I don’t really write about my faith. I was raised in a Catholic family but I came to adulthood with very little formal knowledge of the Catholic Faith. I came to the practice of the faith through the heart rather than the mind and this is where I stayed. I don’t write about faith because others do it better. My most inspirational line would probably be “It sucked before. Now it’s better.” A supernatural outlook on life and a good sense of humour are staples of loving life in a big family. Today is Palm Sunday and Palm Sunday deserves a blog post.
Palm Sunday is my favorite Feast Day in the Catholic Liturgy. Not favorite as in “we get chocolate”, but favorite as in “every year, it chews me up and spits me out.” I’m a lousy Catholic, really. I don’t get the warm-and-fuzzies about Mary or the Pope. There are elements of Catholic doctrine I don’t understand, others I struggle with. There are elements of Catholic doctrine I live-out like a champ, like not using artificial birth control. But I chose to stop artificial birth control and embrace natural family planning before I returned to the Church. So even in that regard I’m not punching above my weight. I found affinity with conservative Catholics because I was not using birth control, not the other way around. So there. But when I had deep questions about the meaning of life, suffering and happiness, Christianity and the Catholic Church had the most thorough answers. And when I thought that my 3 young children were going to drive me insane, Christian moms had a peace and a fortitude I longed for. That’s how I returned to the Church: I wanted a piece of what they had. I didn’t join because I had something for God but because God had something for me. And they used to let me sing at Church.
Palm Sunday is the Feast of the Lousy Christian. It used to drive me nuts. Palm Sunday commemorates the triumphal entrance of Christ into Jerusalem. The procession starts outside of the Church with the blessing of palms and continues into the church with the reading of the Passion. The procession reminds us that the same people who welcomed Christ as their King would later ask for his crucifixion. I always found the procession painful. It should be solemn. We are celebrating our hypocrisy after all. But instead, we sing and dance and smile and wave our silly little branches. Don’t we realize after 2000 years that it’s a parody of ourselves and our shallowness? It took me a long time to accept than the ridicule of welcoming the celebrant 5 minutes before a dramatic reading of the Passion of Christ was part of the penance. The Feast of the Lousy Christian starts with a reminder of how weak and fickle we are.
The Gospel on Palm Sunday is always a reading of the Passion, the story of Christ’s long, painful, death. But the most graphic depiction is not of what the crown of thorns and cross did to Christ, but of the betrayal of those who once professed their faith in him. And every year, a verse of the Passion stands-up, steps out of the book, walks over to my pew and punches me in the face.
Judas’ 3 pieces of silver represent my choice for comfort over the demands of self-sacrifice. Peter’s denials, they are mine. The two thieves, one challenging God, the other humble, are my struggle to understand suffering. Palm Sunday is the Feast of falling short, of saying things we didn’t mean and meaning things we never say. It’s the Feast of the weak and the proud, of thinking we know better, of wanting to go it alone.
Palm Sunday is the Feast of discomfort, of knowing we are capable of so much more. Judas broke down. Peter wept. The thief repented. It’s the Feast of coming face-to-face with our fears and our limitations and choosing the easy way out instead of pushing through. It’s the Feast of embracing our lousiness before embracing weakness and knowing we need help. Next week, we will celebrate the hand outstretch. This week, we are not ready to accept it.
It’s my Feast, it’s your Feast. It’s the Feast of all of us.
Cette semaine, ma fille de 11 ans a été invitée à participer à une vidéo-conférence avec le Commandant de la station spatiale internationale Chris Hadfield – mes sels…. Qu’on m’apporte mes sels….- et le Premier Ministre. Voici un album photo qui relate notre expérience. J’y ajouterai des photos d’Ève et moi lorsque je les recevrai. Si vous ouvrez la première photo en cliquant dessus, vous pourrez voir l’album pleine-grandeur et lire les sous-titres plus facilement.
Vous pouvez trouver des meilleures photos ici (photo de groupe) et ici (Premier Ministre avec David St-Jacques et Jeremy Hansen – je m’évente un peu, ouf!).
Video You Tube du Commandant Hadfield qui répond à la question de Marie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYWJTu_JJ_A J’adore sa réponse sur la prise de décision: “Making good decisions is a skill…” Quelle inspiration!
