Bakeram Yoga

This is off topic, I know, but I am a wee bit pissed.  I promise to go back to our regularly schedule some erratic blogging shortly.  I have worn Lucky jeans since I first decided that I was grown up and needed a pair of expensive jeans that actually fit well which I believe was around 2006.  They were fantastic.  They fit my ample bottom and hips and I felt stylish in them, but they could still be paired with a t-shirt and flip flops.  In September, I decided that 6 months post Walter it was time to buy a pair of jeans that didn’t involve the word maternity.  So back to Lucky I went,  I found a decent pair of basic jeans and felt like a real person again.  About two weeks ago, I realized the crotch and the inner thigh of them were almost worn bare.  Let me elucidate that I had worn these pants for about 3 and a half months at this point. So I took them back to the store, explained the situation to the sales guy, expected them to say, “Oh no, that is awful, we sell a quality product, let me replace those for you.”  Instead, I was informed that since I didn’t have my receipt they couldn’t do anything to help me.  Evidently other stores, besides Lucky sell them and they couldn’t be sure I had bought them there and therefore evidently they weren’t responsible for them.  Awesome.  I felt like informing the guy that I would no longer be buying their jeans and yelling about how awful that particular piece of corporate policy was.  However, I have done retail before and know it isn’t in his hands, so I didn’t.  Thanks for letting me unload.

I think I have mentioned before that my yoga practice is Ashtanga.  I chose it for a variety of reasons one of which is that there is a series of poses that you do each time you practice and once you have learned the series of poses it is very feasible to practice outside of a studio and away from a teacher.  I still prefer to practice at a studio (Yoga is Youthfulness aka YIY) with teachers that know my practice and are ever so helpful with adjustments and information on how to tackle whatever pose I am working on.  In the last couple of weeks, I have had an early class to teach which interferes with me going to the studio to practice so I have had some time to explore this solitary practice.

This practice is completely different than when I practice with others.  First, it requires far more discipline.  At YIY, I know that if I decide to cop out on my practice half way through Anne will come around ask what is wrong and when I have nothing really to say, instruct me to get my bum moving (in the nicest possible way!).  At home, no one keeps me moving through my practice.  However, I find that it is much easier to just get lost in the practice.  No one interrupts my practice and the house is quiet so I can just be myself in my yoga.

I can hear my own breath very clearly and it has a way of lulling myself into a rhythm.  I also notice that my breath slows down.  My inhales are longer as are my exhales which leads me to stay in poses longer than I would normally.  The room is colder so I don’t sweat as much.  The temperature in the room at YIY is cause for much discussion among Ashtangis.  It is a bit harder to get going when the room is colder, but I find once I warm up, I enjoy the fact that I am not dripping sweat.  The sweat doesn’t interfere with my practice that way.  Can you tell that I am one of the ones arguing for the room being a bit cooler as opposed to warmer?   When I am finished I can quickly shower and get on with my day.  However, I have to say that one serious downside is that there is no chai afterwards unless I make it, which doesn’t normally happen.  That is a serious downside!  To finish out this otherwise somewhat serious post, I will include my recipe for homemade chai.

Alex and I usually spend Thanksgiving with his parents and family.  However, this year his parents were out here at the end of October and will be back in December so decided not to join us for Thanksgiving this year.  This meant that we were at loose ends. So we decided that we would do a potluck with any of our friends (and friends of friends) that weren’t spending the holiday with family.  We offered to cook the turkey, stuffing and my famous pecan pie (it won reserve grand champion at 4-H two years in a row!) and to provide the house mainly so that we could have access to Walter’s crib when he needed to sleep.

The turkey was quite a story in itself.  It came from Petaluma and was raised by 4-H kids.  Since I did 4-H when I was a kid, I like to support the program whenever possible.  We got a delicious turkey from them last year so I figured we would try it again.  So I drove an hour and a half to Petaluma and back.  Walter was wonderful and slept both ways so I considered myself lucky.  Did I mention it came with the neck and head attached?

However, I have decided that there are tons of articles out there about different dishes for Thanksgiving and the perfect way to cook a turkey so I thought I would devote this blog article to two things that you could easily just bypass and buy, but I think the quality is superior when you do it yourself.

The Pie Crust

*back when I was a kid we used Blue Bonnet margarine in place of butter because the consistency was such that it made the pie crust easier to roll out and pick up without it falling apart.  I try to avoid it and stick to organic non-weird ingredients and use butter.  However, if you are having trouble with the pie crust, use blue bonnet until you get the knack of it.

