If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd Have Baked a Cake

I have been deep in the throes of a baking extravaganza lately, by which I mean for, oh, a few months or so.  It's partly that I finally discovered what Grace will eat when packed up in her little lunchbox for Mothers' Day Out-- Sandwiches? No, not even when cut out with cookie cutters and the like.  Vinaigrette-type pasta salads? No. But muffins and quick breads and the like get a "yes" most days so I've been keeping up a steady supply of the things.  And partly the baking has been a capitulation to pregnancy cravings, although I have exerted much, much more self-control than with my first pregnancy.  When pregnant with Grace, my weight gain each month was just slightly on the high side except for one particular month (5th or 6th, I think?) when I gained nearly 20 pounds.  It now lives in infamy at our house as "cake month" for what I hope are obvious reasons.  I baked a LOT.  And then ate it all.  My cravings do skew to the sweet and baked-- things with that lovely moist cake-y texture and a delicate crumb, things from actual cake to brownies to scones to quick breads to muffins and the like.  Candy and ice cream just do not hold the same place in my heart, and although I have a very great appreciation for chocolate in its purer forms, I am somehow able to indulge in that in a sensible, reasonable manner that I wouldn't really call a craving.

I think another reason I have been baking so much is that it is a borderline frivolous domestic pursuit that I know I won't have much time and energy for after the new baby arrives.  I literally did not cook a thing for 4 weeks after Grace was born; we lived on take-out and frozen foods and the kindness of friends that arrived at our house in the form of foil casserole dishes.  I know if Rob and I were not quite capable of cooking real meals from actual ingredients to sate our dinnertime hunger, then puttering about the kitchen with butter and sugar for an inessential thing such as cake is not going to be within my reach for a while.  So for now I shuffle around the kitchen with the mixer and the flour and the cocoa powder, turning out little bits of gastronomic frippery.

Another domestic pursuit I've been indulging in a lot lately is sewing.  I've been terrible about photographing my projects and reviewing them this fall, so I don't have a lot of documentation of my activities, but most evenings after Grace goes to bed now find me listening to the addictive whir of the sewing machine as I work on another project.  For a while, it was a handful of maternity skirts (which are now about the only presentable clothes that still fit) and then when the weather finally turned colder, I started in on winter pants for Grace.  She is pretty slim for her height and RTW pants are such a challenge that it's easier (not to mention cheaper and more fun) to just make them.  I've decided that hot pink corduroy pants are the toddler wardrobe equivalent of nice black pants for adult women.  So necessary!  They go with practically everything!

My quiet enjoyment of domestic life (before the onslaught of intensity and sleep deprivation that is a new baby) has not really extended to the wild, hormonally-fueled cleaning of pregnancy legend, I am sad to say.  It's a shame because I would so love to have a really spotless, deeply clean house; I can't seem to gather the energy for anything beyond the normal level of cleanliness we live in, however.  Which is fairly clean, I must say-- I just wish it were CLEANER.  My nesting instinct madness has been limited to organizing and decluttering and whatnot, instead of actual cleaning; even under normal circumstances, I have a higher tolerance for a bit of dust and dog hair than clutter and things living out of their proper homes.  Unfortunately for me (and all who live with me), my tolerance for mess is inversely proportional with the level of stress in my life.  This is quite inconvenient because the times of the most intense stress (new baby, finishing one's dissertation, etc) are also the times when one has the least time and energy for keeping one's environment in good shape, beginning a VICIOUS CYCLE where your home makes you even more stressed than you were to start with.  I remember after Grace was born, Rob being so wonderful about keeping things shipshape and attending to details he normally could not give a flying fig about; look, I even blogged about it.  He is so gracious to me.

And on that note, I shall wrap up and go make a batch of blueberry muffins.

It's Advent, Folks

We made a thwarted attempt to retrieve our Christmas decorations from our storage unit yesterday, but despite our foundering upon the rocks of holiday hours and company policies, it's time to start thinking about Christmas.  Hopefully we can get them next weekend (along with the CAR SEAT for our impending BABY) and in the meantime, for your Advent pleasure, here is a little ditty from one of my favorites, Sufjan Stevens:

Thankful

We had a lovely Thanksgiving here, with lots of food and time with family and the like.  It's been good to reflect on how much I have, both in terms of material stuff and the less easily documented.  I really liked the post Stephanie wrote this year about domestic life and possessions and such; I am so, so rich, even in the most literal, monetary sense of the world. I have realized anew how lucky and singular it is in the world today to be cozily tucked away with my family in a warm house, safe and secure and with so much food that I am constantly in danger of being bigger than I want to be.  And of course, there is an abundant richness to my life beyond the safe home and bank accounts and closets full of clothes for all of us.

