Look Ma, no training wheels!

And Eli the blur has graduated from three wheels to four, but looks to be leaving training wheels behind soon himself:

I was curled up on the couch with a cup of tea, happily reading an advance copy of The Food of Love: Your Formula for Successful Breastfeeding, the first mom’s breastfeeding how-to with detailed cartoons that I have ever read, when I came across a big star drawn at the bottom of a page and this message printed inside it: “Hey, you! If you’re reading this book and you’re not just about to have a baby then go and make dinner for someone who just has!”

So, I got myself off the couch and emailed my son’s classmate’s mom, who has just delivered her third child, that dinner was on me.

And then I got back to my reading, because even though I stopped breastfeeding two and a half years ago, I still remember how hard it was for me at the beginning. I’m glad that there’s a good book–a sharp, funny, manageably-sized one (handy for one-handed reading while breastfeeding!)– helping new moms navigate the often-complicated physical and emotional logistics of breastfeeding.

Open the cover and where normally you would find a blank page or maybe just a title page, you find a line drawing of a brand new baby, complete with hospital bracelet and umbilical clip. “Well done,” the text begins. “You have just undergone the most physically and emotionally exhausting process of your life. You have successfully subdivided. You have a baby. You can take it home with you. Unlike a library book, which you have to return after three weeks, this child is yours for years and years. But what do you do with it? What next?”

The next two hundred pages go on to detail “what next,” from “What are Breasts?” to “Stress and Depression” and finally, “When it’s time to wean” with detailed (and often quite funny) drawings, up-to-date medical information (including footnotes!) and a helpful index of topics from abscess (ew) to yogurt, and many stops in between, all written in the wry tone of an experienced and entertaining older sister or friend. A drawing of The Good Mother shows a woman lying on the couch, gazing at her nursing baby while laundry spills from the washing machine, toys litter the floor, and a toddler sits contentedly at her feet with a sandwich, watching tv; the corollary drawing of The Good Friend, who plays with the toddler, brings him a drink, and perhaps tosses the laundry into the dryer isn’t pictured, but strongly implied throughout the book.

The book ends similarly to how it opens: “Ignore this book” reads the header. It goes on to elaborate, “Guilt is the curse of parenthood. This book is meant as a funny, handy guide to helping you to enjoy your baby. Feel free to disagree with it. It’s not a prescription, and you know your baby better than I do…. Look at your baby. He’s perfect. Well done.”

Not nearly enough baby and childcare books take the time to offer this message, and not any I can think of do so with such excellent cartoons. The Food of Love is a breath of fresh air, and a book I’d add to any new mom gift bag.

Some people have baby showers, and some people have book parties, but for The Double-Daring Book for Girls, a special kind of book shower has been organized, during which bloggers will write about activities they tried from The Double-Daring Book for Girls and challenge you (yes, you!) to best their results.

Well, we spent a lot of time trying to decide what to do. We’ve been reading The Double-Daring Book closely since it arrived in our house, because even though no young girls live here, the book offers a lot of material and activities that interest all of us. We have been studying up on notable women (particularly the astronomers (p7), mathematicians, and scientists (p109)), amazing our friends with the math tricks (p198) and memorizing the list of Words to Impress (they do; p199). We have considered dyeing our hair with Kool-Aid (p48; a pink-haired cousin is inspirational in this regard, though she didn’t use fruit juice mix), read the section on swimming (p250) , and practiced the steps of the Cotton-Eyed Joe (p192).

It was hard to choose a challenge, however. At first, Ben wanted to challenge someone to become President of the United States (p153), but then remembered that he actually likes our current president and didn’t want to risk any change in the White House. He wanted to make a lava lamp (p57) — and we will — but that doesn’t seem like a competitive activity. We could summon you all to a Private Eye Challenge (p177) and see if you can figure out our secrets, but that is actually kind of creepy.

