with these two hands

New Blog

2011-04-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

I wanted to give WordPress a try, so I've started a new blog - Please come on over and let me know what you think: Rock Farmer

Fresh Eggs

2010-08-02T17:27:00.000-07:00

I love our chickens. I just handed a fresh egg, minutes old and still warm from the hen, through the fence to our neighbor.

Summer Tent at Midnight

2010-07-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

The tent at midnight

back wall

view through the walls

view out to the raccoon-infested yard

We finally had a bit of hot weather, and the first Summer Tent Mamas Night. Good conversation, sorbet, and raspberries under the twinkly lights, with the raccoons skulking just feet away in the dark, trying to hack the bird feeder. I hope we get more warm nights, so there can be many more nights in the tent.

1st of July

2010-07-02T00:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the 1st of July. I wore my wool coat and seriously contemplated turning on the heat at home. We've had cold early summers before, and I'm sure we'll have them again, but I am ready for some sunshine and some heat. I want to fall asleep to the sound of the fan clicking as it finishes each turn from left to right, I want to eat bowls of cold quinoa tabouli for dinner and find the chill refreshing, I want enough heat that I can't wait to switch from flannel to cotton sheets, sheets that will be smooth and icy delicious.

I love where I live, partly because the climate is all about delayed gratification. But sometimes the waiting drives me a little bit crazy with desire.

Raspberries

2010-06-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

Our raspberries are getting ripe. Last weekend, we picked 9; now we have enough to graze for breakfast each morning, and more ripe by lunchtime, and then another flush for dinner.

Suddenly, there are enough to eat by the mouthful,
not just one-at-a-time.

Summer Tent Update

2010-06-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

Summer Tent Update: We're ready to go - The rain has dried, the sun has been shining, we have fresh rose petals to sprinkle about. Our first all-ages tea party of the summer tent season will be tomorrow afternoon, and my first adult-only nighttime summer tent shindig will be on a Saturday night in early July...The Summer Tent: Fun for all ages.

Summer Tent & Swine Flu

2010-06-29T23:47:00.000-07:00

We managed to set up the Summer Tent just in time for the overcast solstice. Now we're waiting for some sunshine to heat things up, so we want to rest it our shady tent. In the meantime, I'm drinking hot tea out there and shivering off the flu. Between this viral attack and the weather, it really does feel a bit like fall around here. Still, the raspberries are getting ripe and the girls are finally wearing short-sleeved shirts - Summer has come at last!

These photos are of the first draft of this year's Summer Tent. We've been tinkering with things since I took these, and the ground is finally dry enough for a pile of pillows on a carpet of blankets. It's a work in progress until the day we take it down!

GFCF Challah - When the Braid Matters

2010-02-13T22:50:00.000-08:00

We've been eating Grainaissance original mochi hot from the oven in place of challah since we switched to a GFCF diet. Of all the gluten-filled foods we don't eat any more, challah is one of the only things I miss. I haven't tried any of the GF recipes I've found online, because I just knew the taste and texture wouldn't match up with my memory. I'd rather find new foods than eat not-quite-right versions of traditional foods. Still, my girls miss having fresh home-baked challah for Shabbat, and I miss my weekly kneading-braiding-baking ritual. This past week, I had a pot of soup ready for Shabbat dinner, and I really wanted fresh bread to serve with it - Mochi just wasn't going to be quite right. I was running through a mental list of possibilities when I hit upon Chebe. It's such well-behaved dough, I just knew it would be easy to braid, and would hold its shape. I figured the dissonance between taste and memory would be avoided by the very fact that the two, challah and Chebe, are so very different.

I preheated the oven, mixed up a package of dough, helped Chava & Mimzy make circular braids, and put together 2 small 4-strand loaves, popped them into the oven and baked them for about 18 minutes. In less than 45 minutes, we had fresh Chebe challah ready for Shabbat dinner.

If you're looking for a GF challah, and the braid matters, give Chebe's original mix a try. Follow the basic directions, braid as desired, coat with olive oil, add sesame or poppy seeds if you like, and bake until the top is golden brown. We used 1 package of regular mix to create 4 small challot, each a generous one-person loaf. Next time I'll try making one larger 5-strand challah, hoping that the center will cook through before the top is too brown.

How We Went GFCF Without Going Crazy

2010-01-31T20:02:00.000-08:00

I gave myself 4 months to switch to a GFCF diet. I'm a big believer in the idea that change is more sustainable in the long term when it's implemented one step at a time, so that each step seems almost too small, spurring you to take the next one.

For each (casein/gluten), I started my focus by using up whatever we had at home and by purchasing only safe new items. Then I moved my focus out of the house to school/parties/play dates.

For month #1, my focus was on casein. I used up the butter, cheese & yogurt we had at home (I didn't throw anything away, since Mimzy & I could eat it up), and I started checking labels to be sure that everything I was buying was casein-free. By the end of the first month, we had no casein products in the house (dairy is so much easier to eradicate quickly, since it doesn't sit in the cupboards like crackers & pasta!).

During month #2, I started focusing on casein exposure outside of the home at preschool, birthday parties, and play dates, and I started experimenting with replacements that I could easily pack & send. I notified Chava's schools during the first week of the month, thought about how to manage play dates the 2nd week, thought about other kids’ future birthday parties during the 3rd week. I did not try to do everything at once, and I didn't even want to know if Chava ate a cheese stick at someone else's house. I purposely let things like that fall off my radar so I didn't go crazy. Of course, by this point, Chava had figured out what was going on and was screening food for herself, but that's not always what happens! I think she was feeling so much better, she really didn't want any casein in her body, and she was making sure no one gave her any. Also, she loves black-and-white rules, and this was one she got to enforce – Ah, the heady thrill of being in charge! This same month, I started to eliminate gluten in the house, following the same method I used for casein. I used up crackers & bread for myself and Mimzy, gave away the rest of our back stock of pasta and flour (we had a LOT), and started buying only GFCF products to replace things we eat at home.

During month #3, I started notifying family & friends that we would love to see people to share experiences instead of food (trip to the park w/ the grandparents instead of big gluten & casein-laden meals, etc). I found a couple of easy GFCF recipes for things like potlucks, so I'd be prepared, and I baked & froze a dozen GFCF cupcakes, so we'd always have a couple handy for other kids' birthday parties. I notified Chava's schools that she was GFCF and made sure that her snacks at school & play dates were all safe. I started asking around about local restaurants to find places we could safely eat out.

During month #4, I started thinking about cross-contamination from things like our cutting boards, cast iron skillets, shampoo/soap/lotion, etc. By the end of this month, I had managed to get rid of as much of that sort of gluten & casein exposure as possible, and our diet was GFCF both at home and away.

2010-01-30T20:43:00.000-08:00

Here's the essay I read today as part of a panel discussion about autism at a health fair. It's funny, I love public speaking, and I used to be able to breathe and speak and enjoy myself while talking away to a roomful of strangers. But whenever I talk about this topic, I struggle to breathe, to keep my voice from wobbling, to read my own words without stumbling over and over them. Anyway, here's what I shared:

When my daughter was almost 5 years old, after many years of asking her various doctors for explanations and assistance, she was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome.

I was so accustomed to being told that my child would “grow out of it”, or that my first-time-mother eyes were over-reacting, I fully expected to leave the neurologist’s office with more of that same message. Still, I can't say this diagnosis was much of a surprise to me. It explained the things I'd been pointing out to friends and family starting during her newborn days: Her active avoidance of eye contact, her lack of babbling, her obsession with ceiling fans, the long lines of plastic animals stretching across the living room (arranged by species, color and size, feet all perfectly aligned), her feelings about playgrounds, play dates, and parties. The afternoon we drove home from our diagnostic appointment with the pediatric neurologist, I was filled with overwhelming relief, and a sort of giddy happy-sadness, or was it sad-happiness…I’m sure there’s a German word for this complex emotion, but everything I felt was shot through with relief: Relief that this label would bring with it access to all sorts of professional help; relief that now I'd be able to focus on articles, studies, and ideas that would help me understand my child; relief that there would be no more midnight Googling of keywords and fragments of the whole that brought terrifying misinformation; relief that I would finally be able to help her to be a happier person, to have a happy childhood.

I know that not everyone wants an autism spectrum diagnosis for their child, but the idea of a label didn't scare me. I was more worried about the labels my child was already getting from her peers, teachers, and family members in the absence of a more official explanation. We needed help, and I was open to anything that would articulate how my child experiences the world, how to meet her where she was, and how to help her realize her potential. Being diagnosed on the autism spectrum didn’t change my child, and it didn’t change my love for her. My goals as a parent are the same as they were when I first felt her rolling like a sleepy, tangled eel in my body, or when I first held her glowing body in my arms - I want to be the sort of mother who can help her become a happy person, a person with a love of learning, with a love for other people and trust in their love for her, and a love for the world that translates into acts of loving-kindness, a person who has a rewarding and happy life.

Fortunately for my child and for every other child diagnosed today with ASD, there has never been a better time to be growing up with autism. There are professionals in a wide variety of fields who will not give up, who are researching and working and experimenting, thinking in new ways, and this has brought us concrete help. There is a vibrant ASD community that is connecting people with ASD to each other in new ways, and that is helping those of us in the neurotypical world to understand that everyone, even someone who is non-verbal, has plenty to say, that everyone matters. There are other parents who are traveling the same path, parents who really do know what I mean when I say that our trip to the bulk department of the grocery store didn’t go so well, and who share my deep joy when things go well at a birthday party.

All of this has added up to mean that my child is much happier today than she was 3 years ago; it means that she is growing up in a society in which autism is no longer invisible, and she benefits from this increased awareness, this growth both in compassion and in research; it means that I am a better parent because I better understand my child, and have found ways to nourish her, body, mind, and soul.

Please, if you suspect that your child may have autism, don’t give up – Be assertive, be bold, know that you are not alone, your child is not alone. There are people, out there in the wider world, and right here who will stand with you, who can help in many ways.

Poetry

2010-01-12T00:06:00.000-08:00

If you've never read any of Sherman Alexie's poetry, you ought to check out a copy of one of his collections from your closest library. Or splash out and buy a copy for yourself to keep. He's published several volumes that I haven't read yet, but I just rediscovered my beautiful letterpressed copy of Water Flowing Home and I've been carrying it around with me all day. My books of poetry have all been resting arranged on a bookshelf in my living room for the past 6 years, the tidy arrangement a testimony to the fact that I never read them anymore. For whatever reason, when last year got tough, I had a sudden craving for poems. Not for writing them, but for reading them. I've been printing them out and pinning them to my walls, folding them into my pockets, memorizing them and whispering them to myself in the shower. I am thankful for poets and poetry, for the power of words.

Note to Self Regarding the Cuisinart and Marunchinos

2009-11-10T00:11:00.000-08:00

The next time you want to mix the cardamom and rose water into a batch of marunchinos by hand, remove the dough from the Cuisinart beforehand. Because there is a sharp stainless steel blade hidden under the almonds and sugar and egg whites, and it's not fun to dig tiny pieces of almond and sugar and egg white out of a deep slice in your finger. Don't forget!

Marunchinos
Sephardic Almond Macaroons, Iraqi style

based on several recipes found online and in cookbooks, including Gloria Kaufer Greene's The New Jewish Holiday Cookbook

2 cups whole, raw almonds
2/3 cup raw organic sugar
2 large egg whites
1 tsp rose water
1/2 tsp ground cardamom

Preheat oven to 325. Line a baking sheet or two with parchment paper.

Using your food processor, pulse together the almonds and sugar until you have a very fine mixture - Don't overmix to turn the nuts into butter, though.

Add the egg whites, rose water, and cardamom and pulse until the dough forms a large, sticky ball.

Wet your hands and form dough into rounds about 1 1/4 inch wide. Press each down with a wet palm.

Bake for 15-20 minutes, until cookies are set but only browned the slightest bit along the edges. Slide parchment paper off of cookie sheet onto a rack, and let cookies cool completely before peeling them off. Store in an airtight container, if you have any left.

Optional: You can leave out the rose water and cardamom, substituting almond extract for the rose water, and using lemon zest in place of the cardamom. And if you like whole nuts as decor, top each cookie with a whole almond, or just a slice/sliver of one, pressed down into the dough. Personally, I hate a whole nut getting mixed into things, but I know others feel differently.

Long-Lost Foods

2009-11-08T21:52:00.000-08:00

Taste is supposed to be our strongest sensory memory, and my taste buds sure do seem to beat my mind when it comes to recall. In the early 1990's, I lived for a while with a very welcoming and lovely Saudi family in Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. While I was there, we went out for Indian food in a swanky restaurant, where we had Umm Ali for dessert. It was creamy, it was sweet, it had pistachios and sultanas and rosewater, and it tasted so incredibly perfect. I have had such a craving for another taste of this, it was the first thing I searched for when I got online for the first time, to no avail. Happily, the internet has finally caught up, but now I need a gluten-free version. Voila! It won't be the same, but I think it's worth a try. I'll post my version of the recipe as soon as I've had a chance to cook up a batch.

Do you have any long-lost foods that you crave but cannot find a recipe for?

Chava's Mixed Media Gallery & Homeschool Update

2009-10-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

Untitled, watercolor

Garden plan, colored pencil

Parts of a flowering plant, pen

"The sea ice is a bad place to lose a dog", colored pencil
(inspired by Jan Brett's The Three Snow Bears)

Untitled, colored pencil

"Brownies at camp", pen

Chava has been drawing maps, food chains, food webs, specific plant and animal life cycle charts, and people. People are a relatively new addition to her imagery. In the past, she has been much more interested in drawing animals, machines of her own creation, and the other things listed above. She would draw a person if cajoled, but only rarely of her own volition. The other day, much to my quiet surprise, she cranked out a series of girls wearing fancy dresses; they were drawn out in computer-esque format, as a series of possible options for any interested party to choose from. The first girl even had a menu of options in boxes - Eye color and wardrobe choices. This is what happens when your father has just found employment with an MMORPG (that's Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game for those of us who aren't so much geeks), and your father has been showing you how to create your own ass-kicking elf.

Chava's Brownies troop started meeting this week, and she has been working on a series of drawings of the campground she plans to build for her troop on a private island. I especially like the way she draws their brown vests; the fabric is so stiff, they really are boxy, and must not be all that comfortable in real life, just the way they appear in her drawing.

We've also been working on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Chava likes the Oak Meadow mathematic process elves, and has been working drawings of those into the pages of "math sentences" she writes. Arrays are also a hit - All those tidy aligned rows and columns of items; what's not to love in such order and precision?

Mimzy's Watercolor Gallery

2009-10-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

"China"

"Wild West: Palo Verde tree, water, and Saguaro"

"Cowgirl riding her horse Flame"

"Watercolors are fun to paint in"
(watercolor and Aquarelle pencil)

Mimzy and I had a chance to hang out just with each other today, and we decided to give watercolors a try. Chava loved watercolors but disliked crayons when she was about Mimzy's age; Mimzy had been the opposite. Today, though, she grasped the wash-your-brush-between-colors idea, and she had a great time.

"These colors are so beautiful!" was the first thing she said, and she quickly filled up all of her papers and wanted more, more, more. Her vocabulary of representational images is growing quickly, and this amazes me...Chava was more of an abstract artist, and has only just recently drawn people of her own volition. Mimzy is drawing the classic round people with stick arms and legs, and she has also started to write her own name, both forwards and backwards, across every paper she finds.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat, Repeated

2009-10-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

The theme for High Holy Days at my chavurah this year was Prayers of the Heart...I dusted this off, edited it a bit, and read it during services on Erev Rosh Hashanah. I like this version even better than the original, which is how editing is supposed to work, I think. It's been a long time since I've read anything I've written aloud, and it was more exciting than terrifying, although it was plenty terrifying.

I’d love to think that the prayer of my heart would come wrapped it words of great beauty and poetry, but mine revealed itself to be much less flashy. One regular old day over a year ago, while driving along Madison Avenue past the library, heading from one daily errand to the next, three words leapt from my heart then repeated themselves until I spoke them aloud:

Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

This has been my prayer ever since, these words my heart gleaned from a shampoo bottle. This prayer of mine is descriptive - It sums up my life as mother of two young children fairly well - And it's hopeful. Yes, there is the lather, but there's also the rinsing, and then there's the promise of the repeat, of the second bite at the apple, at the chance to change the next cycle.

We have plenty of lather - Rushing to appointments, always 10 minutes late; meltdowns in the bulk department of T & C; frustration and anger on all sides; tears of sorrow; screams of panic and fear; restless, unsettled nights; crazed laughter and running dances that almost always end in injury.

We have plenty of rinsing - Clear water showers and baths, and dips in the salty sound, and the sort of rinsing that comes in moments of shared focus - On the beauty of a bug, on the colors of the setting sun caught in the rain clouds above our yard. Love rinses us, and joy, and our smiles through the lights of our Shabbat candles. I even get moments of rock-solid conviction that all is right, that all will be right with the world. And then, just when I start to melt into peace, or just before I've even caught my breath, it's time to lather up again.

It can be a quick cycle, and sometimes it feels like it's going to spin out of balance, but there's hope in my prayer. Lather follows rinse follows lather as day follows night follows day. There's a chance with each cycle to try something new, to tweak only one tiny bit, or to shake things up at the root, knowing that the next chance to try the same thing again will come soon if this change doesn't go so well. And when I don't have the energy for any changing, at least I know that soon, very soon, there will be a rinse to renew me, or a lather to wake me up.