The Christmas shopping season started yesterday, they tell me; I was almost successful in participating in Buy Nothing Day yesterday but did fall off the wagon a bit at one of my favorite fabric stores here in Dallas. Contemplating Christmas gifts in light of ugly consumerism here and the state of the world in general does make me feel a bit queasy.  I sometimes have a hard time hitting the right balance of weltschmerz and functioning like a normal American.  Or do I not want to be a normal American and the weltschmertz is really the way to go?  Anyway, one thing that always helps me AND de-stresses holiday shopping AND actually brings relief to people's physical needs in the world is to give gifts like these from World Vision.  We've done this for at least some of the people on our Christmas list every year since we got married.  If I have an actual good idea for a gift that I think someone would like and actually use, I will get that, but we decided that if we couldn't think of something truly nice/useful/fun, we would give them the gift of ducks, or education for girls, or a goat.  It's especially great for those really hard-to-buy-for people in your family who don't really need or want anything but to be remembered.  World Vision sends you a nice little card that you can wrap up for the person to open.  I was nervous about doing this our first year because it's pretty far outside the norm for my family, but if our family members have been thinking we are crazy Scrooge types, they've never said anything about it to our faces.  So anyway, here is my holiday tip for the year-- gift idea, stress management, and doing something about the need in the world, all wrapped into one!

Zaftig

Well, it's official-- I am huge. I've been bigger than I was at the same stage with Grace this whole time (which can be pretty common in second pregnancies) but in the past few weeks I feel like I've tipped over into some ludicrous phase of enormity.  And I've finally started to get puffy and swollen now that I'm almost 36 weeks, which I have been lucky enough to avoid heretofore; my rings and shoes don't really fit and I feel like my facial features are these tiny things in a vast expanse of puffy face.  I don't feel depressed about it, which is good; I would describe my feelings as astonishment and annoyance.  Every morning when I wake up, I go to roll out of bed and the tug of gravity on the unfamiliar configuration of my body as I go upright comes as a shock, even though this morphing has come on gradually over weeks and months. My corporeal self has somehow held on to its sense of what is "normal" and dear reader, this is not it.

I remember after Grace's birth feeling so glad to not be pregnant anymore, among all the other intense, wonderful, scary things that were going on.  So much of the swelling and extra fluid goes away SO FAST.  And then by about 4-6 weeks postpartum my belly had shrunk enough that I was overwhelmed with a sense of being svelte and slim and something approaching my normal shape. I wasn't really, you understand, with my leftover tummy and giant boobs and all that; it was just that the transition between the state of my body at 41+ weeks pregnant when I had Grace and 4 weeks postpartum was so dramatic that I felt like a new person. I remember saying, "I feel so slim!" My mom was visiting at the time and I remember the look on her and Rob's faces-- there was kindness to the obviously batty postpartum lady but also disbelief. "That's great that you, um, feel that way." I had objective evidence that I wasn't slim since none of my clothes yet fit but it was such an overwhelming relief, to my back and hips and psyche.

And I did lose weight pretty quickly after Grace, which was wonderful. Sadly, I then squandered the precious gift of breastfeeding weight loss by gaining weight as she weaned, leaving me 15-20 pounds heavier at the start of this pregnancy than with Grace. On the other hand, I'm going to end up gaining something within the recommended 25-35 pounds this time around, in contrast with the 50+ pounds I gained with Grace, so I'll probably start off the postpartum physical transformation at about the same place weight-wise as I did last time around. I currently feel very motivated to not make the same mistake of weaning weight gain twice, for the sake of my health and jeans and sense of myself.

In banana pepper news, our count now stands at 11/30 after I made stuffed peppers a couple of nights ago for dinner.  I think of banana peppers as more Italian than Latin American so I used some marinara sauce I made a while back that was in the freezer and stuffed them with soubise (French, not Italian, but you know, whatever...). It was the first time I made soubise, and it was SO DELICIOUS in a creamy/starchy/savory way; I highly recommend it if your cravings happen to veer that way.  It was weird to cook rice with no added liquid.  So now I am down to less than a dozen of these things.  I am tempted to throw them into all the things I'm cooking for Thanksgiving dinner over at my parents' house.  Pumpkin pie with banana peppers, anyone?

And in hair news, I have suddenly turned on my pink hair.  A mere week ago, I was waxing melancholy about perhaps going back to brown for practical new-baby considerations but my feelings are now quite the opposite and I feel weary of the pinkness.  What can I say?  I can be a fickle creature.  Hair color is certainly not a terrible thing to be fickle about, you must admit, and I did last a good 3 months with this.  I am contemplating doing away with the pink in the next few weeks, if the baby does not beat me to the punch by arriving in the meantime.

(In an effort at full disclosure, that picture is from my first pregnancy at about 37 weeks, not this one.  I can't see my feet at all now.)