Then we found it. Page 120. Pogo Sticks. If you recall, Santa brought Ben a pogo stick two years ago, and to say we have not really mastered it yet is an understatement. So we turned to page 120 and read:

An old story has it that a man traveled to Burma (which is now called Myanmar), where he met a farmer’s daughter named Pogo. Pogo’s family was poor, and she had no shoes. She liked to visit the local Buddhist temple each day, but the road was muddy. So her father built her a bouncing stick, and called it a “Pogo” after his shoeless daughter. Considering the fact that pogo sticks work terribly on mud and much better on hard asphalt and concrete, the story seems unlikely. What is true is that, in 1919, George Hansburg patented the pogo stick in the United States. In the 1920s, pogo sticks became a huge craze, with chorus-line girls in New York performing pogo stick shows on stage.

I would love to see a chorus line of pogo stickers someday. But in the meantime, we read the careful directions and set out in the rain. Ben managed three hops, Eli two, and both are eager to keep trying until they can pogo up and down the block. Can you beat that?!

My fabulous writing group, The Motherlode Writers, is reading at Book Passage on Sunday and we’d love for you to join us!

Motherlode is a Berkeley-based community of mother-writers. We work in a wide variety of genres, including essay, memoir, poetry, and fiction. Our work has been published in print and online outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Literary Mama, a variety of anthologies, and numerous other journals, blogs and ‘zines. Our recent books include Sybil Lockhart’s Mother in the Middle: A Biologist’s Story of Caring for Parent and Child (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2009); Sophia Raday’s Love in Condition Yellow: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage (Beacon Press, 2009); and Caroline Grant’s Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Readers also include Marian Berges, Ursula Ferreira, Rebecca Kaminsky and Sarah Kilts.

Bring the kids and join us on Mother’s Day for a celebration of motherhood and writing!

Sunday May 10th 2 – 3 p.m.
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
(415) 927-0960

In appreciation for the hard work of mothers everywhere, MomsRising has made it possible for every mom to get a personalized Mother of the Year award — announced online in a faux news cast. Check it out! Send it to your favorite mothers so that they can be congratulated by President Obama, celebrated by Hollywood stars, praised by a remarkably articulate baby, and more. Make sure to check out the crawl under the newscast; they snuck in a nice little bit of educational content.

I don’t remember when I first walked into a prenatal yoga class. I was teaching at Stanford at the time, a two-hour daily commute, and maybe the fact that I was so darned uncomfortable –pacing around the conference table during class, fidgeting in my seat during office hours, using cruise control so that I could stretch my legs on the long drive — sent me to that cool, pine-floored studio once a week. There I gathered with the other round-bellied mamas and we stretched and balanced and relaxed through our ninety minutes.

After Ben was born, I returned to mom and baby yoga for a bit but, unsurprisingly, didn’t find the peace and relaxation I’d enjoyed during prenatal yoga. Ben was a noisy, needy, perfectly typical baby and although I aspired to be the kind of balanced yogini that could nurse while standing on one leg in vrksasana (tree pose), I could barely relax lying on the floor with him in corpse pose.

I returned to yoga during my second pregnancy; this time I wasn’t working outside the home, but renovating our house and caring for a three year-old kept me even busier. The once-a-week session seemed like the only time to spend thinking about this coming baby, and I wound up asking my yoga teacher to serve as my doula during my eventual 17-hour labor. I can’t say I consciously practiced yoga during the labor, exactly, but the training I’d absorbed, the thoughtfulness about breathing and stretching and opening, all helped me ride my labor peacefully almost toward the end. I say “almost” to account for the brief interval between feeling the urge to push and getting the doctor’s green light to push, when I recall shouting to my doula, “There is not enough yoga in the world to get me through this!” She laughed, which made me laugh, which distracted me enough to survive that last minute until I could push Eli out.

But again, mom and baby yoga wasn’t for me (especially since I never could find a mom + baby + preschooler yoga class), and yoga has fallen by the wayside as I find my best exercise time is a quick run before the boys wake up. My yoga mat is rolled up in the garage, gathering dust, and I look at it sometimes, thinking I should bring it upstairs, lay it out next to my bed, and try to get in a quick pose or two before bed. All of which explains why I jumped at the chance to read Jessica Berger Gross’s new book, enLIGHTened: How I lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle-Pointer. I thought it might help me get back on the mat.

