bearing blog

Latin for middle- and elementary-age kids. How I rocked the cymbam.

I recently got a request to blog about teaching Latin to elementary school students.

First, I went through old blog posts to dig up what I can on the subject of Latin:

•  Latin begins (June 2007)
• Language learning observations (July 2007)
• Co-schooling: Latin (July 2010 -- part of a series I did on co-schooling)
• Attention all Latin-teaching homeschoolers who are barely staying one step ahead (an online resource) (June 2011)

I also embarked on a project to use what we've learned in Latin to experiment with teaching a sort of accelerated, but reading-and-writing focused, Spanish:

• A language-learning idea (October 2011)
• Spanish from Latin, update (November 2011)
• Spanish from Latin - more information (November 2011)
• Searching for words (April 2012)
• So how did that whirlwind overview of Spanish for Latin speakers go? (January 2013)
• Newfangled language-learning (July 2014)

A side note:  Since I tried that, by the way, I've come to believe that it's simply NOT true that the only valid way to teach a living language is with the goal of fluent conversational speech.  I can think of lots of reasons why it's worthwhile to teach a foreign living language with a text, translation, and grammar focus.

(1) There's plenty opportunity to practice what you've learned even if there are not many native speakers or you don't travel, because there is plenty of text-based interaction out there:  literature, news articles, and Internet fora

(2) Some kids enjoy translation and grammar; it's a myth that only being able to speak motivates kids.

(3) It's less important to work directly with a native or fluent speaker, and can thereby be self-taught.

(4) It teaches the standard syntax of the language.

(5) It can lay the groundwork for a conversational course later on.

(6) It's better than not learning at all because you're afraid to try to learn the language on your own.

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But this is a post about teaching elementary- and middle-school-aged kids Latin...

When I was teaching a single, reading child at home, we started with Prima Latina from Memoria Press.  I have relied on Memoria Press from the beginning because they publish materials that are laid out for the teacher who is not herself an expert in Latin.  The teacher can easily learn along with the student, which is exactly what I needed for the first several years that I was facilitating children.

I followed Prima exactly as it was presented in the curriculum.  But then, when we moved on to Latina Christiana and I picked up some other students, I began to run into problems.  

The organization of Latina Christiana I is... kind of spiral? The grammar marches along in a reasonable succession; but the vocabulary is added erratically.  Ten or twelve new words are learned in each lesson along with a new grammar concept.  But the new words are often a mix of parts of speech:  you might learn six nouns, three verbs, and a preposition.  

I think there are probably kids who could handle this with no problem, but it proved to be very difficult for the learners I was working with.  I wound up adapting the program.   As soon as we'd get to the first lesson on, for example, second-declension nouns:

1. I would halt the new grammar lessons -- we'd stop right there at the first lesson on second-declension  nouns.
2. I would go through the rest of the workbook and flashcard pack to find all the second-declension nouns that they would encounter in the rest of the course.
3. I would teach the second-declension vocabulary words all at once.  
4. We would practice -- flash cards, reciting the cases, copywork, games like charades and "carnifex" (hangman), etc. -- until I had maybe 70--75% mastery of the vocabulary.
5. We would go on with the grammar lessons.

I had a hunch that it would be easier to remember which declension a noun belonged to, or which conjugation a verb belonged to, if they were always introduced in like groups.  This turned out to be correct, at least for my particular group of kids.  The method lent itself well to flashcards and games, besides.  Frankly, I liked learning the words this way too.

Later I began to stretch the LCI curriculum even more.  Near the end, LC1 introduces a spate of third-declension nouns -- without teaching the declension or specifying the gender of any of the nouns.  I halted the grammar lesson; then, I looked them all up myself and taught them in three groups, one for masculine, one for feminine, and one for neuter.  I also taught how to decline them.   It took a really, really long time.

(It turned out that I had missed some of the subtleties of the differences between "i-stem" and "non-i-stem" nouns, and a couple of years later I had to un-teach some of my mistakes.  The kids eventually figured it out and it turned out okay anyway.)

Meanwhile, they were all getting dissatisfied with the slow progress of the grammar.  Everything in LC1 is in the nominative case, but they enjoyed making sentences and they wanted direct objects!  So I taught myself how to construct [Subj]-[DO]-[Verb] sentences, and then started making my own translation worksheets.  The queen loves the girl.  The slave carries the table.  The waves frighten the sailors.   

Before long I had almost entirely abandoned the LC1 workbook, at least in the order that the lessons were presented.  I started doing them out of order, in a way that made sense to me.

More later...

 

Still Kondo-ing.

For inspirational purposes, I subscribed for a while to a Tumblr feed called Unfuck Your Habitat (frequently, for obvious reasons, abbreviated as UfYH.) It specializes in encouraging people to keep their living spaces livable through "twenty minutes at a time," "as much as you can handle" work.  Users frequently post before-and-after pictures on the Tumblr site to show what they accomplished in twenty minutes, or in a few "20/10s" (sessions of twenty minutes of work, ten minutes of rest).  It is popular among people who suffer from depression or other disabilities that make it hard to get up and do things like a day of thorough spring cleaning, or people whose habitats are so far gone that they don't know where to start.  

It's also probably nice for a lot of folks that (unlike something like FlyLady) it isn't aimed squarely at an audience made up of, what used to be called, with no trace of irony, "housewives."

The UfYH website has some helpful, systematic ideas and basic cleaning instructions, and there is also an iOS app (called, I believe, "Unfilth Your Habitat" to get around the obscenity rules at the Apple Store) and now an Android app with a few tools (timers, to-do lists) for the method.

I bring this up because the other day on the UfYH Tumblr someone asked about the Marie Kondo method:

Have you heard of Marie Kondo’s “KonMari” method of tidying/organizing? If so, what do you think? ... I kind of have to call bullshit on her claim that none of her clients has ever regressed. Are they terrified of her? Does she select only clients who are unlikely to regress? Thoughts?

Answer (emphases are mine):

So, I get like at least a half dozen asks a day about Marie Kondo and The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up, which up until now I’ve chosen not to address because, to be honest, I still haven’t finished reading the book...

Broadly, I think there is no one system that is likely to work for everyone, UfYH definitely included. I think that if a system speaks to you and you agree with the principles behind it, you’re far less likely to regress back to your old ways. So I don’t think that’s bullshit, necessarily, that she has clients who don’t regress; she may just have clients for whom her system is the right fit.

From what I can see, UfYH and KonMari differ in two major ways.

First, she advocates “decluttering” (not a word I use, ever, really) [bearing notes:  KonMari's translator uses the term "discarding"] by category: so, all clothes, then all books, then all keepsakes, etc., and says that a “little-by-little” approach doesn’t work. Obviously, UfYH is based almost entirely around “little-by-little” and focuses on the fact that trying to go through all of your clothes in one shot can be completely overwhelming and itself an obstacle to getting organized. I think the people who find UfYH useful need a little-by-little approach so that they can get started, keep going, and eventually get to a point of maintenance, rather than crisis. 

Second, KonMari advises you to only keep items that “spark joy” in you. While I think this is a great concept, I’m somewhat of a realist and a cynic and I know for a fact that my home will never be a carefully curated collection of items that only bring me joy, and I think lots of people live the way I do. I have items that are necessary, items that are useful, and items that I really need to have around, many of which do not “spark joy.” I believe wholeheartedly in paring down your belongings to what you really need or want, but I also think that there’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t have an emotional connection to your cooking utensils.

