Dinners-Revisited

I wanted to revisit our conversation about taking dinner down a notch in the name of improved mental health, and how that’s going.  However, I cannot fail to recognize the latest news.  This week we have the live-streamed deaths of Phil Castile, Alton Sterling, and the murders of the Dallas police officers by sniper fire (apparently one of the most forward-thinking, least violent police departments in the country, so well done you, sniper, you really taught them a lesson).  It seems these days that nearly every one of my posts is prefaced by reference to the latest act of heinous violence.

The only response to violence is peace.  Watch me over here, being aggressively peaceful at you.  The absence of violence doesn’t make news, but there are a lot of us out here not shooting each other, and teaching our children nonviolence.   I am angry, but not without hope.  Try not to despair.

Even as the world burns, we must keep on living our lives.  The work, the school, the summer camp, the feeding and care of the children.  It has been about a month since I changed up the dinner planning, and I thought I’d check in.

First I’ll say that it takes some discipline to do this.  I am meticulous by nature and always have been – there is home video of me at 8 or so, chastising my mother for sticking her fingers in my Easter basket and messing up the perfect order in which I had placed every jelly bean and plastic strand of “grass.”  When we moved this last time I finally tossed all of my outlines and notes from undergrad and grad school, and found tucked in there various checklists and life plans and grocery plans and such.  RG likes total order, that’s just the way I’m made – the illusion of control of my environment has always been a tool to tame anxiety.

The amount of children one has is inversely proportional to the meticulousness one can maintain, which is a long way of saying my house is usually a mess and pre-child me would be horrified.  This causes eyelid-twitching on occasion, but I practice the discipline to leave the mess and just clean once a week (yes, sounds counter-intuitive I know), and now I have extended that discipline to my kitchen.  I was faithful to the actual schedule for about a week, and immediately tired of the chicken nuggets and mac and cheese.  Frozen pre-packaged food just makes me feel grody, and we got the Fat Baby lecture at Craig’s appointment.  We need fresh veg in our bodies to feel good.

So what the dinners has morphed into is basically a short rotating list of fairly easy but fresh meals.  We have a pasta day.  It can be spaghetti and meatballs, or ravioli with squash chunks, or angel hair carbonara.  Pasta out of the box and into the boiling water, jarred sauce, some sort of mix-in, and done.  We have a burger day – actual burgers, or chicken burgers, or sloppy joes, or hot dogs or sausages – some variation of a thing-on-a-bun, plus a potato or fries side.   We have a Mexican/tortilla day – refried beans and mango and jalapeno, or sweet potato and pintos, or chicken and cheese – something made up as a quesadilla or enchilada or something.  We have a meat-and-two day – grilled chicken or pork chops, some veggie side, rice a roni.  We have a freebie day – I keep mac and cheese in the fridge, frozen pizzas in the freezer, stuff like that, for when the day is crazy.  Zero thought, zero nutrition, zero fights because the kids eat it.  And every day, I throw a bag of brussels sprouts or zucchini or asparagus in the steamer and put it on the side.  That’s a pattern with some flex, a good mix of decently healthy and nutritional meals that take almost zero planning.  It’s all simple but varied.  And I buy pre-chopped vegetables, or those steam-in-a-bag things, so we still get mostly fresh vegetables but with minimal sous-cheffing involved.  You pay a huge mark-up for pre-chopped stuff, but I consider that an investment in my sanity.

I miss being a cook, experimenting with quinoa and crusts and new vegetables, but I have felt marginally less frantic.  I’m not sure how much is the meals and how much is the fact that we finally, finally, bought a house.  We are under contract, and should close in early August.  So after 8 months of temp living in a 2 bed 1 bath, we at last get to spread out a bit.  The house is a new one – built three years ago, so no “old house problems” to anticipate.  It is a camelback located about two blocks from here – a good safe neighborhood, familiar, close to all our haunts.  It has a wee postage stamp front yard with some landscaping, and a lovely little front porch.  The next door neighbor on one side is an old blind man who lives in a tiny house on a big lot covered in lime trees.  The neighbor on the other side is not a residence, but something more like a small Elks club.  It’s a small, house-sized brick building that houses a Mardi Gras walking club, a group of older men who walk in the various Mardi Gras parades and hand out roses to the spectators in exchange for a kiss.  Lecherous old men, oh bestill my heart!  Around Mardi Gras time it gets busy, and a few times through the year they host a crawfish boil or social event, but generally it is unoccupied and quiet.  In front are numerous parking spots and we’ve been told they don’t mind us using them when they aren’t in.

