Christmas Fowl Pie (or Bobbi saves Christmas AGAIN)

Bob called me the Saturday before Christmas as he was heading back from a hunting trip in Eastern Washington. He had some game birds, would I like them?

Absolutely! Who can turn down a bag of freshly butchered game birds? Bob gave me a breast of a "greater Canada geese," a "lesser Canada geese" and a "wood duck." Here is a picture of the bag of the meat, with Pearl hoping for a Christmas miracle of falling bags.

Next step for Christmas dinner, figuring out what to do with these pieces of meat. A quick shout out on facebook and I found a British recipe for "hot game pie" that called for pheasants and measures in metric, but it gave me the basics (and I have the internet).

This morning started with sleeping in, then catching up with an episode of the BBC series Survivors, and then finally pulling myself out of bed to start the stock. Instead of pheasant I bought some Cornish Game Hens that I chopped up and sauteed and then simmered them into stock.

After I assembled all the meats with the stock, I had to make something called a celeraic puree. Celeraic, I learned, is British for Celery Root. It looks like this:

Then I made up my own pastry recipe, using roughly 8 cups of flour to a pound of butter and some salt, with cup of cold water thrown in at the end. I needed to have enough pastry to cover a 9 X 11 lasagne pan that I was going to fill with all my meat stuffing.

Finally, I had to figure out how to convert Stone temperature guidelines in the British recipe, and once I did that, I went to turn on the oven to about 400 degrees. And nothing happened.

Oh the little temperature guage read 100 degrees, but that was more aspirational than factual.

After close to an hour of trying different ways to turn the oven on (if I ask it to pre-heat, will it light? How about if I set it REALLY hot, will that convince it to go on?) I had to admit that the little piece of gizmo that usually turned on my oven had gone back east to visit relatives for Christmas. Time to get creative.

Time to call Bobbi.

At 5:00, with a gumpy "I'm tired of everything being so hard" and a few tears, I announced my arrival and shoved the assembled Fowl Pie in her oven. 40 minutes later, with some rolls cooked and the dog getting plenty of action, we were ready to go. I put the Fowl Pie back into the car and drove to pick up the boy. Thirty minutes after that we were home and the Fowl Pie was on the table, the presents were being ripped open, and all was right in the world. Except if you were a wood duck.

Thank God for Stubbornness

The worst Thanksgiving I ever spent was on the oncology floor of Seattle Children’s Hospital. You can bet I always win any “worst Thanksgiving ever” story contest with that opening line. It’s usually followed by uncomfortable silences as people check their shoe laces. As it should be.

On Thanksgiving 1997, we had thought we’d be home with our son recovering from the aftereffects of his next-to-the-last round of chemo. By the Monday before Thanksgiving, EJ’s fever had been down for a day, his blood counts were rising and his mucositis was almost gone. But when I got him out of bed to take him for a walk around the floor (a usual part of our routine on days when we were preparing to leave the hospital) he wouldn’t stand up. He wouldn’t bear weight on his legs and hardly seemed able to talk to me.

I was in the little refreshment area they had on the floor at that time, a space the size of a pantry where parents could nuke something, use a blanket warmer, find emesis basins and a few other necessities, and I needed to put EJ down so I could use my hands.

I tried to put him on the surf board. Some Children’s volunteer had designed small plywood shelves that could slide around the bottom of the IV poles so the kids could ride while mom or dad pulled the pole itself – accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of making IV infusions fun. EJ wouldn’t stand on the surf board. His knees didn’t support his weight and he slumped onto his bum, kind of halfway on the board, halfway off. I tried to reposition him and encourage him to grab on to the pole, but he wouldn’t. He was a rag doll.

I often wonder if he was having the stroke right then and there as I squeaked cheerfully, “come on baby, grab the pole.” A nurse finally stopped me by very kindly saying, “maybe we should take EJ back to bed.”