Do I think the KonMari method is bad or wrong? Of course not. I think everyone should use what speaks to them and what is useful and applicable in their own lives. It’s a vastly different approach than mine, which is good, because people are complex, and what works for one won’t necessarily work for another. I think it’s great that her method works for so many people and has inspired so many to try to get their homes and messes under control. I want everyone to have a home they’re comfortable and happy in, no matter what journey they take to achieve that.

A note on the joy-sparking thing:  With the help of a translator, Marie Kondo did an English-language IAmA on Reddit some time ago in which someone asked her

What about keeping objects that don't spark joy but that I don't want to spend money or time replacing right now and which are still helpful - for example a computer, a mattress, a toothbrush, a frying pan, a suit, a blender, a coffee table? Should I keep these if they don't spark joy but I still use them regularly?

She replied:

So those things are helping you every day. Because you are using them.

Even if they are not sparking joy, they are helping you every day. They are making your days go by - meaning, you have not realized that they are making you happy. They are sparking joy to you, subconsciously. So it's you, just not realizing that sparks joy for you. So you should convince yourself that they are sparking joy, and you should prioritize their status, because they are making your day, everyday. Then, gradually, you will start seeing some sparking joy concepts from those items.

Be grateful for what you have, I think, is a more usual way of putting that in perpective.

(The Reddit IAmA is not terribly long -- 148 comments -- and is well worth your time if you enjoyed Kondo's book.)

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So, can you do it all at once or is that too big of a job and it's just going to make a big mess that will remain after you get distracted from it?

  Here are some points about the system that if you heed them will go a way toward solving the problem.

(1) You're supposed to sort quickly.  Go with your gut, your first impression.  Don't pause to think too hard about each item.  Just pass it through your hands and ask yourself (let's say the item is a book) "Does this item make me happy when I see it on my shelf?"

(2) If you have too many things in a category -- and Kondo does not specify how many is "too many" or what limitation (space? attention? time?) makes the category too big -- you are supposed to break the category down further.  For example, you are supposed to put all your books on the floor and sort them all at once  unless you have too many books to do this.  She suggests some categories of books, but only so that you can see the order in which to tackle categories ("general pleasure reading" comes first, reference books later).  It is clear that the only purpose of the categories is to deal with as many books as you can manage at once, and to deal with like books together.  

So, for example, I dealt with all my personal "pleasure reading" at once, over the space of a few hours spread over a couple of days, using space in a spare room.  I went through my shelves, pulled out everything that counted as "reading for pleasure," and put it on the floor; then I sorted it into three piles:  

• sparks joy in me personally when I see it just sitting on the shelf (the KonMari book criterion):  this pile, when complete, went back onto my bookshelves, in a section that I marked "complete" and didn't pull from again
• to be considered later for whether it sparks joy in me as part of my homeschooling library: this pile was temporarily stored in a spare bedroom until it was time to consider the "homeschooling library" as a set
• neither: these went right into boxes that I taped up as they became full

But I could have broken "general pleasure reading" into smaller categories:  pop science and novels would have been the two largest categories, and those would have each fit on my dining room table, and I would have been forced to finish each category in one day by dinner time.  They are both kinds of pleasure reading, and so they compete with each other for my time and attention in one sense, but they please me for different reasons, and so I think novels and pop-sci could be considered separately as subcategories.

It was pretty obvious to me that "homeschooling curricula" was its own category, and "books meant for the children to browse but which really belong to me" was also its own category.  I get the impression that you should break it into categories that are as large as you can handle -- the benefit of small categories is that you can be done with a "session" more easily without it being a multi-day messy project, but the benefit of large categories is that it's easier to discard.

(3) Can't stress this one enough.  Have plenty of boxes and tape (and some trash bags -- some stuff will not be in good enough shape to donate) ready to go before you start.   Fill a box, seal it right away, get it out of your house ASAP.  Mine went to a fundraising garage sale.  

No matter how you do it, it's a long-term project, but it really does break down into manageable pieces very well, and there's an order to it; this method gets you straight through the "But where do I START?" paralysis.  

First:  Restrict yourself to discarding your own unloved stuff, not your other family members' stuff.

Then, she says, start with clothes.  If you have too many clothes to pile them all on the floor at once, start with tops.  And so on.

When clothes are done, move to books.  If you have too many books to pile them all on the floor at once, start with general pleasure reading, and so on.  I extrapolated from that to say:  If you have too many general pleasure reading books to deal with at once, start with one easy-to-define subcategory of pleasure reading (such as novels).  And so on.

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I finished clothes, and I finished books, and now I'm about to discard "papers."  The timing is good because it's the end of a school year, and so I'm drowning in papers that I need to cull.  

A very important note here is that "papers" does NOT include things that are kept for sentimental reasons.  Even if they happen to be made of paper, these -- old love letters, photographs, children's dear little artworks, etc. -- differ fundamentally from insurance policies, credit card statements, envelopes with important addresses on them, immunization records, tax forms, and the like.  Sentimental objects come last of all. When, having just finished "books," one gathers "papers" to discard them, sentimental paper-based objects are passed right over.

I am starting this just as I get back from a weeklong vacation from the Internet, and so I decided to practice the paper-discarding technique on my email inbox first, while I gather papers together.  Kondo's rule is to discard every paper unless

• it is currently in use, or 
• it is needed for a limited period of time, or
• it must be kept indefinitely.

That is a funny way of putting it, but note the difference in the verbs.  It "is" in use, it "is needed" for a limited period of time, "it must be" kept indefinitely.  Note the absence of verbs like "want" or modifiers like "might."  When you turn it into asking yourself a question about whether to discard something, you wind up asking:

• Must I keep this thing for I don't know how long?  (Yes to relatively few things.  The title to the house and car come to mind.  The children's birth certificates.  Contractual documents.  Tax records -- technically only must be kept for a few years but that's pretty long.)
• Do I need  this thing for a known period of time?  (Yes to a larger category of things.  The kids' immunization records, which I'll need only until the next doctor's appointment when I will get a new copy.  Standardized test results, which I need to compare from year to year but which will become moot as each child graduates high school.  Receipts for things that have not been delivered yet.  Forms I need to fill out.  Mail that I need to read.)
• Am I using this thing?  A large category.  I think of it as, "If I didn't have this thing, would it mess up some project I'm currently working on?"  A lot of schoolwork-related papers belong in this category at any given time.  Right now I have a lot of scratch paper that I'm using to plan next school year, for instance.  And I have a pile of schoolwork for the high school kids that I want to summarize into a sort of "report" for my own records and for H's records.

 When it comes to storing papers, Kondo suggests only three files.  They are not quite the same as the three categories of "things not to throw away."  The three files are:

(1) Needs to be dealt with

(2) Contractual documents and other items that are infrequently accessed

(3) Items that are more frequently accessed

Yup:  that's how she puts it.  "Infrequently" and "more frequently."

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Before I started going through my email box yesterday, I created three new folders:

• 00 Deal With
• 01 Save - Access
• 02 Save - Infrequent

(The numbers are there to defeat by brute force the email program's automatic file-alphabetizing feature.)