Le Commandant Hadfield sur Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield En passant, si vous ne le suivez pas sur Twitter, vous devriez!
L’entrevue de Peter Mansbridge (en anglais): http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/TV+Shows/The+National/Technology+%26+Science/ID/2329235320/ Non mais, ne vous donne-t’il pas envie de vous lever de votre chaise et de faire quelque chose de grand? “… The importance of choosing something that has a great personal import but that is also larger than yourself, that combination to internalize early and to lead a life that goes in that direction, is the type of message that I really work hard with young Canadians to get into their heads and into their core, to lead a life that is satisfying to them and that is also good for the rest of us.” (vers 11:30).
– Have you been following Senator Mike Duffy’s expense claim kerfuffle? The claim form confusion seems to be affecting many Senators and, if I may add, their staff. Because who are we kidding here? It’s not like Mike Duffy fills up his own claim forms. But a mistake was made and monies will be repaid. The same week Mike Duffy was ducking TV cameras and avoiding embarrassing questions, I received a letter at work. It’s a letter I receive all too often, coming from a desperate taxpayer who suddenly finds him/herself in the cross-hair of the Canadian Revenue Agency. They owe taxes, in small or large amounts. They got confused filing their forms, like the Senators. They never tried to evade the taxman and that’s probably why they are in such trouble: if they were professional tax-evaders, they would know how to stay out of CRA’s radar. But no, they paid their money, or rather what they thought was their money, and sent it to CRA with their home address and vital information. Only they didn’t send enough money. And last week, they received a letter asking them to pay their taxes before close of business or else. Or else. And the “or else” is not trivial. Unlike Duffy, they never had the option to repay. They are not only taxed but fined, threatened with a garnishing order – which in some businesses, like bank employees, means a loss of employment – or foreclosure. So make my day Mike Duffy. While Senators think they are doing the honorable thing by repaying pocket change and keeping their jobs, the bureaucracy is putting the tax base through the ringer. And nobody bats an eyelid.
– Speaking of taxpayers’ dollars, my city was hit by a major snow fall. The quantity of snow was significant and the mild, slightly above zero temperature, made it heavy and water-logged. More than 200 city buses got stuck and jackknifed in the white stuff. Even my minivan with its kick-ass winter tires got (shortly) jammed in the fluff.
Two days later, it was time for the giant snow blower to remove the snow from the main arteries. I have readers in tropical climes — or so my statistics tell me — so let me educate you.
When a Canadian city is hit by a major snowfall, the roads need to be cleared progressively while the snow is still falling. The snow is first pushed to the sides of the road by snowplows driving up and down major arteries.
Snow plow pushing the snow to the side of the road.
All this snow creates big walls of snow on each side of the road and must eventually be removed by a snow blower.
Snow blower blowing snow in a very big dump truck. It has a big, gas-guzzling engine.
The snow blower blows the snow into several very large dump trucks who then take the snow to a snow dump.
Another day at the snow dump…
Because it takes more time to make a round trip to the snow dump than to fill a dump truck with snow, several dump trucks take turns filling-up while the others go to the dump and come back. It’s like a giant snow-removal-tag-team operation. When the City removes the snow, cars cannot park in the streets. So the City puts snow removal no-parking signs to warn people. And people don’t pay attention and park in the streets anyway, hence the need to tow cars out of the snow blower’s path.
If the little no-parking sign doesn’t make sense to you, this is what will happen.Does this make sense to you?
Last week, I drove past 4 giant dump trucks idling on my way to the vegetarian restaurant. As I got near the restaurant, I saw two more giant dump trucks idling behind the snow blower. The snow blower sat empty, on a forced coffee break, while the tow-trucks were towing one car after the other. And as if the waste of taxpayers’ dollars wasn’t mind bending enough, a pick-up truck from the City of Ottawa was accompanying the tow-truck, no doubt to deal with disgruntled car owners. In front of the all-organic-all-the-time vegetarian restaurant, a Toyota Echo and a hybrid Ford Focus were being towed. How’s that for a lifetime of greenhouse gas savings blown away over lunch? I hope that the irony of having half-a-dozen heavy-duty diesel-powered engines idling while their energy-efficient matchbox dinkies were being towed away wasn’t lost on them as they digested their local organic kale.