By Thanksgiving we knew it had been a stroke. I remember that week being a blur of trying to find one doctor who we knew who was still there during that holiday week. I remember my ex asking to speak to someone who had actually graduated medical school. I don’t know if it was that bad, but I do remember that Monday, Tuesday and much of Wednesday was spent just trying to find someone with the authority to order the appropriate diagnostic tests.

And finally, on Wednesday, after the MRI, my sister and sister-in-law took me on a walk, and we came back and there was my ex sobbing. They had told him while I was gone. It was a stroke. He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t see.

The next day, the floor was filled with volunteers and family members trying to help us make the best of the holiday. Turkeys appeared on buffet tables. People offered us plates of food. We sat in EJ’s room and wondered if he would live.

Today, on a Wednesday before Thanksgiving 11 years later, I took that now 13 year old boy to an appointment with the school audiologist. It was a mess. EJ hates his hearing aids and bristles under everything that has to happen because of them – the appointments, the maintenance, the responsibility of keeping $6,000 worth of equipment dry and accounted for. He pushes back, he questions, he tries to wrangle his way out of it.

Today he argued that he didn't need two aids, that only one ear was "deaf." He wouldn't lower his head so the (fully grown adult woman) audiologist could reach his hear to check something. He threatened to burn them, then to roast them as part of the feast tomorrow. He leaned away when we wanted him to lean forward.

He was stubborn.

He's stubborn and he won't give up what he thinks is the right course. Of course that can be maddening. I mean, he needs his hearing aids! But I am so grateful for his stubbornness, that spirit inside him that has kept him moving forward, always fighting and struggling against the cards he's been dealt.

Thank you God, for making him stubborn!

Economy Rant

Time for Trickle Up Economics

I’m going to rant a little bit here. First off, a confession: I’m an NPR junkie. The upside of that is I’ve been listening to some great minds talk about the economy. The downside is that there’s not a lot of synthesis (you know how they take all sides – so annoying).

So here’s my rant:

One guy will talk about Detroit, and how the Big Three are “saddled” – and they invariably use the word “saddled – with spiraling health care and retirement costs. In another segment, a guy, or woman, will talk about how we can’t afford universal health care with the economic downturn. Then someone else on another program will talk about how the consumer is so loaded down with debt, unable to get additional credit, afraid of becoming or actually becoming unemployed, or what not (or all of the above) that no one is buying, so more and more businesses will close down, and we’re just all done for.

Could we tie these things together, please? Why are the Big Three suffering because of health care costs when their competitors overseas are not? Honestly, I’ve never heard a reporter in any situation ask that follow up question. If your expert says "well Detroit has these spiraling costs that their competitors don't" will someone please ask: "Don’t the Japanese use people to make their cars? What about Germany, certainly there are people working in the automotive industry there, and certainly they are subject to the same illnesses we suffer. But Toyota and VW don’t have spiraling heath care costs to worry about. What do they do instead?"

And why is the consumer so saddled with debt that he/she/me won’t shop like a wild woman anymore? Can you say: medical bills? I knew you could. Medical bills are at least a part of it (something like 60% of people in bankruptcy site medical bills as the reason, and believe me I have thought about it myself).

So if we don’t do anything about medical costs and getting everyone access to health care soon, people like me are never going to be able to be the little economic engines we were born to be. The American consumer needs relief if we’re ever going to get out of this downward economic slide.

What just gets me is the miserable job the media does of covering this issue. How much will it cost? Does anyone in the press ever sit down and compare the total cost of health care we are paying, including the cost of uninsured medical care, the cost of uncompensated care, and the upward pressure that puts on the cost of care for the rest of us? Figure that all out and see the gigantor number (15% of our GDP). Shaving even a few percentage points off of that price tag would save us the money we are spending on the Wall Street bailout in one year.

And next year we could save the amount of money we are going to spend bailing out Detroit. And the bail out, coincidentally will be smaller and more likely to succeed because we’ve solved their health care issue.

Someone very smart needs to figure this out. God bless you Mr. Obama!

P.S.
Got the Goose. It’s kind of this giant flesh-colored frozen mortar-shell-shaped thing in my freezer right now. Thawing begins Saturday.