Now if you have filling for the pie crust you and put it in and bake it.  If you need to bake the crust separately, simply take a fork and poke holes into the crust so it won’t separate from your pan and put it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 10-15 minutes.

I don’t like chard.  In fact, I have a hard time with any of the dark leafy green veggies with the exception of spinach.  I know what to do with spinach.  I can cook it nicely or toss it in a salad very easily.  However, growing up in Texas chard, kale and all the rest just weren’t a staple at the Winn Dixie.  But each fall it lures me in, it is all nicely laid out at the farmer’s market.  It just looks so healthy and almost promises me that I can do something with it.  Each time though, I buy it and am not sure what to do with it.  Recently I started cooking it up and just blending it into baby food for Walter.  He seems to love it, especially blended with some spinach, milk and parm, but that is another blog post.  The purpose of this one is discuss the unlikely combination of chard in enchiladas and that they were super tasty.

I have a friend from my mom’s group, Lauren, who writes a wonderful blog called Gourmet Veggie Mama.  I am continually impressed with both her ability to find new recipes, cook them, and then blog about them on a regular basis.  I tend to consider my day a success if I can just make the dinner.  So today I am overachieving which leads me back to the chard and the enchiladas.  She made them and I was skeptical, but hopeful.  You see as discussed above, I don’t like chard, but I do like enchiladas.  However, my definition of enchiladas usually involves meat and a lot of cheese with rice and beans.  Her recipe and post are here.

Last weekend, I bought some wonderful looking rainbow chard and assembled the rest of the ingredients.  I even got ambitious and picked a couple more of Lauren’s recipes to try out too, we will see how the week goes.  Tonight, I followed her instructions and they turned out wonderfully.  I even fried up with tortillas which I had never done before.  It was much easier than I thought it would be.  Although in the future, I might just stick them in the microwave to soften them up a bit in the interest of losing more baby weight.  Try them out and give her blog a read.  Walter is cranky and needs to nurse so I guess my blogging time is up!

I feel the need to follow up my last post with something bit lighter and the partial cause of all this soul searching: caramel apples.  In my family, the holidays revolve around food.  Each holiday has it’s particular dish or dishes.  For Halloween, it is caramel apples coated with nuts.  I have lovely memories of these perfect apples that my mother used to make and my sisters and I would attempt eat all the while getting caramel all over our faces and hands.  It was a delightfully sticky mess.

This year, the mom’s group that I am a part of, Las Madres, had a Halloween party this last weekend.  This was an unabashed excuse to dress our little guys up in their Halloween costumes, take pictures and then eat yummy treats.  So I volunteered to make the caramel apples.  I had a devil of a time with them.  I looked up recipes online just to get a general jist of a recipe.  It seemed that most recipes added milk or water to the caramel and maybe some vanilla.  So I unwrapped all the caramel and then added a splash of milk and a splash of vanilla.  I melted the caramel in my spiffy copper sugar pot that we brought back from Paris last spring.  Then I chopped up a mixture of walnuts and pecans for the toppings.  I washed and dried the apples.  Then I stuck forks into the apples and dipped them in caramel and then dipped them in the nuts.  Problem was that the caramel refused to stay put on the apples.  It pooled at the bottom.  I just couldn’t get it to stay put.  I had Alex twirl them for me, I blew on it to cool the caramel, and Alex even stuck them in the freezer all to no avail.  It was quite sad.  So if anyone has some ideas, I would love them.  I guess I could also do the obvious and call my Mother and ask for her secret.  After all, I am a mom now, I get some of those secrets too, right?

It has been almost 7 months since the birth of my son and I am enjoying every minute of it.  However, the 50 pounds that I gained during pregnancy are bringing me back to an issue that has and probably will continue to plague me throughout my life: my weight.  I am one not one of those people that doesn’t have to worry about my weight or can breastfeed and the baby weight just falls off.  In fact after about 5 months of breastfeeding and 3 months of being back to my normal routine of working out 6 days a week, I had lost 8 pounds of pregnancy weight.  I should take this moment to point out that my son was 9 lbs 2 oz when he was born.

