Category: Uncategorized

Jumpstarting the Semester

Our family has just survived our first week back to school. In a wonderful stroke of scheduling luck, the girls’ school started the same week as mine, and I was able to get Boy back in daycare that same week. After carefully coordinating the cars (only one has carseats at the moment), packing lunches, laying out outfits, and several calls back and forth about who would be getting the children and when, we’re kicking off our long weekend by doing pretty much nothing on what is surely one of the most beautiful evenings of the year.

Luckily for me, the first week of school is a little slow academically, which gives me the chance to start off right. What does it mean to start “right”, and how do you do it? For me, it means getting organized: getting all of the stuff you need, getting everything on your calendar, and getting down to business with reading and homework. Falling behind on an easy week is a very, very bad idea. Don’t do it.

Put in on the Calendar

I’ll go into more detail later about the stuff I use for school because it’s not as important as the scheduling. You can buy new school supplies or switch out your backpack mid-semester. It’s much harder, if not impossible, to catch up mid-semester if you fall behind. Obviously I’ve known my class schedule since registration last spring, but there will always be some adjustments as well as assignment dates to note. For one thing, I learned this week that one of my labs only meets every other week (we have online assignments on off weeks). Not only do I get an unanticipated three extra hours of library time every other week, I also know for sure that I’ll be able to pick up the kids on those days. Frankie will be happy.

The first thing that I do for all classes is put my exam dates on the calendar. All but one of my professors has given us exam dates and stated that they try really hard to stick to them, which is awesome. Classes are rarely cancelled in the fall for weather, so the odds of exams being moved are slim. Finals definitely don’t move, so they’re on the calendar, and I’ll share them with Frankie when we go over the schedule this week. One professor does not advertise dates in advance but gave a vague week for when an exam would probably be, so now I know to reschedule a doctor’s appointment. You might want to put other important dates on there too, like the end of add/drop periods, fall break if you get one, and major project deadlines. Share the dates with people close to you. Frankie has already agreed to drop the kids off on days that my 9:00 class has exams so that I don’t have to stress about being late. Frankie is awesome, if you haven’t already gathered.

Make Lists

Now this is a personal preference of mine, but I choose not to clutter up my planner with every single assignment, reading, and due date. If you’re a traditional student without family responsibilities, this might not be an issue for you. A normal academic planner will probably suit you well. But my planner would be a cluttered mess if I added all of my school stuff to an already-full personal calendar with the kids’ and Frankie’s comings and goings. What I do instead is keep a running to-do list on my iPad. You could use a notebook or a document on your computer for this—whatever works for you. I personally like keeping the list on the iPad because I have the advantage of hand-writing with the pencil while also easily editing the same document over and over without fear of losing it or confusing myself with multiples.

A computer document displays a to-do list with the headings Quant, Orgo, ODE, Physics, Due Dates, and What’s Next. Each heading has a bullet list of readings, assignments, and tasks under it. Some items are crossed out.
My list of lists keeps me organized.

My to-do list is actually several to-do lists on one sheet of paper. One sheet is all that I allow myself because I edit the document daily, and I want to be able to see everything at a glance. I start by making a heading for each class, and under each heading I put everything that I need to do for that class in the next few days to a week: reading assignments, homeworks, online quizzes, practice problems, stuff to buy. Everything. Then, although this is redundant, I make a separate list of upcoming deadlines, generally in chronological order by due date. This way I can easily see everything that needs to be turned in for points without having to scour each individual class’s list. Finally, I have a “What’s Next” list. If you can see the image here (and I have limited alt tags if you can’t!), you’ll see how much stuff is on here. And it’s just the first week of class. This is the least amount of stuff I’ll have to do all semester.

The “What’s Next” list helps me to focus my energy on my upcoming tasks in the most efficient way possible. This is often by deadline, but sometimes it’s not. For example, I have a chemistry homework that’s worth as much as an exam due on the 6th. It’s a big, important assignment, and it would be stupid to save for closer to the due date. I need to work on it now. So I push some easy assignments closer to their due dates to prioritize the big thing with a later due date. Likewise, I got my differential equations book late and was a little behind because the professor jumped right into the new content—and I haven’t had calculus in almost twenty years (I spent all summer reviewing!). So last night I made sure to read the math book and try a few problems until my brain just gave up. And other nights I might have important stuff to do but be so tired that I knock out some of the easier things like mindlessly making flashcards of functional groups or reading the safety section in my lab manual. You get the idea. The “What’s Next list is extremely fluid and allows me to plan the best use of my time in the moment. I intentionally make it flexible and have no guilt about changing it up.