I remind myself every day that this, too, shall pass - Both the moments of exhaustion and frustration, and the moments of clear joy and peace. This past year has brought so much lather, I have learned that it is possible to live with the soapy taste in my mouth and the sting in my eyes, to go for longer than I thought possible between rinses, or to get by with just a bit of rinse, just enough to clear my vision, but not enough to wash my hands clean. And this has been OK. In truth, it has been a blessing, and it makes my heart sing out its shampoo bottle prayer. Sometimes my prayer has all the supplication of a “please” in it, beseeching for the next rinse; sometimes it has all the wealth of a “thank You”, in gratitude for the cycle itself, for the repeat, repeat, repeat.

These Days of Awe bring the best rinse of the year. The rinse of the shofar, of our voices raised together and held in silence, the rinse of clarity that comes with fasting; all of this resets the whole pattern, leaves me praying for another year of lather, rinse, repeat, for myself and for all of us.

Sukkot 5770

2009-10-04T12:44:00.001-07:00

Someday I'll get back to blogging. For now, some photos of our sukkah. This is the best Sukkot weather I can remember, and this sukkah is making me very happy.

Up To Speed

2009-04-01T01:10:00.000-07:00

What I've been up to since New Year's Day:
-cooking
-cleaning
-laundry
-tried to keep my feet warm on these icy floors during a long winter
-2 trips to the zoo
-1 family birthday party for Mimzy
-1 school party for Mimzy (really just delivery of GFCF chocolate cupcakes, easy-peasy)
-facilitated a school-wide vision meeting
-served as point person for Chava's school open house
-1 school project fair with Chava (she exhibited the film of her Greek myth plays)
-separated from my husband, year-2000 style. google "bird nesting" for more info
-met with a social worker at our local community services organization
-partially filled out the DSHS application supplied by the social worker
-turned 40
-completed will, finally
-baked a really good pie (Fuji apples, frozen blackberries, picked at the park last summer)
-took a trip to the mountains with the girls and my own mother
-got a haircut

Not necessarily in that order.
It's been a bit busy around here.

Lost Photos Found

2009-01-01T20:53:00.000-08:00

L.C, L, R

Sapphire & Opalescent Glass Choker

Detail, Sapphire & Opalescent Glass Choker

Freshwater Pearl & Vintage Crystal Choker

Detail, Freshwater Pearl & Vintage Crystal Choker

Vintage Gunmetal Glass, Hematite & Freshwater Pearl Necklace

Detail, Vintage Gunmetal Glass, Hematite & Freshwater Pearl Necklace

One of the fringe benefits of setting up my studio after several years away from my workbench has been unearthing forgotten items and photos. I found these last night and have been missing my friends on this New Year's Day. I always get a bit melancholy when a new year begins, while I'm also excited for the future and what will be revealed. I hope there is a great year in store for all of us.

I started my jewelry business in 1991 with my best friend, L.C. We used a $5,000 loan to grow our business from a weekend market-only thing into full-time employment. L.C. moved back to her desert town after the first year, and it took our friendship a couple of years to recover from the strain of running a business together. Luckily, we salvaged the important things and we reunited years later for joint trunk shows. Then we came up with a group project with L, another jewelry designer friend: We each picked one grouping of materials, which each of us used to make one piece of jewelry. L.C. picked gunmetal glass and complementary materials, L picked white pearls and clear crystal, and I picked sapphires, opals, and opalescent glass.

We used these sample pieces to apply for a summer show and had a great time putting together our booth. It was a great show, and so much fun to spend the long weekend with each other, drinking lemonade and selling each others' work. L.C.'s work is heavy, intricate - Her pieces always remind me of archeological finds, treasures from some lost civilization. L's work is delicate, and for this collection she wove pieces as an ode to her Grandmother's lace work. My own pieces were part of my experiments with chokers using two rows of cold-forged metalwork or intricate loops of chain - I like the complex puzzle of planes, having to get things just-so in order to make solid metal encircle the neck gracefully and with comfort.

These photos are my versions of the three material groupings. It's too bad L.C, L and I live so far away from each other. I miss our collective, I miss working alone-but-connected with such creative women.

Sleepover = Studio

2008-12-29T22:56:00.000-08:00

workbench

storage area - now with wall shelves!

raw materials, organized by color

Chava & Mimzy are sleeping at my folks' tonight, their very first mama-free night ever. I hope they're asleep by now, but my parents didn't feed them dinner until 8 pm, so who knows what's really happening. I feel a little like I did the first time I dropped Chava off at preschool. She was happy, waving goodbye to me, and I spent the first minute driving slowly because everything was blurry through my tears. Then I felt dangerously free, untethered from reality, like I might just float away without the weight of the diaper bag on my shoulder and her hand in mine. Instead, I went to the bakery and had a decaf Americano with cream.

Tonight, instead of floating into the cold cloudy sky, I am setting up my studio. I have found forgotten treasures, and things not forgotten but thought lost. I am surprised - I thought I might be done making jewelry, but I'm excited. I have some non-jewelry work in mind, too, but first I want to wrestle up some new pieces to wear and to sell.

That's a relief. I was a little worried I'd need to find a new path to work-bliss, but I think this one is still worth treading.

Late Addition to the Quirk Catalog

2008-12-24T22:31:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, I'm obsessed with socks. As obsessions go, this is probably pretty healthy. If it goes on much longer, I'll have to add it to my own catalog of quirks.

When I was a girl, my mom had a museum gift shop book of Van Gogh paintings from an exhibit she had visited. I loved Van Gogh, and I loved this book, but there was one painting in particular that I spent hours contemplating. Nude Woman Reclining features a woman reclining on a field of green, wearing only white socks and a pair of shoes. It bothered me that it was considered a nude, since she was wearing some clothing, and it bothered me that she was wearing socks. Socks! Knee-highs, no less. The very antithesis of cool. So very odd. The only reason I knew of for wearing knee socks was either because your mother told you to when you complained that the wood floors were too cold, or with other clothing because you were going to be running around outside. I think I've mentioned before that there were some nudists in my family? Well, I'd seen some of them in strange outfits (nude except for gardening knee pads and a practical sunhat while weeding outside, nude except for work socks while rushing to get dinner started before they started up their end-of-day shower), and none of those outfits ever struck me as the slightest bit worthy of being memorialized in oil paints.

I remember asking my mom, more than once, to explain the socks, and she always answered, "well, I guess it's because the socks are sexy". That bothered me because I just couldn't get my young mind to a place where socks were attractive at all, let alone sexy enough to honor with a painting.

I am changing my mind about socks. I live in a cold climate, and I am determined to reclaim socks as cool, if not downright hot. How wonderful would it be if we lived in a world where people found each other attractive in practical clothing? I think this is a dream that's very rooted in the culture of the Pacific Northwest, birthplace of Grunge, and current hotbed of Crocs-wearing adults.

Anyway, I ordered myself some new socks from a Northwest company that seems to share my vision, and will be doing my quiet and private best (except for broadcasting this to the internet, or course), to bring socks back.

Rules of Chava Land

2008-12-24T20:46:00.000-08:00

Chava really loves rules, and has been busy writing up lists of household rules for all of us this week.

This morning, she put together a list of rules for Chava Land, that perfect land with many animals, but only one person - Chava! She says that she is the only person allowed to live there, but she's working on figuring out a way for me to get there for a visit.

So, here is the flag of Chava Land with an iconic list of rules, so that even Mimzy can read them:

Yes to Hats
Yes to Food
Yes to Clothes
No Axes
Yes to Pets
No skyscrapers (because it is a magical land, and skyscrapers are not at all magical)

Gingerbread House

2008-12-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

We had a gingerbread house party for Chava's birthday in November - Guests made little houses from graham crackers, and I baked GF gingerbread for Chava & Mimzy's house. Here is the finished mansion, minus the doors, thanks to Loki who jumped onto the table in the night and ate them, and minus quite a few gumdrops thanks to Mimzy.

The prone form of Mimzy's Playmobil man known to her as Bob The Builder can be seen through the window. I don't know what happened in there, but it looks like Bob has fallen and can't get up. The girls' flower fairies from one of the multi-age one-room-homeschool-house craft days are guarding the outside.

Full Circle - GFCF Sufganiyot

2008-12-22T20:31:00.000-08:00

Frying

Freshly sugared

All sugared and filled with jelly

Mmmmmmmm

As I was standing over a skillet full of hot oil this evening, I realized that I've been blogging for one Jewish year now. My very first post was about my very first batch of GFCF sufganiyot, cooked up just after we had gone gluten-free last winter. Tonight I cooked up this year's first batch, with some decent results. I'm still not happy with the density of the finished sufganiyot, but that might be unavoidable. I want sublime yeasty-fluffy insides, but I get something more like an old-fashioned buttermilk doughnut. Still - Fried dough dusted with sugar! What could really be wrong with that?

I already want to go on an all-greens diet, and we're only 2 nights into the Festival of Lights.

Oy.

For those of you looking for a GFCF Sufganiyot recipe, here's mine. This is based on Gloria Kaufer Greene's soofganiyot recipe in her wonderful work, The New Jewish Holiday Cookbook. If you had to pick just one Jewish cookbook, this would be a fine choice. It has a great mixture of Ashkenazic and Sephardic recipes, and everything I've made from here has been delicious or better than delicious.

Here's my version:

3 - 4 cups GF flour blend, your mix of choice. I like this one and these. Someday I'll make my own.
1 - 2 tsp xanthan gum (depending on whether there's any in your flour blend)
1/3 cup raw organic sugar
4 1/2 tsp GF fast-acting dry yeast (aka bread machine yeast)
1 tsp sea salt
1/3 cup your favorite oil or melted ghee, or a combination of oil/ghee (if you choose ghee, let it cool a bit after melting it)
1 cup milk, your favorite kind. I used 3/4 cup hemp milk and 1/4 cup coconut milk.
2 large eggs

sugar for coating - I like raw sugar, but powdered works, too
jam for filling - seedless raspberry is always yummy

Oil for frying - Canola works well, so does Spectrum organic non-hydrogenated shortening

Heat the milk to just about body temp (and no more than 120 or 130 degrees!)
Whisk 2 1/2 cups of GF flour, xanthan gum, sugar, yeast and salt together in a large bowl. Stir in the oil/ghee, then pour in the heated milk and stir until smooth. Add the eggs and stir again until smooth - The dough will be very stiff, so put some muscle into this and enjoy the free workout.

Add enough extra GF flour to make a smooth, sticky, soft dough - Add about 1/4 cup at a time, and mix well after each addition. Stop when the dough has pulled together into a ball, and you can touch it gently without the entire thing sticking to you finger.

Transfer to a lightly oiled bowl, putting the dough in, then turning it over, so the top surface is lightly oiled from touching the bottom of the bowl. Cover the bowl with saran wrap or waxed paper and a dishtowel. Let rest in a warm place for about 30 minutes, or until dough has risen to about twice its original size.

Turn dough onto a lightly floured piece of parchment paper and knead a few times, or until smooth. There isn't any gluten here, so you're not going to get a lovely, springy dough - Just go for a uniform smooth texture. Pat into a rectangle, top with another piece of parchment and roll into a slab about 1/2" to 3/4" thick. Cut into circles about 2" in diameter (I use a small drinking glass for this, dusting the rim w/ flour to keep it from sticking).

Set dough circles onto parchment sheets on baking trays and let rest in a warm spot for about 30 minutes to rise a bit. While they rest, start heating the oil. Fill a heavy skillet (I love cast iron for this) or electric frying pan with 2" of oil, and heat to about 325 to 350 degrees.

Gently set doughnuts into oil, leaving some space so they can move a bit without hitting each other. Cook about 2-3 minutes per side, or until they are golden brown. Start with one lone doughnut, so you can break it open to make sure it's cooked inside. If it's too brown outside and raw inside, turn the heat down a bit.

As doughnuts are cooked, remove them and let them rest a minute on a crumpled paper bag or paper towels. As soon as they are cool enough to handle, roll each one in a bowl of sugar to coat the outside. When all of the sufganiyot are cooked and sugared, fill each one with a bit of jam. You can use a pastry bag with a special attachment, spoon some jam in after cutting a tiny hole on the side, or use a clean plastic medicine syringe with a wide tip (my own favorite jam delivery device).

Eat as soon as possible, as these are best when they are warm. They're OK the next day, especially if you microwave them for just a few seconds to warm them up.

I will try an extra egg next time, to see what happens to the texture. I'll also try skipping the second rising period by cutting the doughnuts before the first rise. That second rise doesn't seem to do much for GF dough.

Happy Hanukkah

2008-12-21T14:47:00.000-08:00

I wish there was an army of hearty Maccabees to shovel my drive...Or that I was filled with enough of their hammer-riffic soul to do it myself. I'm ready to take on a tyrant, but I'm not sure I'm up for dealing with all this snow.

Shower Rorschach

2008-12-20T17:55:00.000-08:00

When you've been listening to your spouse go on and on about James Bond, it's possible that you will start to see the dancing girls from the opening credits all around you.

Snow, snow, snow

2008-12-20T00:31:00.000-08:00

So it snowed here the other day, and for once the snow has stuck around. Now we're waiting for a new storm to move in, bringing more snow and maybe some wind. A couple of years ago, we lost power in an icy wind storm on the first night of Hanukkah; maybe we'll get a repeat of that this year. I hope not - I'm really looking forward to frying up my first pan of crispy latkes, and I've even found a way to cook apples that works for Chava. This year, we'll all be able to enjoy a plate full of latkes w/ apple-not-sauce.

I'm part of a local online group, and in the afternoon of the first snow day, when schools had been closed unexpectedly, another member posted a plea for help. She was running out of things to do with her kids, and was hoping for inspiration from other parents in the same boat. I had to read the post twice to figure out what she was asking for, and then I realized that the problem was in my head, not in her wording. My mind has set itself to Homeschool Mode, where it's a given that I will be on the hook for each and every day's entertainment and education (although I get a respite 2 afternoons a week thanks to our fantastic classroom teachers). I'm with my kids every day, and I truly don't run out of things to do...This is in no small part because I'm not such a great homeschool parent, and spend too much time doing laundry, cooking, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making pots of coffee and tea, wrangling barking dogs back into the house, and checking my email. But I like to think that my kids aren't bored silly, and that they are both getting something of value out of our days together. I guess the fact that we are still enjoying each others company means something. I have a long list of things I'd love to do, things I envisioned doing, every day. Maybe someday we'll manage that level of enrichment. For now, just living-learning is taking up all of our time.

Back again!

2008-12-15T22:00:00.000-08:00

And I had been doing so well with the posting in November...

Real life has stolen away my blogging hours over the past weeks. Here are just a few of the changes around here:

- Chava has lost all 4 of her front teeth - The 2 on the top, and the 2 on the bottom. She has the best smile right now! And I've been busy slicing foods so she can chew everything on the sides of her mouth. Chava swallowed her second bottom tooth with a bite of crunchy bean taco. At first, she was insistent that we would be able to find it later. I am so glad that she decided that it would be too disgusting to watch us fish around in the toilet for it, because there is no way I was going to do that. And I didn't want that as a mark against me on her running tally of Bad Mothering Moments.

- Mimzy has learned to use the mouse on my computer, and has obviously been paying attention when Chava logs on to BrainPOP Jr. Last week, I found Mimzy in my office alone, decorating a cake on My Little P*ny. This means she clicked on Firefox, clicked on the bookmarked link, and clicked through to her preferred game. My pride was balanced by my simultaneous horror. Also, I have many bones to pick with the Little P*nies. Starting with, but not limited to, the total lack of accuracy in "Friendships Worth Tending" - Around here, if you "water by twilight on midsummer days", you'll grow nothing but blighted tomatoes and zucchini covered with powdery mildew.

- Do-Daddy D has now been laid off from all of his jobs. In one month, we may be a zero-income family. I am going to go back to work at my first synagogue, taking over for one of the Alef teachers who is leaving before the school year is over, but that pays just enough to buy groceries for one week each month. I'm also setting up my workbench so I'm ready to make jewelry - But this economy is not the best time to be looking for a living as a craftsperson. I kept myself busy full-time during the dotcom bust here, but this is a whole lot different. At this point, there is a certain freedom in the severity of this. And we won't end up homeless, so that's a huge load off my mind. 2009 promises to be a most interesting year.

Thankful

2008-11-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a post in my head, thinking about an article I read in the NYTimes earlier today. But I just went back there to re-read, and now all I can think about are all of the people of Mumbai, residents and tourists, everyone reeling from the violence there. And that makes me think of the violence elsewhere in the world.

I have a long list of things to be thankful for, and this puts that list into even sharper relief.

Glow Stick Hypocrite

2008-11-26T00:49:00.001-08:00

So I spend more time than I'd like to admit thinking about the details of my family's consumption, and its impact on my daughters' body burdens, on the people who grew or produced the item, on the ecosystems impacted by production, transit, and disposal of the item, etc. Yes, I am just that sort of annoying and compulsive person who obsesses about the minutiae, seeing toxic exposures in practically everything. I try not to proselytize, and I try to have a sense of humor about my own obsession with this stuff, but I'm not sure how successful I am.

And then I let my kids do things like this. Chava and Mimzy love to play with glow sticks that Do-Daddy D brings home for them, especially in the bath, with the overhead lights turned down low. I'm sure this doesn't quite mesh with my choices about organically-grown food, PVC & phthalate-free toys, stainless steel sippy cups, etc.

Do I get points for noticing my own hypocrisy, and for providing photographic documentation? Probably not, but at least the photos are nifty.

