Postpartum

Last week, the tragic death of Miriam Carey briefly put postpartum depression in the news. We still don't know what led to the events that culminated in Carey's death, and I will not speculate on that here. But it made me think again about my own experiences postpartum, and perhaps now enough time has passed that I want to write about them in more detail. Already, the details are fading into the haze of early motherhood, and I would like to be able to remember my experiences more clearly.

I did not experience anything that I would characterize as postpartum depression, although I did have a hard time making the transition to motherhood. Looking back, it is impossible to separate the effects of chronic and severe sleep deprivation, hormonal changes, and the unexpected difficulties I had navigating societal expectations about mothers. There is no denying that I was a bit of a mess, but there was a lot of joy in the day to day. I chose to write mostly about the joy here, because I (mistakenly) thought that is what I'd most want to remember. It turns out, though, that the joy has stayed sharp in my memory much more than the difficult bits have. I did post occasionally about specific problems, and I also sometimes acknowledged the fact that I found the transition to motherhood harder than many other women do. Looking back through my earlier posts, I don't find that many details about the difficult bits, though. It wasn't so much that I didn't want to write about the details of why I found that transition hard as that I didn't know how to write about it. I still don't, really.

I know enough about depression to know that whatever was going on with me in my first year of motherhood, it wasn't that. I wish we had a better way to talk about how hard the first year (or two) of motherhood can be beyond discussion of postpartum depression. PPD is too important a topic to clutter with experiences like mine, but experiences like mine should be discussed, too.

The times postpartum I came closest to depression (and perhaps was indeed experiencing depression) were during weaning. I experienced quite strong effects on my mood anytime I dropped a nursing session. For this reason, I weaned very slowly. If dropping one session made me feel depressed, I didn't want to find out what going cold turkey would do.

Pumpkin, a few months post-weaning.

Even with the gradual approach, weaning was one of the hardest parts of motherhood for me, which always felt strange, since breastfeeding was one of my favorite parts of motherhood, once the early difficulties were past. It seemed strange to be suffering so much to end something I liked, but both times, I knew it was time to wean. With Pumpkin, I weaned because I was pregnant again and nursing was making my morning sickness worse. Also, I thought it would be best to be well and truly past nursing Pumpkin before the new baby arrived. With Petunia, I weaned in part because I was afraid that if I didn't take advantage of the window of opportunity that presented itself, we'd be that outlier mother-child pair that was still nursing when the kid was 7 and in part because I needed to introduce a little more space between me and her. She always was, and continues to be, a child who prefers snuggling mommy to anyone else. Usually, that is wonderful. Sometimes, though, it feels smothering.

Anyway, for a few weeks after each dropped nursing session, I felt lethargic and ineffectual, as if I couldn't do anything "right." Little setbacks at work or at home loomed unnaturally large. I was prone to crying jags over minor things, like forgetting to buy the kids' favorite flavor of yogurt. The heightened sense of anxiety that I remembered from pregnancy returned, and I was once again playing out detailed responses to ridiculous scenarios in my head at night, like "what would I do if a car crashed through the front of my house?"

I'm not sure how I was able to have the detachment needed to diagnose the problem. I can't remember how I figured it out. I think I might have read an off-hand comment about the possibility that weaning could cause depression. It was probably in a comment on AskMoxie, but I can't remember the post. Anyway, something made me recognize what was going on, and that helped quite a bit. I felt less crazy and out of control, because I had a reason for the weird things going on in my head, and, most importantly, a reason to think that the weirdness would end.

Petunia, a few months post-weaning, with Pumpkin.
Petunia is wearing that polka dot dress now.

Even once I knew what was going on, I didn't talk about it much. I left a few comments on blog posts mentioning the problems I had, and I mentioned it here a few times. But for the most part, I didn't talk about it. Friends in real life joshed me good-naturedly about how attached to breastfeeding I was, and how I was going to have to "give it up" eventually. Those comments hurt, but I never told them so. The thought of needing to explain what was going on with me was too exhausting, so I just smiled and pretended everything was fine.

And in the end, everything was fine. My kids are weaned. My moods went back to normal. All is well.

Still, I think we would be better off as a society if we found a way to acknowledge the varied realities of new motherhood, to talk about how becoming a mother can mess with your mind in a myriad of ways, and to get all new mothers support as they work through the changes that baby brings. We need to let mothers talk about what has been hard for them without trying to convince them that it shouldn't be hard. I have no idea how to make that happen, but I am pretty sure that it would help if more people talked openly about what early motherhood was like for them. This post is my attempt to start doing that. Feel free to join in, either in the comments or in a post of your own.

