Assumptions about real people are tricky at best, and at worst they are outright bad and harmful.

Moreover, the following ought to go without saying:  there are no bad foods, there are no bad bodies, there is no such thing as cheating.  There is room for rest, and room for feasting, and room for fun, and no one else gets to tell you how much; there is room for you.

 

5.  Nevertheless, I'll stand by this:  morality, theology, charity, the philosophy of the human person, the demands of justice, aren't off limits here.

Nothing that human beings do or decide is untouched by the disciplines and philosophy of my faith tradition, and there aren't many traditions that pretend otherwise for themselves.    I hope to explore them in a way that doesn't violate the very principles I'm seeking to understand.  I'm not certain that I can, but I hope to.  

It is good to use appropriate self-discipline to strengthen virtue.  It is good to consider how to use resources prudently.  It is good to exercise detachment from outcomes.  At the same time, discipline is personal, resources are personal, outcomes are definitely personal.  So I need to take care:  if I write about my discipline and my resources, I need to make clear that they are mine and no one else's.

 

6.  I will be explicit about the limits of hypothetical situations and imaginary characters.  

Ah, the hypothetical situation.  Much maligned for good reason, sometimes useful for illustration, always a bit tricky in their execution.

I love hypotheticals, but I must be more careful with them.  It is tempting to think that if I think up a hypothetical situation, decorate it with only those details that seem to me significant, and imagining human-like actors, I can treat it as my very own creature of pure reason.   Since it is mine, I can manipulate as I please and  judge with omniscience. 

In one sense it's true, I can do that.  But real human readers have a tendency to see in these hypothetical characters someone "like" themselves, or perhaps real people they know.  And I am not allowed to manipulate or to judge the real person based on my fan-fic. 

Even if I think up a hypothetical, and along comes a real person who embodies the imaginary one in every detail I created, I can't use my reason to reach deductive conclusions about the real person.   Why not?  After all, the hypothetical (in this hypothesis) is perfectly matched!  Well, the real human may possess every detail of my hypothetical, but the hypothetical on which I exercised my reason could not possibly possess every detail of the human.   Humans possess an infinite detail and and an infinite worth, far beyond the scope of any model problem.   So watch it.

Once again.  Watch out when you are tempted to make assumptions about real people.

 

7.  If I write about specific activities, I'll make room for modifications for different bodies, variations that make training plans more enjoyable, and goals unrelated to weight reduction.

That short wish list appears in this commentary piece by Rebecca Scritchfield.

 

8.  Athletic performance metrics are useful, far preferable to body-size metrics, but highly individual and unrelated to either value or virtue.

It's probably a step in the right direction to go from "my body's value comes from its appearance" to "my body's value comes from what it can do."   But it's still wrong.

Training is experiment, and experiment requires observation and measurement.  I can use performance metrics to evaluate whether my training is having the effect I desire.  I don't have to be clinical about everything, either:  I can celebrate when I meet the metric goals I've set, and I can express disappointment when I don't.   It's crucial not to connect the results to my value or my "good"-ness.   People do not, in fact, get what they deserve.

 

9.  "Quality of life" is a universal goal, but an individual measure:  how closely reality matches a person's hopes and expectations.

There are multiple ways of going about working for one's quality of life, too.  Much fitness writing is aimed at improving quality of life through hard work; but I also want to honor the effort to maintain quality of life in situations of increasing difficulty.  There is also the tough mirror process of re-adjusting those hopes and expectations to match an unlooked-for reality, maybe in the face of injury or illness, maybe other changes in circumstance, maybe after learning more about oneself.

 

10.  The big picture of what I'm getting at:  an authentically human understanding of self-care.  

Maybe that sounds like an overly grandiose aim.  Especially since, if history is any guide I'll probably be putting up posts like "here's what's in my gym bag these days!" and "I've discovered that it's a mistake for me to forget to eat breakfast before swimming a mile!"  I mean, some of that stuff is really just minutiae.  I might put it up because it's on my mind.

But all the little pieces add up to a bigger picture.  

The ground rules are here as a kind of checklist for the construction of those little pieces, so they're all align-able with the sort of big picture I want to have.  At the same time, there are questions that feel very open to me, so that I'm constructing that picture as I go along without really knowing what it will look like.  What boundaries are essential?  If vocation is about self-gift, what is the type and extent of self-investment that is appropriate for each vocation?  How do we write sensitively about practices that are health-promoting for many but not for some?   How about writing about practices that are accessible only to a few but might be interesting  to many?  How does a family distribute resources (time, effort, assets) among its members with different needs?   Can self-discipline be taught or only discovered?  What are the signs that health, wellness, even discipline has become an idol, or an obsession, and how can a person get their priorities back in order?

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Well, this post has been many days in the making, so don't be surprised if it takes me a while to get around to the actual writing.  But it was a necessary step to unclog the  pipes, so to speak.  I hope to follow up on it soon.

Cognitive labor and recipes.

Last night I used the second half of a package of Spanish-style chorizo to make huevos rotos.  This tastes pretty close to how we had it in Spain. Recipe follows, and blog post below that.

Simple Huevos Rotos (broken eggs)

• 1.5 lb tiny potatoes... you know those bags of prewashed potatoes they have now?  One of those bags.
• 2 links (so, 4-6 oz) of Spanish-style, fully-cooked chorizo sausage
• 1 small onion, optional
• About 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 4 eggs
• Salt to taste

Cut the potatoes into halves or quarters, 1" pieces, and boil in salted water until just tender; drain and spread on a towel-lined tray to dry fully.

Meanwhile, cut the optional onion into small dice and slice the chorizo thinly.

When the potatoes are dry, heat 1/4" of olive oil in a broad skillet that can hold them all.  Fry the potatoes, stirring gently, till browned and as crispy as you like them.  Remove all the potatoes with slotted spoon and divide among four plates (if that's too many potatoes, put any extra to drain on paper towels); salt them.

Add to the hot oil the onion (if you like) and stir, then the chorizo, just for a couple of minutes; remove with slotted spoon (if you dislike burned onion, be sure to get it all out) and scatter over potatoes.  

Fry eggs two at a time in the hot chorizo-flavored oil, sunny side up.  Poke the whites with your spatula to spread them out and give them a lacy edge; baste the whites with a spoon.  When the edges are crispy and the whites set, but the yolks still runny, drape the eggs over the potatoes and chorizo.  Break the yolks so they run all over, and serve.

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I've wanted to attempt huevos rotos ever since we had it on our brief vacation together in Spain last fall.  I've kept it there in the back of my mind as I made the grocery lists and meal plans, and checked the meat sections of the various supermarkets I have shopped in; they often had chorizo, but always the Mexican style, which I'm not as fond of, or an American "chorizo" that isn't quite the same.  When I was out on a long walk in Northeast Minneapolis last weekend, I stopped into Kramarczuk's (no dice) and then into Surdyk's cheese shop, where--hurrah!-- I found a twelve-ounce package of Spanish-style chorizo.  I stuck it in the fridge and the next time the meal plan came around I figured out which day I wouldn't be gone all day, nor too tired to cook in the evening---a Saturday---and put it on the list.  I stuck a Spanish rosé in the fridge that morning.  It was a brilliant dinner.  And since it only used half the package of chorizo, I did it again last night.

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A few days ago a new paper came out in American Sociological Review:  Daminger A, "The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor."   I appreciate Daminger's emphasis of the term "cognitive labor" here, because there's been a lot of messy terminology being thrown around about the work of generally keeping on top of the household.  I've particularly been annoyed by a trend towards calling it "emotional labor," which is a problem because

• (a) "emotional labor" already has a useful meaning, i.e., the part of any job where you have to work to manage other people's emotions or work to control your own, and
• (b) "emotional labor" as a referent to the management of physical tasks is precariously and non-ironically close to meaning "women's work."

The same tasks have also been called "invisible labor" by others, but Daminger's term is more precise, and I think she's done us a favor in describing it in some detail.  From the abstract:

The data [in-depth interviews with 35 couples] demonstrate that cognitive labor entails anticipating needs, identifying options for filling them, making decisions, and monitoring progress. Because such work is taxing but often invisible to both cognitive laborers and their partners, it is a frequent source of conflict for couples. Cognitive labor is also a gendered phenomenon: women in this study do more cognitive labor overall and more of the anticipation and monitoring work in particular. However, male and female participation in decision-making, arguably the cognitive labor component most closely linked to power and influence, is roughly equal. These findings identify and define an overlooked—yet potentially consequential— source of gender inequality at the household level and suggest a new direction for research on the division of household labor.

I am genuinely interested in cognitive labor as a gender issue, not because it is a source of conflict in my own marriage, but explicitly because it isn't. 

I completely understand how it can be.  I have observed such conflicts in others.  In my experience, this kind of conflict is responsible for a very high number of the "ha ha, aren't husbands always like this" sort of small talk that you occasionally get when a lot of mothers are together in a room.   