Chava & Mimzy Update

2008-11-24T21:02:00.000-08:00

Chava and her beloved Puffy Coat

Mimzy and her red candy cape

Today, Chava announced that she will be a pediatrician when she grows up, and Mimzy says she will be a panda collector.

Chava is still having nightmares, about Night on Bald Mountain, Sleeping Beauty, The Owl Witch, Beaverhead* and the dark. Mimzy has been waking up extremely angry lately, because she dreams about having lots of red candy, and multi-colored candies, and when she wakes up, they are gone. She screams and searches the house for them, and seems convinced that I have taken them away from her.

I recently instituted the "thumb rule" for new food - Everyone has to take one good bite of every food on their plate, and "give a thumb reading" for the rest of the family - Thumbs up, thumbs in the middle, thumbs down. Mimzy loves almost everything and shouts out "Thumbs up, thumbs way, way up! Up high!" after almost everything. Chava is more likely to give out thumbs in the middle, or even "Down! Way, way down!", but at least she's taking that first bite (which is sometimes just a lick, or holding the food in her teeth). Chava hasn't added any foods to her list of edible items recently, but she's only lost rice, so we're still doing well compared to a year ago. Still, the loss of rice is no small thing, and I'm trying to figure out how to bring it back. Onigiri still work sometimes, if they're extremely fresh and very cute, and kappa maki sushi is also on her good foods list.

Homeschool seems to be going well, no thanks to my teaching skills. So far, Chava has been picking things up best via computer - It's rather amazing how quickly she grasps concepts and facts when they're presented via Annie and Moby, or Starfall, or other computer programs, instead of by a live person. This really goes against everything I previously believed about teaching and learning. I'm giving myself a couple of months to observe and track and process this revelation. Then, if this really does seem to be true, I'll adjust our homeschool work accordingly. This doesn't mean that Chava will be sitting in front of a screen all day, but it might mean that she can accomplish a lot of academic learning fairly quickly, leaving us with more time for the valuable social learning of playdates and group classes, and those elusive things, fun and games.

Mimzy loves preschool. She charges ahead of me to run to her classroom, and then cries when I come to pick her up - "Why did you rush here earlier?" she sobs, "Why is preschool over?". I guess she was ready for a bit of classroom time, especially when it involves cool high school buddies, unlimited supplies of white glue and paper, and a water table with its own sink to keep replenish what's lost to the floor.

Dry, sunny fall is on its way out, with cold, wet fall settling in. This means it's time to find a replacement for "Puffy Coat", Chava's beloved winter coat of the last 2 years. Good old Puffy is finally too small, for real. The jackets we have from older cousins and friends are lovely and warm, but they are different than Puffy, and that is a problem. I'm working on this, but for now Chava is still squeezing into Puffy, since she just. won't. wear. anything. else. I know from experience that I can get her to put the other coats on, but she will remove them at the first opportunity and run happily through the chill, her hands and lips turning blue. She doesn't perceive cold as quickly as a lot of people, and if the only garment available has a scratchy hood or clingy cuffs, she'd truly rather be naked. I think I need to pack up the hand-me-down coats for Mimzy to grow into, and find a truly comfortable replacement for Puffy Coat.

Mimzy is wearing the red cape we got from a friend, but she won't let me remove the "m" I sewed on for Halloween. She loves being dressed as a red M&M.

Mimzy still loves Bob the Builder, and has added panda bears as her newest obsession. Chava is still all about horses, and has added science, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln to her mental list of preferred topics.

That's the late fall update on my two favorite girls.

* The Owl Witch and Beaverhead are characters from two of the stories Chava heard during Forest Fairy Tales summer camp. Apparently, the Owl Witch turned children into mice and ate them, and Beaverhead was a brave girl who saved her village from a terrible monster. I need to track this collection of stories down so we can process them in depth - I think having the stories here to hide/read/think about would help Chava get some control over the stories and their images.

Carousel Connoisseur

2008-11-24T00:33:00.000-08:00

"Vancouver Rose"
Chava's Birthday Steed

Chava is something of a carousel connoisseur, which means I've had quite a few rides myself over the past almost-six years. Now Chava is big enough to ride alone, and these days I stand next to Mimzy's horse, holding on to keep from spinning off. She loves the horses, she loves the spinning, she loves the pretty lights. Not so much the music, but the horses and spinning outweigh the noise.

Chava turns 6 this week, and we took a trip to our favorite local zoo on Saturday to celebrate in advance. The zoo is great, but what really kicks it into Favorite status is the amazing carousel. It's indoors, a real plus in this climate, and was completely renovated a few years ago - There are horses, but there are also other animals, and each of them is beautiful and detailed and high-gloss perfection.

We promised Chava she could ride as many times as she liked in honor of her birthday - I was thinking this might mean an all-day carousel visit, but she decided that 3 trips would be just right. We were a bit late getting to the zoo, and decided to visit the animals before riding. Dusk came too quickly, and we ran from the Asian Forest Sanctuary to only just squeeze into the carousel pavilion - The woman in charge took pity on us and held the door for us.

Chava only got one of her promised rides, since the zoo shut down when she dismounted from the first turn, but there was no immediate meltdown. Do-Daddy D rode with Mimzy, and I got to watch from solid ground. Chava almost never waves during a ride; she's too busy in Chavaland. I could see her lips moving, talking to her horse, her eyes staring into the universe where she rides horses each day, going where she likes, flying across the flowered ground. Carousels, what a metaphor, huh? I'll keep myself from writing the cliches that popped into my mind, but I'm thinking them, yes I am.

Fun with Glue

2008-11-23T23:42:00.000-08:00

Mimzy has a fascination with glue. She just started going to a small preschool program at our local high school two afternoons each week (the high-schoolers from the human development class spend time with the preschoolers each day). It's Montessori-based, and Mimzy spends her time as she likes - So far, that means playing at the water table, eating a snack, and working with glue. The teacher told me Mimzy spent 30 minutes working with glue to build a series of sticker-paper-sequin stacks on a paper. Unfortunately, M used so much glue, the stacks slid into each other as they dried.

On Friday, I gave Mimzy a full bottle of white glue and a bowl of glitter and stood back to see what would happen. When she was done making mountains, layering glue-glitter-glue-glitter-glue, she moved onto filling her palms with glue. She loved this, and it was a lot less messy than I thought it would be. She loves glue, but she loves clean hands, too. There were several breaks for hand washing and I didn't have to wash glue off the walls. I let everything dry on the art board, and it all peeled off perfectly this morning (it did take a long time to dry, but it got there). Then I remembered we could make Gak with our glue, and we put together two batches. Mimzy picked yellow coloring and vanilla extract for hers, and Chava picked green and peppermint. Now we have good clean gluey polymer fun - And it all fits into the "states of matter" lessons we've been talking about thanks to BrainPOP Jr.

We're loving our homeschool days.

Gak Recipe (courtesy of our favorite pediatric occupational therapist):
1 cup white glue (8-oz bottle)
2 cups water, divided
1 Tb Borax (be precise!)
food coloring (optional)
flavoring extract for scent (optional)

1. In a large metal or glass bowl, mix the glue and 1 cup of the water until smooth. Stir in food coloring and scent as desired.

2. Boil the remaining cup of water and add the borax, stirring until borax is completely dissolved.

3. Immediately pour borax water into glue water. Knead with your hands until all liquid has disappeared - You should have a nice big ball of polymer fun. Store in a large Ziploc bag or other airtight container.

NOTE: Borax is TOXIC - Do NOT let anyone eat this!

Cake Delivery

2008-11-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

Harvest Time Chocolate Cake

I've been baking up test batches of low-allergen treats for the past few months, hoping to start up a small home-based bakery. I've come up with cakes, cookies & muffins that actually taste OK, even though they are gluten, casein, soy, corn, nut and egg-free. Now I have to figure out whether I can do what I have in mind without running afoul of our health department regulations...I've read that home-baked goods without certain ingredients can be sold if clearly labeled as home-baked, and individually wrapped, but I need to make another call to the local health dept office to make sure I'm reading the rules correctly. If all goes well, I'm hoping to have some things for sale in time for the December holidays.

Here's one of the first cakes I baked for a friend - Chocolate cake with chocolate not-buttercream frosting. Chava & Mimzy helped with the decorating, deciding where the leaves, grape clusters and vines should go. My frosting isn't as stiff as true buttercream, so it's hard to get the detail I want with the decorating, but it's fun to do. I loved delivering this to my friend and her kids - It felt so good to see how happy a cake can make people. It's one of those simple excitements of childhood (and adulthood, really) - Going to a bakery and picking an enticing item from the glass case, and people with food allergies miss out. Having a wild-static-haired woman deliver a cake on a waxed-paper wrapped plate isn't quite the same, but that's the best I can offer right now.

Coming Soon: The Tooth Fairy

2008-11-19T22:43:00.000-08:00

The First Toothless Grin

The First Tooth, Finally Fallen Out

Chava lost her first tooth yesterday. It had been hanging on by some bodily sinew for the past week, but yesterday morning it was a very different color than its neighbors, and I was hoping that meant it would be falling out. It has been very unsettling for Chava to have a tooth moving around, hurting and generally feeling different. She was excited to have a loose tooth at last, but the reality of having a tooth fall out, leaving a gumhole and another tooth hidden below, ready to poke through, was rocking her boat a bit. During her swimming class yesterday afternoon, she bit down while trying a front float with her face in the water, and her tooth popped out. Fortunately, she didn't swallow it or lose it to the bottom of the pool - Instead, she hopped out to give the tiny little tooth to me for safekeeping. I stashed it in the empty salt container from her bento box (she had a hardboiled egg with her lunch), yet another reason I love our bento boxes.

Chava decided to hang onto her tooth for sharing with her class tomorrow. Then she wants to write the tooth fairy a note, asking if she can keep the tooth forever. She hid it on her windowsill last night, to keep the fairy from taking it away - We've told her that, as far as we know, the tooth fairy only looks under pillows. I hope the tooth fairy is generous and understanding. Maybe she'll ask for a drawing of the tooth and a story to share with the other fairies, in return for leaving the tooth to Chava.

I had a bit of kick in my gut from sudden nostalgia when Chava handed her tooth to me at the poolside. It's such a tiny, hollow thing, and I remember charting its progress as it cut through her baby gums. No more gummy smiles, but that cheerful flash of white, and she seemed so old with her first tooth. Now her baby teeth are moving out for her permanent teeth, and I'm reeling a bit at how quickly this all happens.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

2008-11-19T00:22:00.001-08:00

I'm cheating today and posting something I wrote for High Holidays services. The chavurah we're part of chose the theme "life is a story" to run through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services this year. They asked people to bring something brief to share, a story from your life or someone else's that spoke to where you were this past year, or where you hoped to be in the new year. I didn't end up sharing this, since it set off my Corny! alarm. Also, I had a horrible morning right before Rosh Hashanah services started, and I was afraid I'd burst into tears if I tried to speak out loud. By Yom Kippur morning services, I was already sort of shaky with hunger. It's amazing how I can skip breakfast every other day of the year with no profound immediate impact, but on Yom Kippur, I feel weak even before breakfast. At least this year I didn't puke around no-lunch time. I haven't fasted for some years, since I've been either pregnant, or nursing, or both, and my branch of Judaism excuses pregnant and nursing moms from fasting. But this year I did fast, and I was very happy to break my own personal record of throwing up on an empty stomach during the fast. I like to think that I'm so toxin-free these days, due to our GFCF diet, that I saved myself from that particular aspect of the holiday. But I digress. Here's the story I didn't tell at services:

It's tempting to share a story that I've read, one that resonates with me, but it's been a while since I've had a chance to do that sort of reading. I'm in the heart of my picture book reading years right now, and I'd love to talk about something other than Frog and Toad or George and Martha for a minute or two. I'd like to offer a story from this past year in my life.

One regular old day this last year, while driving along Madison Avenue, heading from one regular errand to the next, three words came into my mind and repeated themselves until I spoke them aloud:

Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

This has been my motto ever since, these words of wisdom my subconscious gleaned from a shampoo bottle. This motto of mine is descriptive - It sums up my life as mother of two young children fairly well - And it's hopeful. Yes, there is the lather, but there's also the rinsing, and then there's the promise of the repeat, of the second bite at the apple, at the chance to change the next cycle.

We have plenty of lather - Rushing to appointments, always 10 minutes late; meltdowns in the bulk department of T & C; frustration and anger on all sides; tears of sorrow; screams of panic and fear; restless, unsettled nights; crazed laughter and running dances that almost always end in injury.

We have plenty of rinsing - Clear water showers and baths, and dips in the salty sound, and the sort of rinsing that comes in moments of shared focus - On the beauty of a bug, on the colors of the setting sun caught in the rainclouds above our yard. Love rinses us, and joy, and our smiles through the lights of our Shabbat candles. I even get moments of rock-solid conviction that all is right, that all will be right with the world. And then, just when I start to melt into peace, or just before I've even caught my breath, it's time to lather up again.

It's a quick cycle, and sometimes it feels like it's going to spin out of balance, but there's hope in my motto. Lather follows rinse follows lather as day follows night follows day. There's a chance with each cycle to try something new, to tweak only one tiny bit, or to shake things up at the root, knowing that the next chance to try the same thing again will come soon again if this change doesn't go so well. And when I don't have the energy for any changing, at least I know that soon, very soon, there will be a rinse to renew me, or a lather to wake me up.

I remind myself every day that this, too, shall pass - Both the moments of exhaustion and frustration, and the moments of clear joy and peace. I know this quick-repeat cycle will change over time, and new words of guidance will come. I'll miss these lather, rinse, repeat years when some new pattern has emerged.

In Praise of Epsom Salts

2008-11-17T19:10:00.000-08:00

I think of Chava as a "good sleeper", but she has never fallen asleep easily. Once she's out, she'll sleep 12 hours easily, but making that transition from awake to asleep can be a brutal process. She might be bone-tired, with her eyes fighting to stay open, and her body will refuse to let her sleep. As soon as the house is quiet and it's time for a bedtime story and tucking in, Chava's engine sets itself to "Donald Trump HIGH"*. Her voice grows louder and stronger, she charges around the house like a wild horse, she jumps, she spins, she performs high-speed contortions worthy of Cirque du Soleil while hanging from the bunk bed ladder. Once forced to settle down in bed, her arms dart out from under the covers so she can run her nails in an arc on the wall next to her, scritch-scritch, scritch-scritch. Her legs dance under the comforter, wearing grooves in the top sheet. And when she does finally start to lose consciousness, her body jumps as if shocked, which vaults her back to wakefulness. The slightest change in the room wakes her - A breeze ruffling the curtains, a car in the neighbor's drive, and it might as well be someone setting off an air horn by her head.

Even when she was an infant, the only guaranteed way I had to make nap time a reality was to literally pin her down with my arms and legs wrapped (lovingly and safely) around her body. Only after she was immobilized in just the right way would she fall asleep, sound, sound asleep, catching up on much-needed rest.

I've never looked at this as a problem, it was just the way things were. And then, last year, someone told me that adding a cup or two of epsom salts to her bathwater might be worth a try. I was skeptical, but this was one of those safe and easy to implement suggestions, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. Lo and Behold! I put 2 cups of epsom salts in her bath, and Chava fell asleep within 3 minutes of lights out after a bedtime story. She snuggled under the covers, her body relaxed, her breathing slowed and evened out, and she was asleep. Just like that.

Now we buy Costco's biggest bags of epsom salts and add some to every bath. Last week, we ran out of them and I kept forgetting to buy more. Around Wednesday night, I realized that bedtimes were not going well, and was wondering what was going on...Sometimes it's amazing how long it takes my brain to make connections. Now we have a large bag of epsom salts next to the tub again, and bedtime has been much easier, again.

*Chava's pediatric occupational therapist has a great collage mural depicting the "low - just right - high" range that one's engine can be set to, as per The Alert Program. In the HIGH area, she has pasted several photographs of The Donald, in all of his hyper-awake intensity. Chava took one look at him and said "TOO high!".

Cold Coffee, Tepid Tea

2008-11-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've had a hot beverage in the past 5 years. Not for lack of trying, but I just can't manage to drink an entire mug of coffee or tea before it goes cold. Sometimes life intervenes and I put my cup down to mediate some crisis, and find it cooled when I return. More often, I set my mug down while multitasking - Chasing Mimzy down to get her dressed, negotiating with Chava about underpants, collecting towels for the wash, hanging a sweater to dry, convincing the dogs to stop barking at a phantom in the tree and come inside - These things can all be done in one fluid sweep through the house, but I can't seem to bring my beverage along for the ride.

When the girls are asleep and I can catch up on the dishes, I find mugs with various levels of liquid in them around the house: On the bookshelf above Mimzy's reach, next to the water filter on the kitchen counter, tucked in with the wooden food of the play kitchen, under the girls' bed with their books, in the microwave. All from the same day, none of them empty, each of them lost in the shuffle.

I am getting better about this. I think I average about 3 lost mugs a day, whereas my total when each of my girls was a newborn was more than double that. Recently, I've even managed to use the same mug a couple of times in a row, by emptying out the gone-cold coffee and refilling with more good, fresh half-decaf that's destined for the same fate.

I like this sort of chaos. I will be sad when I've returned to the days when I can sit down at my workbench and drink a whole mug of something piping hot. Even though it will taste very, very good.

GFCF Falafel

2008-11-16T15:48:00.000-08:00

I love falafel. I miss being able to wrap a few patties up in a fresh round of flatbread, but I love it by itself. We have this for dinner about once a week, and I love the patties cold for lunch the next day. I've been using this recipe for years, and it only took a few simple adjustments to make it GFCF.