The home has 3 bedrooms plus a fourth room that would be a bedroom if it had a door – it’s a large study/playroom that is open to the upstairs landing, and it’s where our piano and bookshelves and futon and kids’ video game console will go.  There are two more bedrooms with big closets, plus a really nice full bath upstairs – the boys will share one bedroom and the other one will be our guest room.  The master suite is downstairs, with a nice big walk in closet and a really gorgeous bathroom with tub.  The bedroom isn’t quite as bit as our old one – we lost about 400 square feet so nothing is quite as big as our old house – but it has full length windows just like we had in Mobile.  Off the bedroom is a little front porch, and you have to climb through the window to get to it, which is both an old-fashioned trend and also a nod to the fact that most people never sit on their front porch.  (We are not most people, though – we’ll be out there, climbing through that window, I guarantee!)  The porch is also much, much smaller than our old house, but it’s big enough to tuck a couple of rocking chairs.  There is a coat closet, a powder bath, and a laundry over by the master, all located in the bit of the camelback that sticks out and is a single story, and then out in the main area is a dining/living/kitchen space (the second story with the bedrooms, which is the camel’s “hump” in the camelback, is located over this space).  The kitchen has a giant island, which is where I imagine the kids will eat breakfast every day.  Off the back is a small deck and slightly-bigger-than-a-postage-stamp backyard, which is fenced in so Virgil can be let out.  There is a miniscule little patio area which is clearly designed for a grill, and there are narrow passageways alongside the house that will likely become the place for our bikes and such.  We have our own off street parking for two cars at this house, which is a rarity in this area and ups the value significantly.  We will have to buy some sort of shed and squeeze it into the backyard, given we have lost so much storage space from our Alabama house – there is no linen closet, no attic storage space, no spot for holiday decorations or camping equipment or any of the billions of things we kept in our garage in Alabama.  It’s city living for sure – our lot is maybe a third of what our lot in Alabama was.  But it’s a walkable neighborhood, with so much life – not the sleepy, closed-blinds isolation of our old suburban home.  (Which I still miss, but I’m trying to get over it and embrace this new house.)  It’s close to work and school, meaning we don’t have to commute 3 hours every day, and you can also walk to more than a dozen restaurants, half a dozen parks, three grocery stores, hair salons – you name it.

So.  We have a house.  We have a somewhat workable meal plan.  In my usual cycle of self-care/self loathing, I’m in the self care swing right now.  I have two vitamins and a giant nasty cup of Metamucil every morning which is helping with the stress-caused digestive distress that has plagued me for several months.  The Prof and I take turns each morning before work going to work out at 6am, and I am feeling stronger and getting back into the running swing of things.  I still use the pedals under my desk at work, which help a lot with focus, and I’m still doing some yoga moves most days – maybe just 10 minutes, but better than nothing.  These help with circulation and my back.  To this mix I recently added guided meditation.  In fact, the other day I was trying to write a motion and just spinning my wheels, so scatterbrained and distracted (to be fair, I was verging on my fiftieth hour of work that week by then).  So I shut my door and did a ten minute guided meditation (through a GAIAM meditation app on my phone, of course), and suddenly I was focused again.  I’m trying to bill an amazing July, and so I’m not taking lunch breaks and working a lot at night.  Normally this makes me frantic but this week I’m handling it ok, and I think the gym + meditation + reduced dinner + house resolution that has helped.

So, that’s the update.  We are thinking about the timing and logistics of the move, and looking forward to feeling more settled.  Once we’re in, I’ll post some pictures – it is a nice house, good sized and well appointed.  I will be so glad to be rid of the pile of boxes, to have everything we own back under one roof, and to lose the expense of the long term POD storage unit.  Only a few more weeks . . . and then I can get my Louisiana license and register to vote!  (Hadn’t done that yet since we knew we were just going to move and change our address.)