I began going through my inbox with the goal of emptying it, sorting everything I don't delete into one of those  three top-level folders.

Very quickly I realized that it would be helpful to have another top-level folder for the specific purpose of keeping email purchase receipts just until my Amazon, etc., orders arrive undamaged.  These are, technically, a kind of "Save - Access" document, but there are so many of them and they only need to be kept for a short time, that really they should be grouped together.  So I created a fourth folder:

• 03 Orders - Purge

and its name is a reminder that every so often it can be purged completely when I am not waiting for any orders to be delivered.

It took me all day, but I got my inbox to empty.  I still have a gaggle of folders to go through with names like "Archive 2009" and "Rome Trip" and "History Schoolwork" -- not that I really have to delete things, since my email folders are searchable and I have an unlimited-space account.  I could just move the whole file-tree into "02 Save- Infrequent."  It's more so that I can comb through them to find out, once and for all, if anything in there really ought to go into "Deal With."

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So that's today's project.  Once I've finished that, I'll actually "deal with" the things in "00 Deal With." Some of this "dealing" will involve printing things:  turning email into Papers.  And then I'll begin tackling the first of the two boxes on my schoolroom counter, boxes which have been collecting a slow drift of papers for the last few weeks, boxes of papers:  one labeled "School Paper" and one labeled "Non-School Papers."

 

A kick in the pants.

A few weeks ago, I was facing a weekend with Mark out of town, and I needed to clean out the guest room.

Our house has a tiny fourth bedroom up in the attic; at some point, one of the children will likely use it as sleeping quarters, and ostensibly it is a room for guests. For years it has hosted nothing but out-of-season and recently outgrown clothes waiting to be sorted. When guests come, we sometimes sort them; often we stuff the piles somewhere else, such as in Mark's shop, and then put them back later.

I anticipate guests soon, and I kept going up to the attic, opening the door, looking at the piles (there was literally no floor space), and closing the door again. I needed a kick in the pants.

So I got myself a copy of a book I had heard about some months before, Marie Kondo's The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And it kicked me. Hard.

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This is not a book review. This is more a report card, on myself. You can find other reviews of the book in many places, including a recent discussion by an economist of why Kondo's method helps us combat certain irrational tendencies that make us hang on to stuff we don't need. It's less about organizing than it is about getting rid of stuff you don't use or love, and then storing what you have.

This is not the first time I've tried to discard belongings, but it's the first time I ever tried the strategy of discarding by category. Usually, I have "cleaned out" my home location by location. Like this:

PROBLEM: I need to put more books in this bookshelf and there's no room

SOLUTION ATTEMPT 1: Try to move some books to space on a a different bookshelf.

SOLUTION ATTEMPT 2: Get rid of just enough books to make room for the moved books.

I must have done this dozens of times since we moved into our house -- "cleaned out" by discarding just enough things in an overfull location to make room for the new things I wanted to put there. I probably managed to get rid of anywhere from three books to maybe one whole box of books at a time this way. For a while I tried to impose on myself a "one book in, one book out" rule, but I never was able to stick to it.

When I stopped discarding books by location, and instead did them by category -- all at once -- I boxed up nine "small" U-Haul boxes of books in the space of two weeks. And without any sense of regret about it. I found nine boxes' worth of books on my shelves that I did not want to keep. They had been hiding in plain sight all that time. Some of them too damaged to use, some of them duplicates, some of them no good, some of them having served their purpose long ago.

The undamaged ones are going on to a garage sale fundraiser this weekend, and may they find new life with someone else.

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The idea is to discard by category, if you have enough books that doing them all at once is impractical. I went through every shelf, bag, box, and bin in my house looking for "pleasure reading" books, both fiction and nonfiction, and piled them on the floor in our game room. The mountain of books was knee high: sci-fi, classics, popular science, poetry anthologies, mysteries, humor, everything that I read because I enjoyed the subject matter. And then I sat on the floor with a donation box to my left and a clear floor space to my right, and sorted.

The criterion is not "Did I enjoy this book?" It is not even really "Will I read this book in the future, or lend it to someone?"

The criterion, as I understood it (this is not exactly how Kondo puts it) is, "Will the sight of this book on the shelf make me feel happy?" Because, of course, that is where our books spend 99% of their time. That is most of what we "do" with books: surround ourselves with them. An individual book should make me happy to be in its presence when it is closed and resting on my shelf. If not -- if it only makes me happy while I am reading it -- then I might as well give it away, and borrow it someday if I wish to read it again. For we don't have to own a book to read it.

Once I understood that, it was not at all hard to discard books. And with all the general-knowledge, pleasure-reading volumes spread out before me, picking them up one at a time, I could easily tell the difference between the books that I met as one meets an old friend, and the books that I didn't.

I passed through other categories: reference books and textbooks; self-help books; children's picture books. I have accumulated a fairly large collection of theology volumes, and it was especially easy to distinguish the "keep" from the "get rid of" there; with theology either you read it once and you've gotten everything you are going to get out of it, or you read it once and you know you'll turn to it again and again.

I departed from Marie Kondo's method in one respect. She says to handle each item only once. But as I went through each category, many books were diverted into a sort of recycle stream to be considered again under a different criterion: Even if I did not desire to keep this book around for me -- did I want this book to be part of my homeschooling library, the set of books that I keep around precisely so there are plenty of different things for the children to read as part of their school days?

I mean, I have never been able to get into Jane Austen. I have picked up and put down Emma and Pride and Prejudice countless times. I am probably never going to read either. They do not spark joy sitting on the shelf (rather, when I see them I am reminded of my failure to finish them). At least not for my own sake.

But -- as part of a library of volumes that I want to be available in my home for the readers who live there and visit there -- I am happy to see them waiting for the right person to come along and pick them up. So they stayed.

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There is a lot more space in my shelves now. I will be moving on to the next category -- papers -- starting today, at the same time as I put the old school year to bed and begin buying materials for the new one. It is good timing, and it feels like a fresh start, just in time for summer.

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Feedback on the Sunday night feeding paradigm.

I wrote a few posts ago

 

--- augh!  I would love to say "a few days ago" but my blogging is so infrequent right now! ---

 

about our shift to eating prepared cold "party food" for Sunday dinners:  cheeses, crackers, cured meats, olives, cut veggies with dip, etc.   So that Sunday can be a day of rest for the cook, but Sunday dinner can still be a feast:

 At least two kinds of crackers... are set out in bowls, and sometimes a take-and-bake baguette is popped in the oven and sliced. Someone slices salami ... someone arranges 2 or 3 kinds of cheese... If we have leftover deli meats of other kinds, those go out as well. (An alternative to the sausage-and-cheese platter: lox and cream cheese on cocktail rye. Mm.) We keep a small stock of jars and cans of fancy olives and preserves and spreads and pâtés and things... and one or two of those goes on the table. We cut up peppers and celery and carrots and radishes, and put them out for dipping, either with bought hummus or with good olive oil, salt, and pepper.... We open wine or beer, and the kids may have juice boxes or soda if they have some. It takes maybe 20 minutes to put on the table and is not hard to clean up.

And it feels like Sunday.