If you don't have a bottle of Karam's Garlic Sauce in your fridge, you might want to consider buying one. It's good, good, good, and not just with falafel.

GFCF Falafel
based on a recipe found on long-defunct website, with no author citation

2 cups cooked chickpeas (home-cooked taste best, but canned will work)
1 GFCF bun or slice of bread or even a corn muffin
1 Tb GF flour
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped into a few chunks
1 egg, lightly beaten
handful fresh parsley, coarsely chopped
3/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp dried marjoram
1 Tb tahini

enough GF flour for coating
enough high-heat oil for cooking

Start heating your pan before you combine the ingredients. I love to use my large cast iron skillet with enough oil to coat the bottom and a bit extra for the patties to sizzle in.

Combine all ingredients (except for flour for coating and oil for cooking) in a food processor. Whir until everything is well combined. Using either slightly damp hands, or very dry flour-dusted hands, form into balls about 1 1/2" in diameter. Press balls into fat discs and coat on all sides with GF flour.

Place patties gently into hot skillet and fry until they are golden brown, turning each patty once. Serve with your choice of toppings - Fresh sliced tomatoes, lettuce or other greens, hot sauce, garlic-tahini sauce (see below), olives, thinly sliced cucumbers, etc.

Garlic-Tahini Sauce - I created this to make up for not being able to put plain yogurt w/ fresh garlic & tahini on my falafel. Don't tell my mother - She thinks mayo is an evil, evil food:

GFCF mayonnaise
Karam's Garlic Sauce
Tahini

Combine a good glop of mayo with a smaller quanitity of Karam's Garlic Sauce and tahini, adjusting each to your taste. Stir well until everything is smooth and glossy.

Sarah & David, Foot Raccoons

2008-11-15T23:01:00.000-08:00

When Chava was about 2 1/2 , she named her feet Sarah and David. They started off as anonymous raccoons, always interrupting her meals with their tapping and wiggling about on her chair legs. "Raccoons!" Chava would yell, apparently in reference to the noise she was making with her feet. It took me a while to figure out that yes, she was talking about her feet, not just the noise, and that her feet were raccoons with distinct personalities. For a while, I called them "right raccoon" and "left raccoon", but one day Chava let me know that "right raccoon" was really Sarah, and "left raccoon" was David.

Sarah is sweet and compliant, and the leader of the two. She is always the first into a sock (back when Chava wore socks) or a pair of tights, and she likes to be petted. David is a bit of a rebel - He was the one who told Sarah that socks were not comfortable, and shouldn't be worn - And he's been known to step on Sarah and hurt her. There was a sad day about 3 years ago when David died, and was replaced by an unknown raccoon who was rather dull. Then, one day, he was back, first as a new David, not the old one (since First David really was dead), but soon Second David was just David and all was well with the foot raccoons.

I've been talking to Sarah and David directly for so long, I don't usually notice it. For instance, if I'm talking Chava through getting ready to leave the house, I'm used to saying "OK, Sarah and David, into your shoes!". Things have eased up recently, so that I can say "Chava, time for shoes" without being corrected and reminded to speak to Sarah and David. But they are still there, incarnate in her feet, frisking around when they're free from tights and shoes, and not liking to have their nails cut at all.

I spent some time trying to figure out whether this meant anything, this identification of body parts as Other, but Google didn't spit anything all that illuminating at me. I've wondered if perhaps this was a sort of body dysmorphic disease, but Chava has never seemed to view Sarah or David as defective, they just aren't really part of her - They are mostly-friendly raccoons, and she loves their company.

I was reminded of all this tonight when Chava got out of the bath early. She took a spectacular flying fall over a tree root this afternoon, while we were walking through the forest, and her right knee has a purple bruise topped with a red raw scrape. The scrape was stinging too much in the bath, so Chava hopped out and let me put a large bandage over the entire thing. Then she went off to the corner and leaned over to whisper to her knee:

"Don't worry, in the morning I'll show you my new pony, Sassy, and you'll be able to go for a ride. So just stay under there for now."

I'm not sure if she was talking to her knee or the scrape, but it was sweet.

GFCF Lavender Shortbread

2008-11-14T19:00:00.000-08:00

Well, it was Chava's turn to pick the cookie of the week, and she wanted lavender shortbread, so that was our project this afternoon. She was in charge of pulling the dried lavender apart, and we all did the mixing. Mimzy was in charge of "funny butter" quality control. She loves all thing butter-like, and would happily eat an entire Buttery Stick in one sitting if I'd just let her.

I thought these tasted great, which must surely be evidence that we have now been gluten- and casein-free for so long, I've forgotten just how amazing butter tastes, and how everything else pales in comparison.

GFCF Lavender Shortbread Cookies
based on recipe from The Herbfarm Cookbook, found here.

2 Earth Balance Buttery Sticks (1 cup total)
1/2 cup organic raw sugar
2 tsp organic dried lavender
2 cups Gifts of Nature gluten-free baking blend (or your favorite GF flour mix)
1 tsp xanthan gum

optional topping:
combine a handful of sugar and about 1 tsp of lavender in a clean coffee grinder until well combined.

Use electric mixer to combine softened buttery sticks, sugar and lavender. Do NOT over-mix; you're going for smooth and uniform, but not fluffy. Turn mixer off and add the flour and xanthan gum all at once. Mix on low just until dough holds together in one mass. Remove from bowl and shape into a log on a piece of waxed paper. Let rest in fridge for at least 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Use a sharp knife to cut log into slices about 1/2" thick and place on baking sheet covered with parchment paper or the like. Poke a fork at least 3 times into each slice, all the way through. Bake for about 20 - 22 minutes, or until just lightly browned on edges (rotate sheet part way through if necessary for even browning). Let cool a minute or so on the sheet, then move parchment paper w/ cookies onto a cooling rack. Sprinkle with home-made lavender sugar topping if desired.

The original recipe called for the dough's sugar and lavender to be whizzed together in a coffee grinder until fine, but we were in a rush. I did make up some lavender sugar that way to sprinkle on the top of the freshly baked cookies, and that worked well. Next time I'll add a tiny pinch of sea salt and I'll take the time to chop up the sugar and lavender for the dough.

Robots, No Longer Terrifying

2008-11-13T00:09:00.000-08:00

Chava and Mimzy are in love with Moby, the robot from BrainPOP Jr. I'm very excited about this, since until last week robots were on Chava's Scariest Things list, and Mimzy follows her lead on scary things. It's not like we see robots all the time in real life, but I've discovered that you just don't know how ubiquitous something is until a sight of it sets off your child's fight-or-flight response; once that happens, the something will show up at all sorts of inconvenient moments - Say, when you're trying to get your child out of car seat during a downpour, or just before a planned family photo event, or just after you answer an important adult phone call.

Also, now that robots are friendly and beloved, I can buy some of my friend Christine's great art. What's not to love about a Robot of the Month Club?

(edited to add: I don't have any business connection with the Robot of the Month Club. I just love Christine's art)

Kittens Are Not Cats

2008-11-11T22:52:00.000-08:00

Last night, Mimzy chose The Kitten Book as her bedtime story. The first two-page spread has a lovely drawing of a mama cat with her brand-new kittens snuggled close. Mimzy and I had this conversation:

Rebecca: These kittens are so tiny! And they'll grow up to be cats, just like their mama.
Mimzy: NO. They are KITTENS.
Rebecca: That's true. And kittens are baby cats.
Mimzy: NO. Kittens are KITTENS. They are kittens. They are NOT cats.
Rebecca: But...
Mimzy: Mama, this book is the KITTEN book.

I love Mimzy's rock-solid convictions.

Quirk Catalog

2008-11-10T21:18:00.000-08:00

I don't think it's fair to write about my kids without also writing about myself, especially when it comes to things that stray from the typical. So, here is a catalog of my own quirks, former and current.

1. As a child, I had a primal fear of escalators. Not just as a toddler, but well into my elementary years. I was absolutely sure that the teeth that met with the collapsing steps at the top or bottom of each escalator would somehow grab a hold of me, pull me into the hidden mechanical workings and mangle me. I knew this was physically impossible, but rational thought had no power over my fear. I hated going to department stores, and would scream and kick and hit and plead with my mother not to make me step onto the moving stairs. Usually she would give up and tell me, in a disgusted and embarrassed voice, to take the elevator on my own. I think it was supposed to be punishment, going it alone, but I loved that. I knew where all of the elevators were, and could find my way around all of our local department stores.

2. Another childhood primal fear: Tornadoes. I blame the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz for this one. Whenever the wind blew hard, which was often around here in the fall, I was sure a twister was brewing. It didn't matter one bit that there were zero recorded tornado sightings in our region. I had a pillowcase filled with my treasured posessions and a piece of white rope ready to go on my bed - My plan was to tie myself, my teddy bear Edgar, and my pillowcase of valuables to a strong tree, which would withstand the power of the tornado. I snuck outside more than once and really did tie myself to various trees during a few storms, but my father or babysitter would always intervene and make me come inside. I had nightmares about tornadoes, and spent many hours filled with dread, just waiting for the roof of my bedroom to disappear with the wind.

3. I cannot stand the sound of people eating ripe bananas. You know that feeling people get when they hear fingernails scratching along a chalkboard? That's a mild version of what the sound of soft bananas being chewed does to me. It used to make me violent - I would literally attack my sister for eating one too close to me. These days, I can control my banana-stoked rage, but I have to use some tricks to stay focused if I'm forced by politeness to stick around - Focused breathing works well, the same sort of thing that got me through unmedicated childbirth.

4. As I discovered in college, the sound of stoners with dry mouths eating huge quantities of crunchy snacks is just as bad as the sound of ripe bananas. Unfortunately for me, I went to a college with a bumper crop of stoners (maybe it's different now), and they all had easy access to snacks. Sometimes they seemed to be everywhere I went, and I had to fight the impulse to beg them to drink something with their snacks. Fortunately for me, I managed to graduate in less than the time-honored 12 years, and this isn't something I have to deal with anymore. But I sure do remember it.

5. I can't read newspapers unless I'm wearing gloves. The ink makes my skin itchy and red almost immediately. I've never really tried to figure out if this is a genuine reaction, or if it's pyschosomatic. Either way, newspaper ink and I don't mix well.

I can still remember the anxiety that a windy day, the creak-whir of an escalator, or a fruit bowl full of bananas used to cause me. I can still feel that in my body, and that's why I try very hard not to let my exasperation show when one of Chava or Mimzy's quirks changes my plans for our day. I recognize how very real their fears and dislikes are, that they aren't manufacturing these things for their own amusement. Hopefully, they'll become charming eccentricities instead of life-altering fears as they age, and I can only think that freedom from parental guilt-trips and punishment will help with that.

George Washington Carver

2008-11-09T20:51:00.001-08:00

It has been George Washington Carver weekend here, thanks to BrainPOP Jr. Another homeschool parent told me about this site, and we've been using our 5-day free trial. Chava and Mimzy can't get enough of Annie and Moby (a girl and her robot friend), and have been watching and re-watching the film about George Washington Carver whenever they have Computer Time. When it's not computer time, they're discussing the various achievements of GWC, and thinking up their own new uses for peanuts. Too bad we can't grow our own in this climate!

Shower Rorschach

2008-11-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

This one is a bit belated...I meant to post this when I saw it, three days before Halloween. I think it's some sort of monstrous bat-human, lurching around the shower walls.

GFCF Matzoh Ball Soup

2008-11-07T22:56:00.000-08:00

Well, the balls aren't made from matzoh, but they're tasty all the same.

I used the recipe I found here because I could get the ingredients locally; next time I'd like to give this recipe a try (after I track down some good almond flour).

I've made this twice now and the girls love it. When I served it to my gluten-loving seder guests, a couple of people even asked for seconds.

There's nothing like a hot bowl of matzoh ball soup for Shabbat dinner, especially when fall turns cold and wet and everyone is fighting off a cold.

Note to Self:

2008-11-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

Do not serve Chava any more chocolate. No home-baked GFCF chocolate cake. No dark chocolate Coconut Bliss.

Ever.

Unless you like being visited by a rather spirited but hostile and contentious version of your daughter from some alternate dimension.

Mushrooms and Gingerbread

2008-11-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

Or, what I did with my Sunday.

The girls and I invited our best neighbor friends to join us on a trek through my parents' forest in search of chanterelles. We found bags full, and also some other fascinating fungi. Now my kitchen smells like autumnal heaven, heavy with that apricot-ish chanterelle perfume that's filed in my mind under "Fall, scent of".

Before we hit the woods, we cut out some gingerbread men, and when they were cool I used some icing to turn them into skeleton cookies. Next year I'll get these done before Halloween.

Halloween 2008 Debriefing

2008-11-01T23:30:00.000-07:00

Well, another Halloween has come and gone, this time without any robot skeleton mishaps or chainsaw-wielding bunny-costumed neighbors.

Chava was a peacock, using last year's costume (or one of last year's costumes - she decided against her dirty diaper suit at the last minute, after I had it all ready to go).

Mimzy was a red M & M. This was the easiest costume I've made - I free-handed a white "m" onto a piece of red felt and tacked that onto a beautiful red cape we got from a friend (thanks, B!). She wore one of her red dresses with white tights underneath the cape et Voila! A very cute red M & M.

We hosted our 2nd annual Halloween party, with GFCF chili, cornbread and mulled cider for all, followed by a mass trick-or-treating walk around our cul-de-sac-ish neighborhood. The rain stopped just before dark, and only one house had an animatronic skeleton that was too terrifying for Chava. All around a great success, made even better by our tradition of supplying walking parents with to-go glasses of red wine.

I'll post pictures tomorrow, after I've talked the girls into putting their costumes on again for a photoshoot - They were out the door so quickly yesterday, I didn't manage to get any pics at all.

Quotable Mimzy

2008-10-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

Scene: The family bathroom, where Rebecca is trying on a gift from her parents - The most glittery Obama t-shirt available locally, with huge lettering and an almost life-sized Obama portrait.

Mimzy: Mama! You look like Obama!
Rebecca: Hey, you're right!
Mimzy: Mama, I'm so proud of you.

In Praise of Digital Cameras, or Why I Love Trips to the Grocery Store with My Kids

2008-10-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

It is an unfortunate fact of my life that I must drag my girls along to the grocery store at least once a week. We can't get everything we need delivered from Azure Standard, they can't stay home alone, and Doo-Daddy D isn't usually available for parent duty, thanks to an inhumane work schedule. So we are forced to trek along the aisles and through the meltdown-producing Bulk Dept as a threesome.

Fortunately, Chava has discovered the joys of photography. The other week in the aforementioned Bulk Dept, she asked if the camera was in the diaper bag, and it was, and I was happy to hand it off in the hope that it would buy me the time I needed to bag up some raisins and dates. And Lo! It was a match made in heaven. With the lens between herself and the world Chava actually enjoyed the bright lights and big bins. Mimzy was happy as Chava's apprentice, and I got to bring home my dried fruit and download a beautiful collection of photos.

Rainy Day Craft Project: Turn a baby sock into a Sock Baby

2008-10-06T23:55:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me for these directions, and I figured it was easier to post them here than to email all of this...We made these baby sock dolls at Mimzy's playgroup birthday last winter. I wanted a simple doll project that 2-5 year-olds could truly participate in; when I couldn't find just what I was looking for online, I gathered up our lone baby socks and created this project. I wish I'd taken a photo of the dolls the kids in our playgroup made. They were funky and cute and much loved by their creators. If you want to get deluxe, you can stitch on more of a wig or embroider the face - These directions assume kids will be drawing on their own doll's face, and possibly helping to stitch on some wild baby hair-dos.

1. Select your baby sock and turn it inside-out. Choose one that looks good on the inside, since this is the side your baby's finished face will be made from.

2. Pack a good amount of batting into the foot of your sock, until the sock is nice and puffy from the toe to just past the heel.

3. Cut a length of embroidery floss and use it to tie the sock off as tightly as possible just on top of the batting. Use a square knot (or two) and make sure it is tight!

4. Cut another length of embroidery floss and use it to tie off your sock baby's head towards the toe of the sock, so that about 1/3 of the stuffed portion is head and the rest is body.
When you're done tying off the bottom and head, you should have something that looks a bit like this.

5. Now it's time for some hair and a face. Tie a chunky knot towards them middle of a piece of yarn (how long is up to you, and depends on how long you want your baby's hair to be) and thread the yarn onto your needle. Poke the needle into the crown of your baby's head, coming up along the opposite rim of the crown. Tie another chunky knot here, as close as possible to the baby's head. Do this a few times with new strands of yarn, working your way around the baby's head so that there are hairs where you'd like them. Trim yarn as desired.

Use a fabric pen to draw on some eyes and a mouth for your baby, maybe even a nose.

6. Now it's time to nestle your baby in a nice cozy blanket. Roll the un-stuffed portion of the sock up and over the stuffed portion, so that the former top of the sock becomes a snug blanket around your baby.

7. Enjoy your new baby.

Mimzy Update

2008-09-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, both of my girls fell asleep for late naps, and I didn't have the heart to wake them up. They woke up for a late dinner, then we followed our usual routine of tooth brushing, bath, stories, singing, sleep. They were both happy to nestle into bed, but neither of them was tired enough to fall asleep quickly. Chava was drowsy and quiet, dreaming about Disneyland, harps and horses (I know this because she gave me frequent updates on her dream). Mimzy was relaxed but awake, snuggled up next to me while I sang my regular medley of lullabies. I sing the same songs, in the same order, every night. The lullaby set has changed slightly over the years, with a few old favorites dropped and new ones added. Mimzy absolutely hates Golden Slumbers, so much so that she will wake up and yell "NO! NOT THAT SONG!" if she hears me singing the first line; that one lost its spot in the lineup.