Is This Karma or Just the Universe Laughing at Me?

I have mentioned before that I was a picky eater as a kid. I am partially reformed now, but there are still a few things that I just can't stand, and two of the worst are beans (it's the texture) and peas (it's the taste).

When Pumpkin was about 3, we noticed that her day care reports indicated that she would eat refried beans. In fact, she would eat them all up, which was (and is) unusual for her.

This was big news, since she didn't (and doesn't) eat much in the way of either vegetables or protein.

So I dutifully bought a can of refried beans and made them for dinner one night. I took a deep breath and put some on my plate, figuring this was just one more of the many sacrifices of parenthood.

But she wouldn't touch them. We tried several times, with different brands and cooking techniques, trying to make the beans just like day care. Nothing worked, and we finally accepted that refried beans are a food she will only eat at day care, for reasons that only she knows.

I was secretly relieved. I hate beans.

This week, I looked at one of Petunia's day care reports and noticed that she'd eaten all of her vegetables that day. This is big news, the last time she ate a non-pureed, non-grated vegetable, she was about 10 months old- back then she really liked cooked carrot sticks and green beans.

So what vegetable did she gobble up? You guessed it. Peas.

Advice from a Picky Eater

Can you stand one more post about food?

I've decided to take Carrot Cake Pancakes out of heavy rotation- after eating them twice, Pumpkin has decided that she doesn't like them and no amount of bribing her with bits of butter (yes, you read the right) will convince her to eat them now. Hubby and I like them, so we'll probably still have them occasionally, but not once every week or two like we have been doing. I'll give it a rest for awhile, and try again later.

However, tonight, I had a bit of a win- Pumpkin ate pasta from the same dish that Hubby and I ate, and I didn't have to wash the pasta off first (yes, you read that right, too). I have a simple pasta dish that I've been making in different variations for years. It has:

• 1/3 package of my favorite shape of pasta (currently "Paris wheels", a.k.a. Ferris wheels, a.k.a wagon wheels- Pumpkin's name for them is derived from a Dora episode with a Ferris wheel)
• ~1/2 cup cheese (usually feta, but in the new, more child friendly incarnation, the Italian mix of preshredded cheese- after much experimentation, I think my favorite brand of this is Sargento)
• ~1/2 cup of diced tomatoes (I use grape tomatoes, because they require less chopping)
• ~1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
• Fresh basil, if available
• ~1/2 tbs of olive oil
• garlic salt and pepper to taste

You cook up the pasta and then dump all the other ingredients onto it in a bowl and mix it up.

Last time I made it, I reserved some pine nuts and convinced (OK, bribed) Pumpkin to try them. She liked them. I suspected she would- she likes a lot of different nuts. So this time, I made the pasta with the same cheese she usually sprinkles over her plain pasta (the preshredded stuff), and convinced her to try some of our pasta. I didn't give her any of the tomatoes, and I had to pick off any trace of basil... but she ate it. And asked for more. I'm very excited to have discovered another recipe that I can make that we will all eat with minimal modifications. (Next time, I'll leave the basil on the side, and Hubby and I can add that at the table.)

All of this has got me thinking about picky eating, and how toddlers/preschoolers eat, and how to maximize your chances of having low stress about food without just giving up and feeding your kid nothing but junk.

I've written before about my thoughts on my own picky eating. Based on my own experience, I think picky eating comes from several different things:

Taste- some foods just don't taste good to some people. I've mentioned super-tasters before, and described how green vegetables taste bitter to me. I don't think this is the only way in which people's taste preferences differ, though. Taste is controlled by proteins (the receptors on our taste buds), and proteins are produced by genes, which will usually vary within a population.

I don't think there is much you can do about foods your child doesn't like the taste of, except wait it out. There are foods that I used to hate the taste of that I can now stand to eat, even if I wouldn't consider them favorites. I put this down to the fact that your taste buds deteriorate with age. (I don't care what that article says- I think the deterioration starts earlier. How else to explain that I now like blue cheese?)

You can try masking the taste of vegetables. I find that orange juice or bacon mask the bitterness I taste in green beans. Cheese makes just about any vegetable palatable, and a good stir fry sauce can really help, too. I know that a lot of kids will eat just about anything dipped in ketchup or ranch dressing. However, we haven't really had any luck with this approach.

Texture -I don't like beans, not because of the taste, but because of the texture. It literally makes me gag. I can't explain why, but I know a lot of people who have issues with the texture of some food or another.