So... why do I not perceive it as a source of conflict in our home?  Here are some possibilities.  

1. My spouse and I share the cognitive labor relatively equally:  I specialize in some parts, and he in others, and we don't have an expectation that we'll keep track of the stuff that's in the other's sphere.  (This is my knee-jerk explanation.)
2. We don't share it equally, but we are content with the division:  whoever's shouldering more is glad enough to be in charge of that stuff instead of something else. 
3. We don't share it equally, but whoever's shouldering more has lower standards and/or has accepted their lot in this marriage.
4. Actually, it's Mark who is carrying a burdensome cognitive load and I'm the one who is as clueless as the spouses (both male) who are quoted in the opening lines of the paper.  If you knew me in person, you would know that this is not an outlandish possibility.

I'm looking forward to reading the paper in depth because Daminger applies to her thirty-five couples the kind of analysis that speaks to me.  She divides up the cognitive labor in the household into separate "domains," and classifies each as "male-led," "female-led," "shared," or "undetermined."  Along the way she identifies four components of cognitive labor (anticipation of a need, problem, or opportunity; identifyion options; choosing an option; and monitoring the results).  I noticed and appreciated that she left out the performing of the task---a lot of discussion of this kind of thing seems to me to have conflated the task-doing with the mental tasks, so she's made a newly nice distinction.  And then she examines the couples' dynamics for sources of conflict, the reasons why it doesn't make always make it into the couple's "economy of gratitude," and the balance of overall load and decision-making power.

(Yes, I'm setting myself up to write a follow-up post.  Fingers crossed.)

In the meantime I find myself musing about the cognitive load I perceive myself to carry. As a matter of personality and skill-set, I enjoy most kinds of cognitive labor more than most kinds of physical labor.  I will very often perform cognitive tasks, even fairly rote and low-level ones, as a means of procrastination of physical labor.  I loved being at school.  I didn't like the stress of graduate school very much, and I turned out to be a poor experimentalist, and it was hard to juggle everything after I had babies, but the actual academic work---the reading and writing, the computer code, the hours in the library, the organizing of information, the pencil-and-paper calculations---flowed right by.  I would look up and hours would have gone by, and I didn't even notice it.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have chosen to take on most of the work homeschooling our offspring, in part, because it has allowed me to "cognitivize" a life of mothering at home.  As I write, the other windows open on my computer desktop involve detailed schedules of the school subjects that my homeschooled children will be starting this fall:  pages and pages of spreadsheets and booklists.  I've taught myself one whole new language and parts of four others, learned a considerable amount of  biology and art that I never got in school, crammed a lot of educational psychology to try to help one child struggling with the ability to focus, and worked out on my own how to put together a transcript customized for two different universities.

All this is a lot of work, but work I enjoy (much more than the work of sitting down with anyone who is at all recalcitrant or fighting off sleep and trying to teach them).  I am primarily concerned with my own sense of satisfaction in a life well lived.  I admit one navel-gazing indulgence:    I occasionally consider whether the wider world has, in net, lost or gained from my decisions.  I'm not a special person, but my cognitive power has been trained at considerable expense to the taxpaying public, who might have expected to get some kind of results out of me.  And what do they have?  Not much work put into the economies of money and academy;  almost everything into an economy of relationships.  Almost all my efforts  into just a few people, instead of spreading it out and having a smaller effect on many.  Who knows who paid the opportunity cost?

I do not know.  But I know this:  I eat very well.   

And that is as good a stopping point for this post as any.

Co-schooling lunch: why so fancy?

I got a new Instant Pot electric pressure cooker for Christmas.  The first thing I made in it was frijoles negros, which worked beautifully, last week.  

The second thing I am making in it right now is chicken stock -- I hope -- from two rotisserie chickens which I chilled overnight and picked not-quite-clean of meat in the morning.  

The third thing, I will make in it right after the chicken stock is done:  soup with barley, leeks, and carrots, to which I will return some or all of the chicken meat at the end.

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This soup is for lunch on a co-schooling day, along with a loaf of whole wheat bread from my bread machine and a clementine or two for everyone.  While the pressure cooker I thought I'd stop and write a bit about hot lunches in general for the homeschooling family, and then about hot lunches on co-schooling day.

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If I could poll a hundred homeschooling families and get a detailed answer out of all of them, I think I'd love to ask this question:  How do you manage lunch?  Not because I can't manage it:  After eleven-plus years of trying to feed children in between their lessons and studies, and especially now that I am out of the nothing-but-small-ones years, we have a system that works pretty well.   (More on that below.)  No, I just am curious to hear about the ways that diverse families have solved the problem.  

And it is a problem, in the sense of a series of questions to answer:  

• How long after breakfast do you have lunch?  
• Must you clear off a schoolwork surface to make room for cooking and eating?
• Is lunch to be a dinner-like occasion, with a set table and everyone at their places on time?
• Does everyone eat the same thing?  Do all the kids eat the same thing but the parent has something different?
• Who makes lunch?  Is it the parent?  A particular child?  Do children take turns?  If children make lunch, may they choose the menu?  Do people make their own lunch from what's available?
• Is lunch-making time a time for the parent to teach food preparation to young children?
• Do you insist on a balanced meal or that children eat their vegetables at lunch time?
• How much time can you take for lunch?
• Do you have a rest time or "recess" afterward?
• Do you decide what to make in advance?
• Do you try to use dinner leftovers in your lunch?
• Do you have a regular rotation of lunches-of-the-day?  Or do you often eat the same thing day after day?
• Who cleans up? Will you completely clean up the lunch before going back to the rest of your day, or will dishes wait till later?

Different families:  different lunches.

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I keep it relatively simple in my three at-home days.  This year, the regular rotation is sandwiches on Tuesday, pizza (usually from frozen) on Wednesday, and quesadillas on Friday; all with fruit on the side. 

On Thursdays, when I host, there are twelve to fifteen people here for lunch, and the adults have quite a lot to do.  You would think I would want to go even more simple on those days, but in fact I do not.  Here is why.

Point one:  Scale-up.

It turns out that it is not actually simple or quick to prepare most sandwiches, frozen pizzas, or quesadillas for twelve to fifteen people, nor to let those twelve to fifteen people prepare their own sandwiches.  

• Assembling large numbers of sandwiches is a surprisingly fiddly, messy affair.
• You can really only do a couple of frozen pizzas in your oven at once.  That'll feed maybe five children?
• Quesadillas also have the sandwich problem combined with the heat source problem.

No, what you want to feed people simply and easily in your house is probably a couple of deep pans of something you can cut into pieces, or a vat of something scoopable. 

 

Point two.  The co-schooling kids' time is better spent on schoolwork than on lunch.

On our home days, helping me put lunch together is part of my kids' job.   My "simple" lunches for days at home are chosen in part because I need to be able to bark down the stairs, "Elder Teenager!  Please start the quesadillas while I clean up this mess!"  or to be able to ask, "Younger teenager, can you put the pizzas in the oven at eleven-ten so they're ready when I get home from toddler music class?"

But the co-schooling time is short, and we really need all of the kids to be either productively schooling or productively having recess together most of the day.  I'm not going to have them make their own sandwiches by digging through my fridge looking for the fillings they like best (although sometimes in warmer weather I'll set out a tray of meat and cheese and a basket of buns on the table).  Usually there comes a time in the late morning when the students are working independently, and that gives me time to set out lunch trays.

We do assign a pair of children each day to be "servers." It's the servers' job to keep the water pitchers refilled, to fetch second servings, and to retrieve condiments from the fridge (in between bolting down their own lunches).  This little innovation from a few years ago made it a lot easier for  us parent-teachers to sit down and eat.  Servers also have to clear the table so it's ready for schoolwork.  

 

Point three.  Once you've got comfortable with a dish that really works, it's not always all that hard.

Chicken noodle soup from scratch is, on the surface, a bit complicated.  One must immerse the whole chicken in a big pot of cold water, add a few flavoring vegetables, bring to a boil,  and turn down to a simmer.  One must skim the scum that floats to the surface, then an hour or so later remove the chicken and let it cool.  Diced vegetables go into the pot, and that boils again for thirty to sixty minutes; meanwhile the meat must be picked off the bones, and the broth salted and tasted.  Towards the end, in go the noodles, and you must stir so they don't stick.  Once the noodles are all done, the meat goes back in.  If you are frugal, you'll put the bones to boil again in another pot, because there's another pot of broth left in them.

So yes, many steps, spread out throughout a whole morning.  But if I am in the kitchen anyway -- and I teach my co-school students in my kitchen -- I can make chicken noodle soup practically in my sleep.  I have done it so many times that I know exactly when the pot will come to a boil, when to skim, when the chicken will be done, how long the noodles have to go and when to wander back and stir them.  So a vat of chicken noodle soup is something I can make for a co-school day.  It sounds hard.  But because it's one of the things I know how to make work for me -- I make it work for them.

