March 3, 2023
I wrote another post more than a week ago (see below!) and each day since, I’ve thought, Today I’ll sit down and finish that post. But life is such a swirly chaotic whirlwind lately, doing nothing and also doing everything, and it just didn’t happen. Old me would have tossed it out, forgotten it, lost in the deep archives of my Google Drive. But 2023 me says, What the hell! Here it is! Have it a week late!
I’ve been feeling excited about all the things I could do here - documentation I’m craving in this season, a way to mark and distinguish the days, a way to find myself again. There are moments I want to remember - a million times a day when I try to freeze a memory of August’s tiny fingers and peach-fuzz head and Leo’s voice quivering with excitement as he yells, Big snowplow! Snowblower! Lawnmower!
It’s March already, and August is almost nine weeks old, and Leo will turn two this month. I had August at the pediatrician yesterday for his two month check-up and kept thinking, Two months ago I was here giving birth to this baby.
Next week, I’m hoping to cook and eat:
- Homemade pizza
- Ottolenghi’s recipe for a red lentil coconut soup
- Lasagna
- Thai curry soup with ramen noodles and tofu
And finally, to say it out loud (so to speak), here’s the beginning of work towards a big goal, which is: running an ultramarathon. I’ve been thinking about this for years, but being pregnant, being postpartum, having young children - I’ve just held this goal close and told myself the time would come.
My plan:
- Start strength training - I began last month! I’ve always been terrible at including strength training in my running work, and I managed to run two marathons without it. But my body is older and weaker and I just don’t think I can run an ultramarathon without injury if I don’t start strength training now. My goal is to maintain a 3x/week plan for the next few months.
- Start regular long walks - I’ve done a few longer walks and hikes with August strapped into the carrier, and as it gets warmer, it’s my goal to start putting more non-run miles on my legs.
- Start running - target date of April 1 (three months postpartum) planning to start with a version of an easy running plan from these guys.
- Run a 5k - planning for early summer 2023.
- Run a 10k and/or half marathon - planning for fall/early winter 2023, with the goal to be consistently completing 5-6 mile runs on the weekends as a starting place for marathon training.
- Run a marathon - sometime in 2024, location and date TBD.
- Run an ultramarathon - sometime in 2025, location and date TBD.
I love (love!) a long-term goal, I love distance race training, and maybe it’s crazy to think I can add this into my already full life - but I'm trusting the spark of excitement that tells me TIME TO START NOW.
February 22, 2023
I’m typing this with one hand, computer propped on my knees. I’m half-laying / half-sitting on the bed, a small baby wrapped in a blanket tucked into my left arm, sleeping. With Leo, I was always trying to set him down, to get him to nap in his bassinet or crib. And he was never very snuggly, just as likely to cry while I held him as not. With August, I know better how fast this time will fly. I feel less urgency to set him down so I can get shit done (honestly, what shit? fold laundry for the hundredth time this week?). And also - he is a very snuggly baby.
The thing I always come back to is food. I love food, and I want to think about it, cook it, eat it - and write about it. Not so much about it, but through it, a lens for my life. I just have never known how to get there. I always talk myself down from it - what a silly thing to write about, and what could I have to say about it, and anyway the golden age of food blogging (i.e. Smitten Kitchen and Orangette) has passed and now people write substacks and record podcasts and TikTok videos.
But here’s the thing - I don't want to do any of those things, and I don't even want to write a food blog, as it were. I don’t really want to write for anyone in particular (or even anyone at all), I just want to let myself sink into a thing that gives me joy - which is food.
I’ve named this the “year of” a few things - the year of journaling, the year of building community, and the year of no guilt. That last one, tricky. Once I started to really pay attention, I realized how much time and energy I funnel into guilt. That’s a whole thing to unpack, but meanwhile - I feel so much guilt around food, most of it swirling around what is the most ethical way to eat, followed closely by what is the healthiest way to eat. Which is not to say that I eat particularly ethically or healthfully - I just feel guilty all the time. Add in the responsibility to feed little humans and instill some food ethic and culture in them, and - guilt guilt guilt.
I’ve been swinging wildly around on how to address this because I am so goddamn tired of feeling all of those things. I just want to feel joy in eating and preparing food. Do I need to eat only plant-based food and the alignment of my values and actions will make me feel joy? Do I need to eat intuitively, balancing a cheeseburger with a lentil stew, listening to what my body wants? Do I need to eat more protein? Less fat? More carbs? More vegetables? What matters to me? What is right? I’m just so tired of constantly weighing all of these things in my mind, balanced with the fact that I do sometimes want to eat meat, and I do sometimes want to eat junk food that is purely for pleasure (rather than nutrition). I want to feel simplicity and joy in food, and I want to instill that in my children.
My grandma was a cook, but I think it would be a stretch to say she enjoyed it. Maybe she did? But often after preparing a feast, she would sit down at the table in a huff, not willing to eat a bite. She drank SlimFast shakes for lunch each day for as long as I can remember. She cooked out of love, I think, but not out of joy or delight.
Cooking has been…challenging these days, to say the least. When we moved last year, we had a commute that left us arriving home exactly at dinner time. Six months later, we moved again, getting rid of the commute - but by then I was pregnant and deep in first trimester food aversions. Then I spent the summer and fall solo parenting many nights and weekends, trying to cook dinner while exhaustedly wrangling a one-year old. Now, I’m almost two-months into this next era, with a newborn and a nearly two-year old, and I am beyond exhausted. We don't have a dishwasher. We’re getting ready to pay for two children in daycare, and food feels like the best/only place we can save money. The baby wants to nurse at the exact moment I should start making dinner while the toddler screams at my feet, “animals cookies* peeeease?! cracker? graham cracker?! smoothie (pronounced “smoozie”) peeeease!!!!”
Anyway, in an attempt to tap into the joy of food again, I thought I’d start writing about it here. At first, I let myself get paralyzed in deciding how (classic), but instead I am going to cut straight through that, instead offering: Here! Here are some things I ate this week!
For dinners,
- Black beans and brown rice - beans cooked in the “creamy beans” way - topped with diced onions and peppers, cheese, and avocado
- Frozen cheese pizza from Costco (we are now Costco people!) and a Caesar salad
- A vegetable and white bean soup from the freezer, gifted to us for newborn days, and ciabatta rolls from Walmart that are my go-to for rounding out a simple soup meal
*Side note that Leo calls animal crackers "animals cookies" and there are at least five extra o's in his pronunciation of "cookies."
