Growing Up Savvy Posts

My life, our lives, everyone’s life is like a finite automata. See, Evan, I do use my degrees ;-). We get up, rush out the door, pray we didn’t forget something, commute, work, commute home, try to get dinner on the table, play with kids and put them to bed, pray they sleep the night and then, so do we. Depending on your specific family setup, you may have more things on your daily list or fewer, but the idea is that our lives have somehow become a daily race with one goal: finish this race faster and with fewer obstacles.

Trying to ease the pressure of it all involves relying on others to pick up the slack including gardeners, cleaning persons, nannies, nursery schools, your local take-out joint and the like. I don’t judge anyone for attempting to simplify their days in order to finish each one with at least an ounce of sanity. Sure, rushing to work, achieving your work goals and rushing home is difficult. It is difficult to parent children when you add the fact that somehow, you were busy before them, too. Stay at home parents don’t have it any easier, either. It is just that their commute to work is a little shorter than mine.

Even though this stage of our life is fraught with challenges not the least of which are lengthy commutes, picky eaters and terrible twos, we can always look on the bright side. There are those moments that make you pause and remember that all the commotion, the excitement, the stress and challenges, well, you wouldn’t trade it for anything else.

Here are a few of these moments that have happened just recently that made me think how I am where I should be.

Driving home from work yesterday. I allot 47 minutes to get home. I am a sight to behold as I try to rush out of the office, down to the garage and onto the busy Arlington roadways. I opted to drive from Arlington, into DC (Georgetown) across the Key Bridge and into Maryland. While sitting in the inevitable traffic jam on the bridge, I look over at the car to my left and see that its Evan. I just beamed… because it was so unexpected that we’d be side-by-side riding back home from our respective jobs and end up next to one another. I also realized that I am glad I still feel this way, that I always smile when he is around. Maybe it is a bit mushy, but we are all in need of a little bit of mush.

Having arrived home well ahead of Evan who was actually rushing to an appointment, I decided to try and make a simple salad with Sophia in tow. I did my best to make this sound like a very exciting activity. We set out our ingredients and proceeded to chop and dice. Sophia wanted to try everything, including the shallot, and even helped by putting the little cherry tomatoes on the cutting board one by one for me to slice. Sophia decided she just had to taste a lime, too and I let her have a half a lime to lick after I juiced it over our avocado-laden salad. Much to my surprise, she loved the lime and finished the job that the juicer did by sucking the rest of the sweet-tangy liquid out. Slowly, very slowly, she is becoming a little person who is so much fun to be around.

The simple things in life, like making a salad with your child and the unexpected but oh so pleasant surprise of running into your spouse rushing home make what I sometimes view as a busy, monotonous life filled with the simplest ingredient: love.

… and when you’re having an especially busy and challenging day, just imagine that you’re here…

I am not a nutrition expert. I am however an expert in eating, being a mom and feeding a two year old. Our house, is food-focused — creating delicious, nutritious and inviting meals is at the forefront of our priorities. I should not be surprised that many families do not put such an emphasis on homemade meals and instead focus on going out and even then, do not teach their kids how to choose wisely. Going out does not always provide our families with healthful meals and it is almost always more expensive than cooking at home. That said, and while on the topic of going out, I do enjoy going out to either a very nice meal once in a blue moon or to ethnic restaurants that offer dishes I would have a difficult time replicating at home.

Reflecting back on my own childhood and how we ate as a family, I cannot help but be incredibly grateful to my mom for feeding us healthy and nutritious meals that allowed us to grow and thrive without sacrificing flavor. We were never overweight as children and enjoyed many a treat. Having lived for a long time in Baku, where the weather was warm, our diet was brimming with fresh fruits and vegetables. We also ate on a more traditional European schedule where lunch was the largest, multi-course meal and the day’s dining completed with a supper. Suppers in our house consisted of things like blintzes or syrniki. I’ve already mentioned this many a time, but soups were almost always part of the day’s main meal along with a protein, starch and veggie second dish and something sweet to round things out. Breakfasts were porridge focused but pancakes and even baked potatoes and herring, my personal all-time favorite, made their appearances on our menu. I don’t remember drinking too many juices and there were no colas until I was a bit older and even then, they were expensive and not something we craved. I do remember eating lots and lots and lots of fruit.