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Today I got some feedback from a reader named Jenny in New Orleans:

 

[T]hank you so much for your recent "what we do about Sunday night dinner" post!!

 

We live mere blocks from the in-laws, and our regular Sunday routine has been Mama-made brunch here after Mass, then over to the in-laws' house in the afternoon for playing-and-supper. As the in-laws are aging, they've decided to drop back to more like twice-a-month Sunday get-togethers (when everyone shows up, my MIL is cooking for 22 people!!).

 

I totally  understand, and actually sort of prefer to have our Sundays to ourselves, but we were definitely languishing in the but what about supper area. We don't have the means to go out every week, but--like yours--my husband wasn't interested in me cooking a whole 'nother meal (especially since we do a fairly full brunch mid-day). And leftovers or sandwiches just weren't special enough.

Well, after your post, we've seen the light!!

Every Christmas, one of our kids' (girls: 8.5, 8.5, 7, 5, 3 months; boy: 2) favorite traditions is eating a "snacky supper" (read: you don't have to sit down, you can walk around, food is arranged in a buffet-type style on the table) while we decorate the tree on Christmas Eve.

And now!! We're doing it on Sundays!!

You're right--it strikes exactly the balance we were looking for between "special" and "easy". (I even put it out on paper plates because I've already run the dishwasher after brunch.) We've done cheese, crackers, fruit, deviled eggs, leftover tuna salad, ham chunks, chips-and-salsa, hot dog bites... it's awesome. Everyone loves it, it relieves the near-temptation to just go out, it's super-easy to clean up, and I can keep my eye out for crackers and such on sale at the store.

And one of the best things, to me, is that it's allowing us to establish our own Special Sunday Routine Treat that will already be in place when the inevitable happens and going-to-grandma's on Sunday is done with. It's flexible and quick enough that we can accommodate the occasional Sunday afternoon outing--a pool party, a quick trip to the museum to catch the closing-today exhibit--and still do our "regular" Sunday Snacky Supper.

So: thanks. It's a great idea, it works perfectly for us, and I'm really glad you mentioned it.

Awesome!  

Anybody else try it?

Fourteen-hour fasting.

Every May and November I try to write about the long-term maintenance of the significant weight loss I achieved in 2008.

(Care about numbers? I am 4'11" tall. From lifelong obesity, having had an all-time nonpregnant high of 160 lbs, I went in 6 months from 148 lbs to 108 lbs. After my subsequent pregnancy, I ended up at 113 and felt better there then I had at 108, so stayed. Since then I have had an additional pregnancy.)

Longtime readers will remember that while that was going on, I blogged about almost nothing else, to the point that, for example, wildly popular paleo websites linked to me and called me a "weight loss blogger." I probably overdid it, but I can't be too sorry because the hyper-focus probably helped.

May is disappearing fast, so here I am with my update.

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My youngest is now nearly seventeen months old, still happily breastfeeding, and generally keeping us on our toes. I am feeling really good overall. I haven't run a 5K in a while, and have been swimming more often than running, mostly because swimming feels better and is easier to convince myself to do; but I am getting to the gym at a fairly reliable pace of twice per week.

However: I am really, really frustrated by the non-budging of my postpartum bathroom scale.

Is it just the difference of being four years older in this last pregnancy than I was in the pregnancy before that? Or is it from being four years farther removed from the felt experience of constant, successful self-denial in my 2008 weight loss, so that I forgot how to work hard? Or is it from having 25% more children vying for my limited attention than the last time around? Whatever: After my last pregnancy, the weight came off with very little effort, and fairly quickly. This time -- it appears to be happening, but verrrrrrrry sloooooowly.

Seventeen months postpartum, I am still 7-10 pounds above my prepregnancy weight, which (on my 4'11" frame) means I am still one full clothing size larger, which means that I have a bunch of clothes that I would really like to wear that I can't. The conflict: I am still, unnecessarily it would seem, living in the yoga pants that I bought at the beginning of pregnancy to bridge the gap until maternity clothes. Should I accept life in my current size, buy more clothes that fit me, and get rid of the ones that don't? Or should I keep on working at it, in the hope that little by little, enough flesh will slip away to allow me to wear my "real clothes" again?

I don't look bad. I don't feel bad. But I don't want to buy a whole new wardrobe either. It feels like giving up.

+ + +

One factor is certainly attention. The self-denial that I have found necessary to drop pounds -- mostly, from sticking to small portions -- is not difficult to endure; I am quite used to it by now. But the body has tricks to play. As odd as it may sound, I seem simply to forget my intentions, forget to account for food I have already eaten, forget that I meant not to snack or to have seconds, forget to arrange plates full of vegetables and to limit rice and tortillas and bread. To combat this, I should make a meal plan for each day, but it is hard to find the time; family life is so distracting right now. The only time I have ever had rapid success is when I prioritized eating self-control over all other family priorities, and I am unwilling to do that now.

The best I've been able to do at this attention level, it seems, is to work on it when I remember, and hope that my efforts pay off over time.

+ + +

I am trying a new experiment on myself right now, though, to shake things up a bit: what is called Intermittent Fasting, of the "14/10" variety. That is, I'm spending at least 14 hours of every day (including my sleeping hours, of course) not eating at all.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is popular in a few circles right now -- paleo and bodybuilding, for instance. I guess the idea is that dividing your day into a (longer) period of fasting and a (shorter) period of eating is somehow better for your blood sugar, even if you eat the same stuff in your eating window as you would have if you had spread it out over the whole day. As a practical matter, it presents a clear-cut rule that should reduce one's exposure to snacking opportunities, simply because there is a biggish block of the day where you have pre-decided that you won't eat. Besides the daily block of fasting that I am trying out, another flavor of IF is to periodically, perhaps twice a week, go 24 hours without eating (generally skipping dinner-lunch-breakfast so that every calendar day does have some food), and a third is to follow a more-frequent modified fast (very-low-calorie days intermixed with high-calorie days).

I started by attempting 16-hour fasts, but very quickly switched to 14-hour ones -- which some say is more appropriate for women, anyway. A typical fasting period would begin sometime after dinner -- so, perhaps I would have my last bite around 8:30 p.m. -- and last until a late breakfast, around 10:30. But sometimes, because I chose to have a snack around 10 p.m., I would not eat until lunchtime.

As a lifelong believer in light but early breakfasts, I expected to have trouble getting used to the long delay before the break-fast. Indeed, I find I am pretty hungry when that first mealtime rolls around. But it isn't as bad as I feared. I typically drink coffee all morning anyway, and that hasn't changed, so my routine isn't all that different. It is the kind of thing that would happen to me sometimes when, interrupted by children or intent on the preparation for the day, I would forget to eat until later. That never caused me any great distress, other than a little light-headedness, and I find that doing it on purpose is no worse and often easier because of having planned for it.

I find that each day naturally seems to fall into one of two patterns, depending on whether I can set my own meal schedule or whether I am around other people who are eating normally.

If I set my own schedule, I eat a late breakfast at, say, 10:30 a.m.; a somewhat late lunch at about 2 p.m.; and dinner at the normal time or a bit later. Because the meals are closer together, it is not terribly hard to keep to a fairly light lunch and dinner (though I am still getting used to not inhaling a huge breakfast after the long fast).