I don't think there is anything you can do about a texture aversion.

Neophobia- This is the fear of eating something new, which, as I alluded to in my earlier picky eater post, is not necessarily a bad thing. I will admit that I take this to a bit of an extreme, although I've gotten better at trying new things as I get older.

I think most kids have a bit of neophobia in them, too, and some kids (like, say, my Pumpkin) have A LOT of it.

The standard advice on dealing with this is to just keep offering the food. That has occasionally worked for us, but we have had better luck with a more complex approach. I try to grow Pumpkin's tastes slowly, moving from things she likes to similar foods. She liked tortellini, so I slowly introduced ravioli. She liked crackers, so we introduced dried fruit that crunch like crackers. She liked the dried strawberries, and we were (miraculously) able to use that to convince her to try actual strawberries, which she liked. (This same approach has not worked on apples- she eats dried apples and applesauce, but not actual apples, no matter how they are presented.)

I also use a bit of bribery to get Pumpkin to try new things, but I use this carefully. I think this approach can really backfire and lead to a contest of wills. So I tend to only bribe her to try things I think she will almost certainly like and that aren't too "scary"- for instance, I told her she could have a juice box with dinner if she tried one of the "grown up" pastas tonight. She liked it, and ate about 8 more with no further bribery.

Presentation issues- when I mention that Pumpkin is a fairly pick eater, a lot of people tell me that I should mix vegetables  into things she likes, like mac and cheese. This may work for some kids, but it absolutely would not have worked on me as a kid. In fact, there could be two foods that I liked, but wouldn't eat if they were mixed together. I have gotten a lot better about this as I've gotten older, but I still tend to prefer things "plain"- no sauce on my hamburger, please.

For this reason, I tend to tread carefully when trying to get Pumpkin to eat things like pasta dishes. I make sure that she likes all of the ingredients first, and even then, I'm not surprised if she is hesitant to try it.

Plain old stubbornness- this is probably the most frustrating reason for picky eating, and I think this is the one that leads parents to do things like insist that a child stay at the table until she tries everything on her plate. I think that this strict approach will work for some kids but be disastrous for others. If your kid is pretty stubborn, I would NOT get into a contest of wills over food. It is just not worth it, because you really can't make a kid eat. And, as someone who has gone hungry on occasion rather than eat something I didn't want to eat, I can tell you that unless you're willing to be quite draconian, the old saw about how a child won't starve herself just isn't true.

Another common approach to deal with stubbornness is to try to reason with the child. I think this can backfire, too. I think I have mentioned before about how I stopped eating pizza because my parents told me that the red sauce on pasta was the same as pizza sauce.

I think Ellyn Satter  has the absolutely right approach to dealing with stubbornness- just ignore it. Don't make a big deal out of it, and maybe your kid will relent later, when he can do so without losing face.

I've used bribery a little bit to deal with stubbornness, too, but as I mentioned above, only very carefully. I don't usually bribe with desert or candy (at least not when it comes to getting Pumpkin to try other food- I happily bribe with candy for using the potty, but that is another story altogether). I also think that peer pressure works well on stubbornness- Pumpkin will eat somethings at day care that she won't eat at home, and I suspect that is because she loses more face for not eating things at day care. I figure that eventually, she'll let us serve her those foods at home, too.

I know that my picky eating seems completely irrational to people with more adventurous tastes. I just refer back to the evolutionary advantage of being a cautious eater- you're less likely to inadvertently poison yourself! I don't get the moral judgment that seems to get attached to picky eating. Sure, it is inconvenient for me and my family, but as long as I get the nutrients I need, why is it a big deal if I've never eaten an artichoke? And as long as we're providing Pumpkin with reasonably healthy food options, and modeling good eating behavior, why is it anyone else's concern that she has yet to find a green vegetable that she likes?

Still More Thoughts on Food

I've still been thinking about food, particularly about the idea, taken as gospel in some corners of the internet, that processed food is a bad thing.

Two questions are floating around in my head:

1. Do you suppose that when humans first learned how to turn wheat into flour and then into bread, a group of traditionalists went around grousing about this new, unnatural processed food?

2. Why is it that when Native Americans or a tribe in some remote corner of the world use all parts of an animal it is considered noble, but when a food company does something similar and fashions chicken nuggets out of less-favored bits of chicken meat it is considered bad, even evil?

I suspect the answer to the first question is a resounding "no", because that technological innovation increased the food calories that could be extracted from a plot of land, and enabled those calories to be stored for delayed use. These were good things. But who knows, maybe some people at the time were suspicious of the new-fangled bread.