It can be even easier than that.  A perennial favorite is meatballs (read:  from a bag, frozen), heated all morning in my crockpot in a simple tomato sauce (read:  straight from a can -- even plain crushed tomatoes will do because the meatballs flavor them).  I boil spaghetti -- that's the most complicated part -- and serve with buttered rolls and green beans (frozen, steamed in the microwave).  Another is chili (it all goes in the crockpot in the morning) with tortilla chips and a bowl of cheese to pass around.  Mashed potatoes (made in the morning, kept warm in the crockpot) and a tray of oven-baked chicken legs is another.    I also like to do a pot of coconut rice (thanks, rice cooker) with plain poached chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, and pineapple chunks.  Give them a bottle of soy sauce and those are some happy kids.

H. tends more to casseroles than I do, and usually preps them the night before so they can be popped in the oven.  The three things she makes most often are a ridiculously plain and ridiculously delicious salmon loaf (it's so great, you must try feeding it to your kids),  a sort of cheesy noodle bake made with mostly parmesan, and ... hm, I think number three might be little mini meatloaves.  I hope so, because I love mini meatloaves.

These things are not as hard to get on the table as you might think, at least not once you have the routine down.

 

Point four:  You might want to eat something tasty, too.

Let's be real:  although my children are happy to eat it, I do not want frozen pizza for lunch.  Certainly not every week.  I do like quesadillas and eat them sometimes, but not every week.  

On the other hand, I would be perfectly happy to eat H.'s salmon loaf or meatloaves or cheesy noodle bake every week.  They are yummy.  A bag of steamed vegetables on the side of any of those, and I'm very happy.  (Salmon loaf especially makes me happy.  We make a sort of rémoulade of mayonnaise mixed with homemade hot sauce for it, and it's really nice.)

 Likewise, I could eat chicken noodle soup -- my own homemade chicken noodle soup, that is -- every week for the rest of my life, and I would not tire of it, at least if I had copious amounts of saltine crackers and black pepper.  Or mashed potatoes and chicken, or even the spaghetti and meatballs.  

Co-schooling days are very busy, especially traveling to the other's house in the morning -- what with gathering together all the stuff and piling it in the car, fighting morning rush hour traffic, setting up all the stuff again -- and it's nice to have a good meal to look forward to, shared with a friend.

 

Point five:  It's welcoming.

I can get stressed out by the details of hosting everyone, to be sure.    But in the long term, I want my house to be a place that kids remember fondly being a guest in.  Sometimes I get frustrated when I teach.  Sometimes I get irritated picking up after people.  I'm sure the kids see this all the time.  But I do hope they like sitting around my table with their friends scarfing down my chili.  Maybe they'll remember that as a good time, remember a feeling of being welcomed and fed and among friends once or twice a week (between being hounded for their history homework and quizzed on their Latin grammar).    I have to believe that it makes a real difference to them to sit down to (say) a bowl of hot soup with fresh rolls and a piece of fruit.

 

Point six:  You can always order pizza.

Which sounds like a jokey way to end a post, but in fact, it is actually a real point.  Once, maybe eight years ago, H. and I sat down and worked out about how much it cost per serving to feed the kids a home-cooked lunch.  I am sure the price has gone up significantly since then, partly because food prices have risen significantly, and also since we now have some teenagers.  If I remember right, we figured that we spent about $2 per serving back then.

That turned out to be a very useful thing for us to have calculated, because we realized that it didn't actually cost us significantly more to order Domino's pizza for the kids (at $5.99 for a two-topping medium pizza, the lunch special that has been going for years in this area).

We didn't want to order pizza all the  time; we wanted to have balanced meals that would be good for everyone, as much as possible.  But we'd also been assuming that pizza delivery was kind of a luxury, and so we definitely didn't want to order pizza all the time.

Turns out that it's not.  I think it might even be less expensive relative to home-cooked meals now, because the prices of a delivered pizza have not risen as fast as the prices of groceries.  (Although four teenage boys can put away a lot of pizza, it should be noted -- probably more pizza than salmon loaf.)

Anyway, the point of this is that if your home-cooked meal backfires somehow, or if you wake up in the morning and you just can't stand the idea of cooking, you could order pizza (provided you live somewhere that you can get it).  H. and I have given each other carte blanche to resort to pizza whenever that seems necessary.  I think we're both committed to making a good-faith effort to a lunch that is not pizza, for the sake of balance and variety; but we're not fanatics, and sometimes the pizza is the best thing to happen to the day.

Remember to tip the driver, and then make your peace and get back to your school day.

 

Mother's Day -- in the life.

I got up early on Mother's Day to go for a run around Lake Calhoun before Mass. I think this will be my summer Sunday routine -- I like running outdoors, and I much prefer the cool mornings before the paths get crowded.

The Lake Calhoun loop is a near-exact 5K. To make the circuit is to be treated to a pleasant series of vistas: the downtown skyscrapers in the distance, sailboats and kayaks on the lake, families of waterbirds, children swinging from the play structure at the 32nd Street Beach, blue water reflected in the plate-glass faces of the sprawling homes atop the bluff, towering apartment buildings standing sentinel where Lake Street dives into the bustling neighborhood of Uptown.

Something there is in me that loves apartment buildings. I lived in one-bedroom city apartments by myself for about two and a half years at the end of college and the start of graduate school, and I think back with nostalgia. I liked their smallness, the ease of keeping them tidy, the door that opened a few steps away from a noisy city street. I liked that it was never quiet, that the sound of human activity just outside never stopped. I liked that the space was all mine. I liked the foompf sound of the gas furnace in the first apartment coming online in the winter, and the faint scent of warm dust rising from the electric baseboard heaters in the second apartment when I turned them on for the first time. I liked the sound of sirens and car horns coming in through the windows when I first slept with them open in the spring. I liked having my own mailbox in the row, to open with a little key. I liked never having to think about snow shoveling, or clogged gutters, or lawns, and that when the ceiling leaked it wasn't my job to fix it or pay for it, but only to call and ask.

I have a house now, because I have a whole family to raise in it. (Still a city house, with sirens and car horns and a short walk from a busy commercial district.) When I run around the lake and see the sprawling big houses, I wonder who lives there, wonder how much the house costs, but don't want to trade places with them. Sometimes, though, I feel a little pull towards the upscale apartments at the edge of Uptown. Or towards the ones near the university, in a different part of the city. I think how lovely it would be not to have to get in my car to drive to the lake, but just to step out the front door to go for the run. I think about walking to restaurants and shopping and movies. I think how much better the sirens and car horns of Uptown would sound than the sirens and car horns of south Minneapolis. I think about living in a building with a concierge.

For a long time I assumed that as an empty nester someday I would return to apartment living. I am neither a gardener nor a bird watcher. Even sitting in my own space outdoors with a good book could be accomplished just as neatly on a balcony as in a yard. I could maybe have a few potted plants there, which would never require mowing. I am a strange sort of introvert: I like nothing more than to be alone in a crowd. I want to be near where people are, but in no way obligated to interact with them. I am a city person. I want to live where there is a sidewalk (and have never understood why suburbs seem to treat this accoutrement as optional or undesirable). Maybe I won't grow old in Minneapolis, because the icy winters can be dangerous when frailty sets in, but a small city apartment somewhere -- not necessarily a cheap apartment! -- is how I pictured retirement. I let myself think of that when I ran around the lakes.

And then one day recently I sat up straight and exclaimed to Mark: "Wait a minute! I'm going to be the matriarch of a large family! What if they all want to spend Christmas with us?"

Yes, folks, I had been a mother for fifteen years, had given birth to five children. I had updated my self-image many times since then: from future scientist to ever-present homemaker, from sedentary to sometime athlete, from chemistry/engineering nerd to Nerd Across The Catalogue of elementary and secondary education. From expecting to travel whenever and wherever and however I wanted to waiting twenty years to visit another country. I stopped shoving a wallet and keys in my back pocket, and became a carrier of voluminous handbags stuffed with a change of someone else's clothes. All this happened quite naturally.

And yet in all that time I had not gotten around to updating my vision of the future.

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I am not saying I won't have my city apartment to retire to. I have a suspicion that we will turn into the snowbird types (possibly reverse snowbirds), with a place to call home in the city and a place to call home near the mountains, and maybe we'll have both a place that is small enough for two and a place that is big enough for all our descendants. I don't know; it is still far too early to make plans, and maybe even too early to dream about it.

My point here is just that motherhood, parenthood, has a way of sneaking up on you. After all, I still think of Mother's Day as primarily a day I need to acknowledge for other people, not a day meant for someone like me; eventually my associations may shift, but they haven't yet, even though my children wrap me little presents to open each year. I guess it may go on happening my whole life, this transformation, outside and in.

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On eating while small of stature.