If I am around other people, it works better to break the fast with a small snack as soon as the 14 hours are up. Then it's a normal lunch and a normal dinner at the normal times.

+ + +

Trying this out was a bit of a philosophical departure for me. Most of the time I try to focus on dietary disciplines that seem as if I'd like to adopt them as lifelong, or at least long-term, habits. And before I tried this, I definitely thought it would be something for the short-term. I just like breakfast too much to take it seriously! I justified the uncharacteristic "crash diet" approach by thinking that I just needed to shake things up for a few weeks, maybe break through the plateau that's dogging me.

But now that I have tried it for several weeks, I find it ... appealing, actually. I think I will keep going for a while and see what happens if I tweak it a bit here and there.

Some reasons why I like it:

• Bright-line clarity. I don't risk overthinking it. It is very simple: Notice what time I last eat before going to bed, and don't eat again for 14 hours.
• No food restrictions. Except, of course, that it's easier to fast if you've eaten something that is not empty junk.
• Flexibility: On average, of course, the eating window is 10 hours long. But in any given day, I can go ahead and have more food later into the evening; the tradeoff is a later breakfast. (How bad can it be? I doubt I will ever eat past 11 p.m., so the worst it can be is 1.) Sometimes that seems like a good tradeoff and sometimes it doesn't. I get to decide. Similarly, I get to decide when to have meals during the day. If for some reason I want to have an early breakfast -- say 8 a.m. -- all I have to do is stop eating at 6 p.m. after an early dinner the night before.
• Less time to wait between daytime meals. This means -- I hope -- that I could be satisfied with a smaller portion size. When I decide to try that.
• I am practicing a useful skill. Fasting for 14 hours is occasionally necessary. I am slowly learning that it will not kill me or make me crazy or unbearably irritable, but that I can do it without difficulty if I plan well (and carry that fast-breaking snack if I have to leave the house in the morning).

I think I will keep this up for six weeks or so, and then maybe -- if I can sustain the effort required to pay attention -- start watching the total calorie count as well. I am not ready to give up on those non-yoga pants yet.

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Update: The crash of the token economy.

I'm having trouble writing these days because a lot of the stuff going on in my head right now is stuff I really ought not put out there, so I'm going through last year's posts looking for things to update.  

One thing that started out giving me high hopes was getting the kids to pull their weight around the house a little more via a token economy.  Here are the posts from that experiment:

• Token economy -- in which I describe my monthly system by which the children lose one popsicle stick each day they don't clean their rooms, and at the end of the month are paid for the remaining popsicle sticks
• Token economy (results) -- in which I report how the first month went
• First expansion of the token-for-chores system:   Laundry -- in which now the children have to do their own laundry once a week
• Job number 3:  Cooking for the family (the first week) -- in which the children begin to earn extra popsicle sticks by making dinner
• The token economy: slowing down?  and adding bathrooms --  in which I notice that compliance is falling off just a bit, and in which the children receive a raise in return for adding a daily bathroom reboot to their tasks
• Token economy:  Little-kid edition -- in which I explain how I use stickers, slightly differently, for the four-year-old's jobs

 

I only had one more set of daily tasks that I was going to spring on them, and then -- after that final set of tasks had become a habit -- I was going to transition out of the token system.  To something.  I wasn't sure what.  Something where I didn't have to handle popsicle sticks every day.  I hadn't made that part of the plan yet.  But the rest of it?  It was all going according to what I'd planned so far.

And then we went to Europe for a month, and came back and dived right into schoolwork --- 

and the whole system fell completely to pieces.

I couldn't believe how easily the routine, built up over five months, fell apart in one month.  And the fault  definitely did not lie entirely with the kids.  It was me too -- I didn't follow up on it.  I let it slide.  I forgot to check their rooms for days at a time.  I sporadically removed popsicle sticks.  The kids didn't leave time in their school day to do their jobs.  We rushed off in the morning to do errands without making sure that the bathrooms were done.  And at the end of the month, we counted up sticks and I had to pay them (because I had said I would) even though I knew darn well that they only had those tokens on the technicality of Mom forgot to make sure we did our jobs.

(Meanwhile, the other thing that fell apart was the baby's infant potty training.  I had been taking him to the toilet about once a day since he was only a few weeks old.  I had him -- at eight months -- sitting on the Baby Bjorn potty and urinating on cue.  We were trucking right along.  And then we went to Europe and used disposable diapers for a month and he forgot everything.  Argh.)

Yeah, I've done some second-guessing about that.  I should have brought the potty with us.  I should have made the kids tidy their rooms in the apartments every day.  Then they'd still have the habit.

On the other hand, we had a nice vacation.  So there's that.

+ + + 

So October didn't work in the sense that the kids didn't do jobs they weren't being asked to do every day, and the children's rooms got messy again.  

It wasn't a complete loss.  They still put their laundry into the wash every week, for example, which is an improvement.  And they still do the daily post-lunch cleanup before going off to have Leave Mom Alone Until Two O'Clock time.  And they still can cook dinner, and so once a week or so one of them will make dinner for me.  And of course they knew how to do everything, so all I have to do is tell them to "do your bathroom jobs," for example, and they can do that.

But the doing-it-every-day-without-my-asking was gone.

I eventually took the popsicle sticks out of their rooms, and they are sitting on the cookbook shelf in my kitchen while I try to figure out what I do next.

+ + +

I talked to Mark about it and he suggested that I consider which parts of the kids' jobs are working well.

"Well, the part that goes the absolute best is the after-lunch cleanup," I mused.  "The 8yo and 11yo squabble a lot, and the 8yo does her level best to dawdle so her brothers do more of the work, but on the whole they get it done well and they get it done quickly.  I think it's because we do it at the same time every day that we're home, and because they know that their break lasts until two o'clock no matter how long it takes them.  

"Also, I'm right there while they are cleaning up -- sometimes I'm helping them, sometimes I'm feeding the baby, sometimes I'm using the computer -- and they know I won't let them go until it's done right.   So they're motivated to get it done, so they can run off and have break time.  Usually they're done by 1:15, and that's with us sitting down to lunch around noon, but sometimes if we finish morning school early and then have lunch early, they're done as early as 12:30."

"Well, maybe you need to schedule times in the day to do all the other jobs," said Mark.  

"And maybe I should motivate them by promising that if they finish the jobs early, there will be break time.  With a hard stop at some clock time -- like the two o'clock end of break and start of afternoon school.  If they don't finish by then there won't be any break."

"I don't know if the kids need a break to be motivated," said Mark, "if we're going to have their allowance hang on it."

I thought of the popsicle sticks, now gathering dust on my shelf.  "I don't know if I can keep track well enough to have their allowance hang on it."

"Figure something out, and if you need help keeping track, tell me what I can do to help and I'll do it."

+ + + 

Later I sat down and thought about the jobs I wanted the kids to do and the break times that are part of our day.    I like do the younger kids' school in two bursts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a long break in the middle of the day.   (My high schooler has a good deal of freedom in setting his own work/break/sleep schedule, since he doesn't really need my help from day to day.)  

We're already using the 2 p.m. start of school as a "hard stop" on break time.  

There's also the morning start, 9:30 or 10 a.m.... maybe I could use that as the end of a "morning break" that they could get if they finished a set of morning chores.