Right now the best use of my time is having dinner with the family and enjoying this weather. We only get a few evenings like this a year, and I don’t want to miss it

Summer Reading: O Pioneers!

A hard-back edition of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! rests on a table.
O Pioneers! is worth the read.

Ah, summer. Since quitting work to stay home with the kids and then returning to school full time, I get the comparatively rare adult luxury of summers off. No work (except self-imposed math review to prepare for the fall), long evenings, trips to the beach, and ample free time to read. So what do I read? Well, choosing a book has been harder than I thought. My main goal for a beach read is to avoid using too many brain cells while not killing any, either. And I prefer fiction for vacation, although I readily concede that there are many fine non-fiction books that meet the above criteria. Being a person of extremes, I have struggled to find the sweet, narrow middle ground between chick-lit and The Brothers Karamazov.

My strategy was to recall the authors from my high school English classes or the authors of classic novels that I had memorized from my Academic Team days (the nerdiness goes waaaay back). A book with high quality writing and a decent plot that would make a ninth-grader’s head hurt seemed just the ticket, so I headed down to my local library to browse the stacks. After failing to find a few titles, I recalled how much I enjoyed My Antonia by Willa Cather and decided to see if there were more of her work checked in. When I saw O Pioneers!, I knew what my next read would be.

Set on the Nebraska frontier (the same setting as My Antonia), O Pioneers! chronicles the life of Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson, who came to the frontier as a child. Alexandra is fated to run the family farm after her father’s untimely death (and her brothers’ general ineptitude in business matters) but accepts her lot with grace and humility. To say much more would probably give too much away, but suffice it to say that book explores Alexandra’s relationships—relationships with family, community, the past, the land, and ultimately herself.

I marvel at the way that Cather was able to craft a tale worth reading about such an ordinary existence. This fact is, in my opinion, a testament to Cather’s writing skill. Where she shines the brightest, however, is in her incredibly vivid descriptions of the Nebraska landscape. I have never been to Nebraska and cannot vouch for any degree of accuracy, but I can say that I felt the landscape. I could imagine myself there—in the orchard on a dewey summer morning, half frozen in a horse-drawn cart in the dead of winter, and walking through a field at sunset.

Some turns of events were predictable, which I did not mind. O Pioneers! is not a who-done-it, and I was not reading it for the thrill of solving the puzzle. Rather, I read it to vicariously experience life in another time and place, and that is what I got—an enjoyable, predictable trip to the Nebraska frontier.

Matchy-Matchy

An open dishwasher holds matching sets of children’s dishes.
Life is easier when stuff matches. Trust me.

As any parent knows, one of the major challenges to a tidy home is kids’ stuff. Toys, books, clothes, baby-proofing stuff, and dishes. Dishes may seem like an odd addition to the list. You probably throw them in the dishwasher with all of your other dishes and don’t give them much of a second thought. But what about putting them away? Do you struggle with where to put them? Are you greeted with an avalanche of mismatched plasticware every time you open the cabinet? How about which lids match which cups? Yeah, I thought so. We used to struggle with all of these things until I got smart.

The adult dishes have always been a snap to put away because they all match. When we got married twelve years ago, Frankie and I registered for two sets of dishes—a fine china pattern that lives in the china cabinet and Fiesta Ware, which lives in the kitchen cabinets. Over the years we have added onto the Fiesta set, but the critical point is that this is the only pattern we have. With the exception of about five plastic plates for eating outdoors, we do not have any dishes expect for the Fiesta Ware. Why is this important? Because when everything matches, it’s easy to put away. So easy. Putting away the grown-up dishes has always been a totally automated process with no thought involved. All you need to do is stack the plates or bowls on top of the like plates or bowls. Before you know it, you’re done.

Fiesta Ware dishes are stacked neatly in a kitchen cabinet.
About half of our dishes are dirty at any given time, but you get the idea.