Jenny commented on my last post:

Not to complain too bitterly about being short, but my normal, weight-maintenance meals are already small. If I eat to lose, we are talking child-sized portions which is a drag without significant motivation.

Isn't it a drag, though? I took a minute to write out a 1500-calorie menu that sort of mimics the pattern that is most comfortable for me (fairly light but egg-based breakfast, medium-sized lunch, fairly hearty dinner). This is what I came up with:

A 300-ish calorie Breakfast

• 2 soft-boiled eggs
• 1 slice pumpernickel toast with a pat of butter and optional smear of marmalade (alternatively, scramble the eggs in the butter and leave it off the toast)
• 6 ounce mini can of V-8

A 500-ish calorie Lunch

• A couple of cups of chopped mixed salad greens and raw vegetables
• 5-ounce can of oil-packed tuna
• Half a cup of cooked chickpeas
• Balsamic vinegar to taste (just rely on the tuna for oil)
• 1/4 cup fresh grated parmesan

 

A 700-ish calorie Dinner

 

• 1 roasted, spiced chicken thigh, with skin
• 1/2 cup raita (half yogurt, half chopped vegetables)
• 3/4 cup grated carrot salad with spices and lemon
• Steamed green vegetables -- say, 10 spears asparagus
• 1 cup grain pilaf
• *Allowing for about 1.5 tablespoon of added oil total from the chicken, salad, and pilaf.

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All that is fairly hearty-looking because of lots of vegetables and because it was homemade to my tastes. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to have a depressingly small-looking plate. If you want to stick to 500 calories or so for lunch at your typical sandwich place, you get the sandwich, generally, and nothing else. You might be able to manage a half-sandwich and a cup of soup, depending on the soup. Coleslaw will set you back farther than you think. Fries are most likely right out.

For instance, let me grab some lunch data from a casual chain restaurant that has it online, Chili's. Lunch off the menu that would suit someone my size would be:

• On average, about half a burger or half a burrito. No sides.
• Shrimp fajitas will work and probably taste great, and I would get to eat all the sizzling innards -- but only one tortilla. (Ordering the shrimp option is a good trick for right-sizing meals, incidentally. They never give you much, and the cost will help you appreciate it.)
• Nachos are one of my favorite things, but I have to split them with two friends. And I am done with lunch already!
• A "Fresh Mex" bowl sounds like the sort of thing that I should be able to eat, and looks tasty, but I only get half.
• Kids' meals? Okay, this strategy can work. If I happen to be in the mood to eat a circular burger, the teeny pair of sliders come in under the bar, at least if I stick with fruit on the side. Actually most of the kids' meals would work that way, except the pizzas. This is how I could also get a piece of plain grilled chicken that gives me room for fries and fruit.
• Main-dish salads? I only get part of them. Less than half the buffalo chicken salad, about three-quarters of the Caribbean salad with grilled chicken, a third of the "quesadilla explosion salad." Oh, by the way, that is without any dressing. Fortunately salsa makes an excellent dressing substitute.
• Bowl of soup? Those work. A lone bowl of chicken enchilada soup is just about right.
• Tacos? There are three in an order, and for most varieties, two of them makes your meal.
• Lunch combos! They are supposed to be smaller lunch portions. With salad and the included fries, will any work? The short answer is "No." You could give away your fries... no, wait, still too big. How about if you only eat half the lunch combo? Now we are getting somewhere, as most of these are eligible if you only eat half of it (half a salad, half a portion of fries, half a chicken burrito or whatever).
• What about the "lighter choices?" If I am hellbent on cleaning my plate, I could choose some of these (though not all). They don't look bad, actually. There's a steak, for example, or various grilled chicken meals with pico de gallo and salad or broccoli, even a little rice.

In sum, a not-quite-five-foot-tall woman like me -- fairly physically active -- gets to eat approximately half of the average restaurant meal, without fries, unless she doesn't mind sticking with a simple bowl of soup.

And that is without saving any room for a dessert -- or rather, for a couple of bites of someone else's dessert.

This gets old really fast -- unless you can really internalize the notion that restaurants portion for big, hungry males, and small women are second-class citizens.

...Oh, wait, it still gets old really fast.

Yes, yes, I could think of it as free leftovers that I get to take home in a box. I used to be in the habit of taking an insulated lunch bag with me when I went out for the day, and could probably be induced to do it again. Still -- the only way to avoid feeling like you are stuck with a child's portion (or convincing yourself to overdo it) is to deeply internalize what "right-sized" food looks like. This is possible, I have found, but it takes a lot of practice -- meaning, for me, a lot of deliberately ordered, deliberately half-eaten meals, to disconnect my notion that cleaning my plate is the norm.

 

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The belated twice-yearly post on weight maintenance.

Usually I write this post in May (around the anniversary of the "click" in my head that changed things) and November (around the anniversary of reaching my goal weight, around six months later).   I'm writing the November post late this year, in January, not because I want to cash in on all the New Year's resolution stuff, but just because I've been a delinquent blogger.

Let's grab something as it flies by and slap it up on the page to make things look current.  Here's a year-old article that has been going around on FB the last few days, it being January:  Diet and exercise alone are no cure for obesity, experts say.  Here is an extended excerpt from the  newspaper's summary of the information:

Take note, glib-talking doctors and legislators, rail-thin commentators, and fat-haters of all stripes: For most of the nation's 79 million adults and 13 million kids who are obese, the "eat less, move more" treatment, as currently practiced, is a prescription for failure, these experts say.

In a commentary published  [ed: in the May 2015 issue] in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, four weight-loss specialists set out to correct what they view as the widespread misimpression that people who have become and stayed obese for more than a couple of years can, by diet and exercise alone, return to a normal, healthy weight and stay that way.

"Once obesity is established, however, body weight seems to become biologically 'stamped in' and defended," wrote Mt. Sinai Hospital weight management expert Christopher N. Ochner and colleagues from the medical faculties of the University of Colorado, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania.  

The human body, evolved to endure through periods of food scarcity, has adapted a host of methods to ensure that lost weight will be restored, the authors say. It will respond to weight loss by powering down its use of calories as fuel, pumping out hormones to increase hunger, boosting fat storage capacity, and tricking the brain to demand overconsumption.

"Few individuals ever truly recover from obesity," the authors wrote. Those that do, they add, "still have 'obesity in remission,' and are biologically very different from individuals of the same age, sex and body weight who never had obesity." They are constantly at war with their bodies' efforts to return to their highest sustained weight.

...Why would an influential foursome see the value in recapitulating these ideas in a respected medical journal?

"It's not just that most people still stigmatize obesity--as they say, it's the last acceptable form of stigma," said Ochner. "What really bothers me working around and with clinicians, is that some of them--a disturbing percentage--still believe it's all about personal choice: that if the patient just tries hard enough, and if we can just figure out how to get them a little more motivated, then we'd be successful. And that's just not right."

Lifestyle changes are undoubtedly a necessary condition for enduring weight loss, Ochner said. But they're far from sufficient, and when physicians believe they are--when they say "you already know what to do, I told you what to do," he said--"that's certainly cruel, and it's harmful: It prevents them getting the care they need."

Physicians, he said, should be doing more than exhort patients to eat less and move more. They should[:]

• "intervene more quickly to encourage weight loss in overweight patients before they become obese."
•  "discuss with obese patients ... medications, surgery and device-based treatments...to supplement diet and exercise..."
• "make weight-loss maintenance--an aspect of obesity treatment that is neglected--a part of their treatment plan."

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I'm one of the odd people that did manage to correct long-term obesity through diet and exercise.  It required a level of focus that bordered on the obsessive; I paid a price in mental health.  I'm not saying it was the wrong choice to make; the sacrifice was temporary, and it worked.  

 I think I'm mentally more balanced now, but it's also been harder to maintain the habits that seem to correspond with keeping my weight off.  It could just be because I'm under a lot of demands in this season of my life; but sometimes I wonder if I will always have to choose between staying thin and staying relatively sane.

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Maintenance?

It really is very difficult.  I understand intimately what they mean by "obesity in remission."  I was obese for about 25 years, and I've only been not-obese for 7.5 years, and I feel -- deeply -- that the lifestyle which maintains it is something I put on, not something that's really sunk in fully.  

For a while, between my last two pregnancies, I thought it really had sunk in.  Post-weight-loss, I'd maintained for several months, gotten pregnant, had an amazingly healthy pregnancy and an easy delivery, and then I picked up my old, good habits where I left off.  I returned to my desired weight range and maintained that for three years or so before my fifth pregnancy.  

But after my youngest child was born I was much more sluggish.  He is two now, and I have never quite gotten back to where I was.  I'm about ten pounds and one clothing size over my desired weight.  I'd be okay with it, I think, if it weren't for the frustration and fear that's all wrapped around the knowledge that I've simply not been able to hold myself tightly enough to a plan.