– I started writing this post 3 week ago. That’s how slowly I write, in case you are wondering why I am posting about the last snow storm on a beautiful sunny day. Not only that, but why would I be posting about manly trucks on International Women’s Day? I listened to a few radio interviews today in between hosting a weekly meeting for my local babywearing group. Yes, women who choose to be attached to their babies as much as possible. From what I heard, Women’s Day is all about abortion and contraception and how hard it is to get either. Isn’t there more to being a woman than to be sexually available and artificially infertile? Because my experience as a woman who raised and gave birth to 8 children, running a home and occasionally a slew of volunteer activities is worth nothing in today’s economy. My degree is outdated, I am unemployable to most but the friend who gave me my part-time job, and I can’t even get a biology credit to return to University without going back to high school. As if I hadn’t learned more putting my kids through school than is required to enter the midwifery degree I so long to get. But hey, what is really keeping women down is not having enough pills. No: What is keeping women down is the belief that women have to be barren like men to succeed and that childbearing and child-rearing are impediments to equality. So that’s your International Women’s Day reflection from a women who is not using artificial birth control out of principle. And while I call myself a feminist for my radical view on the beautiful integrity of the feminine body, ovaries and all, I know that most feminists would be ashamed to count me as their own. Cheers!
Il ne sera pas dit que j’ai laissé passé une célébration! Les jumeaux ont 17 mois. 17 mois ça ne veut pas dire grand chose mais c’est le mois où ils ont commencé à dormir dans la même chambre et à faire leur nuit, sans traumatisme, sans hurlements… Ou si peu! Je suis fière d’avoir écouté mon cœur et d’avoir attendu le moment propice.
C’est aussi le mois où Ève a découvert le monde des deux-pattes. Trois mois après son frère. Comment je peux suivre deux bambins qui déambulent? C’est simple: une série de rhumes et de poussées dentaires les gardent bien au chaud près de maman et papa. Je crois que nous avons comme une excroissance dans le dos: notre centre de gravité change pour trop de portage, mais c’est mieux que d’être suivis par deux zombies qui pleurent et qui morvent, non?
En septembre dernier, j’ai revu une maman que je connaissais depuis longtemps à travers l’école des enfants. Maman à la maison pour quelques années, elle avait pris congé du marché du travail pour avoir ses enfants. Son mari poursuivait une carrière accaparante et il semblait raisonnable qu’elle reste à la maison afin de s’occuper de la caverne pendant que papa allait à la chasse au mammouth.
Quand les aléas de la vie ont vu papa se retrouver sans emploi, maman est retourné travailler à contrecœur: bien qu’elle ait été plus “employable” que son époux, je ne crois pas que papa était un père à la maison dans l’âme. Il s’en suit donc que maman dû maintenir la caverne et s’occuper de la chasse au mammouth pendant que papa s’occupait vigoureusement à éplucher les petites annonces d’emplois dans The Economist — et peut-être se rattraper dans sa lecture, hum, qui sait?
Quand j’ai revu maman, elle avait doublé de taille. La sédentarité du travail de bureau n’a rien de comparable avec la vie quotidienne avec quelques enfants. Et le stress y était peut-être pour quelque chose? Je me préparais moi-même à retourner au travail à la fin de mon congé de maternité et j’ai pris note.
Mais que s’est-il passé? J’ai perdu la note. il est devenu difficile de courir régulièrement. Puis il y a le bol sans fond de M&M que mon patron garde bien rempli “pour les visiteurs”. Et tout d’un coup comme ça, juste avant les vacances de Noël, je n’arrivais plus à attacher mes pantalons. Pas drôle!
J’ai essayé de me mettre au régime mais mon corps qui allaite s’est rebellé. Trois semaines de régime n’ont pas réussi à faire bouger la balance. J’ai coupé le Nutella et la crème glacée complètement. Je n’ai jamais aussi bien — et aussi peu! — mangé de ma vie et pourtant la balance refuse de bouger. Cette semaine, elle a même augmenté de 3 livres. 3 livres… Pas grand choses mais démoralisant quand même.