The very obvious answer to my kid dish problem had been staring me in the face for twelve years, although we’ve only had kids for six years. Make everything match. Over time we had amassed a mish-mash of odd plates, bowls, and cups that didn’t nest or stack neatly, causing me to dread opening the kid cabinet. There was the Choose-Your-Plate plate, the Minnie Mouse with funny ears plate, and the dinosaur tray (which had cracked, anyway). They all had fond memories attached to them, but they had outlived their welcome in my kitchen. On a family trip to Wal-Mart, I decided to end the mess and grabbed two sets of kids’ dishes, each containing five color-coordinated sets of plate, bowl, TV tray, cup, fork, and spoon. Each set cost $5, so this is not an expensive solution. While I was at it, I scooped up some more of the cheap sippy cups that we like. Although I try to be conscious of the environment and avoid disposable products, the reality is that we lose cups every year under sofas and car seats and all sorts of other places. We’ve already lost most of the lids and straws. Organizing the playroom and the Land of Lost Objects under the sofa is another topic for another day.

When we got home, I let each kid keep one fun cup (the fun ones are always the worst to wash and the kids’ favorites—I still remember the cool orange-shaped cup with the green lid and Mickey Mouse logo from my childhood) and bagged up the rest of the dishes for Nana’s. She didn’t have too many plastic plates for the kids, and we didn’t want Boy destroying her real dishes. All of the kids’ dishes fit neatly in two drawers, with the exception of the flatware, which fits in the main flatware drawer.

And here’s a bonus tip that puts the icing on your matchy-matchy cake. Put the kids’ dishes in a drawer that they can reach. My girls now set the table with their dishes and put them away after I’ve dried them. Boy grabs a cup when he’s thirsty, shoves it in my face, and says, “Eh!” He also throws them on the floor, but if you’re going to have a drawer that a toddler can reach, it should contain stuff that won’t hurt him and that he can’t damage, right? Back to doing dishes. I do them all day long since the dishwasher broke, and as I go, I stack the kids’ dishes on top of the counter. As the girls pass through the kitchen several times a day, they can grab their dishes and put them away. It’s not quite a habit yet, but we’re working on it. Sure, it wouldn’t take much longer for me to put their dishes away. The sink is literally one step from the dish drawer. But if I can save myself even ten seconds multiple times a day, that adds up, and the girls are learning how to take care of the home.

After seeing the success with the kids’ dishes, I did the same thing with our plastic lunch containers. Like types are nested with their lids in a single drawer, and they are only to be used for lunches. There have been too many times that I’ve gone to make my salads for the week only to discover week-old leftover fish stowed in a salad container at the back of the fridge. No, siree. Leftovers get the random assortment of containers stowed above the stove. Lunch containers are in an easily accessible drawer because they’re used more frequently.

As the summer winds down and another busy semester is staring us in the face, it’s good to know that we’re getting some systems in place that actually work and are pretty easy, too. So now that kitchen organization is down, what’s next? The toy room. Oh, the toy room. We made some progress this week. Next week I’ll let you know if my ideas have worked.

Bad Hair Day

Now that the semester is over, I am once again a full-time stay-at-home mom and attending to the mom things that I’ve let slide over the course of the semester, like my children’s hair. I’m pretty sure that the girls’ teachers know when I’m on break based on the state of their hair. Tidy ponytail with a cute bow? Mom’s on break. Barely combed? Mom has school. I thought that boys would be easier, but then I realized that they need frequent cuts. Darn.

Frankie has been pestering me for several months to get Boy’s hair cut. He’s almost two years old, but I was still holding out. If you saw him, you would understand. He has soft, bouncy, angelic, strawberry blond curls. My mother told me that my baby curls permanently disappeared after my first cut, so I know that once scissors meet hair, Boy’s curls will be gone forever. Women of all stripes gush over his hair, which I think is sufficient justification for keeping it as is. The girls are on my side, too. When Frankie mentioned The Cut a few weeks ago, Bear proclaimed “You can’t give him a haircut! Mom loves his awesome hair.”