Banana Peppers Take Over the World!

Life here has taken a turn for the better in the past few days.  I don't think I mentioned it last week, but Rob was working unusually long hours due to an unhappy confluence of scheduling brouhahas, not arriving home before Grace went to bed the whole week.  I think I often underestimate how much that affects me, and then of course as I've already established, EVERYTHING is just affecting me WAY TOO MUCH these days.  Some equanimity has returned to the hormone-addled tangle that is my brain after a lovely weekend and the beginning of a more normal week.  Our weekend was quite idyllic, and by that I mean that we indulged the reclusive tendencies of our natures.  Rob and I are both moderate extroverts and chat easily with friends and strangers, but nonetheless there is a strong streak of the hermit in us.  We have various social butterfly friends who seem to have really interesting and exciting social lives, who seem to thrive on activity and interaction and whatnot, but in contrast sometimes we find ourselves happiest holing up away from the world.  I hypothesize that there is some internal meter in humans with a dial labelled on one end "social needs" and on the other "hermit needs".  Our dials are set rather more than average toward the hermit needs, I think.

One of the things Rob tried to do while holed up away from the world was to watch Ratatouille, which none of us have seen. (Really, I cannot overemphasize how behind the general flow of pop culture we are.)  Grace would have none of it, however.  There was a fair bit of yelling and dramatic music and the little rat looking awfully scared-- it really upset her.  Yes, this G-rated animated CHILDREN'S movie was just too much for her.  I know! I can't believe it either. Her little face crumpled with overwhelmed concern, she hid around the corner from it, she insisted we turn it off. Rob kept trying to surreptitiously finish it on the computer without her noticing, but her eagle eye and sensitive ear noticed each time and she would rush in to protest that she did not like it and require that it be turned off.  He ended up having to watch it after she went to bed, which makes me laugh laugh laugh.  I'm still a little puzzled, as she watches TV nearly every day while I shower in the morning (and sometimes if I'm desperate for a nap in the afternoon too).  Neither Rob nor I are much for yelling, so I think that's a big part of it.  Part of me is actually glad that yelling struck her as so strange that she reacted that way.  And I guess her usual fare of Blue's Clues and The Backyardigans just doesn't have the same dramatic intensity as an actual film.

And as to my other child, she is doing quite well these days.  I am 35 weeks pregnant now and had an OB appointment on Monday where I measured just exactly how I was supposed to.  The past few visits, the midwives' palpating has left them completely convinced that she is head down and although not obviously ready for an imminent arrival, moving in that direction.  She is definitely getting big and strong, as her movements are not the fluttery gentle frissons of earlier weeks but now the attention-grabbing jabby wallops of late pregnancy.  And I am having a lot more contractions, as well as twinges and stabs and pangs in the business area of having a baby, than I remember from last time.  I really hope it's all my body actually doing something constructive to have this baby and I would LOVE it if there was something actually happening when they start checking my cervix at these ever-more-frequent OB appointments.  With Grace, I ended up going to the hospital for an induction while dilated absolutely nothing, which was fun, let me tell you.  Anyway, I bought a package of newborn-sized diapers the other day and am discussing with Rob when to go to our storage unit to get the infant car seat and the crib and the bouncy seat (and the Christmas decorations, although that is unrelated, I suppose).  A baby!  We are having one!

Also!  Banana peppers!  We are having a lot of those too!  We joined a produce co-op here in Dallas, which is pretty good.  It's not quite as fun/delicious/good for the environment as the CSA that we did in Connecticut was; that was all organically grown on one farm that we would visit to pick up our food.  This co-op involves going to Dallas Farmers' Market to get produce (the responsibility to purchase rotates through the members) and the people in the co-op tend to only buy from the wholesalers there, so we are getting the same produce you see in the grocery store but just for a screaming good price.  Not quite the same thing but nothing to complain about, certainly.  I need to take some solo trips to the farmers' market to really scope out what local produce is available so when it's my turn to purchase I can skew the group toward my interests.  Anyway, this past weekend we had a produce pick-up day and among the useful collection of onions, oranges, pears, and butternut squash was a HUGE PILE of banana peppers.  We counted them up and we had 30 banana peppers.  I now feel at a bit of a loss as to what my next step should be.  I've used a few already in soup and marinara sauce, sort of as a bell pepper replacement, but such paltry attempts are not up to a challenge of this magnitude.  I think I'm going to stuff some, and I think I'm going to do some refrigerator pickles.  Heck, maybe I'll pickle them and can them for real with the water bath and everything.  That would make a nice big dent in our pile.  Rob decided we should keep track of our banana pepper endeavor and has posted a status report on the marker board in our kitchen.  It currently stands at 26/30.