Goose Day

Today’s the day I get the Goose. That was what popped into my head this morning, first thing. My son, the connoisseur, requested Goose for Thanksgiving this year after confessing that he doesn’t like Turkey.

I was very pleased that he’d remembered he doesn’t like Turkey, as it always seems to come up after I make the big bird and then he remembers and says, “Eh, I don’t really like Turkey.”

So we’re getting Goose. And Turkey. I ordered a Deistel from our food coop a month ago. That was easy, I do it every year.

But where to get the Goose? Living in Seattle, I had plenty of options right outside, if only I could build a snare or convince my hunter friend to intervene, but I think there’s probably a difference between Goose and Wild Goose. So I started asking around.

It took about two weeks of constantly remembering to bring it up before I wandered into the University Seafood and Poultry looking for some sole. As I was waiting for the fish to be wrapped, I noted the large display of eggs – all kinds of eggs. I was on my way out the door when the voice inside my head yelled – Goose!

“Will you have Goose for Thanksgiving, by any chance?” I asked.

“Of course,” said the guy behind the counter. I don’t know if you shop at University Seafood, but have you noticed how the guys all got attitude? I guess I can’t blame them – they got Goose!

So I ordered a small bird, learned that it would be frozen (how choosy could I be, after all) and today’s the day I pick it up. My perfect plan is to defrost until Sunday, then do that parboiling thing I’ve seen recommended, and then get ready to bake. Of course, I’m going to ask the guy at University Seafood. “Of course he’ll know exactly what I should do!”

Perseverance

Perseverance

Today someone said that word and made me cry.

I had my son’s IEP meeting today. Seventh grade. I’ve been going to IEP meetings for him since he was three, so 10 full years. Doesn’t someone owe me a wooden gift or something? No, I just looked it up. Ten years is the tin or aluminum anniversary. Just what I need, more recycling!

For those of you not fortunate enough to be raising a child with “special needs,” an IEP is an Individualized Education Plan, or a document that parents and teachers create – theoretically together – that governs the child’s educational goals and activities for the school year. Again, theoretically. And yes, before anyone corrects me in the comments, I know that before kindergarten he was getting something called an IFSP, not an IEP, but I want my damn tin so I’m calling it ten full years.

The idea with an IEP is that, as a team, parents, teachers, administrators and whoever else gets drafted comes up with a statement about the child’s disabilities, abilities and how each factor into his/her ability to participate in a “free and appropriate public education.” The educators write up approved “objectives” that are supposed to be measurable goals the child can achieve within the stated time period. It’s all very well-formatted. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Except that my son doesn’t fit into even the “special needs” categories. Just like him to cause a fuss. When we started out, my son was such a complex number that no one could figure him out. The teachers just kind of threw ideas for goals out, trying to see what I might grab on to, or at least what I might not push away, mock, burn or threaten to sue over.

For the first four years of elementary school I fought to keep him in the regular education class room. IEP meetings were like skirmishes in the Thirty Years War – each side would gather as many friends as it could, then we’d lob volleys at each other from close range, and call the winner based on who had the most players left standing at the end of the time.

Time and again the teachers, administrators and school psychiatrists would muster against me, trying to convince me that I was being just shy of abusive by not letting them put him in a ‘self-contained’ classroom. Did I not understand how different he was from the other kids? In self-contained, he'd make many more friends, he would not stick out so much, he wouldn’t be so far behind the others. And I would think “he wouldn’t cause you so much work either.”

Their comments were never based on my son, but on some idea they had of how he suffered, or how they weren't up to the job of educating him. Their views were based on fear.

Mine were based on fear too, but fear that someday he’d hold me accountable for letting a bad situation get worse. If I put him in self-contained, someday he’d use that incredibly clever mind to figure out that I had taken the easy route and let the “professionals” make the decisions for him, while I just smiled and nodded.

So, four years into fighting the same battle over and over again, I finally hit on a successful strategy for the battle. I figured out what was really going on.

First off – they need you to cave. The school can’t move your child without your permission. However, they can cajole and even bully you into doing what they want. But then it’s on you, not on them.

