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A Really Long Post About Oatmeal

My husband is normally up and gone an hour before we even get up in the mornings, but last week saw him drinking coffee in the kitchen one day as the kids headed off to school. The kids waved out the door, he drank down his coffee, and as he kissed me goodbye, he said "I am SO, SO SORRY, Beck." And that is because mornings here are just awful.

I am not a morning person. Not one of my children is a morning person. And in the short hour between getting up and leaving, they have to get their clothes on, brush their hair and teeth, and eat their breakfast - a monumental, horrific task, apparently. Most mornings see us just barely making it, and me collapsing into an exhausted heap as soon as they're out the door, my throat raspy from all of the loud encouraging I'd been doing. It is the hard part of my day, and even saying that makes me feel silly since it's not actually hard. It is, however, very very annoying. VERY.

In my rare moments of self-awareness, I know that certain things I do make mornings harder- like, for example, our cereal ban. No Boxed Cereals on Mornings, I cry! They are crap! Over-priced, over-processed, under-nutritious crap! And so I make the kids a hot breakfast every freaking morning, oatmeal or cream of wheat (which I loathed so much as a kid - OH I STILL DO - that I called it "cream of punishment" and yet my children actually LOVE) or whole wheat English muffins with scrambled eggs or fruit smoothies or whatever, and yes, it makes my life that much harder than it actually needs to be.

There's a price to every choice we make in life, these little unseen costs that can add up while we're not paying attention. Let's take boxed cereal - on the one side, my children would probably eat a heaping bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs with substantially more enthusiasm than they greeted my spinach smoothie experimenting phase and it would make our mornings much easier than they currently are. And yes, I am aware that there are some quite healthy cereals out there. So what's the cost on the other side?

The answer: on its own, probably none. But how about when we relinquish all control of the food in our houses, when we start living on a combination of frozen foods and take-out and restaurant meals - what cost does that carry?

The actual financial cost is, of course, unbelievable. We would easily go through 3 380 g boxes of cereal a week, which run us about $5 a box locally - to a cost of $60 a month for cereal alone. Our current oatmeal-eggs-toast breakfasts probably cost us that in a YEAR. (Or maybe not. But they're cheaper, anyhow.) Eating at a popular fast food chain now costs us at least $25 for a meal - several of those a week would easily add an additional $400 onto our monthly grocery bill. And so the price we pay for convenience is actually money, and lots of it.

There is the health cost. I read recently about a popular commercially-available muffin that has the same calories and FAT as a popular fast-food hamburger. Good grief!

I have spent the last year and a half writing right here about products that can make producing healthier meals for your family easier (my most-recommended product? Likely the rice cooker. We use it ALL THE TIME), and they certain can. You can't remove all of the effort from making a from-scratch meal, though - there will be some work involved. And I think that is likely a good thing.

I've mentioned before that I grew up on a farm, where I was possibly the world's least enthusiastic farm girl. I'm phobic about animals and fastidious about dirt and easily spooked and wilt in... well, pretty much any sort of weather, and so my parents gave me a pass and probably wondered what they'd done to deserve me. But even I figured out that food takes a lot of effort to produce - fields must be tilled in the heat and the rain, large and dangerous animals must be cajoled and cared for, vegetables and fruits planted and picked.

This simple work - chopping vegetables, cooking rice - ties us into the quotidian reality, into our humble lives - better than anything else. Who knows how many generations of mothers before me stood at their stoves on bitter winter mornings, making hot oatmeal to warm their children before they went out into the cold world? Who knows how many generations of children will follow after me, eating oatmeal as they stare out into the snowy morning? And in the background, their mother or father bustling around, irritated with the morning rush and wondering why they don't just give in and buy whatever freaky future food is popular.

And so I guess the final cost is a moral one: if food is too easy, we run the risk of forgetting that our food was raised by the work on human hands, that the meat on our plate was once an animal who stood eating grass on a sunny hill (or who deserved to have that life, at the very least), that everything did not just magically appear at the store without work or effort or cost. Everything ends up costing something, but only this gives you an onion whole and round and cushioned in golden papery skin, the humble everyday magic of real foods filling your house and your children.

Old Foods and New Years

There are some things that my mom made when I was a child that I still remember with a poignant, nostalgic hunger: cinnamon buns at Christmas with white frosting and red maraschino cherries on the top (memorable because my mother, a responsible mother of the 70s and 80s, shunned red food colouring); tea biscuits with winter suppers, to be devoured afterwards with margarine and homemade jam; hot milk sponge cakes on lazy Sunday afternoons; pancakes on Saturday mornings while we watched HOURS of cartoons.