The answer to the second question is harder to fathom. I suspect it has something to do with our deep-seated ideas about how homes should be run and what women should do with their lives, mixed with a healthy dose of knee-jerk "if a big corporation does it, it must be evil".

Personally, I think we should evaluate our food based on whether its production is sustainable and whether it is good for us, not on what technology was used to produce it or who produced it. I think we should be rational about this, instead of dogmatic. I don't think high-fructose corn syrup is a problem- I think the problem is our overuse of refined sugar. So I don't search for juices cookies made with "real sugar". I limit our use of juices cookies*. Similarly, I don't think the problem is that we are using foods that are made by a company and not baked from scratch at home. I think the problem is that some of those foods use too much fat, sugar, and salt as a shortcut to good taste. So I try to chose these foods carefully and use them in moderation.

It is not that I am a huge fan of "processed" food. We don't eat fast food very often at all. We cook most of our meals in our house, and I try to find recipes that I think are healthy. The vast majority of the recipes in heavy rotation come from Cooking Light, actually. However, I do make use of "convenience" foods, such as pre-shredded cheese, store bought tortellini, and frozen sweet potato fries (which I bake, not fry). And once every week or so, we eat a frozen pizza. I read the ingredients, and I decide if I think the product is a good mix of nutrition and convenience. I balance those things against the limited time I have in the evenings, and my desire to spend some of that time with my children, not in the kitchen.

I suspect that as my children get older, dinner time will move a little later and I will get them to help me make dinner- or at least hang out at the dining table while I make dinner. Hubby will make dinner more often, too, once we don't have to try to eat between 6 and 6:30. When these things happen, we will use fewer convenience foods, because we will have more time to cook and the work will be shared among all the family members.

In the meantime, I will continue on as I am going now- evaluating recipes and ingredients one at a time, with an eye to both nutrition and easing my hectic after work routine. And I will continue to refuse to feel guilty about it.

*Thanks to Petunia's decision to let me get some uninterrupted sleep last night, I'm thinking a little more clearly, and I realize that juice is a bad example. What I actually do with juice is look for products with NO added sugars and less added "sweetener juice" (e.g., grape juice). And then I still limit its consumption- Pumpkin gets juice at home only rarely.

Also, more on HFCS, food safety, and additives in the comments!

More on Food

As an answer to anyone who might have read my last post and thought that I just need to offer Pumpkin more vegetables, here is a list, probably incomplete, of the vegetables she has been offered but refused to eat. Each thing on this list has been offered multiple times. Some things, such as carrots, have probably been offered close to 100 times by now.

• zucchini (sliced and shredded, steamed, fried, and grilled)
• broccoli (a.k.a "little trees", raw and cooked with cheese sauce)
• carrots (raw and cooked, with and without sauces, ad infinitum... she'll nibble them, but spits them out)
• corn (on the cob and off)
• asparagus (steamed and grilled)
• green beans
• red, yellow, and green peppers (raw and cooked)
  
• spinach (raw and cooked)
• tomatoes (raw and cooked, chopped, as a soup, and in sauces)
• butternut squash (in soup and cooked in pasta dishes)
• potatoes (mashed or baked)
• peas (frozen or cooked)
• hummus
  

And here is the sadly complete list of vegetable-like things she will actually eat:

• sweet potato fries (this took about 10 tries, but now she'll eat them >75% of the time)
• carrots when shredded and cooked into carrot cake pancakes (but not always)
• ketchup
• french fries
• refried beans, but only at day care
  

Hubby and I try to eat a vegetable with every dinner. I am building quite a collection of ideas about how to quickly prepare vegetables in a way that I can stand to eat (remember, most green veggies taste bitter to me). One of my current "go to" recipes is to put a bunch of green beans in a microwave-safe dish, plop a little bit of butter on them, pour on some orange juice, and sprinkle on some thyme, salt, and pepper. Then I microwave them for 3-5 minutes (depending on the number of beans), stirring once.

We've had better luck with fruit- Pumpkin likes grapes, strawberries, bananas, pineapples, applesauce (but not whole apples or apple slices!), raspberries, and sometimes tangerines ("tangeringes") and mandarin oranges. We've also tried pears, blueberries, kiwifruit and several different stone fruits, but those have yet to meet with success. We can get away with just about any fruit when it is blended up into a smoothie, though, particularly, if we add strawberries to the smoothie.