Faute de comprendre ce qui ne marche pas et d’accepter que la quarantaine qui approche, la grossesse multiple et les 6 grossesses qui l’ont précédé, ont changé mon corps pour toujours, je tente de mettre moins d’emphase sur la balance et son allié le miroir qui me renvoient l’image d’une personne que je ne reconnais pas. Je me concentre sur la course, le prochain demi-marathon, le plaisir que j’ai à aller courir, et une alimentation saine.
Lorsque je déjeune à 5:30, j’ai besoin de refaire le plein avant midi. J’ai commencé à apporter un smoothie pour le trajet au bureau, histoire de ne pas tomber dans le bol de friandises en arrivant.
Le super smoothie simple et délicieux, végétarien, sans gluten et avec un petit boost de protéines en prime:
– une banane fraîche
– 3/4 de tasse de petits fruits congelés
– une bonne cuiller à soupe de beurre d’amandes
– environ une tasse (ou plus selon la consistance) de lait d’amande. Si vous avez le bec sucré, vous pourriez utiliser la version sucrée à la vanille. J’utilise du lait d’amandes normal sans rien.
I had the honour to be part of the Human Library Project this year in my city and a friend asked if I would write a blog post about the experience. It was a unique experience and I’m not sure where to start, so let’s start with a definition.
On the Human Library Day, readers get to “borrow” a Human Book for a 20 minute one-on-one conversation. The premise of the Human Library project is to give individuals the opportunity to meet people they would not otherwise encounter. A week before the Human Library day, I had the chance to appreciate the Human Library experience when I attended the Human Book orientation. When I arrived, I sat beside Zelda Marshall also known as The Drag Queen book. I shook her hand and introduced myself as The Mother of 8 book and her response was an enthusiastic: “Wow! I have a ton of questions for YOU!” and all I could think was: “Likewise”. It made me realize that mothers of 8 children were likely as foreign to Zelda’s day-to-day environment as Drag Queens were to mine. I didn’t get to ask many questions to Zelda that day, but as the Human Books introduced themselves one by one I grew in my appreciation of the unique opportunities offered by the Human Library project.
A week later, I arrived at my assigned library branch and met my fellow books. I was sharing the Human Library space with a recovering compulsive gambler, a Chef, a female firefighter, a person living with bipolar disorder, and a CBC radio newscaster. The Human Library set-up takes up a relatively small corner of the library space. Chairs are organized face-to-face but each book is separated from the other by a shared coffee table. You are no more isolated than you would be in a coffee shop having a private conversation with other customers chatting around you. Readers line-up at the library counter and ask to borrow the Human Book they would like to speak to. If they are among the first, they can go right away. If not, they are asked to come back at their assigned time. I believe that all the books were signed-out for the day before lunch time. Each one-on-one conversation lasts 20 minutes and the Human Book gets a 10 minute break before the next reader. In reality, the conversation wraps-up into the 10 minute break and a 5 minute break is more likely. I was warned early-on to take my breaks as the day would be exhausting. I think that “exhausting” is a relative notion: I was sitting in a comfy chair with a coffee instead of chasing, driving, cooking for, grocery shopping with, and generally cleaning after a family of 10. This was fun! But when I got home, I was spent!
My readers were all female and either young women with one or no children, or older women. It’s funny because I was expecting more women with children but really, they can’t come to the Human Library on a Saturday. They are too busy running their families! Some readers came with specific questions. Others just sat and waited for me to start. Then each conversation took a life of its own. Most readers were curious about the role of the older children in taking care of the little ones, the logistics of cooking and cleaning and how growing in a large family affects the character and personalities of the children. One young woman wanted to talk about contraception, human sexuality, natural family planning and the relationship between spouses in a large family. We talked about teenage pregnancies, abortion and why too many young women see their value through the lens of their sexual availability and desirability. It was my most memorable conversation. One grand-mother asked specifically about disciplining toddlers in preparation for a trip to visit her daughter and grandson. I don’t remember all my readers’ names but I remember their faces. Each of them unique. Each conversation breaking barriers and enlarging horizons.