During Mimzy's first year I had to start things off by saying "Nighty-night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite. And if they do, pound 'em with your shoe until they're pink and blue, red and blue, orange and blue, yellow and blue, green and blue, blue and blue, purple and blue, silver and blue, gold and blue, black and blue". If I skipped a color, or got them out of the prescribed order, Chava would demand that I start again from the beginning. I managed to drop that bit of our nightly routine by luck, when Chava and Mimzy decided to move to their new bunk bed, away from the giant family bed. Something about the shake-up allowed for a new ritual, and I was so very happy to see that one go.

These days, our song list is You Are My Sunshine, All Through The Night, Tumbalalaika (chorus only), Hush Little Baby (Sylvia Long's version), Brahm's Lullabye (Hank Snow's version), Barges, Today (first verse only), and finally, the Sh'ma.

Last night, Mimzy listened to all of them without falling asleep, and as I started each song, she said, in a stage-whisper of genuine surprise and joy "Oh, this one! I love this song!". Mimzy has a lot of love in her heart for things - The color red, Bob the Builder and his crew, Chava - And apparently also for the lullabies she usually hears filtered through her sleepyhead ears. These days she does a lot of screaming about things not on her love list, but we also get to know what is on the list. And I love all of it, I love how she knows her own heart's desires, her loves and hates, and how she lets the world know about how things are in Mimzy Land.

Homeschool Perks

2008-09-24T17:52:00.001-07:00

I'm finding that homeschooling has some unexpected (by me, anyway) benefits. Here's the first one I discovered. There are others, but this is the most obvious so far.

Clothing Optional Policy. Chava really prefers not to wear clothing, since almost nothing is comfortable. She's OK with our We Wear Clothing in Public Rule, and we've made great progress on the We Wear Clothing When We Have Guests in Our Home Rule. But when it's just family, she's usually naked. Even in the dead of winter, when the rest of us are shivering, piling on the layers and turning up the heat to combat our bone-chilling damp, Chava is happily naked, or maybe wearing just a soft knit hat. So, being able to do a bit of writing, playing with letters, or watercolor painting au naturelle makes her very happy. And when she's happy in her skin, it's much easier for her to focus.

I'd say that she'll probably outgrow this, but I do come from a long line of nudists (or naturists? I'm never sure what the difference is). OK, mostly on my mother's side, but I grew up in a home where adults and children alike did daily chores in the buff. I always worried about my mother cooking up spaghetti without any protective layers, and it was mortifying when I was about 12 years old. Now I'm happy I grew up parroting things like "the human body is a work of art, and nothing to be ashamed of". I have plenty of other neuroses, but I'm happy that I feel OK in just my skin, and I'm happy that my daughter does, too. At least for now...I reserve my right to freak out about this if she's still a nudist when she's 12.

Shower Rorschach

2008-09-24T16:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know what is foretold when a Fantasia-style dancing ostrich appears on the shower wall, but I guess I'll find out.

Homeschool Report - First Week of Kindergarten

2008-09-21T23:32:00.000-07:00

Chava and I took turns putting together words with our plastic letters. I went for "cat rat bat". Chava made "Zhena's Gypsy Tea".

The letter "A" we made during our first Alphabet Forest Walk

The letter "A" we found in the bushes, courtesy of Mother Nature.

We're officially homeschooling now in a structured way, after a week of unschooling. Chava starts the classroom portion of her Kindergarten year this week, but we've been on our own so far while the classroom teachers held parent conferences to write up yearly learning plans for each student. I met with Chava's advisor during the first week, and I was surprised by how nervous I suddenly was. I realized that I had no idea whether my plan would actually be enough to qualify as a decent homeschool program. After going over the K benchmarks with Chava's advisor, I'm less worried. Chava has either already met the strictly academic benchmarks, or she's well on her way to most of them. The social communication benchmarks are going to be trickier, but that's not news to anyone. And I still don't think that being in a general-ed classroom would necessarily make it any easier or more enjoyable for Chava to meet them.

Yesterday, I asked Chava if she missed being in a classroom with other children, if she missed J's class or K's class from last year. She said, "NO. Mom, I wasn't really happy there. Not in J's class. Not in K's class. There were too many kids, and it was too noisy. This is just right. There are just the right number of other kids. One. Mimzy." This both freaks me out - It's just what everyone worried about! She's going to regress socially! Oh no! - And then it doesn't worry me. There is no getting around the fact that Chava's anxiety level is much, much lower than it's been at the start of any other school experience, and although we still have hard days, they're hard in new ways. And the hard times don't seem to be lasting as long, and have fewer violent episodes. Chava seems happy, Mimzy is happy that she's not spending hours each day in her carseat while we transport Chava here and there, and I'm surviving with some patience intact. So far, so good.

Here's what we've been doing with our days. We start each day with a long waking-up period, then an unhurried breakfast (we have one meal-eating speed here - slow). When everyone is ready, it's Circle Time. We light a candle and say a little poem, then sing a couple of songs relating to the week's topic. I read a few stories that also tie in to the topic, we say a closing poem and blow the candle out. Then it's an activity of some sort again relating to the week's theme. I aim for an interdisciplinary mix of arts, crafts, gross motor, math, writing, reading to flesh our our theme - Our first week was A is for Animals; Chava and Mimzy picked each day's animal. We had 3 days of insects, 1 day devoted to rodents, and 1 day of horses. When we're done with our structured activities, we have free play, then snack time and more reading. We've had so many out-of-the-house activities, we've been eating quick lunches at home, or picnic lunches on-the-go, with our afternoons full of play dates, a trip to the zoo, forest walks.

As I suspected, Chava loves the structured time, but she also needs the downtime. Mimzy seems to be enjoying this, too, although the real challenge is coming up...This week will be a big change, with classroom time on two afternoons, gymnastics class, swimming class, and Chava's first meetings with the OT and SLP for the homeschool program. I get tired just thinking about it, and I need to find ways to make Mimzy's experience of gymnastics and swimming classes fun and interesting. She's too young to take either without a parent in the class (actually in the pool, or on the mats) with her, but I can't take class with Mimzy and leave Chava alone by the side of the pool, or in the balcony over the gym. Poor second kids!

Most exciting of all, Chava also started taking horseback riding lessons once a week with an amazing woman on a beautiful local farm. These lessons are probably the high point of her life so far. She absolutely glows when we're there, and is excited about everything - Mucking out a stall! Using a hoof pick! Tacking up! It's all very, very Good. Even Mimzy likes these lessons, since there is a sandbox for her Bob Machines, a slide for Lofty to careen down, and swings that overlook the riding arena.

On top of everything else, we're off to the hospital tomorrow to meet with the pulmonologists about Chava's atelactesis. I have all sorts of exciting new diversions packed to keep everyone happy and occupied in case it's a long day. Mimzy will bring her Bob Machines, Chava has a new book, and I'll have a big cup of coffee.

UnBirthday Banners

2008-09-12T16:31:00.000-07:00

Since Chava & Mimzy were both cold-weather babies (late fall and early winter), we've been throwing an UnBirthday Party for friends in the summer, and family parties on their true birthdays. Last year, we made a beautiful banner from paper and yarn for the front porch, but I wanted to try something more permanent this year. Voila, thanks to a suggestion in an old issue of Martha Stewart Kids from our library's 25 cent rack, we have no-sew fabric banners. Each girl picked out 3 fat quarters from the local fabric store and her favorite color of bias trim. I used pinking shears to cut the semi-circles from the fabric, ironed double-sided fabric tape onto the bias trim, set the fabric along the trim, folded it down and ironed everything again to set the tape.

We love these so much, we don't want to take them down. I volunteered to make another set with tattered muslin for our Halloween decor. Chava and her Do-Daddy (that's what she calls him, when she's not using his first name) are working on quite the installation, complete with fog machine, skulls, headstones, home-made blacklight art, creepy music, spiders and their webs, and Crowzy The Crow. Apparently, I'm shacked up with the sort of man who aspires to be the owner of That Halloween House, the one that still has a gigantic plastic pumpkin on the roof in January.

Thinking about the causes of autism

2008-08-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

I just found this video here, and I really liked it. It's great to see the possible causes of autism discussed in a more complex way than usual. It's worth clicking on.

It sounds like the folks of the MIND Institute are working on just the sort of research I've been wanting to see. The first question people usually have about Chava's diagnosis is "Was she vaccinated?". For the record, she did get some vaccinations, although on a delayed schedule. Her Pediatric Nurse Practitioner was very open-minded, and didn't have any problem at all working with us to create a schedule that the CDC wouldn't approve of. We lived in a neighborhood that had annual outbreaks of pertussis, a large population of recent immigrants from countries with less than complete vaccination programs, and many people without health insurance. This combination meant that there was a real chance that we would come across viral-laden adults who hadn't seen a doctor recently coughing on us at the grocery store. So, one of the early vaccines Chava received was the DTaP. And of course, this being how my life works, and Chava being my treasured firstborn, she had what our PNP described as "a classic, textbook, serious adverse neurological reaction to the acellular pertussis component of the DTaP".

In case you're wondering, this is what that looked like: Chava cried non-stop from the moment the vaccine entered her body until she seemed to fall asleep about 1 1/2 hours later. She was quiet for a little while, then she started to scream again. This time, though, the scream was really just pure vocalization, like an air-raid siren. Strong voice, clear, starting low on the scale then rising slowly to a higher pitch. Over and over, and when I picked her up to comfort her, she was unresponsive and truly limp. No muscle tone at all, not at all like a sleeping baby, but floppy and hard to wrangle, like leaden jelly. I couldn't wake her. I held her while she vocalized, and tried everything safe to rouse her. After some minutes (how many? an eternity to my heart, probably 10 or 15 by the clock), she woke up and seemed fine. But she lapsed into this state every couple of hours. For days. The interval between episodes grew longer, and the last one was about 1 month after the vaccination.

And yet, with all of that, I don't think this was the only, or even the most important, causative factor, if it was one at all. I think it's entirely possible that some people on the autism spectrum are vulnerable and more likely to have reactions like this because of their genetics and/or neurological makeup.

When I think about the increase in the number of "classical" cases of autism, the ones that are not likely to be overlooked or unnoticed, I can't help but think about the increase in our own body burdens of bioaccumalative neurotoxins, and wonder just how they would relate to each other if graphed together. I suspect that Chava's neurological construction was impacted by the fact that I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, born to and nursed by a mother who herself grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Women here have some of the highest body burdens of PBDEs and PCBs in the world, and our levels of other toxins aren't low, either. The levels of these toxins increase as we grow older, and when we are pregnant, they pass across our placentas to our fetuses. Studies seem to indicate that, although they are also present in our breastmilk, there are other components of our milk that mitigate the damage done prenatally by these same chemicals, in all but "the most extreme" cases. Since Chava was my first biological child, she received approximately 2/3 of my body burden between prenatal and breastmilk exposure. Who can say if I was one of the most extreme cases, the women whose body burden was so high, the chemicals in my blood and milk actually outweighed the protective and healing properties? I'm still a breastfeeding advocate, a la Sandra Steingraber.

My money is on a combination of genetic vulnerability, prenatal exposure to neurodevelopmental toxins, and environmental triggers during infancy. I think of Chava and the other 1 in 150 children as canaries in our coal mine, telling us that we're descending into dangerous territory.

Off-Road GFCF Baking: Experimental Blueberry Muffins

2008-08-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

I'm out of my favorite GF baking flour blend (and I'm too lazy to custom order the ingredients through my local bulk department to mix my own), so I couldn't bake up a Dutch Baby for breakfast today. I did have some coconut flour and freshly picked blueberries (thanks, Papa R!), so I did a quick bit of searching and found two recipes online that matched what I had on hand. Mimzy and I mixed them up while Chava played Mrs Piggle Wiggle in her bedroom; this game involves re-enacting the various foibles of the children Mrs Piggle Wiggle helps. Today's inspiration is Hubert Prentiss of The Won't Pick Up Toys Cure. She's done some impressive work involving multiple wooden puzzles, the train set, their Playmobil collection, stuffed animals and books. Chava wanted to get her breakfast on the tines of a rake, a la Hubert, but the smell of the muffins lured her out of her den of mess.

These turned out well, much better than I expected. Chava ate 4 and wanted more but we had run out. Next time I'll try doubling the recipe!

GFCF Blueberry Muffins

3 room-temperature eggs
1/4 cup coconut oil
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp sea salt
2-3 Tb honey
1/3 cup coconut flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 Tb coconut milk
2 Tb water
1/2 cup blueberries

Preheat oven to 375 F and line 7 muffin cups with your favorite paper cups (or use a silicone pan). Fill the remaining muffin cups about 1/3 full with water.

In a medium bowl, whisk the room-temperature eggs until well combined. Drizzle in the coconut oil, whisking constantly to combine very well. Add the honey and vanilla and whisk until smooth.

Sift the coconut flour into a separate bowl, then whisk in the baking powder and salt.

In a small glass, combine the coconut milk and water to a liquid with the consistency of cream.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and whisk until smooth. Slowly add the coconut cream water mix 1 Tb at a time, stirring after each, until batter is runny enough to flow off of spoon in a thick stream (it shouldn't fall off in clumps). Stir in the blueberries.

Spoon mixture into paper cups, filling each to just below the rim. Bake at 375 for approx 15 minutes, or until tops are golden brown. Makes 7 muffins.

You could substitute butter or your favorite oil for the coconut oil, and agave nectar for the honey.

Sorry, no muffin photo - Our digital camera batter is dead, and I'm waiting for a new one to arrive in the mail. It's too bad, because these were very photogenic as well as tasty.

In Praise of Sea Jellies

2008-08-17T00:53:00.000-07:00

Chava loves sea jellies. Especially when they're in dramatically-lit aquarium exhibits, but even a dead one on the beach is a precious object. It's probably a good thing we can't install a giant glass ring tank in our living room, or transitions out of the house would be impossible. We visited a small marine science center today, and she wanted to skip lunch to stare longer at the jellies floating through their dark water, bumping into each other and moving off in new directions. The last time we visited the Seattle Aquarium, she wanted only to stand in the Ring of Life to watch the jellies changing colors as they drifted in circles. This was so compelling, the noise, and smell, and jostling of the summer crowd didn't even register with her. I think some part of their attraction comes from their slow grace, their process-not-goal sort of lifestyle, their radial symmetry, and their clear translucence. Add in the danger element of their tentacles and you have a creature destined to capture Chava's heart.

Mimzy At 2.5

2008-08-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Mimzy is already 2 1/2 and changing quickly. So that I don't forget, here's what she's up to these days:

Mimzy is in love with Bob the Builder. We have a yellow plastic hard hat in our dress-up box, and this is Mimzy's must-have accessory for any outfit. She *is* Bob, and frequently says to me "Wendy, what you doing?", to which the acceptable answer is "I'm working on this job. What are you doing, Bob?". She also loves Muck, Lofty, Scoop and Pilchard, and insists they are all girls (if their gender comes up in a story we're reading or making up, she'll correct me so that "he" becomes "she", etc.).

Mimzy's favorite color is red. She volunteers this information to friends and strangers alike every day. She has a red tank top that she has worn every single day for the past two months (except for mama-mandated washing breaks), red sunglasses, a red backpack, red matchbox cars. Her favorite doll house person is Marie, a Playmobil girl with red flowers on her shirt; if Marie is missing, then Sammy, the red-haired girl, or Bean, the boy with red shoes, will work until Marie is located. She brings Marie to bed with her, which means I have to search through the bed each night after she falls asleep, to keep Marie's hard little feet from poking into sleeping Mimzy and waking her up.

Mimzy likes to sing. Last night as we were driving home from a day in the big city, she broke into her version of this song in her soft, sweet, high toddler voice:
"Puff the magic dragon lived in the sea,
and folly did the estee moo in de de bean de de,
and then he blasted off like this,
(fists clenched at chest, then thrust forward with force)
3-2-1 BLAST OFF!"
This is how it is in Mimzy's land - Things speak and sing softly but move with intent and strength.

Mimzy loves small items, and almost always has one in each hand (at least). This past week, it's been a trio of Playmobil girls (each with red in her outfit, of course), but other favorites are her Calico Critters, her "quiet stones" (recycled glass nuggets from the tile store), or a couple of matchbox cars. She also likes to carry bits of food around, which endears her to the dogs. They love to get their snouts on the hot, compacted bits of rice or bun, and Mimzy loves them licking her - I have a short list of things that sort of gross me out, and this bit of symbiosis is on there.

This morning, I read Stellaluna to her for the first time. When Mommy Bat found Stellaluna, Mimzy started to cry. She sobbed out "I not sad, this story make me happy. Mommy bat found Stellaluna!". Then she said that reading "A Trip to the Hospital" from our copy of What Do People Do All Day? would make her feel better, so that's what we did.

Coming Soon to a Workbench Near Me

2008-08-12T23:50:00.000-07:00

I am going to set my studio up this month, so help me. I'm excited about wrestling up jewelry again. It will be interesting to see what happens - I look at these old pieces and have that familiar feeling: There's much that I'd like to change, and just a little that I'm happy with.