It is just like sleep, in my opinion- you can do everything "right" and still not have great success. However, I think it is interesting that the article I found on supertasters says that most kids can taste the bitter compound, even if they will eventually become "non-tasters". So maybe we're all just fated to have to struggle to get our kids to eat their vegetables.

Anyone have any suggestions for more vegetables we should try?

On Food

I have finally figured out why Pumpkin's potty regression is bothering me so much, and no, it is not because I'm cleaning up a lot of poop (although I wouldn't say that I enjoy that aspect of it). It is because it is taking me back to the way I felt when Pumpkin was a baby and just would not sleep through the night. It is making me feel like I must be doing it all wrong. Surely something as simple as going potty (or sleeping) shouldn't be this hard?

Rationally, I know that yes, indeed, sleeping and pottying can be this hard for some kids. Just because something seems easy to us as adults (and actually, sleep, at least isn't that easy for some adults), that doesn't mean it will be easy for a kid. The amount of brain development that is going to occur between now and when Pumpkin is an adult is staggering, so why should I expect her to be rational about the potty? But on an emotional level, my gut wrenches a bit every time some one asks me how the potty training is going, because admitting the truth feels like admitting that I've screwed up.

So it is killing me to suddenly be reading all of this guilt and angst from people about feeding their kids. I'm not going to link to the blog posts that I've read, because the last thing I'd want to do is make anyone feel even worse about this by somehow implying that they shouldn't feel what they do. Eating is another thing that seems so simple, until you try to feed your kid. And just like some kids are easier sleepers than others, some are easier to feed than others.

The proximal cause of all of this angst is Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution TV show. I've never seen the show- TV is so low on my priority list right now that I might as well replace our television set with a potted plant- so I only know what I've read about it. Therefore, I have no feeling for whether Jamie Oliver would be pleased that he's making people feel guilty or horrified. (If you have been living in an even deeper cave than I have, you can read Marion Nestle's write up about the show to get an idea of what it is about.) I, for one, think that making people feel guilty is never a good way to bring about lasting change, so it saddens me to read guilt-ridden blog posts about food from women whose good motherhood practically oozes from the computer screen.

It doesn't surprise me, though- just read the comments on Marion Nestle's follow up story about an evaluation of the results of Jamie Oliver's show to see why parents might feel guilty. If our kids won't eat their vegetables it is clearly all our fault and all we need to do is sit them down with a plate of spinach for dinner and tell them that is all they are getting and/or that they aren't leaving the table until they eat their greens.

I call bullshit on this idea. I think that these strict, inflexible approaches to vegetable eating probably do work for some kids. Heck, they may even work for most kids, I don't know. But I know for a fact that they didn't work on me as a kid, and I'm grateful that my parents recognized that pretty quickly and switched tactics. I am still a picky eater, but I now eat a variety of vegetables, and I'm a fairly healthy adult. I don't seem to have suffered any lasting harm from my "white food years", and we can all look back and laugh at how I once stopped eating pizza because my parents told me that the spaghetti sauce I wouldn't eat was the same as the sauce on pizza. (Yes, this is a true story.)

I suspect that temperament and other genetic factors play a role in eating, just like they do in sleep. For instance, a supertaster is unlikely to ever eat unadorned green vegetables, because they taste very bitter to her. Perhaps the strict approaches work well for your average everyday toddler food defiance, but I don't think they are likely to work well on a really picky eater. The cry it out sleep training methods don't work on some kids (as anyone who has had a child cry until she throws up can attest), so why should we expect strict "eat it or starve" approaches to feeding to work on everyone?

None of this should be taken to mean that I think our food system is all hunky-dory. I think there are some serious problems with how we approach food. Long time readers might remember that I went on a little food reading kick when I was pregnant with Petunia, and came away wanting some changes in both my own approach to food and my country's approach to food. I may even agree with Jamie Oliver's goals- since I didn't watch the show, I don't know. But I also think we are prone to looking for silver bullet solutions to our problems with obesity and the like. We vilify certain foods- high-fructose corn syrup and "processed" foods are the current targets- but don't stop to think about what the real problems are (too much added sugar of any sort and too much salt and fat, respectfully, in my opinion).

We seem to have a hard time thinking about food issues sensibly. I have yet to see any evidence that convinces me that my body can tell the difference between the glucose and fructose in HFCS and the glucose and fructose in sucrose. But the evidence that my body doesn't need all that extra refined sugar is pretty strong. So I won't scour the grocery store looking for cookies made with "real" sugar to give to Pumpkin- I'll limit her intake of cookies.