Again, I have a lot of demands on me right now, and I well remember the level of obsession that it required for me to lose the weight the first time.  Maybe there simply isn't enough of my attention to go around, and maybe I could do it if I could only clear my schedule and clear my head.  But it's all hypothetical.  I can't seem to stick to anything very long.  And that "can't" is very scary to me.  

I wonder all the time:  Am I out of remission?

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Let's take a look at these words again:

The human body, evolved to endure through periods of food scarcity, has adapted a host of methods to ensure that lost weight will be restored, the authors say. It will respond to weight loss by powering down its use of calories as fuel, pumping out hormones to increase hunger, boosting fat storage capacity, and tricking the brain to demand overconsumption.

 

I don't know if the three other response mechanisms are active, but the last one?  Tricking the brain to demand overconsumption?

It is so very, very real.

My brain is a traitor.  It has completely gone over to the side of the body in this one.  How to explain it?  My brain doesn't try to get me to break my resolutions, to foil my plans, anymore.  It's learned that this does not work.  

I don't do the emotional-eating thing.  I don't get tempted to break my resolutions.  If I am conscious of a plan I have made (say "Don't eat dessert tonight") you can wave a chocolate cake in front of me all evening and I will not take that first fatal bite.   My brain has given up trying to tempt me away from my plans.

Instead my brain has learned a better way:  it causes me to forget I had a plan in the first place.  "Ha ha!" the brain says.  "If I refuse to do my job of remembering important things, there's nothing that the rest of you can do about it!" And when dinnertime comes it's all like "Plan?  What plan?  Pass the potatoes."

I realize that this sounds absolutely insane.

I can't think of a better way to describe it.

I make plans.  I literally forget them, or at least forget that they matter, when I sit down at the table.  And then immediately after we are all done eating, I seem to remember them again.  Shit.  And then the remorse.

This is not a good mental situation.  I really have to do something about it, because it is the kind of mental situation that eating disorders are made of:  a cycle of self-recrimination that begins immediately after a meal.  It's bad.

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There are definitely things I could do about this.   I think that the best course is probably to pick one good habit, one tried and proven one from my old life, and concentrate on that until it's second nature again.   But panic overtakes me.  "Just one habit" is too scary; I fear I'll let all the others go.   For example:  If I concentrate only on not snacking between meals (a worthy goal, part of the way I want to live my life), I fear, I'll destroy all the practice I've made at having reasonably-sized meals.  And so on.  I keep starting off with single habits, but eventually I try to do all the habits at once, get overwhelmed, and start forgetting them again.  

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And make no mistake:  while I might be able to develop and reinforce habits that maintain my weight where it is, I really have to be conscious at every meal if I am going to run a calorie deficit and live off my stores even for a few weeks.  I am under five feet tall.  Maintaining my weight as it is  requires, roughly, only 1850 calories per day.   Losing it at a noticeable pace means going down to something like 1400-1500.  This is not that much food, people!  Unless you are the sort of person who forgets to eat under stress, it takes attention to maintain that for more than a couple of days, and it is shockingly easy to make up several days' deficit in only one meal.  

Example.  If I am trying to stay at 1500 cal/day, chances are good I'll really manage closer to 1650.  Let's say I do that for 4 days in a row.  Great! I'm running an 800-calorie deficit.  Then on day 5 I go to a restaurant for lunch and in a fit of forgetfulness I order a cheeseburger and a fountain Coke with a vinaigrette side salad (no fries, please).   That's all it takes!  The deficit is gone, and I'm back to square one.  Without ever really departing from reasonable, moderate eating!  We're talking a single, culturally normal-sized meal (too big for my body size, but it isn't an amount of food anyone would call "overeating") after 13 carefully-restricted meals in a row.  If I kept up that pattern (13 restricted meals, one culturally normal meal) over and over, I would never change.  The only thing that would be different is that I would feel very frustrated.  Would you be able to keep that up without going slowly insane or developing an eating disorder?

It requires attention.  I have found that it requires counting.

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Still, I can point to areas of relatively easy improvement.  Someday I will have the attention available to make a final push through those two-year-old postpartum pounds, and I could concentrate on developing the habits that support the drive, make it a little easier.  Cutting back on alcohol, making easy-to-remember resolutions like eliminating snacking and seconds, making rules like "half sandwiches only," splitting things with Mark at restaurants (and NOT using that as an excuse to go ahead and have dessert).  

I could do these things.  The question is, will I?

A series of older pictures can be found here.

Teaching young children to use knives.

Jamie asked me to write a bit, in the Sane Mom Revolution tradition, about training toddlers to use real knives.   Jamie was thinking about this post from when my 9-y-o daughter was about three and a half, which featured this shot:

In that picture, my daughter is using a serrated knife with a rounded tip to strip collard leaves off the stems for me.

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 When I was a young mother with my first child and all my theories were new and untested, I was very fond of a book called The Continuum Concept, by Jean Liedloff.  

(You thought attachment parenting was crunchy?  Meet something crunchier.)

I foresee someone raising their eyebrows that a person like me would find something to like in TCC, a book which has been roundly criticized by a large number of people across the spectrum of parenting philosophies and social positions, for a number of reasons.  I'm still fond of it.  If you should decide to pick it up, my advice is to consider it a philosophical memoir rather than a work of scientific anthropology.   The key takeaway concept:   humans thrive best in an environment which contains those cues which our nature evolved to expect* from its environment.

[*N. B.  You can substitute for "evolved to expect" the phrase "was designed by God to expect" if you want, it works just as well.]  

That goes for surroundings (sunlight, mother's milk, a certain cycle of seasons of hunger and plenty, earth beneath our feet) as well as social cues from others (language, interaction with siblings, adults with work that can be imitated).

So, Liedloff is writing informal observations of a group of people living in the South American rainforest among whom she resided for a time, and she commented about how the young children are surrounded by real dangers and yet rarely (note: not "never") are seriously injured by them.

One of the most striking [dangerous situations] is the omnipresence of machetes and knives, all razor sharp, and all available to step on, fall against, or play with.  Babies, too young to have learned about handles, picked them up by the blades and, as I watched, waved them about in their dimpled fists.  They not only did not sever their own fingers or injure themselves at all, but if they were in their mother's arms, they managed to miss hurting her either...

The boys, from the age of about eighteen months, practiced archery with sharp arrows, some enthusiasts carrying their bow and arrows about most of their waking hours.  Shooting was not confined to designated places, nor were any "safety rules" in effect.  In my two and a half years there I saw only the one arrow wound I have mentioned.

...And there are the rivers, in which ... a child swimming farther out in the current than his strength and ability allow has a good chance of being smashed on the rocks or... branches.... The children who bathe and play in the river every day must gauge their ability accurately under all conditions.

The operative factor seems to be placement of responsibility.  The machinery for looking after themselves, in most Western children, is in only partial use, a great deal of the burden having been assumed by adult caretakers.... The continuum [by which Liedloff means our human ability to adapt, with limitations, to our environment] withdraws as much self-guardianship as is being taken over by others.  The result is diminished efficiency because no one can be as constantly or as thoroughly alert to anyone's circumstances as he is to his own...

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Mind you, I am not leaving razor-sharp knives and machetes about for my children to step on and for my babies to pick up.  This is, fundamentally, because I do not live in an environment where that works, where everyone is used to the omnipresence of razor-sharp knives and machetes and treats them accordingly.  I live in an environment where knives are kept out of the way, on a magnetic strip (see photo above) where no one will accidentally step on one or slice their hand by mistake when carelessly reaching for a whisk.

 And so I work with my children and knives in a way that makes sense for that environment: the environment where knives come out when it is time to cook, and are put away when the cooking is done.

But I still can use the takeaway here:  I prefer my child to take some of the responsibility for keeping herself safe from knife wounds.  If I take all of the responsibility, keeping the knives safely locked away -- well, that only works until I make a mistake, or until she enters an environment that I cannot control.  If I teach her to use a knife correctly and carefully, and step back so she knows she has to be careful, then she can protect herself even if I forget and leave one lying about.

+ + +

I've had the knife shown above since my first child was pretty small.  It began life as a combination knife/cheese spreader that came with a picnic set we received as a wedding present.  When I wanted it to become a child-sized knife, Mark cut the handle shorter with some power tool or another, and used a Dremel to ever-so-slightly blunt the serrations, which had been quite sharp.

I mention this just to note that the most important thing for starting to teach a small child how to use a knife may well be to choose a "starter knife" that doesn't strike fear into your heart.  You're not going to be very confident in your child's ability if, every time he picks it up, you visualize him falling off the stepstool and landing on the point of the knife.  Choose a knife that you're going to be comfortable letting your child actually use, holding it with his own two hands.  

The non-pointy tip of this knife means I don't worry about death-dealing stab wounds.  And that was important for me, personally.  YMMV.