And yet. Frankie has been increasingly frustrated that Boy is occasionally mistaken for a girl. I tell myself that people just see the pink stroller handed down from his cousin and make assumptions. And you know what you make when you assume: an ass out of you and me. Maybe people are confused by how much he looks like his older sister, but I think that people are just being lazy. Honestly. He wears boy clothes and walks around saying “Car go! Vroom vroom!” Not that we aim to gender stereotype or anything, but OshKosh just doesn’t sell a lot of girls’ clothes in solid red, navy blue, and gray, you know? And the kid just likes cars.

With great reluctance, I agreed to let Frankie get Boy’s bangs trimmed—just to get the hair out of his eyes. Today was the day. We swapped cars and children after I took Bear on a field trip and he took Bug to the doctor, and I took both girls home to rest while Frankie took Boy for The Cut and a few other errands. When he got home, he quickly placed Boy’s carrier inside the door and ran off to his next appointment. He looked very, very guilty.

And he should have, because my son now has a horrific combination of a bowl cut and a mullet.

And he looks more like a girl than before.

I have to evaluate my options here. Keep the bowl-mullet and live a life of ridicule and constant justification? Nope. Find a time machine and go back to the early 80s? Cool, but not happening. Get a real haircut and bid the curls farewell? I want to cry, not as badly as if my kid went out in public with the bowl-mullet. Real cut it is.

The family agrees, and they’ve all been quite entertained by my sweet boy’s misadventure at the barber shop. Sister One says, “OMG, I’m so sorry.” Sister Two says, “Oh no no no no.” Mom says, “Oh, that is bad.” My father says that I need to get it fixed before we visit and that Boy looks like he’s from the Dukes of Hazard. He’s right on that point. And Bug, ever the honest child, wailed, “Boy’s haircut is so horrible! I don’t want to be near him if he has that haircut!”

Who gets the blame for this atrocity of style? Naturally the ladies blame Frankie, because of course men don’t understand that when a woman says, “Trim his bangs,” that does not mean just chopping away any hair that might fall over the eyes. After all, Frankie just buzzes his own hair at home. My brother and brother-in-law blame me for giving bad directions, and I can’t say that they’re totally wrong on that one. I should have found a picture of what I wanted. But we’re all in agreement that the barber is not to be blamed. Boy didn’t sit still at all, so I should probably just be thankful that he still has both eyes and ears, let alone a few curls.

So tomorrow after my last final, I will load my sweet little baby into the car and take him for his first real haircut. I won’t just miss the curls; I’ll miss his baby look and probably cry a little as he morphs into a little boy. But while I cry, I’ll also be laughing really, really hard about his very bad hair day.

Update: We got the cut, and it looks good. He looks like such a little man now. The family is much relieved.

Exercise Update: Unexpected Progress

A large backpack, two textbooks, and several notebooks sit on a coffee table.
I had no idea that school could make me skinny.

It’s been a month since I publicly committed to exercising, and the results are in. And they’re mixed. But it’s OK! Even though the weight didn’t shift as much as I would have liked, I lost a lot of inches. Here’s the tally so far: I’m down 6 pounds since January 1 and have lost 2.5 inches off of my natural waist, 3 inches off of my low waist, and 2.5 inches off of my hips. Sometimes I lose in a funky pattern like this—the weight stays the same or even goes up, but I lose inches. The point is to be smaller, not necessarily lighter, so in that regard, I’m winning. Measuring yourself or going by how your clothes fit (unless they involve elastic waistbands) can be a really good motivator when the scale isn’t moving. I was totally convinced that I wasn’t making any progress (because of the scale) until I tried on a pair of pre-baby-#3 shorts and discovered that they fit.

Almost immediately after I made the public declaration that I would be exercising, I got sick with a nasty, nasty cold that kept me off the bike for at least ten days. Then kids got sick, and I was running on like five hours of sleep and my muscles hurt, and life more or less got out of control. We did finally run out of clean underwear (but it took an entire month—this new record is progress!) For about a week the laundry was at that dangerous point where the clean stuff had gone unfolded long enough that it could almost be considered dirty. All of the dishes were dirty because….I don’t know why. I’m lazy? (Frankie is not lazy about dishes—as he will tell anyone, he used to be a professional dishwasher. He is a dishwashing machine.) All this to say that things have not been operating at their best these past few weeks, so I’m not really sure how I shrunk.