It's funny what we take away from our childhood, this brief, haunting space of time. I have had - and, I will say with no real modesty, made - any number of delicious things in my adult life, but none of them possess the same enchanted glow as a bowl of orange jello brought to me in a silver bowl when I was in the hospital at 8. I can't even remember what my birthday cake tasted like this year, beyond it being delicious, but I could tell you in detail about my childhood birthday cakes, delicate and chocolate and sandwiched together with strawberry preserves.

I read in a cookbook ages before I had kids that it was important to keep in mind what "taste memories" we are building for our children, which I mentally squirreled away, thinking at the time that it sounded like quite sensible advice. Now, though, I'm not so certain - I don't think we get to pick what "taste memories" our children take away from childhood, since my kids have no memories at ALL of me ever making things that I am quite proud of and make WAY too often (brownies, anyone?) but speak yearningly of doughnuts that their grandfather bought them two winters ago.

And then there are the things that I make without even thinking about, like the tray of polenta squares (totally simple and from the cookbook that came with my son's lunchbox) that I pulled out of the oven last night, and which my husband had never even SEEN before, since they're normally packed in school lunches and eaten before he gets home. Yet I make them nearly every week and they're received with a surprisingly rapturous glee by my kids, this food that I rarely even think about and that he'd never even seen.

Most people go into parenthood wanting to give their children a good childhood, to give their children happiness, sweet-tasting and mild. The problem with children, though, is that they're actual people and live in the actual world and we don't actually get to control other people or the world - well, I don't, although that feels unfair. And we also don't get to say what memories they'll keep from their childhood, which is sort of depressing, just like my stupid polenta squares.

A lot of people take stock of their health in January, and make plans to eat healthier in this still-new year. It's certainly not a bad idea - my personal resolutions are to eat more fruit, to have more vegetables with supper and to cut back on how many processed foods we eat, but I have other food resolutions beyond those. I want to make more soul-feeding foods, more foods that will stay (possibly) in their memories long after childhood is over, long after this goes from being their home and just becomes the house they grew up in, long after childhood is over and this all has just become memory, vivid and bittersweet and gone.

New Year, New Promises

Everyone is back to school/work today! I spent much of yesterday feeling a bit downcast about this, but now that everyone is out the door and my house is quiet - except for the happy Baby, playing with her Littlest Pet Shop toys from Christmas, and singing Jingle Bells again, God help me - it's quite lovely. And it's probably for the best that we're forced back into our regular routine, since having my husband home for nearly TWO WEEKS caused us to nearly get beri-beri or rickets or some other exotic malnutrition-related disease.

I made some half-hearted Eating Healthier resolutions for this year, but a) we already think we eat quite healthily, with little apparent effect that I can see and b) it's mostly just code for "I want to lose a lot of weight". But the post-Christmas season of lazing around, eating nothing but appetizers and leftover Clementines have made certain glaring deficiencies in our diets a lot more obvious. We are a lazy, lazy people. Apparently, only the structure of the school year and the work week keeps us fed at all - over the break, the kids floated around the house unbreakfasted until midmorning, supper a question mark at 5:30 instead of a certainty, an answer I've known for a week. And so now we all have bad, chesty colds and the relationship between our half-hazard eating patterns and our health seems more obvious.

So yes, this year we've resolved to eat healthier. We've also resolved to stop eating so decadently, to start spending substantially less on groceries and then to pass on the savings to local children's hunger groups. Our part of the world is being hit REALLY hard by the financial crises, and we've decided that it's no longer moral to keep eating like life is one big Greco-Roman feast.

One thing that's always startled me about old photos is how grown-up everyone looks - serious people in suits and proper dresses, serious people for a serious time. Looking at them makes me feel ridiculous in my jeans and hoodies and sneakers, makes me feel like a perpetual toddler, someone who has been protected from serious choices and consequences. And lounging around the house over the past two weeks, with my husband and I barely even changing out of our goofy pajamas and eating snacks instead of dinner and playing Guitar Hero - as fun as it was - really made me feel like we'd backslid on our already tenuous adulthood, that we'd skidded all the way back to our teen years.

This morning my husband got up in the dark and the cold of the morning and put on his workclothes, and I watched out the window while the car lights disappeared off into the distance. Then I sighed and made a big pot of No Fun Oatmeal for the kids' breakfast, got back to the daily work of adulthood, with my secret promise that this year we will be serious people, people who will look like real grown-ups when our pictures are old.