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Although the tip is rounded and the serrations have been slightly blunted, the edge of this knife is still sharp.  Sharp enough to cut most vegetables, and -- crucially -- sharp enough to cut your fingers, too.  Probably not a maiming, stitches-requiring wound (with blunted serrations, you'd have to saw at your thumb a little bit) -- but enough to hurt and bleed and need a Band-Aid.

And that brings me to the next point about teaching kids to use knives.  It's good for them find out that careless knife work can hurt them.  I don't particularly want to run to the ER, so for early knife work I chose a less-than-razor-sharp knife.  But I welcome that first moment when a child tries to cut the zucchini while holding it, instead of having it flat on the board, and --zzzing -- she has a minor, painful cut on her palm.   And then while I'm bandaging her up we can talk about why that happened, and how she can prevent it from happening the next time.

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Here are three types of knives that can work:

Top:  My child-sized knife, the one my daughter is pictured using in the first photo.  Middle:  a piece of toddler cutlery from IKEA (not as sharp; will cut butter and zucchini and avocado).  Bottom:  a spreader (the tip is curved, which makes it less useful for cutting, but is good for learning how to use a knife to spread).  

I've also heard good things about the knives that come in a pumpkin-carving set (take note!  those might still be on sale somewhere!), the plastic "lettuce knives," and a wooden-handled "crinkle-cutter" like this one.   

(Montessori suppliers, like the one at the previous link, often have tools sized for children -- here is a plastic knife that would work for a child, here is a hand drill for woodworking, here is a saw.  Although my husband, who does more woodworking than I, prefers to teach children to use a coping saw, and to saw with a miter box.)

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Once the knife is selected, you are mostly teaching children to observe the same knife safety guidelines that the adult cook should observe.  Familiarize yourself with these!  Articles can be found all over, and some comprehensive cookbooks will include an introduction.

See, e.g., here, here, here.

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 The next thing to do with small children who are first using knives is to prep them for success.  Some things are hard to cut; some things easy.  Some things start off hard but get easier after they have been trimmed.  

Don't give a toddler a butternut squash or a whole carrot.  How about a peeled banana for her snack?  How about a stick of cold butter that needs to be added in pieces to the pastry flour?  How about a zucchini, halved lengthwise and placed flat side down so it can't roll, and the ends trimmed off?  

Later, if the knife is sharp enough, the vegetable can get harder; children will be able to slice a potato, for instance.  But keep trimming the vegetables (halving the potato, for example, or cutting the cantaloupe into peeled wedges for her to cube). They may as well not deal with vegetables that will roll until they've really mastered slicing.  You're modeling a practice that's good for grownups to use too:  mise en place.  After a while  you can teach how to trim an onion or a zucchini to get it into that no-roll, easy-to-chop form.

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Early on teach them always to put the vegetable on a cutting board, never on the counter or on a plate (a stray stroke down onto the turned-up edge can flip it), and certainly never to hold the vegetable in their other hand.  (You may have to refrain from using a paring knife to peel apples in the child's line of sight for a time, or they are sure to copy your apple-in-hand technique.)

At first teach them how to hold the handle of the knife with one hand and place their flat palm on top of the blade, and push down to cut a large, not-too-hard vegetable.  (This works with any knife, and the crinkle cutter is particulary good.)  With one hand's fingers wrapped around the handle, and the other hand's fingers flat and above the blade, a finger cut just won't happen.  Watch, and correct the child if she bends her fingers down, or tries to cut with one hand while repositioning the food with the other hand.  

You're not teaching a useless skill here.  This flat-hand-on-the-blade technique, with a bit of rocking added to it, is the same one that adults use to mince garlic or dice onions with a chef's knife.   

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Advanced knife work does involve putting the fingertips more in harm's way.  We do often need to hold food in position with one hand while cutting it with the other.  This bit is tricky even for grownups sometimes, but the most fingertip-safe way to hold a vegetable while cutting it is to curl your fingertips under slightly so that the part that protrudes the closest to the blade is part of the knuckle.  Yes, you might graze your knuckle, but (unlike a fingertip) you can't actually sever it.  And it's a slightly unnatural way to hold a vegetable (until you are used to it), so while you are learning it forces you to be attentive.

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I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't mention that in the workplace, frequent users of sharp knives sometimes use cut-resistant gloves on the non-dominant hand.  But I doubt these come in child's sizes, and anyway, I wonder if the awkwardness and loss of sensation might not create more problems than it solves for the ordinary kitchen user.

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All along, the most important thing to teach children who use knives is attentiveness. You should stay close by, not because you need to hover to keep them safe, but because there are many opportunities to teach features of knife safety that they might not think of on their own.  Things like:

• Don't climb down from your stool to retrieve a dropped vegetable while your knife is in your hand.  Put the knife down on the counter, then climb down.
• Don't let any part of the knife stick out over the edge of the counter when you put it down.
• Don't let any part of a cutting board stick out over the edge of the counter.  (If there's a knife on the cutting board, it could be knocked off).
• Don't let the baby climb up onto your stool with you while you're cutting.  Call for help and I will take him away.
• Don't gesture with the knife.  (NAG, NAG, NAG)
• Don't let people take bits to eat off your cutting board while you are cutting.
• Don't climb down from your stool to put the knife in the sink while your knife is in your hand.  Put the knife on the counter, then climb down, then carry the knife to the sink.
• Don't try to watch a screen or read a book while you cut.

 Later, these lessons can become more advanced cooking lessons.  Time in the kitchen with a child is eventually rewarded -- if nothing else, you may wind up with your own prep cook or even sous-chef.  And we all could use one of those.

Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap: or, How to get a dozen kids to eat their vegetables, courtesy of the USDA and some of that mayo-vinegar-sugar dressing.

You guys!  Believe it or not, this sandwich wrap (in which broccoli slaw figures prominently) was just proclaimed unanimously a hit by three families' worth of homeschooling kids.   And also their moms. 

I adapted it from the USDA school lunch recipes by taking the 50-serving quantity and, approximately, quartering it.  The filling is gluten-free, so have a corn tortilla option for the GF kids.

Our kids, oddly enough, thought it was a little too sweet.  It does have a lot of sugar -- but I thought the sweetness was perfect.

Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap  (12 generous servings)

Dressing:

• 1/2 cup       mayonnaise
• 6 Tbsp        white vinegar
• 1/2 cup        sugar
• 1/2 Tbsp    poppy seeds
• 1 Tbsp        garlic powder
• 1 Tbsp        chili powder
•                     Salt to taste

Also:

• 2.5 lb         frozen, boneless skinless chicken breasts, cooked and diced
• 12 oz          bagged "broccoli slaw"
• 6 oz            bagged julienned/matchstick carrots
• 5 oz            baby spinach leaves, chopped
• 20 oz        canned crushed pineapple, drained
• A mix of burrito-sized and taco-sized tortillas

Combine dressing ingredients with a whisk.  In a large bowl, combine broccoli slaw, carrots, spinach, and pineapple.  Fold in dressing.  Chill. 

At mealtime, serve about 2/3 cup of for a burrito-sized wrap, less for smaller taco-sized wraps.

It took me about ten minutes to throw the filling  together in the morning before school (with chicken I'd cooked ahead of time). I served these with peas and with string cheese on the side.  We all agreed that a bowl of honey roasted peanuts would have been a nice topping for added sweet-and-salty crunch.  Some of the kids requested a side of beans to make it more "taco-like."  

Definitely going in the permanent rotation...

 

The next step of Kondo... where to start in the "household equipment" category?

More on Marie Kondo's book can be found here, here, and here.

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I'm now partway through decluttering the most baffling meta-category, what Marie Kondo (in her Life-Changng Magic of Tidying Up) calls komono.  I've already done several of the categories within it -- the ones that were easiest to select items that belonged within them -- and am about to embark on the more difficult ones.

Many items within the home... are placed, stored, and accumulate "just because," without our giving them much thought.  I call this category komono, a Japanese term that the dictionary defines variously as "small articles; miscellaneous items; accessories; gadget or small tools, parts, or attachments; an insignificant person; small fry."  It's no wonder people don't know what to do with things that fall into such a vague and all-encompassing category.  Still, it's time to bid farewell to this "just because" approach.  These items play an important part in supporting your lifestyle and therefore they, too, deserve to be handled one by one and sorted properly.

Unlike clothes or books, this category includes a diverse range of items, and the thought of trying to sort and organize them may seem daunting.  If you deal with them in the proper order, however, this task is actually quite simple.  The basic order for sorting komono is as follows:

1. CDs, DVDs ------ Done
2. Skin care products ------------ Done
3. Makeup -------------- Done
4. Accessories -------------- Done
5. Valuables (passports, credit cards, etc.) -------- Skipped; already well organized
6. Electrical equipment and appliances (digital cameras, electric cords, anything that seems vaguely "electric") ------------- Done
7. Household equipment (stationery and writing materials, sewing kits, etc.)
8. Household supplies (expendables like medicine, detergents, tissues, etc.)
9. Kitchen goods/food supplies (spatulas, pots, blenders, etc.)
10. Other (spare change, figurines, etc.)

