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Pondering a recipe-roundup: empty cupboard meals.

I've been bouncing around the idea of trying to host a recipe roundup, once or twice a month.  (You know the drill -- write a recipe post, send me the link, I'll put it all together into a post.)  But I've been searching for a theme that hasn't been done to death.

Today I think I might have hit upon it.  What do you think about an "empty cupboard" roundup?  I'm not sure how often -- once a month or biweekly -- and it doesn't lend itself to an alliterative name, maybe you all could help me with that -- but here's what I'm thinking:

The idea is to write a post about what you managed to throw together the night before you go grocery shopping.  What can you make from your pantry staples?   It's easy to eat fresh, local, seasonal, interesting, and impressively right after you come back from the farmer's market (or the co-op -- or even the SuperValu).  What can you do at the end of the week, from your leftovers, odds and ends, and emergency rations?  What have you got to choose from?  What did you decide to make and why?

Here's an example from today.  I'm pretty good about meal planning, but I often leave the last couple of days blank because I know I'll have things to use up; on the other hand, sometimes we eat up all the leftovers and I have to get suddenly creative.  I'm about to leave to go grocery shopping right after I finish this post.

Before dinner, the only fresh veg I had in the fridge was a bunch of broccoli (and it was starting to look a little sorry, so raw was out).  No fresh fruit left except some wrinkly apples, an orange, and a lemon.  We had some leftover enchiladas and arroz con pollo, but we were kind of tired of both and needed a break (it'll still be good for lunch tomorrow).  

So I made this:

• Grilled Meatloaf (double onion, since I had no green pepper -- there's always ground beef in my freezer)
• Steamed broccoli with a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil
• Plain Fordhook lima beans cooked from frozen -- just a little salt and pepper
• A can of cut beets, drained and briefly marinated in a dressing of orange juice, balsamic vinegar, and fennel seeds
• Homemade bread and butter.
• Oh yeah, and rum and coke for the grownups.  (Hence the need for me to churn out a couple of blog posts before I go shopping)

I think it turned out pretty great, and not bad for a day when I didn't know what I was going to make until about three-thirty.

Anyway, what would you say to having a roundup on a semi-regular basis?  I think it would be a nice way to explore our creativity, celebrate frugality, and get over some of our hangups about appearing as if we only occasionally rely on convenience foods.  Also share some ideas.  And even if your answer is something like, "frozen pizza -- again," well, why not fess up?  If you had an ice-cold beer on the side, you could at least tell us about that.  In fact, I'll make one of the rules be you have to tell the whole meal, not just one interesting recipe.

What say you?  How often?  Which day of the week (or month)?  And furthermore, what should I call it?

Co-schooling: Study hall.

The school year is winding down, and Hannah and I hashed out some end-of-the-year co-schooling thoughts over tea.

We keep bouncing around the idea of writing an article or, more likely, putting together a talk on co-schooling that we can shop around to the homeschooling conferences.  We've been doing it for a few years together now and learned quite a lot, but it feels to me as if I need to talk to some other people who have tried co-schooling, with varying degrees of success, before I could possibly start to generalize about ways to make it successful.  "We only know what works for us," I said, "I'm not sure I could tell other people how to make it work.  Maybe you and I are just freakishly lucky that it's turned out so well."

Hannah said, "No, we have definitely learned some things that are universal."  She went on to list things that we've figured out are important, like having a shared understanding of what you're trying to get out of the arrangement, and prioritizing the scheduled-together days, and having a plan of some sort for every child in the house, and each parent teaching the things they're enthusiastic about teaching.    

I think she's probably right, but I would still rather find some other people who have attempted co-schooling.  If only because then maybe I could understand better why it works so well for us and why so few other people make it work well for longer than a few weeks.   I like data better than anecdotes.