Regarding Baked Rodents and Other Thoughts on Mothering a Problem Feeder

2008-08-12T23:25:00.000-07:00

Here's an email I sent to a friend last year - She's part of an online support group for parents of children with sensory integration issues, and one of the group members was struggling with the sort of eating issues I'm familiar with. I'm posting it here so I can keep it handy for my own future comparisons of where we used to be with where we are now regarding eating.

Hi N -

I miss you!

It snowed here yesterday, but now it's raining, raining, raining. I'm ready for the Chanukah lights to drive a bit of this gloom away.

Hoo-eee, do I feel J's pain! Chava's eating issues literally wake me up at night - It's emotionally tough to be the mother of a Problem Feeder. Especially if you've been culturally programmed to equate the ingestion of your food with acceptance of your love (ahem).

We worked on eating with our OT for months, and did make some progress. I'll just ramble a bit, and hope there's some sense it what I say...Chava's primary sensory issues with food seem to be visual and scent-related, although she also has less severe issues with textures and tastes. She usually decides what she will eat based on sight alone, or smell - A glimpse of stringy melted cheese, or a sniff of yogurt odor, and she gags and loses her appetite for the next 24 hours. So, my main challenge was to find a way to get foods onto her plate without triggering her gag reflex, so she could start the long and drawn-out process of seeing, smelling, touching, licking, tasting, swallowing. It sounds like J's son is at least working on these steps, which seems like wonderful news to me - Every one of us goes through the steps that she details with new foods, although neurotypical (NT) kids tend to master this quickly, so that the steps are completed quickly, with flow...Think of a 6-mo old NT baby who smears yams all over her body, licks her hands, licks her gums, mouths some yams, spits them out, etc. I've heard that a lot of PDD-NOS/ASD kids need a long, long time to work on these steps, and don't easily develop the see-smell-touch-lick-taste-swallow flow. So, the first thing I had to was adjust my expectations. I had faith that Chava would eventually eat enough food to grow and nourish her body & brain (because the OT told me so), although there were days when she'd only take in a couple hundred calories (at the most). When she loses foods, I tend to panic, and have to remind myself that this eating thing is a life-long process, and I need to take a loooooong view of it, and not set her up for an eating disorder like anorexia/bulimia along the way.

Our OT typed up a great list of Table Rules w/ her social stories program, which we laminated and keep at the table. We also have a social story drawing of all the steps Chava will take when she meets a new food - There's an eye for "Chava looks at the food", a nose for "Chava smells the food", a finger for "Chava touches the food", a tongue for "Chava licks the food", a mouth for "Chava tastes the food" (taste does not imply swallow, that's the next level, and wasn't something we expected in the beginning - Even having an icon for swallowing on the page probably would have produced way too much anxiety). Armed with these pages, I helped guide Chava through the steps in a low-pressure way - As in "Hey, there's a carrot on your plate" (positive but mellow voice) "Let's start with the first step." As we worked through the steps, both looking, smelling, touching, etc, I'd say "Chava, you are always trying new things", or "Chava, you choose such good foods for your body - You are really getting strong!", or "Chava, you are so brave!" in my best OT tone. She really did start to take pride in her exploration of new foods, and I didn't force anything too horrible on her - One of the table rules is that Chava doesn't get to take foods off her plate or the table, and she cannot tell others what they can/can't eat - So, I started eating yogurt at the table again (although I haven't given her any), after going through weeks of baby steps to get there - Buying yogurt at the store with Chava in tow, taking it out of the fridge, opening the container, eating it while standing in the kitchen, eating it at the end of the table, eating it across the table (each of these steps done alone on a day, sometimes repeated for a few days if necessary). How tedious to type, how tedious to read, how tedious to live - But tiny steps forward in the minutiae do add up. We only "worked" on eating at breakfast, lunch & snacks - Dinner became The Meal When No One Mentions Chava's Eating. It's all about being together as a family, not about food, not about eating - I make sure there's one food that Chava is likely to eat, I assemble her plate w/ small servings of everything we're eating, and we only discuss food if she brings it up. This is a challenge for Doo-Daddy D, who has to fight his ingrained desire to yell helpful things like "So help me, you're going to try that broccoli!", or "WHY WON'T YOU JUST EAT?", or "If you don't eat your dinner, there's no bedtime story!".

At the same time that we were working on this at home, and with the OT each week, we were also more careful to rotate the foods she would eat - If she had a quesadilla on Monday, she couldn't have one again until Wednesday. I didn't serve endless helpings of a favored food at a single meal, because Problem Feeders will binge on a favored food and then reach a sensory burn-out and lose the food - only for weeks if you're lucky, but more likely for months or years. So, we had to prevent binges, which meant a lot of creative meal planning, and a lot of supplements to keep her from starving. I do a lot of baking with whole eggs and lots of fat, pureed veggies, tofu popsicles, kale smoothies, etc. I also let go of my vision of my daughter as an adventurous eater - I grew up in a family that is all about food, the stranger the better, and I liked to think of Chava as following in my footsteps. I had to realize that she is extremely adventurous, it just doesn't look like it if you use NT-Vision; I think her sensory issues make eating a grilled cheese sandwich the equivalent of me sitting down to eat a whole baked hamster, or maybe a bowl of eyeballs. I had to make my peace with the possibility that my daughter would grow up to be That Woman Who Only Eats Plain Quesadillas (cooked with no butter until barely brown and sliced so no cheese is visible) and Grapes.

Removing the anxiety at dinner (the frustration and genuine worry coming from D & myself was more than palpable), and working on things a tiny step at a time, coupled with finding some new ways to get calories into Chava started to pay off. She ate meat for the first time this past summer, and although she hasn't found any of her lost foods, she has actually added a few foods, and started to take in larger quantities of the ones she will eat.

Recently, we've seen some sort of amazing changes - 3 weeks ago, I removed all dairy/casein from our home food (next step is preschool, etc), and this past week I started to take out gluten, too. We won't know if this is what's behind the changes until we've eaten GFCF for at least 3-6 months, when we can re-introduce casein & gluten to see what happens...It could be the new diet, it could just be one of those surprising, seemingly spontaneous, steps forward (to be followed, of course, by another regression?). Only time will tell, but the past week has been very, very different. Chava is telling me that she's hungry (a first!), actually chewing and swallowing new foods the first time she sees them on her plate, and liking some of them, and even asking for more (another set of firsts!). She's not a typical eater by anyone's standards, but at least she's eating, the dark circles under her eyes are less pronounced, and she actually has rosy cheeks.

I hope some of that helps - I have no idea what I've written, and I'm just going to send it off while I can!

xo,
Rebecca

More Medical Fun!

2008-08-12T21:49:00.001-07:00

So, my promise to solve the choking problem seems to be bearing fruit. Here's what we've learned over the past week:

Chava has atelectasis in her right lung, consistent with pneumonia or aspiration. She doesn't have viral or bacterial pneumonia, and our doctor's money is on aspiration. It could be chronic aspiration of tiny bits of refluxed liquid, or it could be a foreign body that she aspirated some time back, hanging around and causing problems. She's using almost 71% of her lung volume, with the rest out of commission. This earns Chava a referral to the children's hospital for a CT scan and an exam by the pulmonology department.

Chava has generally low muscle tone which extends to her swallowing. This earns her a referral to the local rock star speech pathologist for an investigation of her swallowing, with a barium swallow study at the same children's hospital to be ordered upon consultation between our pediatrician and the speech pathologist. This is the same speech pathologist who just agreed to work with Chava despite her over-full schedule. I'm still pinching myself that we're on her client roster - She's incredible, and has a very long waiting list. Lucky (very, very lucky) for us, she will squeeze two groups of new clients in: Toddlers exhibiting the first signs of autism spectrum language challenges, and children on the spectrum who weren't diagnosed until fairly late, despite their parents concerns. It's true - There is actually a benefit to Chava's various doctors' wait and see policy. Of course, if they'd taken our concerns seriously from the beginning, we'd have logged a few years of speech therapy already, but that's another post...

Chava probably does have reflux, possibly GERD (which would explain the aspiration issues with her lung). This earns her a prescription for Prilosec for the next 2-3 months. Since this isn't available in a liquid, she gets the capsules and we have to stray from the prescribed administration. According the the official paperwork from the pharmacist, if she can't swallow the pill whole, she can sprinkle the contents of the capsule on a spoonful of cool applesauce and swallow that whole. There is no way on this green earth that Chava will swallow the capsule whole, nor will she swallow anything at all on any amount of applesauce, of any temperature. Applesauce is on Chava's Absolutely Not For Human Consumption list. So, we're using tapioca pudding and hoping it works.

I did learn something interesting from the speech therapist. She says there is solid research that shows a 90% positive correlation between a parent's concerns about their child's development and a true developmental issue. In other words, if a parent says that they are worried about their child's development in motor skills, speech, etc, their child's doctor should sit up straight and start taking notes, because there is a 90% chance that the parent is correct. I'd like to have a decent sound bite version of this turned into a rubber stamp. I'd love to bring that along to add to the reading material in every medical waiting room I get to wait in.

Our hybrid classroom-homeschool Kindergarten choice is starting to look better all the time - I have a feeling we're going to need plenty of extra hours to follow up on all of these referrals. Despite all of this, I think of Chava as a basically healthy kid. I don't know if that's motherlove clouding my vision, or just the truth. There's nothing like a visit to a large children's hospital to make me want to drop to my knees from the mixture of gratitude for my family's good fortune and sorrow for the families sharing the hallways with me, the ones with critically ill children, who might not have years to pursue various therapies and diets. In the overall scheme of life, Chava is healthy, and we're lucky to have access to health care (a Right in my book, but filed in this country as a privilege), and lucky to have each other. Who knew I'd turn from my youthful grumpy Eeyore self into such a Pollyanna?

Chava's Gallery

2008-08-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

GOD by Chava, August 2008

I'm especially fond of this. As she was drawing this, Chava told me that she believes God isn't Real, that She or He or It is Just A Story. Still, she's fascinated by the concept. I like the simultaneous sun and moon, the rain and lightning, and the fact that God looks a bit like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Lollipops and Helicopters

2008-08-02T22:10:00.001-07:00

We had an exciting Shabbat in January when Chava aspirated the disc of her organic lollipop - The festivities included a night-time call to 911, a visit from a huge team of paramedics and other first responders, a car ride to our local Urgent Care, an ambulance ride to the local fire station, a ride on the air ambulance helicopter, a ride in a second land ambulance, hours in the ER of the closest children's hospital, numerous chest films, and various opinions about where the lollipop had gone, and what to do about it. In the end, we brought Chava back home and waited to see if she would develop aspiration pneumonia. She didn't, and we went back to work with her OT to investigate her swallowing and eating. We didn't discover much of anything new, and the ordering of a swallow study got lost in the combination of my brain haze and the change from our family practice doctor to the new pediatrician in town.

I will be making several calls on Monday, though, since Chava choked again today. This time, it was on a fingernail-sized piece of old-fashioned stick candy, but her distress was real - She couldn't speak or make noise (only for a moment), and was crying, drooling, clawing at her throat, and sticking her hand in her mouth to try to grab the bit of sugar. All while we were standing in line for my iced Americano. Besides pointing out that I am the Worst Mother Ever, this experience made me realize several things:

1. We need to sign Chava up for the insurance program offered by the air ambulance company. $400 per year is a lot less than the $4000 the first chopper ride cost us, and it looks as though we might be the sort of family who will have reason to use their services again. Which brings us to...

2. Especially if I keep giving my kids hard candy. See, Worst Mother Ever. It's just that there are so few candies readily accessible for my kids that are GFCF, not chocolate, and (in a perfect world) not so full of artificial colors and flavorings. I know there are plenty of candy-free children in the world, and I'm sure they're enjoying lovely childhoods. But my own parents were very anti-candy, and I think that's one of the reasons that I struggled to create a healthy relationship with the stuff when I was away from their eyes. It's hard to internalize the "Moderation in All Things" principle unless you actually practice moderation. So I like to let my kids have sweet treats more than once or twice a year; I just need to find treats that won't compromise their airways.

3. We need to figure out why Chava chokes so often. It's not just candy - I've had to forcibly clear a wad of masticated tissue paper and a piece of mango out of her airway, and my husband was in charge of removing the penny that she tried to swallow. There have been numerous other almost-Heimlich choking events, which we've been able to resolve with no-kidding-around blows to her back. Is it any wonder she's not a fan of eating? Add this to the reflux we suspect she has, and her two bouts of pneumonia, and I'm pretty sure we're looking at something physiological...Low tone, some sort of anatomical issue; there must be something behind this other than just sensory issues related to food.

4. I am already exhausted by all of this, and I haven't even started to DO anything about it yet. This is one of the big things I find challenging about being a mother - The effort required to deal with health-related issues, especially in a country without universal health coverage, is sometimes more than I have time and energy for, which means that everything.....happens.....so....slowly. And it can't, it needs to happen quickly, before Chava chokes on something that I can't dislodge. So I'll focus on this next week, at the expense of something else that's equally important but less terrifying. And that's not to mention things that are so much less important, like all of my domestic tasks - I'm afraid there will always be a pile of clean but unfolded laundry, stacks of scraped but dirty dishes, overdue library books, parched houseplants.

5. It's best not to come to these sorts of revelations in line for espresso. It sucks to freak out surrounded by Hipster Baristas and silent but watchful coffee shop patrons, whose newspaper reading and Important Conversations you are interrupting. I've got to quit going to the quiet coffee shop - The noisy one in town takes longer, but I'd rather have a mama meltdown in that crowd.

Retroactive Memory Adjustment

2008-07-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

Last night, when I meant to be heading to bed, really to bed this time, I came across a huge stack of Snapfish photo envelopes. I suspect that most people don't have this amount of clutter in their lives that such things suddenly appear, unearthed from the office midden, but that's how it is around here. I opened the first one and found my tiny toddler Chavaleh staring out at me, with her fine hair and her big eyes and her hand in her mouth.

I stood there and looked through every single envelope, quickly-quickly flipping through the images, finding so many photos of a little girl covering her eyes, or looking past the camera, or wedged into small spaces, or curled like a prawn on the floor, or pouring sand over her hands, or hiding her face against the closest adult, or fixing the camera with an intent focus and a neutral face, always with dark moons around her eyes. I hadn't seen any of these photos for at least two years, and I found what I was looking for this time, just as I did the last time. Then, I was looking with my besotted heart, gazing on this beauty, this quirky, razor-sharp, observant, thoughtful baby, looking for hints of who Chava was growing into, wondering, would she look like her daddy forever, or would she look just a smidge like her mama?

Last night, I was looking with my besotted and remorseful heart, looking for signs that I only half-noticed, or didn't catch at all and should have noticed. And for the things that I did notice, but that no one else took seriously. Things that, had they been perceived and collected and articulated, would have found us the help to be the parents Chava needed. Parents with an understanding of why the vacuum was truly terrifying, why the very sight of certain foods elicited an involuntary gag, why birthday parties were no fun, or why playgrounds were not for playing. Maybe Chava could have spent two years in the developmental preschool program, maybe she would have grown larger and gained more weight, and maybe she would have been happier. That's the one that gets me most - That my failure to take my own intuition seriously, and then to get others to take me seriously earlier meant less happiness for Chava.

I still have the thrill in my heart when I look at these baby photos of the person who birthed me as a mother and changed my entire world. But I suspect my brain is already at work re-filing images and memories and emotions to catalog things according to my current understanding of Chava, and of what early childhood might have been like for her - Surrounded by loving but slightly clueless people who persisted in running the vacuum, feeding her yogurt, and taking her to playgrounds and parties despite her clear efforts to communicate how unwelcome and overwhelming these things were.

In Praise of Fast Lemonade

2008-07-29T22:37:00.000-07:00

I've combined tips from three friends to put together an extremely easy and tasty lemonade recipe. We've been drinking this all year but it really hits the spot on a hot summer day. The rain has rolled back into town here, but I'm hoping we still have some good weeks of lemonade weather before the damp of fall arrives for good. My thanks to M, D, and Apron Thrift Girl for this one!

Fast Lemonade:
- Tasty drinking water
- Lemon Juice (freshly squeezed does taste best, but I'm lazy, and besides, this recipe is for fast lemonade)
- Maple syrup, honey, or agave syrup
- Orange blossom water

Fill your desired container about 3/4 full of fresh drinking water. Add good glugs of lemon juice and your preferred sweetener, adjusting tart and sweet levels to taste. When you have the balance you like, add just a few drops of orange blossom water, if desired. Great over ice, as popsicles, at room temperature, or well heated to combat a cold (with a good bit of grated ginger).

I Heart Cast Iron

2008-07-26T11:25:00.001-07:00

When we went GFCF, I stopped using my beloved cast iron skillets to avoid cross-contamination. I had cooked so many Dutch Babies in the large pan, it was a giant gluten-riffic sponge. Last week, I finally bought two new skillets, and I'm wondering why, oh why, I waited so long. There's just nothing like a cast iron skillet - The way it holds heat, the way it goes from stove top to oven, the way it glistens when it's freshly oiled and waiting for its next job. I don't find them to be at all delicate - I scrub mine with steel wool when necessary, and use dish soap pretty much every time I wash them. After I wash them, I put them on the stove and warm them to evaporate the water, then I add a bit of oil, spread it around the pan, turn the stove off and leave the pan to rest on the warm burner. If they start to lose their shine, I cook up a batch of latkes in them - The combination of oil and sustained heat seasons them beautifully, and I have plates and plates of crispy latkes to enjoy - A fringe benefit I don't get if I season them in the oven.