Certainly part of it is diet. The constant salad for lunch has been a huge help both in limiting less-nutritious stuff and in getting enough vegetables. Breakfast is still consistently fried eggs or oatmeal, and I rarely snack when I’m on campus. Since I’m there for eight hours two days a week, that’s a good long stretch with not eating mindlessly. If I were at home, I’d just be stuffing my face while I procrastinated on scrubbing toilets or something. I know my habits.

Another part is movement. The cycling has been much more sporadic than hoped, but apparently lugging a giant backpack around campus is an acceptable substitute for “real” exercise. Actually, the CDC agrees. They recently updated their recommendations to say that anything that gets you off your butt and gets your heart beating faster counts. When you commute and are on campus all day, you have to lug everything around with you instead of popping in and out of your dorm room to lighten the load. And when you’re old, you get the bonus of not being able to stand electronic textbooks, so on most days I have at least one giant, heavy science text. Yesterday I had the iPad, chem lab manual and notebook, a smaller notebook, my chemistry and microbiology textbooks, a statistics book, my wallet, a travel coffee cup, and probably a pound of random crap like pens, tampons, and wads of old (unused) napkins. I just weighed it, and the backpack is around 25 pounds. I don’t do a lot of walking because the campus is small, but I do take a lot of stairs because the campus is on a hill. I was worried that spending so much time sitting while studying would be my downfall, but I guess not.

So what’s next? Just keep it up. Now that everyone is hopefully recovering from the most recent bout of illnesses (Bug and I had a stomach bug this week) and the bike shorts are washed again, I can get back on the bike. Tonight I was kind of organized and made a big pot of oatmeal for the week and started soaking beans for a bean, ham, and kale soup tomorrow. We have fruit and salad stuff. And now I’m going to go to bed so that I have the energy to make all of this happen.

Lunch for a Week: Make-Ahead Salad

Four plastic storage containers of salad are stacked on top of each other.
Lunch is one thing off my to-do list.

We’re in the fourth week of my semester, and we’re settling into something of a routine despite all of the snow day interruptions. Everyone has gotten everywhere mostly on time, we haven’t run out of clean underwear, and we’re all fed. Yeah, my standards are sky-high. The only glaring hiccup in our routine was what I had been eating for lunch. Two weeks ago I did the responsible thing and cooked chicken breasts with the intention of packing a salad every day. Then I couldn’t find any clean storage containers for a salad, so I ended up buying Chick-fil-A several times last week. Chick-fil-A is the cheapest and fastest food available on campus, but it’s killing both my budget and my waistline. Warm, salty, crispy chicken sandwiches are the last thing I need since a nasty cold had kept me off of the bike for two weeks. Seriously, that cough could have caused a hernia in a weaker person.

So last week I figured that I’d get my act together, buy the necessary plastic containers, and pack myself some salads. I rebooted my diet at the new year, taking some tips from the book 8 Steps to Reverse Your PCOS by Fiona McCulloch. For whatever reason, my body doesn’t tolerate wheat and sugar very well, which means that meals take some advance planning if I want to stick with what makes me feel good. Sandwiches and pasta are out, but salads I can do. I’ve done this for two weeks in a row now, and I can’t tell you how much easier my mornings are when all I need to do is grab a container and a piece of fruit from the fridge. I’ve also got the peace of mind knowing that I’m saving my family some money and eating something that’s going to help me keep a clear mind and a good, steady energy throughout the day—no sugar crash!

Below is a salad that meets my requirements of being wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, and something that I can make in bulk ahead of time. Consider the recipe as a rough guide and adjust as you see fit. If you can’t find Campari tomatoes, use another kind. If you prefer romaine to spring mix, use that. If you want to add cheese, go for it. Just make something that you’ll actually enjoy eating and rest easy knowing that your life is a little more organized.