 Maybe few homeschoolers would really want to do anything similar to what we do.  Hannah suggested that homeschoolers as a group are maybe very much "we do it my way because my way is the way that works for our family" people, and co-schooling inherently forces you to let go of some of the control you have over curriculum, teaching style, even child discipline, and hand it over to someone else for part of your teaching time.  If we liked doing that sort of thing, we'd probably have our kids in school, right?

The discussion trailed off with us talking about how we've noticed that our 7- and 8-year-old boys, plus our friend's girl (Thirteen today!  How the $^% did that happen?!?!) who joins us, are the three kids who could use a little more work added to their co-schooling day.  We're already kind of maxed out on direct teaching time, especially since there's be a busy toddler to contend with now, but fortunately all three of them probably could use more high-level independent work.  My 7-year-old, for example, now that he's reading fairly fluently on grade level, is ready to work on the skill of "read-and-answer-written-questions-about-the-reading."

We tossed around a few ideas, and decided to give them each a "study hall" period.  For the teenage girl, we decided to ask her to bring a book to read, and to start her on a journal, and we'll give her a block of time for reading and writing in the journal on various little journal-starter assignments we can give her.   As for the boys, we'll choose something workbook-y that the boys can probably do independently, not the same subject matter but the same kind of work, and have them sit together and do the work quietly for a time.  

Should it be a set time period or a set amount of work?  We don't want them either to sit idly waiting for the timer to ding, or to rush through a page to get it over with.  In the end we decided to give them a particular daily assignment (say, two workbook pages) AND a twenty-minute minimum, so that if they happen to finish the assignment before the time's up they have to read or something until their study hall is over, but if they run out of time before they finish the assignment then they have to keep working until they're done.  We'll try it out over the summer to see how it works when they don't have very much other work to do.

The "study hall" will be a major experiment for us, because one of the things we swore we weren't ever going to do again was to have kids working side-by-side on different work.  Way back when our first kids were the same ages, we were trying to do co-schooling that way:  each of us bringing our own curriculum and trying to teach our own child our own way, but in the same house.  It was no fun at all, and that was what we threw out when we started our "new way" of bringing the kids together, giving up some of the control to each other.  But maybe now that we've learned a few things, we'll be able to teach kids how to work on their own work while still enjoying each other's company.

I think it's funny that we often wind up borrowing terminology  -- like "study hall" -- from the school-y environment that we have been trying to avoid.  Clearly, in working together in a family-like environment, in a home, we're trying to assemble the best of both worlds.  Home.  School.

Meanwhile, we have other concerns, like trying to cram in the end of the history books by the end of June so we can actually have a "summer vacation" that means something...

Shaking it up a little, involuntarily.

  Like his brothers and sister before him, Child No. 4 entered what we call the "Feng Shui" phase of toddlerhood at about fourteen and a half months.  He walks around attempting to lift small pieces of furniture or portable items such as wastebaskets; when he finds that he is able to move one, he carries it somewhere else and leaves it there.  So we keep finding potties in the hall and office chairs in the bathroom.  

Yesterday morning my middle toe found a step stool in the kitchen.  Right up against the wall so it didn't give a millimeter.  Here, let me pause in my R.I.C.E. therapy to show a little leg, courtesy of Photo Booth:

I decided to do my part to keep health care costs down by not getting it checked out just yet, especially since (a) the website we checked said things like, "An x-ray may be required, but only to appease the patient" and (b) I've been through this before.  Yes, yes, I promise to go to urgent care if it starts to necrotize or something.

It hurt a lot after Easter Mass (should have stayed sitting down; should have worn the Dr. Martens instead of the Fluevogs with my pretty Easter dress), and I frowned a lot.  But this morning, once it was buddy-taped to the next toe over and laced into the Docs, it wasn't too bad, and I started to hope that maybe it was only sprained instead of really broken.  We'll know soon enough; if sprained, it'll feel better in a few days, if broken, not for a few weeks.

Mondays, my 4yo has a 30-minute swim lesson.  Usually I swim laps while she's busy with that, but it didn't sound fun.  Neither did running, obviously (still cringing at the thought of a footfall driving the foot forward into the toe box of my running shoes).  I brought  my gym bag and changed into running clothes anyway.