My goal was to fit back into my pre-pregnancy jeans on Walter’s first birthday.  So I decided to join Weight Watchers again.  I had success with them several years ago and lost 30 pounds.  Besides, I had heard that fruit was now 0 points which had to be so much better cause I love fruit!  I have been following it pretty faithfully for the last two months until last weekend that is.  I find myself rapidly losing motivation to stick to it.  I like to eat sweets and cook with butter.  Which brings me to my current, and ongoing, quandary in life: where does nutrition end and vanity or the pressure of society begin?  Despite my earlier statements, I eat fairly healthy with lots of veggies and fruit and lean meat.  However, I also read continually about how we are an obese nation and that we need to not be overweight or it will cause us significant health problems.  I want to lose the baby weight because I think it would be healthy for me.  However, at the same time I recently saw a picture posted to Facebook of a nude woman who was much curvier.  It had been posted my someone in my mom’s groups and the caption relayed something to the effect that this was beautiful too.  The intent of the poster was to say that society expected too much of women (and moms in particular) to expect that they would be super thin after having a baby.

These two things cause me much concern and I waiver between the two depending on the day.  I, too, feel that my body is different after having a baby.  I know that certain things will just never go back to the way they were and that I need to let go of it.  However, I want to teach my son healthy eating habits and I don’t want to set a bad example by being overweight either.  On the flip side, I want to teach him to respect women and that women have curves, period.  Where is the line between being healthy and just being in your body as it is and being unhealthy and setting a bad example for my little guy?

So every once in awhile I am going to just blog about being a mom.  I know it doesn’t really fit into the subject area, but it is helpful for me to write about it so I am going to do it.  :)

Today I realized just how exhausted I am.  I came home from my first foray into mommies groups.  I had a good time, but I was unusually tired.  I thought, I will just lay down for a minute and bribe Walter to lay down too by nursing him.  I lay down and got Walter situated and the next thing I know I am waking up and Walter has long since finished nursing and is passed out at my side.  It is two hours later.  I think about getting up, but this wave of tiredness just rolls over me and I almost can’t move.  Walter woke up and started to get fussy so I popped him back on the boob again to buy me some more time.

In times past, it takes me awhile to fall asleep.  Lately, I just pass out as soon as my head hits the pillow and I just feel weary and bone tired when I wake up.  I know this shouldn’t be a surprise to me.  Moms seem to mostly always be tired, but lately I thought I wasn’t tired.  Lately I thought that I had things under control.  Life has seemed doable so it is surprising that I am so tired.

Back to my yummy iced coffee.  Actually, here is my tie in for this blog post. My friend Donna, who is also a mom of two adorable little boys who are 2 and 1, had this fantastic idea. She makes a pot of coffee in the morning, drinks her cup and then sticks the pot in the fridge.  Then you have iced coffee in the afternoon.  It is simple, but just brilliant! The added bonus is that I have good iced coffee as opposed to the crap that you generally buy that has lots of sugar in it.

Last Friday, I went for my first run since Walter was born.  Yesterday I went back to mysore and today I went running again.  I am beginning the very slow climb back to some sense of in shapenss and baby weight loss.  It is  a rather interesting experience.  On one hand, I am super excited to be back at it again.  It was really hard when I was pregnant because I knew that each time I went to yoga or for a run that the next time would be more difficult.  I was in a downward slide physically as I got more and more pregnant and I knew that at any point I would have to stop until after Walter was born.  So now it is wonderful to know that at this point I am at my worst and it will only get better from here.  Each run should get easier and I will gain more and more of my yoga practice again.

Now the flip side of that….it hurts!  It is painful in a way that in the past, I would be cursing myself for stopping working out for whatever reason I had and swear to never stop working out again.  The fact that I have a perfectly good reason for stopping this time doesn’t seem to make the pain any less.  Alex decided to be my trainer and encourage me to run faster.  My legs felt like jelly after about two minutes.  My body also feels foreign to me.  When I run I feel oddly disconnected and just plain awkward. I can feel all the fat bouncing and bearing down on my c-section incision.  In my practice, I notice that I have no arm strength to do chaturanga dandasanas or really an pose that requires me to use my arms as a substantial part of the pose.  I am just plain weak.

I have always thought of myself as strong physically.  I have never been super skinny, but I always have had physical strength from doing work on the farm when I was growing up or staying active as I grew older.  To lose that strength gives me pause and makes me think about my self perception and listen to that voice in the back of my mind that says, “your body is different now, please be nice to it,” and wonder exactly what that means for me in the coming months.  The one thing that is still the same is how good it feels to finish the workout and how fantastic the shower afterwards feels.