I also don't think the vitamins in the food I serve my children can tell whether the food was made with love or for profit. Food is not inherently bad for us just because someone else made it, even if that someone else is workers 2054 through 2078 in some giant company. I think we should judge our food on its ingredients and not on how it was made. Take the sweet potatoes that are currently Petunia's favorite food. I could make these from scratch. I could cook up some sweet potatoes and puree them with water. But I can also buy "processed" sweet potato baby food. The ingredients in this are sweet potatoes and water. Does it really matter who does the pureeing? Similarly, I rely heavily on preshredded cheese to make it easier for me to get dinner ready in the limited time I have after we get home from day care. The ingredients in that are cheese, some starch (to keep the cheese from lumping together in the bag), and natamycin (to inhibit mold growth). I'm not too concerned about either of these "extra" ingredients, so why should I feel bad that I'm not the one who shredded the cheese?

Am I thrilled that Pumpkin will only eat chicken if it is formed into a nugget and breaded? No. Do I wish I could get her to eat a vegetable other than sweet potato fries? Of course. Am I going to feel guilty about her eating habits because of what somebody who has never met me or my (extremely stubborn but really quite wonderful) little girl says? No way.

Win or Fail?

I love my husband dearly, and he had many wonderful qualities. The ability to figure out a reasonable schedule that ensures we eat dinner roughly on time is not one of them. For some reason that is obscure to me, he likes to do our weekly grocery shopping at the end of the day on Sunday. Sometimes Pumpkin will go with him, but usually she wants to stay home with me and Petunia. This pretty much guarantees that I will not be able to start dinner until he gets home with the groceries- even if by some miracle I have all the ingredients that I need before we do our weekly shopping, I have yet to figure out how to get dinner started while also caring for one hyper toddler and one baby whose sole clingy time of the day is the late afternoon. (This is going to be a serious challenge in March, when my parents will be back home and no longer caring for Petunia during the week. Right now, my Mom helps with Pumpkin, Petunia, and/or the cooking. But I digress.)

Tonight, I decided that I wanted to try a new recipe for dinner: carrot cake pancakes. (Yes, I'm a big fan of breakfast for dinner, particularly since bacon is one of the few meat-like substances that Pumpkin will eat.) We eat dinner between 6:15 and 6:30 most nights. Most of my recipes take between 15 and 30 minutes to make. It takes Hubby an hour to do the grocery shopping and put the groceries away. Given all of this information, you can easily determine that Hubby needed to be leaving to go grocery shopping no later than 5 p.m. So what was he doing at 4:45? Yard work. FAIL.

I managed to get him inside and heading towards the store by 5, but then his phone rang, and he spent the next 10 minutes talking to a good friend from New Zealand. So I was predictably about 15 minutes late starting dinner. FAIL. Then Pumpkin threw a fit after one of her potty breaks because I wan' Mommy to wash my hands!!!! (Big mess of FAIL.) And when I told her that we'd have to hurry because I was making dinner, she looked up at me and smiled. Can I help? "Of course you can, honey," I say, while thinking that his will make us even later. FAIL, FAIL, FAIL.

Amazingly, Pumpkin was a good little helper while we made pancakes. She stopped banging the measuring cup against the bowl when I asked. She did not put her fingers in the egg mixture when I told her not to. She watched me pour the 2 cups of shredded carrots into the batter and asked What is that?. Now, Pumpkin is no fan of vegetables (she's no fan of many foods, actually). In fact, there is not a single vegetable that she likes. The most vegetable-like food item that she has ever eaten willingly is a sweet potato fry. So I certainly didn't want to tell her that the mass of orange stuff I was pouring into the pancake batter was carrots. Think fast, Cloud. Tell her it is something cool. "That's magic stuff, honey." But what is it, Mommy? "Uh.... magic, yummy stuff." MAJOR FAIL. (Late in the day on Sunday is not one of my more creative times, but to be fair, I still can't think of what cool thing I could call a cup full of shredded carrots. Ideas, anyone?)

Around this time, Petunia starts fussing. It is getting late. She wants to be nursed. Hubby manages to distract her for awhile, but pretty soon, it is clear that she will not put up with her evening meal being delayed much longer. I start getting flustered. I look at the pancakes cooking on the stove and get impatient. I turn them too soon. They don't cook all the way through. FAIL.

Hubby and Pumpkin sit down for dinner. I nurse Petunia. Hubby puts the second batch of undercooked pancakes back in the skillet, but to no avail. They remain gooey in the middle. Luckily, there are four nice ones, one of which is on Pumpkin's plate.