Once in the fitness center I decided to make friends with the rowing machine, something I never use.  There's no impact; the foot strap goes over  the top of the foot well above the toe; and while the foot does flex, I didn't feel much discomfort there.  

By the time I figured out what I was doing (push with the legs then  pull with the arms; reverse the steps to recover) I only had 17 minutes to do the workout.  So I tried to make it count by getting the power readout about up to what the treadmill tells me I burn in Cal/hour.

I hope my foot feels up to a run or at least a stairclimber soon, but I guess I could have fun on the rowing machine for the time being.  Maybe I'll brush up on technique first.

Mark thinks I should try lifting for a while, but I never see the point of taking up lifting as a temporary diversion.  When I start lifting, it'll be either for a specific purpose, or because I intend to keep doing it for the rest of my life.

 

Scriptwriter's block.

If I were to attempt to write one of those trendy Xtranormal animated dialogue movies, the ones that have two animated characters speaking in a dreary monotone, what should I write about?

Of course it has to follow the formula described in this NPR article:  a dialogue between  "a wise guy who is the voice of reason, and a tone-deaf, argumentative adversary."

Give me some ideas.

 

A multi-age, whole-family science curriculum.

This week I wasn't able to get together with Hannah for co-schooling, so I gave the kids Tuesday and Thursday off and dedicated a day and a half for school planning:  mainly, to throw together a week-by-week curriculum for next year's science.

This coming year I want to try out something new:   teaching the same subject to my three school-age children as a group.  I figured we'll read some picture books and have some discussions and activities together, and then my sixth-grader can be sent off for some extra independent work.  I thought I'd try it with the subject block we call "science."  I typically hate -hate-hate prepackaged elementary school science programs anyway, so as long as I'm going to be winging it I might as well save time and teach the same subject to all three kids.

(Why do I hate prepackaged science curricula?  Let's be blunt:  I have had enough training in physical science that I tend to get morally outraged by all holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps.  This causes me intense irritation that I don't experience when trying to teach other subjects, such as art appreciation or history.   I recognize that every curriculum contains holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps, but even when they are obvious to me, they don't bother me as much as they do in science curricula.  I would be interested to find out if other homeschooling parents get exceptionally irritated  about the shortcomings in curricula covered by their particular fields of expertise).

Since it's the first time I'll have tried teaching science to three levels at once, I want to pick a topic that would be easily accessible to all of them.  That is, I want to choose a field with the potential for hands-on demonstrations and experiences that can involve the kindergartener and second-grader; at the same time, I want the sixth-grader to keep a laboratory notebook,  make precise measurements, run calculations, and self-evaluate.  

I briefly considered botany, but decided to save it for another year on the grounds that I would have to do a lot of preparatory review myself (I've only had one year of high school biology, from a ridiculously incompetent teacher).  Earth science would be good, except my sixth-grader already had that as a second-grader; I'll repeat that curriculum (which I designed, natch) for the younger kids some year when he's doing something else.   The sixth-grader has also already done electric circuits, anatomy, and a chemistry-in-your-kitchen sequence.  Hannah has been teaching ornithology to the younger kids for months now; come to think of it, she has done such a great job at it that I ought to ask her to write a guest post about it!

In the end I settled on human nutrition:

• There are a seemingly endless supply of relevant picture books in the library system.
• The subject is obviously and practically related to daily life, which fits my philosophy for primary-grade nature study.
• The "labs" are mostly cooking, but the sixth-grader will be able to find some test-tube-and-beaker work.
• I can use the subject to teach some useful practical-life skills, like snack-making and food budgeting.
• The topic is interdisciplinary in an interesting way.  By that I mean I can use some good children's literature about food (food preservation unit study = Blueberries for Sal!) and I can let it creep into social studies at the edges (what children around the world eat for breakfast; economics) as well as getting into several different branches of science and technology (chemistry, anatomy, ecology, agriculture) and, as a bonus, some rhetoric (why do we have a "food pyramid" and not some other shape?).