If you have many items related to a particular interest or hobby, such as ski equipment or tea ceremony articles, treat these as a single subcategory.)   ------ I just did one of these, because I decluttered all the school supplies.

00So, I'm up to #7, "Household equipment."

I had to stop for a while and think:  What exactly does this encompass?  When I have collected all my "household equipment" together, what items will be in the pile?  In what way should they be similar to stationery and sewing kits, but not to medicine, spatulas, or figurines?

By looking at the rest of the list, I could deduce a few things.

o   "Household equipment" doesn't include JUNK.  ("These items play an important role in supporting your lifestyle.")  Or at least, it's time to get rid of the junk that may be hiding among the equipment.

o  "Household equipment" includes some kinds of tools, but not ALL tools.  The sewing kit is given as an example -- and a sewing kit includes scissors, seam rippers, needles.  Writing supplies are an example -- and that means things like pens.  But kitchen tools are excluded, as well as anything that's part of a large hobby-related collection.  (Presumably if your hobby is sewing, most sewing items  go outside "household equipment" and in with the hobby items -- I think she's thinking of a small mending kit that's employed as needed for maintenance tasks, like replacing buttons, repairing seams, and adjusting hems.)

o   "Household equipment" excludes most consumable items, but not all.  Food, detergent, medicine, tissues -- all things that get "used up" -- belong to other subcategories.   But "stationery" is also something that's used up, and it is included, along with the thread that is presumably part of a sewing kit.

o    "Household equipment" excludes items already sorted:  the other types of komono as well as clothes, books, and papers.  It also excludes sentimental items.

What I'm seeing so far is that "household equipment" means durable tools, kits, and other things that are useful.  Consumable goods are part of this only insofar as they are part of a kit or set, like the  thread in the sewing kit.   Kitchen items are not included, I presume because kitchen items are a big enough category on their own in any household; whereas in smaller households, "household equipment" might be a small enough category the deal with all at once.

So:  useful items for household tasks, but not kitchen items, not sentimental items, not related to a specific hobby, and generally not consumables.   I went through my house with a clipboard and pen and wrote down the kinds of items that I thought fell into this category, to see if I should do it all at once or if there are some subcategories to break it into.  Here's what I came up with:

    Baby care items.  Cloth diapering paraphernalia, child carriers, portable changing pads.

    Clothing care.  Laundry baskets, hangers, lingerie bags, eyeglass and jewelry repair kits, mending kit. 

    Cleaning tools.  Brooms, mops, totes, scrub brushes, rags, dishpans.

    Linens.  Bedding, towels, napkins, tablecloths.

    Quasi-furniture.  Folding chairs, stepstools, little-kid workbenches, rolling carts.

    Travel items.  Suitcases, backpacks, toiletry kits, picnic coolers.

    Board games and other gaming paraphernalia.  Cards, chess timers, extra dice.

     "Tool" tools.   Hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, twine, etc.

    Containers and organizers.  Boxes, bins, racks, bookends, baskets.    

  

Excluded from all that:  homeschooling paraphernalia, camping gear, athletic gear, fishing gear.  

In our household, most of the "tool" tools are also excluded from my responsibility, as they're stored out of sight in Mark's shop and he knows better than I do what is extraneous and what is necessary.  I can find most anything I need in there, if I look long enough.  But you will find others here and there throughout the house -- needle-nose pliers in a kitchen drawer, wire cutters in my guitar case and in the school science box, a small screwdriver that lives on my dresser, a couple of pocketknives and a set of Allen wrenches -- things I've squirreled away so that I won't have to hunt for them in Mark's shop should I need them.

What order should they be attacked in?  Marie Kondo:

[I]t is easier if you start with more personal items and clearly defined content first.

The "personal items" won't help me organize them since by now we've gotten to things that belong to "the household" rather than to any one person, although in my role as homemaker some of them (clothing care items) fall more under my domain than others (board game paraphernalia).

 So (prior to publishing the post here) I roughly sorted them from "mostly my domain" to "mostly someone else's domain."  And then I stuck "containers and organizers" at the end, because it strikes me as ridiculous to get rid of any of those until you've finished organizing everything.  I think those come right before sentimental items.

So... I guess that's what I attack next.  Baby care items.  It's about time to get rid of some of those anyway, I think.

Laudato Si': Finally finished it.

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, I read to Mark while he drives.  We pick some nonfiction book that we think will spark an interesting discussion -- usually something we think we'll like, sometimes a work that we'll have more fun attacking and poking holes in.    On our recent trip to Ohio, our book for the way down was a 2013 book called The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.  That was a really thought-provoking one, which emerged with only a few holes in it, and I hope to blog a review pretty soon.  On the way back up, we read Laudato Si' from start to finish.

As I read it, I "took notes" by posting little paraphrases on Facebook.  I mostly didn't quote, but tried to distill it down to my own takeaways from the document.  It wasn't by any means a comprehensive summary.

Mark and I are using the long drive to finally read Laudato Si', the ecological encyclical. Chapter 1 tl;dr: Humans can't just do anything they feel like doing. The consequences hit the poor hardest. There are many possible solutions, but only some respect human beings and put the poor first.

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Laudato Si' ch2.I tl;dr: So if this encyclical is for everybody, why am I writing about Christian doctrine? 1. Cultural diversity means our thoughts count! 2. Don't you think if I can call on faith to motivate millions of Christians to steward the earth, I should? (not mentioned: because I am the pope and it's totally in my wheelhouse)

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More Laudato Si' ch2 tl;dr: Actually, we *don't* steward the earth just for the benefit and use of all the peoples of the earth and future generations. The earth and its creatures are a good worth stewarding for its own sake as well as humans'. "Till it," AND "keep it."

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LS ch2: Neither absolute property rights, nor renunciation of them. "If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all."

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LS ch3: The bad kind of technocratic paradigm is: all problems worth solving are solved by completely controlling material objects, and by the way, everything is a material object.

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LS ch3: The throwaway culture that wastes resources and pollutes the planet is the exact same throwaway culture that disposes of inconvenient human beings and buys and sells the bodies of the poor.

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LS ch3. Better laws aren't going to save you in a culture immersed in utilitarianism, because the powerful will always see the utility of subverting the law.

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LS ch3. Genetic modification techniques are to be judged case by case, depending on their impact on human relationships, labor, and well being.

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LS ch4. One problem with trying to solve problems via high-level regulations binding equally everywhere is that their inflexibility limits the flourishing of local institutions and cultures. Consumerism also levels differences instead of allowing them to flourish.

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LS ch4. Overcrowded cities might make people live in uprootedness and chaos, but if people weave strong networks of human bonds this can be transformed into belonging and closeness instead.

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LS ch5: proposals. Developing countries get to prioritize development and quality of life; let the rich countries bear the heavier burden of environmental restrictions.

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LS ch5: Somehow, we need both to respect national sovereignty and local conditions, while instituting a real global transnational political structure to make rules about global problems -- with the teeth to enforce them, somehow. Meanwhile, lots can be accomplished by local projects.

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LS ch5: The burden of proof should be on the proposers of a new project, that it will not cause serious irreversible damage to the human ecology of an area -- not on the local inhabitants to show incontrovertible evidence that it will.

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Cell phone coverage prevented me from liveblogging the sixth chapter of Laudato Si' as I read it, which is too bad, because that is where the advice is. Here goes: "Purchasing is always a moral, not simply an economic, act."

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LS ch6, my paraphrase: Environmental education needs to mean drawing out an *ethics* of ecology, instilling not just info, but habits of solidarity, responsibility, and compassion.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. For those who can afford to consume a lot, it is meaningful to instead make small daily acts of conservation (turn down the thermostat, reduce food waste, turn off lights). It's a sort of "little way" of simplicity and self-control wth respect to resources that are not unlimited, and may pay off in ways we can't see immediately.

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LS ch6: "Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little... That simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack."

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LS ch6. One way to restore the right attitude, on several levels, towards resources is the traditional thanksgiving/blessing before and after meals.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. Encouraging beauty locally, by joining together in groups to preserve a building, a landscape, etc., also is meaningful.

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LS ch6. My paraphrase. To do away with intentional rest is to do away with the most important thing about work: its meaning. In resting we enjoy the fruits of our labor, experience gratitude, and see that it (what we have made) is good.

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LS ch6. Interestingly enough, the encyclical ends with two prayers, one of which is a Christian prayer (i.e., a Trinitarian one) and one of which is suggested for non-Christian believers in God to use, a "prayer for the earth." They are long, so I recommend checking them out yourself.

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Then after I finished paraphrasing, I went back and recorded a few thoughts on the encyclical as a whole, and on our family.

 

LS thoughts (1): Utilitarianism is the wrong way to calculate which policy and personal decisions to make. You could read the whole encyclical as "the state of the planet is evidence that utilitarianism is wrong."