And then, we have lunchtime.  Maybe I could tell them they had to do a small chore before they could come to the table for lunch.  

And then, we have an afternoon snack at three-thirty or so, a little earlier on Wednesdays because dinner has to be earlier because they have to leave for religious ed.  Maybe I could have them do something before they can have snack...

I made a little schedule and showed it to everyone at dinner time.  There was much groaning.

But my teenage son said, "I can do a better job than that, Mom.  You should let me come up with a system."

At first I was reluctant, but then I said.... "OK.  You come up with something."

More on this next time...

Happy new year! Let's look at last year's resolutions.

 

Here we are, with one day left in Christmas and the first Monday in January upon us.  

I didn't blog over the holidays, and I'm ready to start up again.  I decided to dig back into my past year to look for old posts that I can update.  Why not start with last year's resolutions, and see how I did?

+ + +

In February last year, my baby was about six weeks old.  It was too late to make New Year's Resolutions, so I decided to make New Baby's Resolutions instead:

I am now thinking that a really great time for a resolution -- a shaking up of the old routines and a turning over of a new leaf -- is several weeks after the birth of a new baby.

Because you know what?

There's no going back to the way things were before.

I might as well formalize it....

Mostly, this post was about how I realized I needed to cut back the amount of work I do -- lowering my own standards for productivity -- while I was pregnant and with a new baby.  I started in that post with New Baby's Resolution Zero, and continued through a few others.

New Baby Resolution 0:   to recognize and honor all my priorities.  (I identified thirteen).

New Baby Resolution 1:  to keep in mind the priorities that don't fit into a schedule:

I drew a vertical line down a sheet of paper. To the right I made a list of the things "There's A Time For." Meals and chores and the like, a rough schedule marked out by hours.

But to the left, outside of the schedule, I made a list of things to strive for "All The Time:"

• Serving God in everything
• Showing each other LOVE, INTEREST, & DELIGHT in one another
• Anticipating/resolving conflict by modeling KINDNESS, GENEROSITY, & REASON
• Helping each other work by teaching DILIGENCE

These all have to do with keeping a certain intentional attitude while taking care of all the busy-ness of the day.

Resolution one is to keep these in mind as all-the-time intentions, and find ways to do each thing -- to spend each "time" -- that honors these priorities all day long.

I hope to revisit these a bit.  I had a bit of success with intentions, but less of that came from this resolution than from some reading I did from the works of St. Francis de Sales. 

 

New Baby's Resolution 2: Simplifying the list of things that there are "times" for.

Better to re-formulate the categories and condense them, without micromanaging the details. Mother Teresa's rule for her sisters famously included time blocks that were simply labeled things like "Work for the poor." It wasn't subdivided into individual tasks. I need the same generality categories, because in this season of life, I need to stay flexible. At a particular time in the afternoon, I may need to spend some time homemaking, but I don't want to say "laundry at this time, bed-making at this other time, return phone calls from then until the next time." I need the flexibility to do whatever household task is most important and then let the rest of the to-do list go when I have to move on to some other activity.

So what I came up with was this list:

Things we make "times" for 

• Rest
• Taking care of body and clothing
• Meals
• Learning time
• Work
• "Activities"

Much simpler, isn't it?

...Rest, meals, learning, work, self-care, activities. To everything there is a time. And each of these to be met, all the time: in a spirit of service, loving one another, peacefully, diligently.

 New Baby's Resolution 3:  Know how much time I have in the day.  I subtracted off time for rest and stuff, and calculated that on a typical day at home I have 4 h 45 minutes to knock stuff off my to-do list (not counting teaching).  Then I resolved 

• to stop pretending I can somehow stretch those 285 minutes out;
• to value them, and try not to waste them;
• to quit berating myself for not doing more than I could reasonably have done in those minutes;
• to decide what tasks to use them for, and then to delegate the rest or let them go.

I think all these still stand pretty well.

New Baby's Resolution 4.  This was a pretty nebulous resolution, "Don't get bogged down in scheduling specific tasks."  At the time, I resolved to think of tasks in broad categories, and planning to "schedule" the categories instead:  work for schooling, work for the family, work for others, and creative work.  The problem I was trying to solve with it is my tendency to beat myself up over departing from my specific plans, even when I do so for a good reason.

Back then, commenter Jenny sent me to a blog post at Amongst Lovely Things called  "Looping:  Task Management for the (Recovering) Type A Mom".  That post helped me a lot as I planned out the rest of my school year, including this year:  several of my 3rd- and 5th-graders' subjects are arranged this way, and it's worked out great.  I think maybe this coming year I will try to figure out how to use it for some of my other recurring tasks, and for my sadly-neglected creative outlets.  I'm going to revisit it soon.

New Baby's Resolution 5.  "Quit multitasking."  

Somewhere, I know, there is a homeschooling parent with the opposite problem who is resolving to learn how to multitask.  I can be quite effective, it's true.   BUT I can't multitask like that AND demonstrate love, interest, and delight.  Rather, such effectiveness tends to give me Resting Bitchface.  Not a good look on a mom.

 So here's resolution five:  Decide what I'm doing, and do that one thing.  

Leave room in my attention for that love, interest, and delight.

Leave room in my attention to be reasonable, to be kind, to be generous.

Leave room in my attention to stop and guide a child back on task before the urge to yell sets in.

Leave room in my attention for ...intention.

This is a great resolution. So great that, I, um, need to make it again.

 

Bonus Nifty To-Do Trick.  I started making my to-do list on an index card instead of a whole piece of paper, to force myself to keep it short. 

Guess what:  This mini-resolution has stuck, probably permanently:

That's from this morning.  As you can see, I'm still on task #1.

On the left side of the index card, by the way, are some notes about what I can expect to happen today (especially things that might derail me) and a short list of faults I am hoping to avoid (anger, irritation, procrastination).  I think I'll revisit this soon, too.  

I do keep a longer, running to-do list on Wunderlist and also schedule time-sensitive things on my calendar.  The index card is just for daily concerns.  I can throw it out at the end of the day, whether everything on it is done or not.  Works great.

+ + +

I have to say that although the details didn't work out exactly as I'd planned, the past year -- particularly the school-support-work part of it -- has been going astoundingly well. 

Practically every time I sit down for end-of-the-day tea with H, with our three babies toddling around at our feet, we look at each other and say:  "I can't believe how well this is going."  The two of us really scaled back our expectations for what we can accomplish with babies underfoot, and -- lo and behold -- we seem to have actually set realistic, achievable ones.

In my own home, I pushed most of my weekly schoolwork prep (including recordkeeping and grading) to Saturday afternoons, resolving not to let it bleed into Sunday.  I gave myself a deadline, and I found that I can get the essentials taken care of in two or three hours of focused work.  

(Mind you, I used a lot of the summer to put together a whole-year, big-picture plan for each subject.  So this isn't all my planning, just the setup and takedown of each  week's work:  making photocopies, writing out assignments, grading papers, and the like.)

 I lowered my standards -- and life is better for everyone.  

Maybe you should resolve, in 2015, to lower your standards too!

Thirds on entrées.

One of my real-life friends tried my suggestion to have an entrée with her family dinners for a couple of weeks:  set out a dish at the beginning of the meal as a first course.  