Almost Next Year

It's almost impossible for me to believe that it's nearly 2009, which sounds like a freaky-leaky sci-fi year and not a year that we actually will be LIVING in. I think that in my mind, real years start with 19-something, despite the fact that 2/5 of my household were born in the 2000s and another 1/5 was hanging out in diapers in the latter half of 1999. Still, though.

2008 hasn't been - and I'm knocking on wood here - that bad. It was pretty busy, but I managed to not nearly die this year, which is always a plus, and the kids are still pretty cute, and we're keeping our head above water economically, so I'm grateful for all of that. We're going to celebrate in our usual fashion, which means hanging out at homes, playing board games and eating appetizers and nursing whatever dread illnesses we managed to pick up over Christmas. We are warily allowing The Girl to invite her BFF over for the night, but that is only because we are VERY nice and also because she's a pretty good kid. I realize that's pretty low-key, but by December 31st, it's ALL we are up to.

I keep seeing big menu plans for fancy New Year's Eve dinners, which is fine if you can stand it, I guess, but right NOW I never want to eat again, thanks to... let me think... SEVEN family gatherings over the past four days, all of which involved MASSIVE amounts of food. Nothing but dour water and lettuce for me right now, thank you. So we're probably just going to do a cheese fondue and some boxed appetizers - because I REALLY do not want to cook at this moment - and something child-pleasing for dessert and that is IT.

New Year's Eve used to be THE big party night of the year, and now it's turned into a quiet night at home, which is the sort of thing you never suspect that you might eventually want someday - and this is why I'm not a big plan-maker, because who KNOWS what I'll like ten years from now? Right now, though, the idea of a quiet night with all my kids and some easy yummy food and probably a million rounds of Mario Kart sounds just PERFECT, sounds like the ideal end to a year that was certainly not perfect but that was more than good enough.

So what are you doing New Year's Eve? Has it been a good year for you and yours?

There We Went A-Caroling

We took a large group of little girls caroling on the weekend, which I'd dreaded for the past week. Last week, I walked around in this state of just constant stress - I'm having a ZILLION people over for Christmas dinner! I was taking a ZILLION little girls caroling on Saturday! And so I'd wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what exactly was wrong with my head that I'd sign up voluntarily for these things.

Because we've had -30 temperatures for the past week - oh, that's been delightful - we had to make sure there was enough transportation for all of the kids, so we ended up having my mom and another girl's very game grandfather volunteer as drivers, too, and we also had to do a quick check that each kid was dressed warmly enough before we left. You know, so they wouldn't freeze to death while we were singing and all. And how was it?

Not too bad, actually.

At the time, it felt like maybe the most irritating thing I'd ever done in my whole life, but now it's magically transformed itself into a happy memory, the kids shouting "We're caroling! It's for a charity!" at every house, and then there high young voices raised in Silent Night or Deck the Halls or the version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer where you shout out vulgar things ("Then one foggy Christmas Eve/Santa came to say in his underwear!"), which is the song they sang before I could stop them at our minister's house. Yep. True story.

And they also raised nearly $100 for the local food bank, with enough left over to buy a new Webkinz - oh, this is making me cry to write, geez - for the first cousin of one of the girl's in the group who lost every single thing in a house fire a few weeks ago.

Here's the punchline: this was all The Girl's work. Every bit of it. She heard about the house fire, heard about the food bank running low and planned this party with her best friend at school, designed the invitations ("Dress warmeley", they read.), bought all of the treats (cookie mix, candy for party favours, hot chocolate that kept itself festively warm in the slow cooker while we were out) with her saved-up allowance, decorated the living room, phoned her grandparents and arranged to borrow folding chairs - all her work. So my stress the week before was that all of her hope and her kindness would come to nothing, that no one would show up, that people would be stingy and unreceptive when they opened their doors to little girls standing in the freezing darkness.

TONS of little girls showed up, more than we'd counted on. And at house after house, people would open the door with puzzled looks, quickly replaced by instant delight when they realized that the children on their doorsteps were going to sing to them.

"I'm proud of you," I said to The Girl that night, as I came into her bedroom to tuck her in and turn off her light.

"I'm proud of me too," she said, yawning and closing her eyes.

White Hot Chocolate for The Slow Cooker

2 tsp. vanilla extract

3 cups half and half

3 cups milk

1 1/2 cups white baking chips

Add all ingredients to the slow cooker and stir. Cover and cook on low-heat settings for 4-5 hours, stirring halfway through the cooking time.

Makes 8 servings.