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LS thoughts (2). If I have a lot of resources, and can spend more of my resources (money, time) to reduce damage or impact, I should. E.g. If it costs me more to repair an item than to buy new, but I can afford it, maybe I pay for the repair instead of discarding the item and buying new.

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LS thoughts (3). We do the traditional blessing before meals, but maybe we ought to incorporate the blessing after meals, like before we excuse the children from the table so we can finish the wine and talk together.

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LS thoughts (4). Private property's purpose is the common good. I think this is a "parable of the talents" situation. You can have stuff to use it, to restore it, to share it, to protect it for later, to turn it into more stuff that can be spread around -- lots of possibilities. But if you can't use that item in some way that furthers the common good, why acquire it?

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LS thoughts (5). Be glad for what you have, that's an easy way to start.

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Yeah, I know, the last one is a quote from a Veggie Tales song.  It's from"Madame Blueberry," which I maintain is the most relevant Veggie Tales episode ever.  But I digress.

I have to say, and a couple of my FB friends also had this to say, that the repeated calls for transnational governing bodies to take up the problems of global environmental health and to enforce agreements make me a bit... uneasy.  Reckless, was the word that one of my FB friends used for it, and I think I actually agree with that designation.  We all know how willing powerful people are to take things out of context to justify doing things the way they want to do them.  

When we hear "transnational governing bodies" we think of the UN, and of the UN often the best thing that can be said of it is that its intentions were good, once.  It hasn't just been a corrupt body; it's been a body bent on calling evil good and good evil, off and on throughout its history.  

If you take the document as a whole, it is pretty clear that Pope Francis is not calling for organizations that operate the way the UN does, with the kinds of goals and governing principles that the UN has.  He is calling for massive conversion of heart at all levels of society including the transnational.  But:  the sound bites will never reflect that.  One can argue that the media will never stop taking Popes (and anyone else who is invested by enough people with moral authority) out of context, and that there are no words which cannot be twisted to suit someone else's purposes.  And Francis does seem to be more "reckless" than his last few predecessors, in a lot of ways.  He's not as precise.  He seems to be more easily taken out of context.  

This is a high-risk situation for a Pope to be in, to be sure, that's what "reckless" means, but high risk might also bring high reward, and I'm hopeful.  St. Francis was himself reckless in many ways and is still taken out of context all the time, and yet, those who look beyond the popular image and deeper at the ascetic, at the historical St. Francis, the holiness of the man himself (not either the pious legend or the impious legend) will find something that calls to conversion of heart and of life.

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Besides the bits that I summarized above, I took away from the encyclical some concrete advice at the level of family life.  We are squarely in the class of people who have plenty of resources to live a life that is in accord with human dignity, and then some, and so it's that advice for people who live in rich countries that speaks more to us.

We can afford not to externalize the costs of our lifestyle.  It is a false economy, for example, to buy cheap junk which breaks, can't be repaired, is landfilled and then must be replaced with more cheap junk.  Even if a thing costs more to be repaired than to be replaced, perhaps it is more fitting to pay a worker to fix it than to landfill it and cheaply replace it.  We should continue to use a thing until it becomes unusable, and then try to recycle it, rather than get a new version just because a new one is available.  This is frustrating with electronics, which are subject to a system in which they are designed to become functionally obsolete and to force us to replace them before they are "broken;" but we can use them longer than we might, if we are willing to put up with minor irritations for a while, and over a lifetime we might consume significantly fewer electronic devices than if we had listened to the culture of new-and-shiny.

We are tempted to use climate control unnecessarily.  Mind you, climate control isn't evil; we are having a heat advisory right now, and I have the air conditioning on.  Climate control saves lives, in fact, especially in the case of the elderly and sick, and people who suffer from windborne allergies and can't function well with open windows.  But I have found myself over the past few winters slipping into a "doggone it, I can afford to turn the heat up" mentality, and stabbing the button to take it from 68 F to 73 F.  It's true, I could put on a sweater and a pair of fingerless gloves.  It's a small sacrifice, which means that the turning-up of the heat is a very petty luxury.

We can choose to maintain beautiful things no matter where we are, either as individuals or as communities.  One of the things that I really liked about this "ecological encyclical" -- it really isn't an "environmental" one so much as an "ecological" one -- is that it included manmade beauty as well as natural beauty as worthy of preservation.  Pope Francis mentioned buildings and fountains and city squares, along with landscapes and rivers, as worthy for human beings to rally around, form an identity of place around, and preserve.  I have a bias toward cities and the beautiful and useful things that people design and build, the way that we transform the earth into something new and the ways that we concentrate in urban areas and build social networks that have a sense of unity and identity despite a diverse population, and I was delighted to find that this human ecology has received plenty of attention.  So yes, we can join together in civic groups to preserve wetlands and forests, but it's also good to join Friends of the Library, a local historical association, or any number of other civic groups that strengthen human bonds and keep the city from becoming impersonal and ugly. 

We could all do with a little more gratitude for the good things we enjoy.  The Holy Father reminded us that the blessing before and after meals is a fitting way to pause and exercise that gratitude; we do, as a family, regularly give thanks before meals, but we haven't really done the after-meals thing.  We tried for a little while some years ago, but trailed off as we couldn't really find a good time that was the "end" of the meal, as kids asked to be excused one by one.  Mark and I talked about that and we decided we would try to bring that back.  I left it up to him to figure out exactly how it's going to work.  Maybe instead of excusing the kids one at a time as they finish, we'll excuse them all at once, say the after-meal blessing, and then they'll run away and we can finish the wine together.

We could be careful only to acquire the things that we can "administer for the good of all" -- where that might mean for the genuine benefit of our family (the education of the children, the care for each member's bodily needs) or might mean to care for it so it can be enjoyed by others.  (I'm struck by how this resonates to the same frequency as the Marie Kondo book that I read a couple of months ago.  It feels pretty wasteful to get rid of so much unused, non-joy-sparking stuff, but once you've done it, an a-ha! goes off in your head and there's a reluctance to allow any more non-joy-sparking stuff back in.)

We can do all those small things that, we are told, add up to making a difference:  reduce food waste, reuse and recycle containers, cut down on unnecessary car trips, live more simply.  Sure, it's annoying, and it seems to be a drop in the bucket, but in a spirit of sacrifice it may do some good; like fasting, it has worth beyond the value of the food not consumed, if the sacrifice is made as an offering.  Purely technological solutions that do not ask any sacrifice from us don't have the same dimension of value; self-gift is always effective somehow, even if only interiorly, but technical solutions might have unforeseen consequences and risk becoming just a signifier, a status symbol.  Also, small acts of self-sacrifice are available to everyone.  

In our family, one of those drop-in-the-bucket things might be to change our patterns of meal planning so that we don't waste so much food (I throw out SO MUCH RICE it's ridiculous) and consume a more sustainable mix of protein sources.  

• Meatless Fridays are just a starting point (and of course, there are lots of reasons to choose that as a starting point, here in the US where meatless Fridays are optional -- the primary reason one being to take up the penance that belongs to the rest of the Church as a matter of course).  
• We can recognize that in some countries the people must rely on ocean fish as a primary protein source, and it's a limited resource, and we can abstain from it to leave enough for them -- in economic terms, to keep its price low.   (Similar logic might need to be applied to some imported plant foods, such as quinoa, but the economics are complicated.)  
• We can think of poultry meat as more "expensive" than eggs and dairy protein, pork as more "expensive" than beef, and beef as the most "expensive" of all -- not just based on the dollar value at the supermarket, but based on the amount of agricultural land required to support it.  Maybe a three-pound chub of ground beef on sale is not actually as great a deal as it looks.  I'm not saying never eat beef -- if you're in need of dietary iron, for example, it's very hard to beat it -- but it seems a reasonable sacrifice to regularly abstain from it, save it for legitimate feasts.  Some of the costs of that sale beef have been externalized, and if we pay more for less (as we would if we restricted ourselves to, say, grass-fed small-farmed animals) maybe we can take up more of the responsibility for the real costs as well as supporting family farms.

I think that we have a lot to think about here, as a family, and even more to do.  Fundamentally, though, Laudato Si' recommends a change in attitude.  I think that it's very compatible with the spiritualities I have become most interested in over the past few years:  for example, Elisabeth Leseur's ideas that our tiniest actions and words may affect others in ways that we could never fathom, spreading outward like ripples through time and from person to person, which means that we never have the luxury of apathy.   If Elisabeth Leseur's special gift was to integrate her married life with her spirituality, then I think what Pope Francis is calling here is to integrate our economic lives with our spirituality.  Too often we separate them, but in fact we must integrate all of ourselves into Christ, and that means every decision we make is a moral decision.  Yes, even a choice of taste, like whether your ice cream is chocolate or vanilla or strawberry -- or maybe that's a bit extreme; how about, whether your tacos are  carne asada or pollo or frijoles.