She reported that it had an incredible effect on the pleasantness of the dinner.  I'm paraphrasing her comments here from memory:

• They had time to begin with a prayer and to talk about their day.
• They didn't start off their meal by frantically grabbing to get the best stuff before their brothers and sisters could eat it all.
• Her kids' medications start to wear off towards dinnertime, and that leaves them with a suddenly ravenous appetite.  The slower start, she thought, worked better with their hunger levels and kept them from eating too much right away.
• The kids began to look forward to dinner with interest, asking, "What are we having for appetizer tonight?"

We both agreed that this one little change has a number of different effects on the pace of the dinner, and it's hard to find an explanation for all of them.  It just... alters the environment.  

Because we don't clear away the first dish until (a) everyone has eaten at least a little of it and (b) no one is still working on theirs, we all become a little more aware of the other family members' pace.

There's usually a pause at some point, where we find ourselves talking to each other instead of head pointed down into our bowl, and when we become aware of that we know it's time to get the next course.

Because the rest of the meal arrives somewhat gradually -- I have to get up, take away the salad dishes, and bring the serving dishes to the table one at a time -- the dishes begin to be passed as they arrive, and instead of a free-for-all it's more orderly.  

No one is positively starving when the "good stuff" arrives, and that means everyone has the patience to wait for their turn to help themselves.

+ + +

My friend took it even farther than I do and served dessert, too.  I'm not sure what she made each day, but knowing her family, it might well have been a homemade sweet some days, a packaged sweet on other days, and fruit on yet other days.  She reported that the formalization of the dessert course also added to their enjoyment of the meal.

Dessert is not part of my family culture except on special occasions or sometimes when we have guests.  Instead, Mark and I linger after dinner over our drinks, chatting, as the kids finish up and excuse themselves and run away; later, we call them back to help us clean up (unless we'd rather do the dishes ourselves while we polish off the bottle and continue our conversation), and then we have "bedtime snack."  It's as good as dessert, but it's after dishes; that's just the way we do it.  Ice cream, milkshakes, cereal, the occasional plate of nachos.  I can't see us changing that anytime soon.  It works great for us.

But I've been persisting in the "first course" habit too, despite having to streamline my cooking quite a bit on school days. 

The entrée is sometimes just an afterthought.  A couple of times so far, the first course has just been applesauce from a jar, made slightly fancy by a shake of cinnamon sugar.  (In that case, Mark and I skipped the applesauce and started in early on our wine.)

Yesterday I thawed some leftover chickpea curry, and we had that with rice and greens; I served the grated-carrot-and-lemon-juice salad, usually my go-to-with-curry side dish, as the first course (and replaced its sweet-and-sour flavor in the main course with a bowl of canned pineapple chunks).  

This coming week, my son is making hamburgers and tater tots for dinner, and he's going to start us off with a Caesar salad (from a bagged kit, but hey, it's his turn to cook and his turn to decide).

I'm going to make some kind of a beef and pepper and rice skillet on Saturday, and I think it'll be easy enough to do a black bean and corn salad at the same time.  I'll add avocadoes if any are ripe by then.

I'll make black-eyed pea soup on Tuesday with bread.  I'll buy some bagged baby spinach and mandarin oranges, and hope that the spinach stays crisp long enough to turn that into a salad; but if it wilts, we'll just have extra oranges and I'll put the spinach in the soup.

Not much fresh stuff will be left by a week from today, so Wednesday's appetizer will be a cabbage-apple salad -- or just a coleslaw if the apples have all been eaten by then.

I have a few emergency things up my sleeve, too -- the aforementioned applesauce is one, but I also have some frozen edamame in the pod, and I think perhaps I might buy some frozen cooked shrimp and some cocktail sauce to have on hand, too.  The whole thing has been very fun, and hasn't added a lot of work.  Try it and let me know what you think.

 

Weight bearing II: Adding deadlift.

I must be feeling gung ho about the new weight training program I started, because for the first time in quite a while, I dragged the kids to the gym in the middle of the day to avoid missing a workout. My teenage son carried the baby around for me while I took my time squatting and relearning the deadlift.

The deadlift trains the back, with a bit of legs and grip-strength thrown in. It is tricky, because you need to have a neutral back, not rounded or hyperextended, and because you must take care not to get off balance. It is the lift where you "bend over and pick the bar up off the floor." All you have to do is stand up, with the bar hanging from your arms. Nevertheless, it is easy to screw up.

 

 

I hear it is not a popular exercise. You do not see many people deadlifting at my Y. But that is kind of funny, because it is hard to think of a move that builds a more useful kind of strength. It's the move that trains you to pick up a heavy object from the floor without hurting your back. Think a big sack of rice or dog food or potting soil, there on the ground at the store, that you've got to get into your shopping cart, or a crate of full wine bottles that has to go in the trunk, or a 75-pound kid with a sprained ankle.

Think deadlifts might be dangerous? Someday you are going to have to pick one of these things up, and it will go better if you know how to deadlift a bar that is even heavier.

I started with the empty barbell lifted up on blocks to approximate its height when loaded with standard plates. I took my time with the first lift, carefully going through the steps of a sort of form checklist that appears in the book:

• stand with heels 8-12" apart and center bar over arch of foot
• bend knees slightly so shins touch bar without pushing it forward
• bend at the waist without dropping hips and grip the bar just outside of legs
• rotate chest upward between arms and contract back to normal arch position
• use back to drag bar up shins and past knees, then straighten up and drag bar up thighs.

But I was pleased to note that the motion felt natural and easy to me. It is still in my motor memory from the time I tried to learn it some years ago (using this online resource).

Come to think of it, I never really forgot it because after I learned to deadlift, I always and ever after used deadlifting form to lift heavy stuff; at least when lifting with the legs was impractical, such as getting a heavy box out of a deep car trunk, or certain kid-lifting scenarios.The key is first, to get the center of mass of you and the object close to being directly over the arch of your foot, and then, in the contraction of the back muscles: after grabbing the object, you take an instant to, as Rippetoe writes, "rotate your chest upward between your arms" and put a normal (but not hyperexteded) arch in your back. Just enough to make sure it isn't rounded. Then go slowly so that if it turns out the load is too heavy, or too far from your body (= too much torque) you can stop before you hurt yourself trying.

So without thinking, I have been practicing the deadlift for years.

I lifted the 45-lb bar five times, then added 10 lbs and lifted another set of five, then added 5 more pounds for a third set of five, and called it good. So my starting deadlift is 60 lbs. I also added five pounds to my squat weight. (Still squatting outside the dumb, too-tall, fixed-height rack.)

Next time will be the first lifting workout where I will do all three lifts. Then, after that, I am going to figure out the bench press.

 

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Weight bearing (sometimes these titles write themselves).

So... having got medical clearance last week, I went to the Y on Tuesday evening, not to swim, but to start a weight training program.

Now.  If you know anything about me at all, I'm sure your first question is, "Erin!  What book are you using?"  So let's save time.  I'm using a pair of books authored by Mark Rippetoe:  

• Practical Programming for Strength Training, 3rd ed., Kindle version
• Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd ed., paperback.