I've been using coconut oil to season my new pans, and they are already looking lovely. Non-stick cooking without any toxic Teflon, increased iron content in our food, handy household self-defense tool, the perfect weight for pressing tofu or flowers...What's not to love?

The Revenge of Freddy Petite

2008-07-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

No, it wasn't a monkey slurping spaghetti. It was the head of Freddy Petite and the lower intestines of a certain dog.

On Sunday, Mr Loki vomited a few times in the morning, as is his wont. Then, he kept vomiting every few hours through the day. He really picked up speed late at night, with frequent sudden puking (none of the usual "hurk, hurk, hurk" warning) of a lovely root beer-colored bile all over the house. He was restless, I could have bounced a quarter off of his abdomen, and I had a horrible feeling that he had an intestinal obstruction. Still, my previous dog, Stumpy, was the King of Vomiting (and also King of Stolen Carl Buddig Lunch Meat Slices) and his bouts of puking always self-resolved, sometimes after a bit of re-hydrating at the vet's. So we didn't rush Loki to the (prohibitively expensive) emergency vet.

In the morning, we rushed him to our regular vet, which led to X-rays, which led to frantic calls from the vet's office to my cell phone, which was, of course, not getting reception. Finally, I got the call, gave the OK for surgery, and Voila! The disembodied head of Freddy Petite (Loki having puked up his headless torso 2 months before). Mimzy's long-lost security object of this past spring, restored to us! Missing one eye, minus the flocking, and somewhat more brittle from its months-long bath in stomach acid, but still full of cheery plastic cuteness.

And Loki is OK, no thanks to my loving laissez-faire care. Another lucky break, this one foretold by my hair on the shower wall.

Summer Tent

2008-07-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

This is what quiet time in the summer tent looks like. Rather, this what it looked like for 30 seconds, before the wild rumpus began.

Shower Rorschach

2008-07-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or is this a monkey slurping spaghetti?

Rainbow Fairy Sighting

2008-07-19T20:32:00.001-07:00

This fairy runs very quickly, and has a piercing shriek when angered. If you're playing tag with her, it's only permissible to touch her wing gently with one fingertip, never her body. FYI (see "piercing shriek" above).

Jam!

2008-07-19T16:46:00.001-07:00

Freezer jam is just so easy to make. I think we might need to buy a chest freezer to make room for more, more, more.

The Quotable Chava

2008-07-15T00:55:00.000-07:00

A recent quote of note from Chava:

"I've never been an outlaw-er, and I like this peaceful life. It's simple."

Berry Days

2008-07-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, we were lucky enough to have an acre of raspberries and strawberries farmed by a man named Sam. I loved Sam, because his voice was just like the Lamplighter's in my record of The Little Prince, and because he grew amazing berries on the anemic glacial till that covers this island. Sam sold his fruit to the local packing plant, and paid us with all the berries we could pick and eat. When the first raspberry ripened, we'd call my grandparents, who would immediately drive their RV up from the Bay Area. They'd stay for a while, my grandmother beating each of us at scrabble in the evenings, my grandfather humming to himself and making sandwiches, but the main reason for their visit was the berries. They'd pick enough to fill their freezer with whole berries and jam, then hit the road again for warmer climes.

When Sam stopped farming the berry plot, the annual call to Grandma and Grandpa went out when the first blackberry was ripe. These were more dangerous to pick, but that didn't stop my grandpa from tossing on a floppy hat and filling wrinkled plastic produce bags with blackberries from the local parks and roadsides.

This week, my raspberries are suddenly ripe, and I'm really missing my grandparents. Berry season just isn't the same without them.

An Explanation: Why we are a GFCF family

2008-06-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

(This one's for my friend Fred)

Last August, after many years of asking her various doctors for explanations and assitance, Chava was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. She has been diagnosed as "high-functioning" within this already "high-functioning syndrome".

(I have to stop right here for a brief digression. I struggle to write about this because I have some issues with the clinical language used to describe autism and those diagnosed along the spectrum, and the ideas, theories and beliefs behind the language. The very idea that there is a clinically definable normal by which to define someone as “high-functioning” or “low-functioning” smacks of the commodification of humanity set afire by the Industrial Revolution. I’m not saying that autism doesn’t exist, or that there aren’t common markers or behaviors associated with it. It’s useful to have language to describe clinically significant aspects of a state, and we’ve certainly benefited from having things named and researched when it comes to helping Chava and ourselves regarding Asperger’s. I’m just not comfortable using terms that speak more holistically about a person’s personhood, their very self, as being “high-functioning”. It seems that the vocabulary I’ve found is tainted by its use to misrepresent and misunderstand people diagnosed with autism. I'm using this term now because this is how the pediatric neurologist described Chava in her diagnostic write-up. Ah, this reminds me of my college seminars – Many hours spent on semantics, leaving precious few minutes for substance. So, I’ll cut my digression off. For now, anyway.)

I can't say this diagnosis was much of a surprise to me. It explained the things I'd been pointing out to friends and family since Chava's newborn days. The afternoon we drove home from our diagnostic appointment with the pediatric neurologist, I was filled with overwhelming relief. Relief that this label would bring with it access to all sorts of professional help, and that now I'd be able to focus on articles, studies, and ideas that might actually help me understand and help Chava - No more midnight Googling of keywords and fragments of the whole.

I know that not everyone wants an autism spectrum diagnosis for their child, but the idea of a label didn't scare me. I was more terrified of the labels my child might get from her peers and teachers in the absence of a more official explanation to help understand where she's coming from. I didn't then, and don't now, want to "cure" Chava of autism. My goals as a parent are the same as they were when I first felt her rolling like a sleepy, tangled eel in my body, or when I first held her glowing body in my arms - I want to be the sort of mother who can help her become a happy person, a person with a love of learning, love for other people and trust for their love of her, and a love for the world that translates into acts of loving-kindness and tikkun olam.

So, when we switched to a gluten and casein-free diet (GFCF), it wasn’t because I wanted to “cure” Chava of anything, it was because I was desperate to get some calories into her. Between the age of 2 and 4, I think she gained about 3 pounds, total. She grew taller by just enough to keep her doctor satisfied, but she was so slight, she really did get knocked down by strong gusts of wind. She never asked to eat anything, didn’t recognize hunger, gagged at the sight and smell of many foods, refused to try new foods, and only wanted to nurse. We had a panel of allergy tests done, but that was just to check for anaphylactic responses to allergens, not to the sort of allergy that shows up in a delayed, systemic response. Given the emerging understanding that what we call autism is a state of being that impacts not just neurology, but the body’s other systems, too, I figured it was worth a try – It didn’t involve blood tests or trips to multiple specialists, and the only risk was that she wouldn’t eat the food and would waste away. Since that’s what was happening with gluten and casein in her diet, that didn’t bring any new fears to my heart. Lo and behold, within the first week of removing casein (the protein in milk that gives cheese its melty, stringy appeal), she was asking for seconds of favorites, telling me she was hungry, and was willing to look at, smell, and even taste new foods. I removed gluten from our diet one month later, with continued success. She gained about 3 pounds in the first 2 months on a GFCF diet, the dark circles disappeared from under her eyes, and she had more energy to play, talk, connect with Mimzy, stay focused, etc - In other words, more energy to be a kid.

It can take up to 6 months for gluten to leave your system, so we’re at the point now where we can offer Chava a gluten-rich treat as a challenge, to see what sort of reaction she has. So far, she’s not interested – There have been a few times when she’s had a few crumbs of someone else’s cracker by accident, or a bit of soy sauce with wheat, and she’s had stomach cramps and diarrhea within a few hours. She has noticed this on her own, and I guess the allure of a wheat flour cookie pales with this in mind. The same thing happens with casein, and Chava definitely prefers sorbet or Coconut Bliss to dairy ice cream. So, for now, we’re GFCF.

The Joy of Writing

2008-06-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Chava has been writing for the past hour, copying enticing words from her much-loved copy of My First Word Book onto a piece of paper. Her list of words reminds me of Ratty's recitation of his picnic basket's contents from The Wind in the Willows. The sheer joy and pride on her face is making me giddy - Our summer vacation is off to a fine start! This balances out the kick in the face I got during lunch time.

Regarding Hair: Helena Bonham Carter vs Nick Nolte

2008-06-19T00:50:00.000-07:00

Mimzy seems to have curly hair, for real. At first, I thought her curls were one of those transient physicalities of babyhood - Like Chava's glowing strawberry-blonde eyebrows and lashes, or the amazing Michelin Man rolls of creamy thigh fat that melted away when my babies became toddlers. But now, after almost 2 1/2 years of continued growth and development, I think it's safe to say that the curls are here to stay. I love Mimzy's curls, but I have no idea how to deal with them - My hair has some stubborn body, thanks to cowlicks that each want my hair to head in different directions, but I'm new to true curliness. After much wrestling with ratty tangles, I've worked out a system that seems to work; this involves a weekly shampoo for Mimzy with spritzes of watered-down conditioner each night before combing and afterwards. In between, I leave her hair alone, except for clipping her bangs aside with a barrette each morning and picking out obvious stowaways (I found a plastic zebra hitching a ride to bed this evening).

There are days when Mimzy's hair is truly alive, and seems filled with the desire to reach out to the universe - Around here, these are known as Helena Bonham Carter Hair Days; my friend whose daughter has similar hair calls this her Nick Nolte Look.

If anyone has some miracle product that will allow Mimzy's hair to express its Helena-ness without crossing over into Nolte-ness, that also passes muster on the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Database, I'd love to know about it!

Pie!

2008-06-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

Our strawberries are almost ripe - We ate the first one just now, but only because the potato bugs were already munching on it's nearly perfectly red tip...We brushed them off, cut off the chewed up bit and split the rest between us. We'll only have ripe berries for a few weeks, since our plants aren't everbearing, but I'll try to freeze some for the winter. To make some room in the freezer for this year's berries, I just used up the last frozen bag of last year's crop in a strawberry-rhubarb pie. This was my first GFCF pie, and also my first baking-with-agave experience. All-in-all, it was a success...Chava and Mimzy helped with the measuring, mixing and quality-control tasting, and we got the pie into the oven in record time. I used extra tapioca to compensate for the agave nectar, and the pie set up very well. So well, in fact, that Chava ate an entire piece of pie then asked for seconds. This was yet another Food First for her; she's always been interested in pie in theory, excited to help with the cooking, but absolutely set against eating even one bite. I think the sight of the filling was the opposite of appetizing for her. She was very happy that this pie stayed neatly under its crust, and announced that "these little balls are the best part!", so I guess the tapioca was a good idea. Mimzy loved it, too, and we each had a slice for breakfast the next morning. I love pie for breakfast.

What's Cookin', GFCF-Style

2008-06-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

polenta pizza

peanut butter cookies

For the record, I think vegan "cheese" is just plain wrong. Cheese is something that shouldn't be replicated with non-dairy alternatives. My kids beg to differ - They both love this stuff on nachos and pizza. I used to make our own whole wheat flour pizza crusts each week (with help from my trusty bread machine), but we had to give that up. Instead of tinkering with gluten-free flour blends and safe yeast, I gave polenta pizza crusts a try. Chava loves them, and will eat several slices in a sitting, and Mimzy is just happy that there's red sauce (she's all about the color red these days).

So, here's what we have for dinner on our GFCF Saturday night Movie Nights:

Polenta Pizza

1 cup polenta
3 cups broth
generous pinch of sea salt
GFCF pasta sauce
kid-pleasing GFCF vegan cheese alternative (read those labels - most fake cheese has casein!)
other toppings as desired (none are desired here, more's the pity)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Bring broth to a boil in a large pan. In a steady stream, add polenta, whisking constantly. Turn head down to about medium and stir, stir, stir - Move quickly, or the polenta will start to explode like Yellowstone's Mudpots, and you'll be burned by flying corn magma. After no more than 2 minutes, the polenta should begin to pull away from the sides of the pan, congealing in the center. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly.

While polenta cools, grease 2 deep 9" pie pans. Split the polenta between the pie pans and, using the back of a spoon or oiled hands, spread the polenta evenly across the bottom and up the sides of each pan.

Top polenta crust with desired amount of your favorite GFCF pasta sauce. Top with grated "cheese" and anything else you desire.

Bake at 400 until crust and toppings are heated through and cheese alternative starts to melt, between 15 - 30 minutes.

I'm hoping to convince Chava to add peanut butter to her diet, and I've been offering peanut butter in many forms. One of my own favorites is the classic peanut butter cookie, so we made a batch of GFCF peanut butter cookies for Saturday night's dessert. Chava and Mimzy helped with the measuring, mixing and sampling, and made the fork marks on each cookie. I adapted this recipe by Diana Rattray, using Bob's Red Mill GF Baking Flour, and they turned out beautifully. I don't always like the beany flavor of this flour blend, but the peanut butter masked it well, and the texture was great - Crisp on the edges, chewy in the center. Even Chava liked these.

GFCF Peanut Butter Cookies
(adapted from recipe by Diana Rattray)

1 1/4 cups GF flour blend
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp GF baking powder
1/2 cup Earth Balance Buttery Sticks (1 stick)
1/2 cup peanut butter (we like crunchy)
1/2 cup raw sugar
1/2 cup Rapadura sugar
1 tsp GF vanilla
1 egg

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or Silpat sheets.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, xanthan gum, salt, and baking powder.
In a large mixing bowl, cream the Buttery Stick, peanut butter and sugars. Add the vanilla and egg, mixing well. Add the flour mixture about 1/2 cup at a time, mixing well between each addition.

Roll dough into 3/4" balls and place on lined baking sheets. Compress each ball with a fork to flatten and leave the tell-tale peanut butter cookie pattern on the top.

Bake for 8 - 12 minutes, or until cookies are golden brown around the edges. Let cool for a minute on the sheet, then carefully slide parchment liner and cookies to a rack to cool completely.

Makes at least 24 cookies, more if you make small kid-sized balls.

Chava's Gallery - June 2008

2008-06-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

Two Schipperkes and A Rainbow, May 2008

Map of Lake Chelan, drawn from memory, June 2008

I love Chava's drawings. As a toddler, she loved to draw. She could spend hours with a tub of crayons, pens, and chalk, drawing first lines, then circles, and later squares. She also did a lot of "writing", small, tight lines of sharply angled waves, neatly arranged in horizontal rows. Then, a few months before her 3rd birthday, she drew two amazing faces, complete with all sorts of details - Individual hairs, ears, eyes, noses with nostrils, lips...And then, literally the next day, she stopped drawing altogether. A few months later, after Mimzy was born, she started drawing again, but only with black crayons and pens, covering small areas of her paper with fields of dense color. No more shapes, no images. We thought at the time that she was working through her feelings about the birth of her sister, but I think it was also, at least in part, an aspect of the other things we noticed then - Trouble reading social cues from peers, sensory processing challenges, delayed echolalia, etc.

Now, she can draw a person if coerced/enticed by a specialist, but until recently she didn't enjoy it. Over the past couple of weeks, she's been including some faces in her recreational drawings, and stick figures in our visual schedules (we try to draw our own each week). Her favorite things to draw, though, are maps and dogs. I love her art - It fills me with nachas, and I love this new way of being able to appreciate how she thinks, what sorts of things are important, what she remembers of a place, what is scary and what is beautiful in Chavaland.

To the driver of the sporty little car behind me yesterday:

2008-06-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let you know that tailgating me will not make the car in front of me go any faster, and I'm not going to pull into the other lane just so you can tailgate them instead of me. Not in this rain-haze, and not when there's a fuel tanker right beside me. Yes, you're going to be stuck there for a little while. Enjoy it.

Muffin Man

2008-06-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

This was Chava's breakfast earlier this week. I put the muffins and grapes on the plate, and she requested a few tomatoes and a "pointy, skinny piece of carrot, about the same size as one of those baby carrots". Then she set to work and called out "Mom! Get the camera! Take a picture and put this on your blog!".

This was my first try at turning our favorite pumpkin muffin recipe GFCF. They came out very well, just as tasty as before, with a great texture.

Pumpkin Date Muffins
GFCF version of Lisa Rauchwerger's original recipe from Chocolate Chip Challah

1/2 cup (1 stick) Earth Balance Buttery Sticks or 1/2 cup Coconut Oil
scant 1 1/2 cups Sucanat or raw sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cup plain Hemp Milk or water
1 cup canned pumpkin (unless you want to cook & mash your own, of course...)
1/2 - 1 tsp GF vanilla extract
1 2/3 cups GF flour blend
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup finely chopped almonds or nut of your choice (optional)

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and grease or fill 2 12-muffin tins with paper liners.

Cream the Buttery Stick or coconut oil with the sugar in a medium-sized bowl. Add the eggs and beat well. Add the Hemp Milk or water, pumpkin and vanilla extract and beat to mix well.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour blend, xanthan gum, salt, baking soda, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Add to wet ingredients about half a cup at a time, beating to mix well. Stir in dates and nuts.

Spoon a good tablespoon of batter into each muffin cup, making 24 kid-sized muffins. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 - 30 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted into the center of muffins comes out clean. These will stay fresh for a couple of days if stored airtight, and they freeze well if you have any left over.

Fork in the Road

2008-05-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

Tonight, on the way to a meeting of the local Autism Moms group I'm part of, I drove right over a fork. In the low angle rays of the setting sun, it looked like a piece of fancy silver flatware, but maybe it was just plastic set aglow. "Fork in the road!" my mind screamed, "Protect the tires!". And as I drove over it, centered safely between my wheels, I thought of what a great thing this was, this literal representation of the place I find myself these days. Then I thought of Kermit and Fozzie's fork, and of Robert Frost, and of the phone call I need to make to our local public school, telling them not to hold a space for Chava. I'm pretty sure we'll be using our school district's homeschool support program for Chava's kindergarten year. This means she'll spend two afternoons a week in a K-1 classroom with a great teacher (the mother of Chava's best friend), some great specialists (music & art), and a Chava-friendly PE program (swimming and gymnastics with local park district teachers); the other three days a week, I'll be on the hook for a total of 6 hours of home-based teaching.