More than that, they need your signature. This comes right off #1 because they need you to cave and then sign. And if you don’t cave, they need you to sign. No matter what, once every 365 days they need you to sign the IEP so that it can go into your child’s compliance file and they can survive their state and federal audits.

So . . . use their overpowering need for your signature to get them to back off their efforts to make you cave. I did it on the phone when we were preparing for the 3rd grade IEP and I was hearing, yet again, that the teachers really loved [my son] and thought the world of him, but had I ever given any thought to a self-contained class placement. Oh, he’d be so much better off, blah f-ing blah. So this was how it went:
Me: You know, if I come into the IEP meeting and someone so much as mentions the words “self-contained” I’m going to get up and walk out of the room and I won’t come back.
Teacher: Wha?
Me: I hate to say this, but I really think it’s counterproductive for us to even briefly raise the subject. It distracts the IEP team from what we’re really supposed to be doing (and here, feel free to remind teacher that the job is to plan for child in current placement) and it makes me so mad that I can’t be counted on to control my language. So I would have no choice but to leave the room and not come back.
Teacher: Oh.

It worked. I was nervous as hell, of course, but at the beginning of the next meeting I stuck to my guns, reminded everyone of my decision, and that basically put the kibosh on the whole self-contained idea. Mind you, the occasional teacher does still bring it up. I had one teacher tell me that my son could be in self-contained but still get a valuable regular education experience “during passing period.” This would be the time that I mocked them.

So obviously it’s been a contentious ten years since I started my career as a “special” mom. I do want to say that I always try to be of good humor and to show appreciation for what the teachers are doing right. Oddly, even as they can be psychically shoving my son into the self-contained closet, his teachers have done a phenomenal job educating him, pushing him and going far beyond what they ever thought possible.

So today at his IEP meeting, it was amazing to me to be in a room with a group of teachers who, uniformly, embraced my son as part of the school community. I knew this about them already, but to hear again and again how proud they were of his work, how thrilled they were to have him in his classroom, how much he'd improved since the year before, how the challenges were real, but the work worthwhile . . . oh pick your own metaphor ‘cause it rocked.

But then, darned it all, the school administrator, who’s been through a fair number of issues with us around bullying and some personal struggles and who’s seen a lot of my son’s most difficult moments up close, he leaned over to me and said, “so I’ve got to go to another meeting, but I wanted to let you know that [your son] to me shows what the meaning of perseverance is.”

Open tear duct. In that one word, this gentleman showed he'd gotten it. Ten years of scrambling to get him services and keep his options open, so that he could fight his own battles and come so much farther than anyone would have predicted. I knew and know that even though he has significant disabilities, he also has this furious stubborn streak that won’t allow him to give up. I know that this, more than anything, help him move forward and my job is just to keep those doors.


Notes:
* I put the phrase “special needs” in quotes because it feels creepy to me. Oddly, my son has picked up on the “specialness” of “special needs”. Someday I’ll write about how mercilessly he mocks the idea of being special. It’s kind of the best thing on the planet, how he does that.
* Give yourself two points if you got the hyper-inside pun in the third paragraph. Then take away three points for being such a dweeb.

I'm thinking of going back to school to get a degree in history -- all history. That's probably not the best plan, since if you're going to post-post-post graduate study, you ought to narrow things down a bit more.

But I'm convinced we need to study how things have been done in the past to gain some perspective on the crazy way we do things now.

Work takes work. I'm convinced a study of any past major accomplishement will reveal that the acheivement was a pain in the butt. We all know about the light bulb story and Edison's take on mistakes, but then we go right on behaving as if this whole innovation and good idea stuff is just-oh-squeeze-it-out-one-errrr-consultant-uhhhh-away.

If we can just plug the right "solution" into our problem, we'll have this thing fixed in an hour.

I'm not against optimist. Heck, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning if I didn't believe something good might happen to me that day. But I'm against the tendency in today's world -- work day, personal life, choose your sector -- to believe that life ought to be easy.