Some googling will let you know that this author's style is not to everyone's taste (sample quote:  "The only legitimate use for a glove is to cover an injury... If your gym makes a lot of money selling gloves, you have another reason to look for a different gym.  And if you insist on using them, make sure they match your purse.")    

Given that, I can recommend another educational and inspiring source that is similarly no-nonsense but much less likely to bring back PTSD from high school gym class:  stumptuous.com , written by Krista Scott-Dixon, who is only one inch taller than me.  If nothing else, her article "Don't Fear the Free Weights" is a great place to start.   

+ + +

Nevertheless, the Rippetoe books are thorough, detailed, and -- this part is important -- simple in their approach for the novice.  I compared the advice in these books to another very popular weightlifting book The New Rules of Lifting for Women by Lou Schuler, and my impression was that the latter contains a lot of unnecessary shuffling around of many different exercises.  This might keep it from getting boring, but it also means a lot of time spent on the learning curve.  So:  not for me.

Rippetoe suggests starting with four barbell exercises (links go to stumptuous.com so you can see what I am talking about):  

• the squat
• the press
• the bench press
• the deadlift.  

The press and the bench press alternate, so you only do three at each workout.  That's it.   Alternate, three workouts a week.  Cardio not required.

+ + + 

Speaking of books, there's one more in this history.  Of late, Mark's been implementing some of the principles in Training for the New Alpinism:  A Manual for the Climber as Athlete by House and Johnston.  I read through some of that book, and I liked its attitude of goal-specific training:  not so much making the motions of training match the motions of your sport, but training for the particular mix of endurance, strength, and technical skill that your sport calls for.  

Mark's interested in skiing and ice climbing and rock climbing, maybe running a 5 or 10k here and there, always looking about three months ahead to the next trip.  My sport, on the other hand?  Life with kids, and staying mobile and strong and able to choose many activities as I get older.  I have modest but long-term goals.  

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So, we read through the theory in the programming book together.  While I had waited for my doctor's appointment, Mark started re-acquainting himself with overhead press, bench press, and pullups (which make an appearance a bit farther along in Rippetoe's program but are nevertheless known to be a good exercise for climbing).  

I spent a long time Tuesday afternoon, while the kids were messing around with some new Minecraft feature, carefully taking notes about the squat and the overhead press.  I've done both of them before, but it's been a long time; I think the last time I did weight training at all was before my 7yo was born.  

I don't have any special weight lifting clothes or tape or anything.  I wore my running capris, my cross-country racing flats, and a tee shirt.  Mark wore the baby in the Boba carrier; I met him at the stairs after a few minutes warming up on a rowing machine.  "Thanks for coming with me," I told him.  "I know I've done this before, but I still feel like it's obvious I don't know what I'm doing."

"Why don't you do the overhead press while I've got the baby here, and then I'll take him down to the child care while we both work on the squat."

"Okay."

 I went to the A-frame rack of small barbells, because I knew I would not likely to be able to start with the empty Olympic bar; it weighs 45 lbs all by itself, and most people can't lift as much in the overhead press as in the other lifts.    "I'm only pressing fifty," Mark pointed out by way of reference.  The small bars weigh twenty pounds, and the smallest plates are 2.5, meaning that the lightest barbell is 25 pounds.  That is where I was to start.

Mark pointed out that the top peg of the A-frame was just about the right height for me to take the barbell into the correct position.  And that is where the 25-pounder happened to be resting, so I gripped it and took it out of the rack, resting it at my collarbone.

It wasn't that heavy.  I checked my notes:  elbows forward, overhand grip, thumbs encircling, wrists straight.  I rocked my body back and forth a couple of times, muttering, "Let's see..."

"It's not that complicated," said Mark, "just push it up till you lock your elbows."

I pushed it up to the ceiling and felt what it was like to be stable under the bar.  Once it is all the way up, it isn't hard to hold it there; your elbows lock and that's it, you are a pillar in compression.  The tough part is getting your face out of the way as the bar goes up and down around it, but that's harder-looking on paper than it was in the gym.   

I brought it back down, and repeated it for a set of five.  I didn't need to slow down; I could do more weight than that. We switched it out for the thirty-pound bar, and that was more difficult; I could tell I would not be able to lift five additional pounds, but I could press thirty pounds for three sets of five with only a little slowdown.  So.  Thirty pounds.  I wrote it down.  

Time for the squat.  Mark toted the baby downstairs while I performed a few bodyweight squats.  I am naturally quite flexible, my one genetic advantage, so it isn't hard for me to drop all the way down ("ass-to-grass," or ATG, as they say in the creepy bodybuilding forums).  My heels stay down and my knees don't hurt, and I don't have any bad habits like looking at the ceiling or arching my back.  

When Mark returned, we headed over to the squat rack -- and I instantly saw a problem.

Eight years ago I squatted at the gym in a proper squat cage, aka "power cage."  These look like this:

The cage has three functions for the squatter (or the bench presser).  

• First, it holds the bar for you while you change the plates.  
• Second, it holds the bar for you on a pair of hooks, the height of which you can adjust, while you get into position under the bar.
• Third, it has a pair of adjustable safety rails that you set just below your range of motion.  They are supposed to catch the bar if you drop it or crumple under it, so it doesn't destroy the floor (or, in the case of the bench press, crush you to death).

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the Y got rid of the squat cage and replaced it with a squat rack.  These look like this:

Ostensibly they perform the same three functions for the lifter who wishes to safely execute a squat.  The hooks hold the bar for you while you change plates and get into  position.  And there are safety rails to catch the barbell if you drop it.  

However, the safety rails are not adjustable; they are fixed.  And guess what?  They're too tall for me.   If I were to squat inside such a rack, I'd get partway down and then the bar would go BANG and stop while I went the rest of the way down.

And probably too tall for a lot of other people, too.  Even though I'm unusually short and unusually flexible, it seems to me that you only need to be unusually one or the other to hit the rack.  I googled around and found lots of complaints from below-average-height males about the squat racks at their gyms.  How annoying.

I talked to a staff member named Joe who agreed that it was a major bummer and added that he heard they were going to get rid of it and replace it with a squat cage sometime in the fall.  

Putting an aerobic step inside the cage felt very unsafe, and I couldn't easily stop partway down.  What I wound up doing was stepping back outside the safety rails, which is a stupid thing that nobody should ever do with a really, really heavy weight.  At this point I'm only lifting the 45-pound bar; if I drop it, nobody's likely to get hurt.  

If I'm lucky enough to progress so fast that  the cage isn't here yet and I can't justify doing it without the safety, I'll just have to rope a couple of staff members into helping me -- because the squat requires two spotters, one on each end of the barbell.  Either that or get Mark to spot from behind, a method which requires a certain level of comfort and/or intimacy with your spotter.

 Not a job for some random guy I just met at the cross cable machine.

 

 

Three sets of five, and that was enough for the day.   

When we fetched the baby back from his 20-minute stint in the child care, he wanted to go straight to me.  I tucked him in the crook of my arm and instantly felt the fatigue I'd given myself.  I was glad to transfer him to his car seat back at the van.  The next morning everything felt warm and just a wee bit sore:  not an unpleasant feeling, and I can tell that I worked hard.  A completely different feeling from the post-swim sensations I am used to.

Next time, I learn the deadlift.