Once I got that figured out, I picked a sixth-grade nutrition textbook with decent scope and some ideas for experiments -- yes, it's full of holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps -- and used that as a sort of skeleton to hang my own ideas on.   

Just when I had made up my mind to teach human nutrition, along came Jamie's suggestion via email that I should review Ellyn Satter's Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family (I'm giving it a mixed review:  I criticize some aspects here and here, and I begin to point out some good stuff here).  One of the appendices is entitled "Nutrition Education in the Schools," and it gave me some good ideas for organizing my approach toward the differently-aged children.  Because of its influence, I think I will save all the "nutrient" discussions for the sixth-grader, and spend my time with the younger children exploring the world of human food: classifying, growing, harvesting, buying, cooking, preserving, displaying, tasting, and digesting.  

 So far I've assigned a topic to each of the thirty-six weeks of the school year, based on the kind of work I think my sixth-grader ought to be doing.  Now I'm going down through the topics and searching through the library catalog for good picture books that match up with each topic.  (I am doing subject searches like:  "Vegetables -- Juvenile fiction" and "Refrigeration and refrigeration machinery -- Juvenile literature.")  This is the fun part.   It'll give me an excuse to check out a whole lot of kids' cookbooks, if nothing else.  

Once I get all the topics in order with a list of good picture books appended to each one, it'll just be a matter of requesting  the books a week or two in advance so I can plan some activities.  I'm pretty used to doing this by now with history, so I have a lot of confidence that I can "wing it" on a week-to-week basis as long as I have a topic plan in place.  If I have time before the year starts, though, I can plan more details in advance and so cut down on the winging it.

Switch.

Readers who have been interested in following some of the threads about personal change -- becoming an athlete, overcoming gluttony, detaching from time, and maybe even beginning the devout life à la St. Francis de Sales --  might be interested in a quick-read book I just finished, one that Mark got for free at work after the author made a presentation there.

The book is Switch:  How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  It seems to be aimed at the business/management market, and indeed most of the many and very interesting anecdotes have to do with encouraging behavioral change in other people, but there is a sprinkling of stories about personal change as well.  I don't think the logic is perfectly crisp (and Mark wasn't terribly impressed by the author's presentation), but I think it's worth reading, if only because the anecdotes are so fascinating and varied.  For example:

• How aid workers permanently improved child nutrition in a Vietnam village with no extra resources
• How hospitals reduced medication errors by discouraging staff from distracting nurses
• How therapists taught child-abusing parents techniques that dropped re-offending rates from 65 to 20 percent
• How one hospital nearly eliminated IV-line infections with a single policy

... as well as some other examples of effective techniques from popular gurus that will be familiar to many readers of this blog, such as Dave Ramsey (the get-out-of-debt-with-cash-in-envelopes guy), "FlyLady" Martha Marla Cilley (the clean-your-house-by-shining-your-sink lady), and Brian Wansink (the lose-weight-by-shrinking-your-plate professor).

Chapter One of the book is available on the authors' website here.

+ + +

Nowadays when I read self-help books of any kind, I find myself testing them against my own experiences making serious, deliberate changes.  I have made two life-altering, "previously impossible" changes now:  I've gone from being mostly sedentary to regular vigorous exercise and even athletic competition; and I've gone from being a habitual and even compulsive over-eater to, well, not being one at all anymore.   Those are fairly recent, within the last three years, so they are still fresh in my memory, if not entirely completely understood and processed yet.  

I can go back farther and remember a couple more successful changes.  One significant, life-altering change was made about ten years ago in conjunction with another person, my friend Hannah, when we with our (then) one baby each quite deliberately set out to create a "tribe," a sort of extended family for ourselves and for our kids and husbands, by sharing one day's worth of our work each week.   Hannah and I had to make another deliberate change about three years ago when we realized we absolutely had to integrate our homeschooling efforts if we were going to keep up our (now two days a week) schedule.  