She eats three whole bites of a pancake with carrots in it. I like it, Mommy! she proclaims, before turning her attention to eating a blob of butter off of her plate. WIN.

Mother of Two

I have to admit, I haven't really found my groove as a mother of two yet. I do pretty well during the week, when Pumpkin is at day care and I can spend my days trying to come up with ways to entertain a newborn (so far, this mostly involves nursing her, but she does seem to enjoy a rousing game of "knock over the foam block tower" now and then) and running errands. But on the weekends, Hubby and I are struggling to figure out how to cater to the differing needs (and schedules!) of a toddler and a newborn, while also managing to get the necessary chores done.

Yesterday, we went down to a park by Mission Bay with both kids and my sister, to take some photos for our Christmas cards and to let Pumpkin have a good long play at the park with the fast slide and bouncy bridge. The plan was for me to make dinner when we got back- tacos and sweet potato fries (shut up, food critics, you try to come up with gourmet meals that don't feature cheese- I'm still not eating dairy as we try to figure out if Petunia will have the same issue with that as her sister did- and that contain at least one component a picky toddler might agree to try). We got home, and I went to start dinner. I started the taco meat, cut up the tomatoes and got the cheese into a bowl (yes, food critics, I use pre-grated cheese). Then Petunia started fussing, and needed to be nursed. So I told Hubby what needed to be finished for dinner, and sat down to nurse Petunia.

And then it hit me. I hadn't put the sweet potato fries in the oven (yes, food critics, when I said "sweet potato fries" I meant "frozen sweet potato fries" and not "lovingly made by hand sweet potato fries"). At this point, it was too late to start them, so they were not part of the dinner. Unfortunately, they were the dinner component I had hoped Pumpkin would eat, since I knew the taco meat was probably a non-starter for her. She was hungry (I know this because she actually tried the taco meat before spitting it out and saying "I don't like it"). So I missed an opportunity to get something approximating a vegetable into her stomach, and she had a dinner of cheese and tortillas with butter on them.

Hubby and I are also suffering from a general lack of child-free time in which to talk. This has led to some problems. For instance, I finally found the time to research non-stick skillets (and you thought I was joking when I said we have to research every purchase). I determined that Scanpans are probably are best bet for non-stick skillets that stand up to Hubby's high standards for durability coupled with his general disregard for instructions on how to care for them. Hubby never actually trusts my research, so he went to Amazon to read the customer reviews. As we passed each other in the hall, me on my way in to get Pumpkin down, him on his way to do the dishes, he said he'd been on Amazon and thought Scanpans were indeed the way to go. I assumed that he had actually ordered them. He assumed I would handle this. The pans did not get ordered.

These are just a couple examples of the daily reminders I get that no, I really don't have this all figured out. The tantrums from Pumpkin and Petunia's evening fussy time are further reminders. Pumpkin's tantrums can often be short-circuited by some Playful Parenting type techniques, but Hubby and I are having a hard time coming up with the energy or brain power to use them. Petunia's evening fussy time can usually be avoided if I take her for a walk at about 4 p.m.- she falls asleep for 20 or 30 minutes of the walk, and is in a much better mood for the rest of the evening. But on the weekends, it is hard to fit this walk in. Last night, we were at the park. Today, I had to get the grocery shopping done.

So at least once a day, I sit there listening to a child meltdown, and think "I suck at this mother of two thing." It reminds me a lot of how I used to feel when Pumpkin was a little baby- incompetent and a little bit overwhelmed. The difference is that this time, I know that I will figure things out, and that eventually, I'll feel like a competent parent again, and eventually, Hubby and I will get new household routines figured out.

And then, I'll go back to work and we'll have to figure out how to get everyone to work or day care on time.

Success?

So Pumpkin finally tried some mashed potato today. We've been having mashed potatoes with our "fishies' (fish-shaped fishsticks) almost weekly for months. Really, months. And tonight, for the first time, Pumpkin ate some.

But first, she dunked it in her milk.

Is that success?

We're actually floundering a bit on how to respond to Pumpkin's new fascination with dunking everything in her milk. Her fishies also went for a swim tonight, as have many of the entrees we've served her lately. On the one hand, its kind of gross, especially when she strands stuff in there. On the other hand, she usually eats it after dunking it and I hate to make a big fuss about a basically harmless activity. I'm very much a "pick your battles" sort of parent. And Hubby, who is more likely to be willing to fight the battles over this sort of thing, doesn't seem to care about this one.