Salad with Baked Chicken
Makes 4 servings*
Total time: 1 hour
Active time: 20 minutes

Ingredients
2 medium chicken breasts, about 1-1.5 lb
drizzle extra virgin olive oil plus 3/8 C
salt and pepper
4 t Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste
3 T red wine vinegar
1 red onion
2 T sunflower seeds
2 mini cucumbers or 1/2 regular cucumber
2 bell peppers
8 Campari tomatoes
small container spring mix

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly coat chicken breasts with olive oil, salt, and pepper and bake until done, about 25-30 minutes.**

2. While chicken bakes, make dressing and chop vegetables. To make dressing, whisk mustard, salt, pepper, vinegar, and olive oil together until well-blended. Slice onion and mix into the dressing.***

3. When chicken is done, allow to cool enough to handle and chop into bite-sized chunks.

4. Layer into 4 storage containers in the following order: dressing and onions, sunflower seeds, chicken, peppers/tomatoes/cucumbers, and spring mix. Store in fridge until ready to eat.

*If you want 5 servings, one for each week day, just multiply all ingredient amounts by 1.25. Alternatively, keep the ingredients the same and make smaller salads.
**When in doubt, use a meat thermometer.
***Trust me. This takes the bite out of the onions and gives them a whole different taste.



Snow Days!

A laptop, graphing calculator, notebook, and chemistry textbook rest on a desk in a home office.
What the cool kids do on days off.

Today is our second snow day in a row and the third or fourth of the semester. Technically today is an ice day. There’s no new snow accumulation, but the roads were slick as all get out this morning. Leaving the house was ill-advised. The weather report predicted this, so I made sure to set my alarm for 5:30 to start checking the alerts from daycare, the girls’ school, and the college. Daycare is nice enough to call, and they started with a two-hour delay. If daycare is delayed, then you know that the schools are. After confirming that the college was on a two-hour delay, I turned off the alarm and went back to bed.

Normally I like to get up early and “beat my day into submission,” to quote my father. But sometimes our bodies need rest, and I had to admit that today mine did. For the past week I’ve been trying to shake a nasty cough that could give a weaker person a hernia. Frankie says that I sound like I’m on a TB ward. He blames it on my frigid office (there’s a reason I keep the electric blanket down there), my mom blames it on pushing myself too hard, and I blame it on Boy. He started it with a nasty cold last week. Whatever the cause, I was worn down enough on Sunday afternoon to nap for two and half hours, which is unusual. Falling asleep instantly for a nap is a sure sign that I’m under the weather. I would be stupid to pass up this rare chance to sleep in.

Because of the cold, I’ve fallen a little behind on school work. Colds don’t sound that bad until you actually get one. With a stomach bug, you’re immobilized for about 24 hours, and everyone understands that you’re incapacitated and they stay far away from the puke germs. Colds are different. You’re able to get around and do most things, but you’re stuck operating at like 50-60% capacity for a solid week. You can lose a lot of ground in that week, like three chapters of microbiology that go in one ear and out the other.

Part of me is bummed about the snow days because I was really looking forward to making my agar plates in micro yesterday and doing the math for my chem lab today. The other, bigger part of me is relieved that I’m getting the chance to make up lost ground. Getting behind early in the semester and staying behind is a sure recipe for disaster, so these days are a real gift. Yesterday the kids only had delays, but I had a cancellation! You know that I dropped them all off, headed home, and got down to work. I knocked out the post-lab for last week’s chem lab and did the prelab for this week’s (now canceled) lab. Then I reworked my flash card system (Anki all the way!) and listened to my micro lecture. The professor doesn’t want to lose ground on snow days and records his lectures online. He’s hardcore, and I like it. His high expectations push me to do my best.

Today I got in a whopping solid five-hour block of studying done. I’m caught up on chemistry and making headway on micro, having finished my reading and flash cards on bacteria and having reviewed my notes on archaea. Then I did some math to clear my head. All in all, it was a good day. But then it got better! My micro professor sent an e-mail this evening saying that this week’s test has been moved to next week, and lab is canceled tomorrow. Canceled lab means that I have a two-hour block to catch up on reading for biomedical ethics and my sociology class. So tonight I get to relax with some Grey’s Anatomy.

Oh, but now I got an e-mail saying that the girls have a two-hour delay, which means missing chem lecture and a quiz because Frankie won’t be free to watch the kids. Maybe the college will have a delay with some luck, but I’m not holding out hope. Whatever. It’ll all work out. At least I get to sleep in again tomorrow, right?