I know Jessica’s writing from Literary Mama, of course, but also from her work editing the gorgeous anthology, About What Was Lost. EnLIGHTened is part memoir – a journal of her struggles with weight and the emotionally unhealthy family dynamic that contributed to her eating issues —part gentle how-to. She is so honest in her writing about her past (starting with the confession that her childhood nickname was the mean “Bubble Berger” because of the extra layer of fat she carried), that a reader is immediately sympathetic and open to her advice. The book is practical and pragmatic, full of diagrams of yoga poses, recipes, and sutras (both in Sanskrit and in English); she is so convinced of the benefits of her path that she offers a reader lots of ways to join her, and the result is friendly, charming, and accessible. I may not go as far as she does in her low-fat diet (I’m lucky not to have weight issues), but she makes me think twice about the ice cream in my freezer, or at least consider serving myself a much smaller scoop.

I figured I would read her book the way I do books by Michael Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver (books with which enLIGHTened shares some thinking): I am a member of her choir – I am a vegetarian, organic food-buying, yoga-aspiring writer – but as such, I try to be extra-sensitive to preaching, proselytizing and didacticism. So I’m happy to report that whenever she strays into potential eye-rolling territory, she pokes a little fun at herself. For instance, in the chapter on purity and cleanliness, she describes attending a retreat in which she was led through a thirty-minute exercise in “conscious sipping:”

“It was unnerving to drink so slowly. After all, I was used to downing a juice while talking on the phone or blow-drying my hair or driving my car or checking my e-mail. Plus, I was already hungry and it was only the first morning. “What do you want out of the next sip?” Alison asked. I wanted to be comforted, I wanted to be filled. (To be honest, I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich.)”

Later in the same chapter, she writes, “If you eat healthy and low-fat most of the time, you can splurge on the occasional more-indulgent foods.” I perked up, wondering what would count as indulgent for someone who bemoans her previously unenlightened nightly snack of Cheerios and chocolate chips (please! My indulgent snack is a bowl of melted peanut butter, topped with vanilla ice cream, granola, and chocolate syrup.) So she continues, “On a weekend—not every weekend, but on the occasional Sunday—Neil and I will go out for whole wheat organic pizza made with hormone-free cheese (I know, I live on the edge).” If she’s living on the edge, even my decent diet puts me over the cliff, but that’s fine. The point here is not that you slavishly follow every tenet she outlines here –I agree with her that we’d probably be healthier if we did, but I certainly can’t – but she offers a great menu from which you can choose.

Yesterday I finished reading enLIGHTened and then washed off my old yoga mat and rolled it out next to the bed. This morning I was already awake when the alarm clock went off, having been woken at 5 by my 7 year-old climbing into bed next to me. At the sound of the alarm, my almost-4 year old thundered down the hall and climbed in, too. I extricated myself from the warm pile and stood on the mat a moment, groggily collecting myself in tadasana (mountain pose) before stretching my arms up over my head and bending one leg at the knee in vrksasana. The boys giggled from their cozy nest, but tomorrow I’ll encourage them to come join me. Now I know this is the perfect way to start the day, and I’m grateful to enLIGHTend for reminding me.

I can’t believe that with all my cake posts in various places I haven’t written about this cake yet, from the Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame in Nigella Lawson’s Feast. It takes about five minutes to get into the oven, is rich, chocolatey, but not too sweet, and (perhaps my favorite feature) it is an excellent vehicle for lots and lots of cream cheese frosting.