Waiting is hard.  When I was little, I used to make up little stories in my mind to distract myself from remembering that big exciting things were going to happen.  It worked sometimes and other times I was just overcome with impatience and excitement.  I am 31 years old and I still get excited and wake up early on Christmas morning.  Granted it isn’t the 3 or 4 a.m. that it used to be, but I am generally always up by 6 a.m. (truth be told, my sister Peggy dictates this so that little Christmas can be accomplished at the proper hour, but I think I would be up regardless).  I think that is why I was wide awake at 4:47 a.m. this morning.  It is my due date and I was just filled with excitement to meet this little guy.  Now granted I am not having any contractions at all and I have this funny feeling he has no desire to leave his warm baby enclosure to face the world any time in the next couple of days, but I am still excited.

The problem for me is when the excitement turns into impatience and anxiety.  I feel like I am walking that line a lot lately.  The build up to a baby being born is intense.  You spend 9 months getting prepared both mentally and physically.  Then there is all the things that need buying and acquiring.  I have been immensely fortunate to inherit a good chunk of baby things from a favorite yoga teacher and the rest from one of my best friends.  So now, due date officially arrived, I sit here and look at the nursery which is all put together just waiting for its little occupant to arrive.  My to do list is done and most consists of things that while it would be nice to be done, really aren’t necessary and exist mainly to keep me busy.  I have even cleared my to do list of long term items like putting our wedding pictures in an album (only almost 3 years after the fact!).  Now I wait and try to keep the side of excitement and stay away from the anxiety and impatience.

I feel like the key to all of this is something I have been trying to do now for a long time: just to let it all go and go with what comes.  To realize that as much as I would like it, I can’t control what happens in life.  Truthfully, the non-planned, non-controlled things in my life have been the best.  Often the things I think I want have just made me miserable.  Now I work on remembering this and actually applying to my life so that I can let little Walter enter this world at a time of his choosing because he needs that.

Note before I start: I am very excited to meet Walter and be his mother, I am just very frustrated at the moment and venting tends to help me let go of things.

“You have a stress fracture in your foot.  That means no running and no yoga for the next 6 weeks.” the doctor said to me after pushing on and poking my foot in different ways to see what hurt.  I was in shock.  I knew that my foot hurt enough that running for the next while was out of the picture, but yoga too?

“You could bike or swim though, but nothing high impact on your foot.”  she continued on.  ”Great,”  I thought, remembering the last time I had a foot injury and was told to swim.  I like swimming ok, but being told that I should swim just makes me hate it.  I never feel like I get as good of a sweaty workout from swimming or biking, it just isn’t the same as a good long run or a good mysore practice.  It just makes me very cranky.

I walked out of the doctor’s office this morning and got in my car and just bawled.  I couldn’t stop, I felt like I was losing it.  I know that the hormones in my body are all sorts of nuts at the moment because of being pregnant, but losing my yoga practice in addition to my running was just more than I could take.  Pregnancy is hard and once you get towards the end everything just gets difficult to deal with.  You are bulky and big and it hard to get up out of chairs and tie your shoes.  Your organs are all misplaced and so you get nasty reflux (everything tastes very gross coming up the second time around) and you have to pee all the time.  Additionally you can’t sleep because being comfortable is a state you just can’t quite get to.  Even if you do fall asleep, you have ridiculous and crazy dreams that make sleep not all peaceful or restful.  This just all adds up to the point where you get stir crazy, very cranky and sad.

However, today it felt like I lost the last piece of my life that was really still mine, my running and my yoga practice and it just sucks.  Exercise (the very sweaty, exhausting kind) is how I have coped with my anxiety for most of my life.  I am not at all talented at running or yoga, I am just stubborn and I love the way I feel once I finish a long run or a good practice.  I feel like I can let go of all the crazy in my head and just relax, for a brief time in life it is ok to be exactly just me.  Whenever life hands me shit I put on my running shoes and head out the door.  Nothing has changed once I come back, but the chance just to be and think always helps me. Pregnancy brings a whole new level of anxiety to life.  You have this whole other being to care for and you desperately want to do everything you can to keep him safe and secure. Now I have all this anxiety and I have lost my favorite ways of dealing with it.  Logically, I know that I will just have to do other things to take its place, the problem is that they are never as good.  I know because I had plantar fasciitis about 7 years ago.  I hadn’t started a yoga practice at the time and running was what I did.  It took me a good year to heal and get back to any sort of running and then another six months before I work up to the same run I was doing before I got injured.  Let’s just say that the next six weeks (which ironically enough is the exact time to my due date) is going to be a bear and I am not looking forward to it nor the time it will take to rebuild my run and my practice.

Although, I have this nagging thought in the back of my head that says this is the universe knocking me over the head to start meditating which I dislike.  So here we go….