So when I look at a book like this -- a book that purports to explain how to make difficult changes happen -- I feel that I can really evaluate it on the merits, at least as far as personal change is concerned.  (I've never been a manager, and I've never had to enforce any really major changes in the family's behavior, so I can't really evaluate it in terms of encouraging others to change.)

And my judgment is that this book meshes really well with my experience.  Let's take a look.

+  +  +

The Heaths organize their book around a borrowed image of something I've written about before, the divided self.   They envision:

• the logical, decision-making, long-term-focused self as the reins-holding Rider; 
• the emotion-driven, pleasure-seeking self as the much more powerful Elephant; 
• and the environment or situation that influences both as the Path.  

The various chapters in the book offer advice on how to "direct the Rider" (that is, how to show the intellect where to go and what to do, what steps to take;  how to  "motivate the Elephant"  (that is, to get the emotional side on board with the change and thus harness its power, or at least, how to reduce its resistance); and how to "shape the Path" (that is, how to change the situation to make the desired change easier for both Rider and Elephant).

At first I was a little skeptical about this way of framing the divided self, but as I went through the book I came to see that it is indeed an apt analogy (and a neat organizational principle as well -- which always appeals to me).  

Here's a quick outline of their main points, with comments about how these fit into my two recent experiences with personal change:  becoming an athlete and overcoming a lifetime of overeating.

+ + + 

I.  Direct the Rider

A.  "Follow the bright spots:  Investigate what's working and clone it."  

The only recent exercise I had successfully stuck with was YMCA swimming lessons once a week.  So when I decided to exercise twice a week, I picked swimming.  

I didn't know about any normal-eating "bright spots" before I started, but an example of this would be if you picked up a book like Thin For Life:  10 Keys To Success from People Who Have Lost Weight and Kept It Off by Anne Fletcher -- which is based on data from the National Weight Control Registry -- and tried to follow their recommendations.

B.  "Script the critical moves.  Don't think about the big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors."  By this they mean, identify one or two specific action items that pack a big punch.  

The perfect example of this is the four-point "No S Diet" published by Reinhard Engels.  It goes like this:  "No snacks, no sweets, no seconds, except on days that begin with S."  Easy to remember, and really quite effective for many people.    As for me, it took a long time for me to discover the critical moves for reducing my own weight, but now that I have them, the task of maintaining is much easier.  They are:  no seconds, no bedtime snacks, sharply curtail alcohol, use small plates.  If I concentrate on those four rules, my weight goes down surprisingly quickly.

As for exercising, I guess you could say that my "specific behavior" was "Get in the pool twice a week."  If I do that, I get enough exercise.

 C.  Point to the Destination:  Change is easier when you know where you're going and why it's worth it."  

I didn't need much intellectual convincing that it was a good idea to get some exercise.   Here's a post I wrote about the non-weight-loss benefits of regular exercise.

As for overeating, you might think that I would know intellectually my whole life "where I was going," but actually I didn't.  It wasn't until my intellect grasped the (should-have-been-obvious) fact that I was simply eating too much food that I was able to make the change.

 

II.  Motivate the Elephant.

A.  Find the Feeling.  "Knowing ... isn't enough..."

One of the things that went "click" for me and let me stop overeating was the onset of a feeling -- the feeling of being really sick of overeating itself.  When I suddenly started to feel disgusted with my behavior (rather than with my appearance), I started to act to change.  And (before I decided it was bad for my sense of compassion) I used to deliberately linger over watching other people's disgustingly gluttonous behavior, e.g., at salad bars.  Effective, if spiritually damaging.

B.  Shrink the change.  "Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant."

Oh yes, this is a big one:  measuring my successes meal by meal, snack by snack, and workout by workout.

C.  Grow... "Cultivate a sense of identity." 

I definitely did this.  I set out to create an identity of myself as a person who exercises, an "athlete."  I imagined myself as a "person who goes to the gym" -- and then I tried to do what I thought that person would do.  It is more than just "Well, she'd go to the gym, duh!"  When it's an entire identity, you have to fill in lots of details of character.  