For the cake:
Butter for pan
1 c Guinness stout
10 T (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter
3/4 c unsweetened cocoa
2 c superfine sugar
3/4 c sour cream
2 large eggs
1 T vanilla extract
2 c all-purpose flour
2 1/2 t baking soda

For the topping:
1 1/4 c confectioners’ sugar
8 oz cream cheese at room temperature
1/2 c heavy cream

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Butter a 9-inch springform pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. (I seem only to have 8 1/2″ and 9 1/2″ springforms, but the 8 1/2″ works just fine)

In a large saucepan, combine Guinness and butter. Place over medium-low heat until butter melts, then remove from heat. Add cocoa and superfine sugar, and whisk to blend.

In a small bowl, combine sour cream, eggs and vanilla; mix well. Add to Guinness mixture.

Add flour and baking soda, and whisk again until smooth.

Pour into buttered pan, and bake until risen and firm, 45 minutes to one hour. Place pan on a wire rack and cool completely in pan.

Meanwhile, make the topping:
Using a food processor or by hand, mix confectioners’ sugar to break up lumps. Add cream cheese and blend until smooth. Add heavy cream, and mix until smooth and spreadable.

Remove cake from pan and place on a platter or cake stand.

Ice top of cake only, so that it resembles a frothy pint of Guinness.

Eat.

I save. I keep shoeboxes of letters, files of graduate school notes, baby books and photo albums and boxes with the tiny outfits the boys wore so briefly years ago.

I dump. I keep a box in the garage which I fill for a regular Goodwill run, recycle Christmas cards, send magazines to preschool for collages, purge closets of outgrown clothes.

Eli is a saver. More than that, he is a collector. He comes home from school with his pockets full: a scrap of ribbon, a pebble, a leaf. He arranges his treasures on his bedside table (pictured above) on which he also displays souvenirs acquired along the way (a model Eiffel tower; a photo taken at the Empire State Building; my Dad’s old pocket watch); art projects (a wood train engine he painted at a party; a shoebox diorama; a pottery cat); books (Goodnight, Moon; Frog and Toad; Maisy’s Favorite Animals); toys (a windup frog; a windup train; a handful of beads). He touches them carefully before naptime or bed, making sure everything is in its proper place, shifting them slightly to make room for a new addition. Luckily his little table has a drawer, which is getting full, but still has some room for whatever catches his eye. And although I do a regular sweep of the boys’ room to disappear ignored toys and toss torn drawings, I won’t touch his table. It’s an art project in progress.

A couple days after my first son’s birth, I walked down the street of our busy neighborhood with my baby in a sling, awestruck. Everybody I looked at, I realized, every child, every adult, had come out of a woman’s body. I walked home slowly, mind-boggled at the wonder of it all. I was still a little stunned by my short, hard labor, and felt like I had been initiated into an amazing new society; I wanted to tell my birth story to anyone who would listen, and wanted to hear other women’s stories. Now, nearly four years after I gave birth to my second son, I still often find myself in groups of women that drift into sharing birth stories; we commiserate over past pains, cheer for supportive attendants, and, as we tell our stories, come to a better understanding of this sometimes joyous, sometimes traumatic, always transformative event.

Better understanding is the impulse behind the documentary, The Business of Being Born (2008). Producer Ricki Lake, unhappy with the interventions she experienced during her first child’s birth, set out to research American birth practices. She and director Abby Epstein (who became pregnant during the filming) dig up incredible documentary footage and still photos to create an informative, gripping film that should interest anyone concerned with healthcare in the United States, especially parents and parents-to-be.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest!

I once tried to write an essay in which I compared my writing to the proverbially ignored third child, but the analogy didn’t seem to hold up and I shelved the piece. And now it’s out of date; I can’t claim that my writing isn’t getting much attention, and I’m grateful for that. But now this blog is becoming that third child — the independent oldest, left alone for long periods while I tend to its younger blog siblings.

At Learning to Eat, I’ve been giving my muffin tin a workout, and offer recipes for blueberry, banana, and vegan banana muffins, as well as pizza. Browse around and you’ll find a balanced meal or two (and the drink to accompany them).

At Mama, PhD, I’ve been invited to participate in a reading at UC Riverside, and posted a video of our recent event at the University of Richmond. So go check them out and I’ll try to update here over the weekend.