I loved every minute of my Human Library experience. I enjoyed doing media, a long-lost dream of mine. I enjoyed talking about my blessed life – and challenges – as a Mother of 8. I really connected with my readers and I hope that they took home as much as I did.
Les jumeaux ont maintenant 16 mois et je dois vous avouer que la deuxième année des jumeaux est presque plus intense que la première. C’est un rythme différent, une intensité différente. Quand on persévère à travers les premiers mois, on se dit que les choses vont devenir de plus en plus faciles. Les choses changent et les défis d’aujourd’hui ne sont pas les mêmes que ceux d’hier. Mais deux bébés, c’est beaucoup de bébés!
Au cours des derniers mois, les bébés se sont mis à marcher. Le garçon vers 13 mois et la fille tout récemment à 16 mois. Ils ont percé plus de dents (quoiqu’ils n’en aient que 4 chacun) et ils ont commencé à parler. “Regarde!” “Papa” “Maman” “Neige”
Bébé fille e commencé à “faire ses nuits” (c’est-à-dire à dormir du coucher jusqu’au lever) vers 14 mois tandis que son frère a continué à se réveiller aux 2 heures comme un nouveau-né. Vers 15 mois, il a commencé à faire des siestes de 5 ou 6 heures pendant la journée et nous avons initié le sevrage de nuit afin de l’encourager gentiment et paisiblement à dormir plus longtemps la nuit. S’il allait dormir 6 heures, je voulais que ce soit entre minuit et 6 :00 plutôt qu’entre 8 :00 et 14 :00!
Le processus de sevrage de nuit ne s’est pas fait du jour au lendemain. La première étape du sevrage paisible – sans extinction des pleurs — est d’apprendre au bébé à se rendormir sans allaiter. Une de mes critique de la méthode 5-10-15 est qu’elle ne respecte pas le fait que nous avons permis à notre enfant de développer une habitude enracinée dans un besoin primaire de succion et de réconfort sur plusieurs mois. Puis du jour au lendemain, c’est dort ou pleure mon coco, maman est fatiguée.
Pour tous mes bébés, s’endormir sans le sein a commencé naturellement vers 4 mois. Même lorsqu’ils se réveillent aux 45 minutes, ils retournent toujours au lit somnolent mais réveillés. C’est une nécessité imposée par la taille de notre famille, mais je peux vous dire que même les mamans qui ont des familles moins nombreuses trouvent que de devoir rendormir leur bambin au sein à tous les 45 minutes devient lourd après 12 mois!
Si votre bébé s’endort et se rendort au sein, peu importe son âge, la première étape du sevrage de nuit sera de l’habituer à s’endormir sans le sein. Si bébé refuse vigoureusement ce changement de routine, vous pouvez soit persévérer à le calmer au sein avant de le remettre au lit réveillé, soit substituer le sein pour un autre mode de réconfort. Notre bébé garçon aime les câlins et dans la mesure où maman n’est pas dans les parages, se laisse réconforter par un câlin sur l’épaule de papa.
Dans notre famille, les fêtes de Noël, les dents, puis la grippe ont étalé le sevrage sur un bon mois. Jusqu’au jour où le Monsieur a commencé à se réveiller aux 45 minutes pour boire. « Ce sont les dents! » me suis-je dit, jusqu’à ce que mon mari me fasse remarquer que « si c’était les dents, il serait de mauvaise humeur pendant la journée aussi. » Vrai. Il buvait toute la nuit et me faisait des siestes de 5 heures pendant la journée. Alors là….