As a result, and we are all a product of our own upbringing, my own fridge is chockfull  of fruits even in the winter. Maybe Evan is right that berries should be left alone until they are in season, but I do focus on apples, oranges, pomegranates, kiwi and persimmons.

Now, some things can’t be helped… Sophia is a super slim kid. She’s very tall and very skinny and I am starting to feel the fine fashion offered by the Gap slip out of my reach :-). At two, she is as tall as a three year old and as slim as a one year old. Everything hangs on her like a hanger or is freakishly short. She hates short pants, by the way. But I digress. She’s slim and it isn’t because we don’t offer her enough food or offer her items that are different from what we are eating. In fact, she has mostly transitioned to table food and is built this way. At her yearly 2-year checkup, our pediatrician supported our plan to switch to 2% milk and urged us to “feed her the way we would want her to eat when she is an adult”.

I recently started taking a Childhood Nutrition course from Coursera taught by a lecturer from Stanford University. The course is free and you can listen/watch the lectures at your own pace. I encourage everyone to tune in. Dr. Adam’s  course overviews the basics of nutrition (the roles of fats, proteins, and sugars) and offers advice on how to cook for your family. One of the very first recipes shared in the course was an oatmeal porridge. It reminded me of the way I grew up eating it. The oatmeal was cooked with water and a dash of milk was added at the very end to up the ante on the creaminess.

I am incredibly grateful to my parents for the way we ate when we were young. To this day, I try my best to echo my mom’s principles to feeding and to this day, my parents peel pomegranates for us when we visit and even send peeled ones to go. That’s nothing if not love. I’ll do the same, I think.

The extraordinary positive impact music can impart on our state of mind, both emotionally and physically is well known. In fact, thanks to iTunes, iPods and now iPhones, we can have our favorite tunes with us, always.

Sophia almost always listens to her favorite kids songs on our drives and I have gotten into the habit of using my 45 minute commutes (that’s one way, by the way) to listen to my own playlists that help me decompress before coming home to my second full-time job. Many of my Food for Thought posts and my master’s thesis were written as I listened to music. Music is also how I coped with the stresses and challenges in planning a wedding, and, it ended up being a great escape and provided our guests with some good entertainment.

In fact, music, and more specifically our band, were among the best decisions we made when we planned our wedding. When deciding on a general theme or feel, we steered away from anything too trendy wanting to avoid being labeled as a wedding from that generation and chose a Big Band theme. Well, if you’re going to have a Big Band-themed wedding, you must have a Big Band. We hired Jump City Orchestra to play during our cocktail hour and reception. The band was spectacular and we knew they would ensure a good time for everyone there.

Alas, to prepare for the wedding, we signed up for dance classes and spent a few months perfecting the foxtrot. People spend serious money on flowers, caterers, and wedding  dresses but seem to ignore the fact that the most important aspects of the wedding, the reason there is a wedding is because there are two people who want to say their vows in front of family and friends and then have a party, too. As such, if you’re going to commit to putting on a wedding, commit to learning how to dance — it is something you will do for yourself, something that you will take with after the evening is over.

We didn’t want to just memorize dance moves to our first dance song, and instead enjoyed learning the dance and practiced quite a bit. At first, it was intimidating, but as we got more comfortable, we began to really enjoy it. To this day, although we are a bit rusty now-a-days, we are glad that we invested a bit of money into those private lessons because nothing can lift your mood like a dance to a beautiful song.

Whether you are trying to get a better workout, get inspired to express an opinion or work off a few calories on the dance floor listen to some of your favorite tunes and enjoy the results.