A person who was like me, except she goes to the gym.... well, she'd have two sets of workout clothes, not one.  And she'd keep her bag packed all the time and in the car so as not to miss an opportunity.  And she would be the sort of mother who expects her kids to manage in the gym child care for half an hour, not the sort who would reflexively reject gym child care.  And she would occasionally take a yoga class if she happened to arrive at just the right time.  And she wouldn't care if occasionally slipping that workout in meant she would wind up washing her hair twice in a day, or that she would have wet hair or wrinkled clothes when she got where she was going. "Sorry I look like a mess, I just came from the gym," she would say.

As for overeating, well, that's the power of the mantra, "I don't do that anymore."  I have observed before that when maintenance requires me to go back to extra-careful eating, it takes me a few days to settle back into the pattern of impulse resistance, almost as if I had forgotten how to do it.  I wonder now if it doesn't take a few days to switch into the "identity" of a non-glutton.  

III.  Shape the path. 

A.  Tweak the environment.  "When the situation changes, the behavior changes."

So many strategies here.  Buying smaller, divided dinner plates was, I'm convinced, the single most helpful environmental change that I made.  

B.  Build habits.  "When behavior is habitual, it... doesn't tax the Rider.  Look for ways to encourage habits."  [including checklists and what the authors call "action triggers," i.e., decisions "to execute a certain action...when you encounter a certain situational trigger."]

I've written a lot about habits, so that's nothing new, but I like the concept of the "action trigger," which the authors recommend for motivating people to "do the things they know they need to do."   One example of an action trigger might be, "I'll change the batteries in my smoke detectors on the same day that I change the clocks."  The authors say that dreaming up an action trigger reduces personal resistance enough to be like creating an "instant habit" -- and if that's correct, then it's powerful indeed.

An example from my overeating life would be when I decided that when I finish my first plate of dinner, I'll get up and get a cup of coffee or a piece of gum.  From my exercising life:  "I'll head to the Y right after the preschool music class every week."    

Everything gets a lot easier when you're in the habit, but making these little micro-plans -- basically just deciding when and where you're going to do something, and taking a moment to imagine it happening -- could perhaps carry you along until the habits are established.

C.  Rally the herd.  "Behavior is contagious.  Help it spread."  

This one has more to do with encouraging change in a group (for example, how managers might get a whole slew of employees to adopt new safety rules) but I still think I saw some of it in my own change.  For one thing, I tried very hard to look to my fit and active and not-at-all-gluttonous husband as an example, and as part of my change -- it's hard to see which came first here -- we reinforced our whole-family identity as "a family who does active things together."

And I am sure that it helped me feel comfortable in my new role as "a person who exercises" that I was part of a larger organization, a member at my local YMCA, and that two or three times a week I was literally surrounding myself with people who already were who I aspired to be:  "a person who goes to the gym."  I felt that identity coalescing as I found that I knew the names of the staff and they recognized me, as I nodded hello to the same people I saw from time to time in the locker rooms, as my kids got comfortable in the child care and made "favorite" friends among the staff.

I think that blogging about it helped too.  There is a certain risk you take in announcing to the world that you're making a change.  I admit that I feel responsibility toward "the blog" to stay on habit at this point!  I don't want to let you all down!

 + + +

This post has gone on long enough, so I'll end here, but I'm pleased at how it coincided so neatly with the start of the new year!  I'm not making any new year's resolutions myself, but I wish the best to any of you who are.  

(Just do it at some other YMCA, not mine.  The parking is bad enough as it is.  Ah, January...)

This is just the kind of thing I've been talking about!

If you liked my tea post, you MUST read this story at Shoved To Them. 

 Part 1 

 Part 2

Labels.