Nous avons donc décidé d’entamer le sevrage de nuit en changeant Lucas de chambre afin que papa ait au moins une chance de pouvoir le recoucher. Puisque Lucas s’endormait déjà sans allaiter, nous sommes passés directement à la deuxième étape, qui est de ne pas allaiter du tout pendant la nuit. Nous avons d’abord choisi les 6 heures qui nous convenaient le mieux. Dans notre cas, 23 :00 à 5 :00. Si Lucas se réveillait entre 23 :00 et 5 :00, papa irait le bercer un peu puis le remettre au lit. Papa allait dormir dans la même chambre que Lucas : nous ne sommes pas passés de tout à rien, le but étant un sevrage progressif, paisible et respectueux. La première nuit, papa s’est levé plusieurs fois pour câliner bébé. Vers la fin de la nuit, il ne faisait que lui parler de son lit : Chhhhhh bébé, fait dodo, et bébé se rendormait. La deuxième nuit, Lucas a dormi de 18 :30 à 5 :00. Nous ne nous sommes pas endormis sur nos lauriers – manière de parler – puisque nous avons assez d’expérience pour savoir que les bébés accueillent parfois un changement de routine avec une certaine patience jusqu’à ce qu’ils réalisent que le changement est permanent. Puis ils s’y opposent.
Depuis, les nuits sont au beau fixe, c’est-à-dire que Lucas se réveille encore souvent mais papa réussi à le rassurer sans se lever de lit, en lui parlant. Nous allons maintenir cette routine et voir si Lucas cesse de se réveiller tout court. Mais il n’y a pas de presse.
Alors pour les parents fatigués, voici un résumé du sevrage de nuit progressif. Nous préférons cette méthode à l’extinction des pleurs (méthode 5-10-15) que nous trouvons émotivement épuisante et avec laquelle nous n’avons eu aucun succès avec nos autres enfants. Le sevrage de nuit peut se faire par maman et dans le lit familial… mais ce sera peut-être plus difficile de convaincre bébé! Pour nous, il était incontournable que maman ne soit pas dans les parages.
Encourager bébé à se rendormir sans le sein. Vous pouvez continuer à allaiter à la demande et à pratiquer le co-dodo. Cependant, si votre but final est que bébé dorme dans son propre lit, vous pourriez commencer la transition à ce moment. Allaitez bébé au besoin pour le calmer et le préparer au sommeil mais couchez-le lorsqu’il est somnolent mais encore réveillé.
Lorsque bébé peut se rendormir sans téter, vous pouvez passer à la deuxième étape. Lorsque vous avez allaité bébé une fois et que vous l’avez remis au lit, ne l’allaitez plus avant qu’il ait dormi, même s’il exprime sa frustration en pleurant. Vous êtes à ses côtés : il n’a pas peur, il n’est pas abandonné. Il est seulement un peu ennuyé que sa routine de choix change.
Éventuellement, vous aurez établi une routine où bébé allaite puis se rendort seul. Il est temps d’arrêter d’allaiter. Vous continuerez à réconforter bébé mais sans l’allaiter. Encore une fois, il est possible que bébé se fâche. Encore une fois, vous n’abandonnez pas bébé. Nous sommes encore à cette étape. Lucas se réveille plusieurs fois et papa doit le réconforter et lui parlant doucement. Au début, il a pleuré un peu (5-10 minutes, avec papa). Maintenant, il se réveille encore fréquemment mais papa le rassure en lui parlant et il se rendort sans pleurer.
La dernière étape est de laisser bébé se rendormir seul sans réconfort. Mais peut-être que cette étape n’arrivera jamais. Notre fille de 4 ans vient encore nous voir régulièrement la nuit. Elle a même un petit matelas au pied de notre lit pour les nuits où elle se réveille trop fréquemment.
Et voilà!
J’ai peu de photos des jumeaux ensemble : ils bougent trop vite! Mais voici une petite tranche de vie visuelle pour ceux qui aiment bien :
This fall, my husband and I came to the realization that our days needed more hours, our weeks needed more days and our months… Well, you get the idea. We considered hiring a cleaning service but my husband was very reluctant to spend good money on such a futile endeavour. “Might as well just burn your money” he said and I have to say that if our housecleaning is any indication, nothing would feel more like lighting-up a big money cigar than hiring a cleaning service. We also want to avoid raising our kids to be picked-up or cleaned-up after. When people ask us: “8 kids! You must have a cleaning lady?!” we always answer: “No, that’s what the kids are for.” Our children are growing-up in affluence and we are fighting a daily battle against entitlement and ungratefulness. The cleaning service is one bridge too far.