It's dangerous nostalgia to think that things were ever better than they are right now. Solving problems, creating innovation, moving forward . . . it all took work. Sometimes it was incredibly painful work. Sometimes, people refused to do the work and generations of their progeny suffered because of the communication dynamic they put into play.

Right now is the best time in history. And I mean right now in the literal sense, not in the sense of "this era." The moment you are living in as you read this is the best moment ever, because you can act within that moment. That moment is reality.

You can plan in the future, you can regret in the past, but you can only act in this moment, right now.

We get into trouble when we allow our inner child to take charge of the facilities questions. The childish part of us thinks we ought not have to work. There ought to be a way to routininze or normalize every process so that its predictable, and most importantly, that everything happens when it's supposed to.

Sure, shoot for that. Give it your best shot to see if you can create the perfect system, the perfect work team, the perfect family dynamic. But you know what, people will get in the way. Damn those people!

I used to work with a human resources consultant who's favorite saying was: If we could do this job without people, we would. Sometimes I think the rest of the world doesn't know she was joking.

People -- no matter how well trained -- will have personality clashes, unrealistic expectations for themselves or others, sick days, uncertainty, vulnerability, weakness. They always have.

This weekend I was talking with some elders at my church about a ministry we support for families of children facing critical illnesses. One elder mentioned that this ministry "just came out of no where." His point was that God made it easy for us, and we jumped at the opportunity. I happened to know how the ministry came to our church, and it didn't just land in our laps and the elders at the time wrestled significantly over whether to incorporate the ministry into our church or not. In fact, the plan was to support it as a start up and then spin it off within a few years, but ten years later it remains a vibrant and beloved part of the church.

Also at my church, we're going through a search for a new pastor. As an elder, I don't know any more about the process than anyone who's not on the pastor nominating committee, and they don't know much more than the rest of us. Since I wasn't here when we called the current, much beloved pastor, I just assumed that God would lead us unnerringly to the next man or woman who is to lead us. I met a woman today who mentioned that her father was on the nominating committee for our current pastor, and she remembers what a difficult time it was for the congregation, and how anxious we all were.

Time and again in my life I face struggle and only find comfort in remembering the times I'd overcome pain in the past. It's not the kind of thing you want to get good at (surviving trauma!) but since the world is filled with all sorts of challenges and surprises, it's better to be a survivor than not.

I feel at my most lost when I forget to revisit the past difficulties. I am not dwelling, but neither do I try to forget the troubles and challenges I've faced. The trick is to use them as part of the arsenal to overcome the next challenge.

Going to sleep now! Write more later . . .

Profoundity

The agency I work for had a thank you party for our donors and volunteers. I had to speak, which isn't unusual for me. This was a group of folks whom I know, most of them anyway, and I've asked many of them to speak for us from time to time, so it was a friendly crowd.

The trouble is, particularly when I'm with a group I respect, I feel like I have to be the one who says the profound thing. The thing that haunts people, that they talk about on the way home. And I just don't have that in me.

I guess that's not entirely true. I don't have it in me to be profound about every single subject. I'm kind of a straightforward gal, not sentimental or romantic. Really a boring broad if you want to know, but if I had to say something to folks to pull at their heart, this is what I'd say:

I'm the mother of a twelve year old boy who loves to talk about, well, poo. His favorite joke is anything that involves passing gas, he believes having to attend school is a human rights violation, and would endure any three painful alternative activities rather than voluntarily read a book.

But everytime he embarrasses me in front of my colleagues with scatalogical humor, everytime we fight about the math homework, everytime beseiges me with requests for expensive video games, I want to shout to heaven how happy and grateful I am. He is alive!

It seems to me like that is the only truly profound truth left in the world: life is good. Being alive is the greatest gift, and we really do not get that.

Having the awareness that I have is also a gift. To konw you are blessed is a separate blessing.

That's what I'd say, and then I'd leave the podium and go find my kid and let him rag at me for leaving him with the babysitter while I went to "AH-nutherrrr meeting!" Truly, it's like music.