This is not our school district's first choice for Chava. Her developmental preschool team is worried that she won't get the services she needs, especially social skills group work with her peers, and the district administration seems upset, too. I truly believe the preschool team has Chava's best interests at heart when they share their concerns with me, and they're very respectful when they voice their doubts. This just makes me love them even more, actually. I've been talking with the homeschool program teacher and special ed staff, and I've been impressed with their excitement and ideas about meeting Chava's needs.

We've been mulling this over and going over pros and cons, but I can't escape my gut feeling that Chava will be much happier and more successful socially and academically with a hybrid homeschool/public school experience. Maybe this will be a huge mistake, and we'll run up the steep hill to our neighborhood public school in October to get Chava a spot in a general-ed classroom. I'm open to that possibility, but I'm hoping it won't happen. Only time will tell if this fork will pop our tires, but I have a good feeling in my bones and in my head about this.

Dragonland

2008-05-27T23:55:00.001-07:00

Contrary to my first impression, this is not an interpretation of the portal in Stargate. It's a group of animals guarding the entrance to a cave hiding a family of dragons in Dragonland (from the same world as Blueland, I believe). The poor dragons have been under siege for so long, a village with ferry service has been built by the animals.

I love Chava's installations - She has a very precise image in mind when she starts putting things together, and it's fascinating to watch each one take shape. I just wish she would build them somewhere other than the high traffic spots on the floor - Her heartbreak when someone else steps on one and shatters the perfect alignment of components is as real as it is inevitable.

Shower Rorschach

2008-05-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not surprised the universe is using my lost hairs to tell me to take a load off and sit a spell. I was pleasantly surprised that the mysterious and invisible force behind this form of divination is such a fan of Arne Jacobsen. I found this on the shower wall and realized that I don't so much sit in chairs these days, I perch, ready to flit away to sort out the reason behind a crying child, a barking dog, the doorbell, the ringing phone, the oven timer. It would be wonderful to collapse into a chair with a book and a free hour.

Note to Self:

2008-05-27T23:31:00.000-07:00

Put the camera in your bag. Every day. Your daughters are doing photo-worthy things every day, and you are missing the shots because of your endless charging of the camera battery. Take a chance! Live on the edge! Who knows, you might even take a photo or two before the battery dies.

Screaming Sisters

2008-05-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

Chava has been screaming a lot lately. I can't say I love this, but it does seem to be an improvement over the biting, windmill-arms hitting, and throwing of heavy toys. I think screaming is related to "using your words", which is what everyone at school and home models and tells her to do. I was asking that the screaming be done outside, or with an indoor voice. I know, of course, that this is a completely ludicrous request. Who wants to whisper-scream their righteous anger to the world? And, if you have the presence of mind to move it outside before venting, you're experiencing a more manageable sort of anger, no? So, instead, I've gone back to removing myself when the screaming starts - Chava screams out in genuine primal anger, Mimzy screams for the sheer joy of copying her big sister, and I quickly remove myself to another room with a neutral-voice comment along the lines of "Let me know when you need me. I'll be in X room, away from the screaming."

Lo and behold, this might actually be working in some exciting new ways. There was screaming tonight after the bath, when Chava wanted to stay shivering wet in the tub to alphabetize the bath stickers. When I removed the sticker collection so that she could work on it outside of the tub while I dried her off, the screaming began, first from Chava, then with Mimzy joining in. I handed Chava her towel and Mimzy her pull-up and headed for the living room to tidy up. The screaming stopped and I could hear giggling and whispers. A happy Chava called out "Don't come yet, Mama!", but I had to peek - She was helping Mimzy into the pull-up. They headed to their bedroom, where Chava got both of them into pj's, then tucked them into the bottom bunk with some specially-selected dolls for each of them.

I snuggled up with them, read a bedtime story, told a Bucky Bee story, and sang my usual lullaby medley to two mellow and focused girls. I guess I should spend more time in tidying up and less time with the hands-on parenting - This might have been our most relaxing post-bath bedtime since Chava was a sleepy newborn.

Oh! Bento!

2008-05-14T00:09:00.000-07:00

Chava & Mimzy's new bento boxes arrived in Monday's mail, just in time for Lunch Bunch today. Chava was so excited about taking her bento box to lunch, the first thing she said as she was waking up this morning was "Mama! Did you forget to make the rice balls?". The three of us spent about an hour putting lunch together - I cut the nori and made the onigiri, Chava & Mimzy decorated them, filled the small animal cups with bits of food, picked out animal heads for their hard-boiled eggs...Mimzy couldn't wait, and devoured her egg after spearing it repeatedly with a chicken-head pick. Chava was so focused on her bento creations, she didn't even mind being covered by the drift of yolk bits from Mimzy's poor egg.

When everything was packed and ready to go, we raced to get Chava to lunch on time. She was so excited, our usual transition to school was radically different: she walked right across the playground without covering her head with her hood, and she didn't ask for a hug and a kiss from Mama with her command of "but no looking at me!". She just sat right down and started to unwrap her box with her very excited face: A coy smile and eyes looking down to the left.

She ate all of the onigiri, the whole egg, the nori hearts - Everything except for a few sunflower seeds. Another food miracle! I will gladly churn out rice balls in happy shapes for the rest of my days if it means Chava will eat rice again. I had a feeling that an obento approach to food would work for us, and it looks like my intuition was working.

Potato Bug Palace

2008-05-05T00:25:00.000-07:00

Chava spends a lot of her free time creating multi-media installations. Over the winter, there have been many traps for heffalumps built from household detritus, generally including deflated balloons, curling ribbon, mason jar lid rings and tape, and many corners filled with zoos built from blocks, plastic animals, dishes and pencil erasers. This is an exciting development, even if I don't always have happy words to share when I stumble into an installation in the dark of night - She used to spend her free "alone time" lining things up: 100 plastic horses on the couch, front hooves neatly aligned; a stream of plastic snakes heading through the kitchen, nose-to-tail; a fluffy line of disemboweled cotton balls stuck to the yoga mat. This past weekend, we had Spring-ish weather (Finally!), and Chava rediscovered her deep love for the roly-poly . After she gently rounded up a handful of unsuspecting isopods, she moved them into her first outdoor installation of 2008, The Roly Poly Palace. It is, in Chava's words, "nature-made" (except for the empty marigold container, of course), and has everything a pill bug could want - Dried tulip petals, wrinkled past-fresh green beans, a pine cone fence, a pine needle roof with a jaunty Douglas Fir flag, a stone path, and a clean clam shell inside for a bed.

She jumped out of bed on Monday and ran outside to see if her roly-poly family was still there, and I was ready for tears of disappointment. Fortunately, it didn't matter that the pill bugs had moved out because an ant had moved in. Flush with success, she announced that she will be building "animal habitats for all different animals" in our yard this summer - Crows, robins, racoons, deer, bees and wasps. Bring on the sun - I'm excited about this plan! Last summer's obsession was verbatim dramatic re-enactments of short excerpts from The Little Mermaid and Cinderella. By the end of July, I was having trouble bringing any joy to my role as Prince Eric or Prince Charming.

G and V

2008-05-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

Chava's community preschool just finished their tour of the alphabet (1 letter per week) with a costume party. Each child was assigned 2 letters, and needed to bring in something small and lightweight to represent each letter - These items will be sewn onto the class quilt which will hang on the walls of the preschool for years to come. Chava got G and V, and chose Garbage and Violet as her two items. I used my collection of custom bridal salon fabrics (another past job) and made this garbage can and violet to flesh out Chava's chosen words.

She was disappointed that no one in class yelled "stinky!" when they saw the garbage. She loves to get strong reactions from people - Last Halloween I was given specific instructions regarding the creation of her dirty diaper costume for her class parties.

Anyway, here are Chava's G and V contributions to her class quilt:

Yes, that's dog hair in the background. I'm baking a GFCF lemon cake for Shabbat instead of Photoshopping out the ubiquitous Schipperke hairs. Cake always trumps housecleaning and attention to detail in my book.

Chava's Perfect Dogs

2008-04-30T17:52:00.000-07:00

Allow me to introduce our Schipperkes. We'd been dog-less since just after Chava was born, and I had a feeling that life would be better if we added a dog to the mix around here. Of course, one dog led to another, and here we are with two LBDs.

Ms Trixie is probably about 1 1/2 yrs old, and came from our local Humane Society last summer - She was found in a rural section of forest where folks frequently ditch their unwanted dogs. My previous dogs were a 3 1/2-legged Chow-Newfoundland-Black Lab mix and a Husky-German Shepherd mix, so I'm new to the land of purebred dogs. We checked with the Humane Society for a couple of months, looking for a small but sturdy mixed-breed dog who loved children. Behold, Trixie! She's not mixed-breed, but she's small, she's sturdy, and she really does love children. And except for her hair-trigger warning barks and desire to snack on cat poop, her bad habits are more endearing than annoying or troublesome.

Mr Loki is almost 5, and came to us last December via craigslist. I was looking for a fish tank for the girls, and I stumbled across an ad looking for the perfect home for him before his family had to move out of state. He is harder to connect with than Trixie, in no small part because his tail was docked. It's very difficult to know when he's feeling happy minus a wagging tail, and he has a habit of growling when excited that is truly frightening to strangers. Also, he leaps onto our dining room table to steal food as soon as there are no humans in the room, which runs afoul of my own lax sanitary housekeeping standards, and is just downright cheeky. Most worrisome, a couple of weeks ago, he leaped into the air to nip the hand of the man who came over to talk about some yard work we need help with. I'm beginning to think his family didn't need to move, they just didn't want to deal with Loki and his wag-less biting ways. But I love a challenge, and Chava loves Loki. He is, she announces several times a day, "the perfect dog for us".

Enter The Dog Listener. While her discovery that dogs are a lot like wolves, and that they view their human families as their packs is not new (see: Monks of New Skete, etc), I have to say she's on to something. We're following her 4 simple steps, and I do believe it seems to be working. Hurrah!

More fun with eggs

2008-04-25T19:16:00.001-07:00

Our dining room came with a light fixture that I don't love, but it's turned out to be very useful as a prop for room decor. It makes a great anchor for birthday party crepe paper streamers, for instance. A few weeks ago, the girls and I decided to do something fun for their Dad for his holiday of Easter. Being an interfaith family can be challenging, but it's also fun, and it means we get to dye eggs.

We blew these eggs empty, then dyed them and strung them on pieces of fancy yarn with a couple of beads. We put a vase of just-opened branches from our flowering cherry tree underneath, and had a lovely Ode to Spring light fixture.

Season of the (Hard-Boiled) Egg

2008-04-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

Wow. Chava ate an entire hard-boiled egg yesterday at Lunch Bunch, the social/eating group that her preschool teachers put together. Her teachers are beyond generous - They give up their own lunch break two days a week to sit with a few "problem feeders" and work on "challenge foods" - Those lost/despised/a-feared culinary treats such as sandwiches, crackers, or apple slices. Chava says she hates Lunch Bunch, but that's mostly because we weren't walking to the classroom using her preferred path (she likes to go exactly the same way they do when she arrives on other days via school bus, especially since this route doesn't cross the playground full of loud and fast-moving kids); it's also because she has so much anxiety about eating any food, let alone something new.

We were going to work our way up to using a sandwich as her challenge food, but that has to wait until after Passover. We do have a surplus of hard-boiled eggs around here, so I've been sending one in as her challenge food each day for the past week. Much to everyone's surprise (and Chava's great pride), she ate an entire egg yesterday. Yes, even the yolk. We've been working on eggs for, oh, about 5 years now, and this development took me completely by surprise. This counts as a miracle in my book.

So, now it's a different poem from our favorite haggadah that will be forever remind me of this year's Pesach -

Season of the Egg

It's the seaon of the egg,
older than any named creed:
that perfect shape that signs
a pregnant woman, the moon

slightly compressed, as if
a great serpent held it
in its opened mouth
to carry or eat.

Eggs smell funky
slipped from under
the hen's breast, hotter
than our blood.

Christians paint them;
we roast them. The only
time in the whirling year
I ever eat roasted egg:

a campfire flavor, bit
burnt, reeking of haste
like the matzoh there was no
time to let rise.

We like our eggs honest,
brown. Outside my window
the chickadees choose partners
to lay tiny round eggs.

The egg of the world cracks
raggedly open and the wet
scraggly chick of northern
spring emerges gaunt, dripping.

Soon it will preen its green
feathers, soon it will grow
fat and strong, its wings
blue and binding.

Tonight we dip the egg in salt
water like bowls of tears.
Elijah comes with the fierce
early spring bringing prophecy

that cracks open the head
swollen with importance.
Every day there is more work
to do and stronger light.

(- Marge Piercy)

Glory be for dappled things

2008-04-22T01:46:00.000-07:00

The haggadah we started using two years ago has a wonderful collection of poems and quotes, traditional and not, interspersed with the other reading material. Each time I use this at a seder, something new resonates and rattles around my mind for days. This year, it's apparently Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don't like assigning a gender to God, but I like this poem.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

This brings a bit of peace to the tension I feel between doing everything I can to help Chava operate with less anxiety, and with meaningful connection, in the typical world, while simultaneously loving her exactly as she is, for who she is, and not wanting to change her at all. I worry that all of the work-work-work on living in the NT world will change her quirky self, or her shining soul, and that will break my heart. But, if I do believe in souls, I don't think they're so easily altered, if they can be altered at all. And I think it might be the same with quirky selves.

Chava's Scariest Things

2008-04-08T21:57:00.000-07:00

Tonight, while Mimzy was nursing and nursing and nursing to sleep, I started a mental list of the things that have most terrified Chava over the past 5 years. And by terrify, I mean, well, terrify. No hyperbole. These things have all Freaked Chava Out, resulting in visible shudders or gagging (the vase full of curly willow branches and sand at the base of my parents' stairs, the mere sight of yogurt), sudden paralytic fear (children on playgrounds; Orange Cat, the neighbor's kitty whose main crime is looking at Chava), or set-a-personal-land-speed-record running away with true primal screams of terror (the dancing, singing Halloween robot outside the local shoe store one year; vacuums, whether plugged in or parked on a carpet with no power supply).

As Mimzy nursed on and on, I started playing with fitting them to the tune of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. I managed a few, and this exercise kept me from passing out sound asleep with Chava and Mimzy, which is great since I have a pile of laundry, including the only clothes Chava will wear, to wash before tomorrow morning.

Here's what I've got so far, as a way to memorialize some of toddler & preschooler Chava's Scariest Things.

Toilet tank refill and clothes that aren't tag-less
Vacuums of all kinds, even those bag-less
Motion sensor robots that dance and sing
These are a few of the scariest things

Smell of bananas and spoonful of yogurt
Fog horns and creamed corn
and vase filled with sand-dirt
Skeleton masks and loud toys that go "ding"
These are a few of the scariest things

Children on playgrounds and thought of an earthquake
Burgers without buns and orange cat when awake
Mama is gone without leaving her ring
These are a few of the scariest things

When the door clicks
When the fridge sighs
When the world's too loud
I freeze in my tracks or I chew on my hand
And I hope you'll help me out.

Scary Things are on my mind because we took a trip to the Museum of Flight last week. I was excited to see what Chava and Mimzy thought of it, since Mimzy loves all machines right now, and Chava has been interested in flying machines ever since her ride on the Air Ambulance a few months back. Also, there are some things about this museum that make it inviting for people with sensory processing issues: The high ceilings dampen the sound, so there's a certain quiet in the air even when the galleries are crowded. The expansive walls of glass fill the main hall with natural light. The children's area is a bit off the beaten path, and therefore not usually filled to the brim with kids.

Unfortunately, on our way to this tucked-away kids' corner, there was a mishap. Mimzy wanted to take a nursing break in the entry foyer, and I forgot to mention to my dear husband that he should steer clear of the one thing I was pretty sure would scare Chava, and take an alternate route when he and Chava went ahead of us to the Flight Zone. I forgot that I cannot always communicate with my husband without actually speaking, and Chava paid the price. As they set off and turned the first corner, they walked right into the screams of the people riding hidden in the jerky-spinning metal box of the flight simulator. She didn't run screaming, but she did shut down and spent the rest of the visit in contemplation of it. From her comments to us and to herself, I think these were her main points of focus: What was it? Why were people riding in it? Was that really safe? Were the people forced to go on the ride? What, exactly, was fun about it? That wasn't for kids, was it?

And, as happens when she's been so moved by something, so flooded with adrenaline, she couldn't "set her engine to Just Right". She perked up when we left the museum and went to buy some seaweed, but I think it may be a long time before she asks for a return visit.

Spring Into Winter

2008-03-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

My camera leached some of the color out of the cherry blossoms, but the sky did most of the work. It is snowing today, which is fairly unusual for this part of the world. Actually, it's very unusual. The frogs in our neighbor's pond have been silent all day, but the rest of us are excited (kids) and horrified (me) about this - My daughters see a gift from Mother Nature, I see Global Warming.

Shower Rorschach

2008-03-27T19:45:00.000-07:00

This is what comes of reading books about dragons at bedtime. A Chinese dragon on the shower wall.