I've been thinking lately about whether I ought, someday, to get myself screened for Asperger's syndrome.    It's something I've been pondering for a while, really ever since I first heard about the classification.  (It wasn't identified widely as a distinct syndrome until 1994, when I was about twenty an adult) [corrected:  added text  in red].  Lately it's come to my attention more directly because the 6-year-old son of one of my good friends has recently received a diagnosis.  

In the absence of a professional diagnosis, I make the assumption with a grain of salt, but at this point I'm assuming that if I went through such a screening I would indeed be diagnosed with Asperger's.  There are a couple of online quizzes around to find out your "Asperger's Quotient," and I have taken them and score quite high, but most of my conviction comes from descriptions in what I've read, both by clinicians who work with people who have Asperger's diagnoses and by those people themselves.  

This is something that interests me mainly for entertainment value.   It's kind of fun to point at the various weirdnesses of my character, like the fact that I can't stand to have my plans changed, or my touch of synaesthesia**, or my intense discomfort at parties, and say "There's another marker of it!"  

The whole thing, especially looking around me at some of the children I know, has got me thinking about whether it is good, bad, or neutral to have a "label" for such a syndrome.   A lot of it depends on how the label is used.  A lot of the stigma of having a labeled diagnosis is gone; on the other hand, there is a tendency today to slot people into boxes based on diagnoses.  And different people feel differently about those who have been "labeled" in some way.  

Ironically, being the sort of person I am is

 (a) liable to get me a diagnosis of Asperger's if I look for it

 (b) liable to make me think a certain way about the label of Asperger's 

(c) liable to make me unable to predict how [cough] "normal" people react to that label.

Incidentally, I should add that in the controversy over whether Asperger's syndrome is a "disorder" or a "difference" -- I have to say that I come down on the side of "difference."  The personality traits that are characteristic of Asperger's have benefits as well as difficulties -- and I don't mean that there are "good traits and bad traits," I mean that the same traits often have a flip side to them.  I think a lot of the troubles that some individuals with Aspergers have, especially as children, are mostly products of institutional expectations -- the way that schools are run and maybe have to be run, for instance, or the accepted formats of things like job interviews.

I was lonely as a child, with few friends.  But I would not trade the person I am today for a less lonely childhood.  Should a pill ever be invented that would suppress "Aspergerism," I wouldn't go back in time and medicate my five/six/seven-year-old self, or even my young adult self.  

On the other hand, I wish sometimes I could go back to the time before I knew of this neurological variant, and tell myself that my problems fitting in, my essential weirdness, were not because I was a bad, selfish kid; go back to being pregnant with my first child and tell myself, "Stop feeling sorry for your unborn baby because he has to have you for a mother." 

 Because having this label for myself has helped me.  I always thought there was essentially a moral failure there, and it made it so hard when I kept trying and failing to meet outward expectations.  It sounds like I'm trying to make excuses for not changing.   No, what I want to say is this:   understanding that the difficulties I have may be neurological -- not moral -- understanding that has shown me that I do have the ability to make my way in the world without hurting other people.  If it were a moral failure, if I was essentially a selfish person (as adults told me when I was a kid) then I couldn't change the way I behave towards people, or maybe I wouldn't care.  But instead I know that it's more a matter of being aware of the differences between myself and most people, and that the things I have trouble with are skills that can be learned, even if they don't come naturally to me.   

Here's an example.  Hannah called me last night to ask if I could watch her kids for her this morning.  Now, I already had plans for the morning.  They weren't the kind of plans that can't be changed:  we were all going to go to the gym while Oscar had his swimming lesson.  Nevertheless, the idea agitated me.  Changing plans always agitates me.  I am always thinking that whoever asked me to change my plans is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE.    I almost said no.  

But!  Knowledge of this label helped me here:

• Because I have an understanding of myself as probably someone with Aspergers syndrome, i.e., someone who's different from the general population, I understand that most people are able to change plans without agitation.
• Therefore, most people expect a certain amount of plans-changing.  
• Therefore it's not unreasonable for a good friend to ask me to watch her kids on short notice.  
• Also, I am aware that she would do the same thing for me, and it is only fair that I should do the same for her.  
• It is one of my long-term goals to be a more hospitable person and a good friend.  
• Hospitable people welcome unexpected guests.  Good friends help each other on short notice if they can.  
• I can help in this situation.
• Therefore the correct answer is....  "Yes, Hannah, of course I can do that."  QED.