So we went back to the drawing table to cut back some minutes to our hours. We found that the repeated assault of cooking three meals a day for 10 people was punching a hole in our ability to do anything in the evening, including but not limited to go to bed early. I would come home from work, start cooking supper. My husband would drive the children left, right and centre while I took care of the four younger children’s bedtime routine. Then around 9 pm we would meet-up in the kitchen to survey the damage. Around 11 pm, we’d be done with the kitchen clean-up and dishes extravaganza, tired, grumpy and looking forward to the same hellish routine the next day.
My husband suggested looking into catering and batch-cooking services like Supper Works. We had a mild case of sticker shock: catering is closer in price to eating in a restaurant than eating at home. The premium on Supper Works’ ingredients was significant and the concept not at all adapted to cooking for a large family: we would have had to buy two or three meal packages to cover our family’s needs, yet, feeding a family of 10 is not necessarily double the price of feeding a family of 5. Supper Works is a good option for families who would otherwise eat out: compared to the cost of a restaurant entrée, Supper Works figures competitively. But it is double the price of buying the ingredients yourself.
A friend suggested Once a Month Mom (OAMM): “It takes the thinking out of batch cooking, and your older kids can help too: the instructions are very easy to follow.” I was ready to give it a try and chose one of their free past menus. Because their menus are planned around seasonal ingredients – whatever that means, I live in Canada where nothing is seasonal for 8 out of 12 months – I went with their November 2011 menu and gave it a try at the beginning of last December. In mid-December, I also tried one of their Mini-Menus to plan a batch-cooking party for a friend who had recently adopted twins.
First, you would be well advised to read through the website for instructions on getting off to a right start. The menus are organized around three main documents: the Grocery List, the Recipe Cards and the Instructions. The Grocery List and Recipe Cards are Google Docs spreadsheets based on the quantities needed to feed one person for a month. You enter the number of people you are cooking for and the software does its magic: the finished product is a detailed grocery list and a series of recipes with the exact amount of all the ingredients required by the menu. We spent an inordinate amount of time formatting the documents in Excel to print it. The getting-started instructions state clearly that the documents are optimized for Google Docs, not Excel. The first take-home message is to download the documents in Google Docs… And read through the website before starting for other pivotal tidbits of information.
We chose the Whole Foods menu because it came closest to the way we cook at home: mostly from scratch, using real food. We printed our grocery list and off we went on a big day of shopping. Planning ahead, you can buy your groceries throughout the month to mimic the ebb and flow of meal preparation, freezing the meat as you go. Buying all the ingredients for a month of freezer meals in one afternoon is not for the faint of heart. We came home with a much lighter wallet and a full-size van full of food. We shopped at Costco for the most part, especially the meat part. (Make sure ahead of time that there is room in your fridge for all the food). Now, we were committed!
I got-up early the next morning and started cooking.
Starting bright and early with my crack-of-dawn baby, still in our pajamas!
I didn’t appreciate how intense this cooking extravaganza would be and didn’t make arrangements to have my children looked after. Thankfully, my husband had no commitments that weekend and was able to do most of the baby-chasing, adjusted for whoever was on my back at any given time. Take-home message number two is to plan your weekend well in advance, including childcare and whatever your family will eat for the duration. When I did the Mini-Menu for my friend, some members of my local babywearing community came to help. Half the moms were in the kitchen working while the other half was looking after the little ones. It was a good old-fashioned cooking party: this is how it was done during harvest season when harvesting and preserving had to be done in one shot to avoid spoilage. It’s a lot more fun to do it with friends and if I can figure out a way of pricing meal-units, I would like to organize a batch-cooking coop of some kind.
Believe it or not, I went to the grocery store without reading the recipes first. That’s your third take-home message: study the recipes first. I didn’t realize until I was about to start a batch of 30 enchilada that the Whole Food menu was making tortilla and bread from scratch! Of course, homemade panini bread and tortilla are an order of magnitude better than what you buy in the store. But if you are trying to make a month of freezer meals for 10 people in one week-end (that’s 300 individual meals by the way), you may elect to skip the part where you hand-roll 72 tortilla, know what I mean? Thankfully, I received crucial and timely help from my mother and my daughters who were giddy at the thought of making a recipe that started with “Pour 34 cups of flour into a large bowl…”
My two daughters making the tortilla dough.My long-suffering mother, hand-rolling tortilla for an army
Reading recipes will also highlight any differences of culinary vocab and allow you to adjust. I peeled and “cubed” 21 cups of butternut squash – a real pain in the butt if you ever had one – until I realized that by “cubed” they meant “quartered” (and ready to roast in their peel). Duh, there went 2h I’ll never get back.