OK, I promise more interesting posts soon. I'm still recovering from the cold that knocked me flat over the weekend and don't really have the energy to work on the interesting posts I have knocking around in my head. Sorry!

Household Outsourcing

A work friend and I spent a little bit of time discussing our respective household outsourcing decisions. I (after much debate with a reluctant Hubby) outsource some of the cleaning, and want to outsource more. I came home to a gloriously clean house today- our cleaner comes every fourth Wednesday. I'd like to change that to every second Wednesday, since Hubby and I have most definitely not been keeping up with our cleaning plan. Hubby hasn't agreed yet, but I am hoping that the realities of life with a newborn will bring him around.

My friend outsources more of the cooking- she and her family eat out or order in more often than Hubby, Pumpkin and I do. She thought that we must spend a lot of time cooking. I had to laugh. In the interest of full disclosure, here is our menu plan for this week:

• Sunday - leftovers (we usually cook on the weekends, but this weekend, we were recovering from colds)
• Monday - Italian eggs with spinach over polenta (a Cooking Light recipe that Hubby makes and I really love. Sadly, Pumpkin has yet to consent to try any part of this. This week, she picked up a slice of toasted polenta, but decreed it to be "too hot"- her standard response to anything she doesn't want to try- and put it back down.)
• Tuesday - Quesadillas and smoothies (the quesadilla maker we got as a surprise gift for our wedding has turned out to be a wonderful thing. I make the smoothies using whatever frozen fruit I have on hand, OJ, and a little water. I used to also put in a tub of frozen yogurt, but that's too much effort these days. This is a great way to use fruit that is heading past its prime- I cut it up and freeze it for the next smoothies day. Pumpkin will eat both parts of this meal.)
  
• Wednesday - Frozen fishies (fish-shaped fish sticks), mashed potatoes, and broccoli with cheese sauce (Pumpkin will eat some of the fishies, dunked in ketchup. She has yet to try the potatoes, and after her one nibble on the "little trees with cheese", she has refused to try again.)
• Thursday- Tortellini and red sauce (Pumpkin LOVES tortellini. I have yet to figure out how we did this and replicate it. The red sauce is home made, but from canned crushed tomatoes. But they're organic! I make a big batch periodically and freeze jars of it for later use.)
• Friday- BBQ (usually sausages, corn, and zucchini- this is all Hubby)
• Saturday - Chicken Fatoosh Salad (another of Hubby's Cooking Light recipes. We haven't tried this one on Pumpkin yet. She'll probably eat the pita bread bits, but not the chicken, tomato, or edamame. We figure its worth a try, though.)

We won't be winning any culinary awards around here. However, none of these meals, except perhaps the Chicken Fatoosh Salad, takes more than about 20 minutes to make. The tortellini and red sauce will be ridiculously easy, since it is packaged tortellini and pre-made red sauce. I will fry up some zucchini, too, because another colleague just repaid our earlier avocado generosity (we have a big tree in our backyard) with a couple zucchinis from her home garden. Pumpkin won't touch the zucchinis.

Since it takes Hubby at least 30 minutes to clean one of our (really small) bathrooms, I think it makes good sense for us to keep the cooking in house and outsource the cleaning. I can see how someone with a less, um, thorough housecleaner for a spouse might come to a different conclusion, though.

A Veggie... Maybe

I have written before about how Pumpkin is living up to her inheritance (or inflicting my own food karma on me) by being a very picky eater. We have yet to find a veggie she'll eat- she won't even touch my old favorites: corn and potatoes, which I know hardly count as veggies these days. I decided that maybe Pumpkin won't eat vegetables because she honestly doesn't like the taste. I can't say I'd choose a plate of veggies as dinner, either (sorry, Mom). So I am going to start trying to hide the flavor.

We tried our first experiment with this today- broccoli with cheese sauce. It worked... sort of. I definitely liked the broccoli better that way! Pumpkin tried her "little trees" and didn't spit them out. But she didn't have a second bite, either. I'm not sure if it was selling them as little trees or the cheese sauce that did the trick. Either way, I think we'll try again soon. I need to practice on my cheese sauce making technique, though. I couldn't see going through the trouble of a real cheese sauce for this experiment (sorry, whole foods fans) and I had a half-used box of Velveeta in the fridge, so I used that. I needed to add more milk, though. The sauce got way too thick and plastic-like as it cooled. Maybe Pumpkin would have had a second bite if the sauce was nicer. Hubby certainly didn't like it- he scraped it off his little trees.