(I tried to use a tone of voice that would convey that I was actually happy to help out, but probably failed there.  Fortunately, I think, Hannah is used to this from me.)

In a way, I like having the Asperger's label because it's useful for me to have a label for other people.  I don't really need to have a label for myself.  I understand myself fine.  But because there is a special syndrome that describes people kind of like me, I can turn that around and use it to understand the people who are not like me, but who nevertheless are quite common.  

People without Asperger syndrome have the following characteristics:

• they are extraordinarily eager to talk to many different kinds of people... 
• they obsessively insist on making eye contact with others who talk to them...
• they engage in bizarre rituals in which they must begin a conversation by discussing irrelevancies such as the weather or the performance of local sports teams before introducing the subject that is the purpose of the conversation...
• they show unusual apathy about numbers, lists, and classifications... 
• they can perform certain athletic maneuvers with uncanny accuracy... 
• they make friends promiscuously...

You get the idea.  If I can intellectually understand the expectations the world places on me, I can make my way in it far more easily.

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** The kind of synaesthesia I suspect I have (see my post about it -- what to call it, kineto-graphic?) is not one that anyone seems to have a "test" for.  I recently thought of a way of designing a test that could be performed on me, and compared to the results given by other people, which might be able to determine whether I really am synaesthetic or whether I'm deluding myself because I just think it is so cool that I might really be a synaesthete.  I can't administer such a test to myself though, because I would already know the answers, so to speak.  If anyone is interested in working with me on such a project, let me know.

For you crafty parents.

A roundup of patterns for making play food out of felt.  Pizzas, waffle cones, saltines, ravioli, Chinese-takeout box, banana and more.

In charge of Christmas.

Here I am in Minneapolis with nowhere to go, the impending birth of #4 preventing us from traveling.  We have never spent Christmas in our own home, not in 11 years of marriage, and have always gone back to Ohio, where other people baked the cookies and trimmed the tree and cooked the Christmas dinner (and bought lots of presents for the kids).

On the one hand, it's nice to get all the way through Advent with our own wreath.  On the other hand, now we have to do all the STUFF.

I am getting it done in bits and pieces.  I wrapped presents last weekend.   Working a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there, I made cookies all week:  Grandma's Hungarian cookies (jam-filled rich sugar cookies), mini pecan tarts, chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons, and finally some chocolate caramel pecan thumbprint cookies that I thought Mark would like.  We have plans to have Christmas Eve dinner with friends, although we haven't managed to schedule a Christmas dinner, so we might well be eating tuna salad at home (unless we decide to settle for "Chinese turkey" -- I hear Shuang Cheng in Dinkytown is going to be open...)

We put the tree up today, an artificial tree we haven't put up in probably six or seven years.  I handed Mark the string of lights and reminded him, "It's traditional to yell at the kids to stay away from you and get out of your way and stop bothering you until you get the lights on the tree."  He gave me a quizzical look, went into the other room, and had the lights on the tree in about three minutes.  I guess they didn't have that tradition in HIS family when he was growing up.

We were going to save the ornament-putting for tomorrow, but the kids dove into the box and started before we could stop them, so we shrugged and let 'er rip.  The children exclaimed over the ornaments.  It is the first time they have seen many of them, because... well, because we've never had the tree up before, except once or twice when Oscar was a baby. 

I said to Mark as we were setting it all up, "It's almost like our first Christmas together, like being newlyweds."  And it really did have a little bit of that feeling.

He said, "It is.  It is 'our first' Christmas, our first own Christmas."  A pause.  "But I admit I'm still a little worried I'll be lonely, not being at home."  I know what he means.