Is the finish result worth it? Hell yeah, but it’s 11 pm on this picture.
At the end of the day, I was thoroughly spent. Don’t underestimate the effort involved in making all your meals in one day: it’s a concentration of 30 days of dinners all in a 48h period. If anything, it highlights the cumulative effort of feeding your family every single month: give yourself a vigorous pat in the back family cooks! I crashed on the couch around 9 pm and promptly fell asleep. I was drooling on a couch pillow when my husband gently shook me and told me to go to bed.
I didn’t finish all my freezer meals in one weekend. The limitations of the spreadsheet are that it calculates like a robot without consideration for the size of your cookware. The reasoning behind batch cooking is that you cook in double or triple batches. OAMM doesn’t provide you with 20 different meals: it offers about 8 recipes that are repeated three times over the course of the month. But as any mother of a large family will attest, a single meal for 10 people already doubles or triples most recipes. So if you follow the reasoning behind OAMM batch cooking, I was cooking in sextuple and octuples batches… Well, nobody has a pot large enough to make a octuplet batch of beef Bourguignon : I found myself having to make several meals (like the boeuf Bourguignon and the risotto) in 2 or 3 separate batches…. And while I was making my third double batch of risotto, nothing else was happening. I am blessed that my twins’ caregiver has a past life in catering: I was able to go to work and leave her with my OAMM recipes and ask her to please, pretty please, do anything to save the meat and as much produce as possible. We did finish with minimal spoilage…. I think I lost the bottom third of my pre-chopped onions. All in all, not a bad average on a $800 grocery.
So what do I think about OAMM? Is it worth it? You will ask yourself that question as you buy all your groceries for the month and slave away in the kitchen for 48 insane hours. But this week, I took out my meals in the morning and we ate without messing-up the kitchen. Our children are going to bed earlier and my husband started reading novels out loud to our son – he’s 6, they are reading Kenneth Oppel’s Airborne at bed time. I have been going to bed at 9 pm on average and it is allowing me to take advantage of my twin boy’s longest sleep stretch: I get 3-4 hours of sleep in a row before he starts waking up every 2 hours, for the first time in almost 18 months. And I learned a few things in this first OAMM experience that I will tweak for next month in order to finish within the Friday night-to-Sunday window. Here they are in no particular order:
– I will study my recipes beforehand and see which corners I can cut. Tortillas will be store-bought although it will be difficult to go back.
– I will skip the breakfast menu unless it involves casseroles that are substantial enough to be used as a dinner. Like the Tahoe Brunch Casserole http://www.cabbi.com/recipes/detail/200 We eat toasts and cereals at breakfast, I need to focus my energy on dinner.
– Pancake recipes, however delicious, take-up too much time and RAM to work in the context of a busy cooking day. I burned 95% of my lemon poppy seed pancakes, which was a damn shame.
– The Whole Food menu includes a few vegetarian entrees but is still very heavily meat-centered. I bought much more meat in my OAMM trial month that I usually do, by a factor of 2, possibly 3. Next time, I will probably make one Whole Food Mini-Menu and one Vegan Mini-Menu to even it out.
– OAMM is American and wow, holy stinkin’ cow they love their dairy fat!! There is an unholy quantity of butter and cheese but mostly butter, and heavy cream too, in their recipes. Their pumpkin risotto recipe was heavenly but wow, with Maple Syrup, it would have been a perfect dessert. A lot of the Whole Food Menu’s vegetarian recipes were heavy on milk fat. A vegetarian diet is not healthier if you replace lean protein by butter. Just sayin’
OAMM is well thought out and does take the thinking out of batch cooking. Their recipes are tasty and varied and so far, none have fallen flat with my family. It is well-worth the intensity of the big cooking day. Try it and persevere: you’ll be glad you did.
Hey Vero 