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05 Jan, 2019

Weekend reading: January 5 edition

By andrea tomkins in Weekend reading

1 Woman, 12 Months, 52 Places, nytimes.com
The Best Skin-Care Trick Is Being Rich, theatlantic.com
The surprisingly bright future of retail, fastcompany.com
How to properly feed a hungry pack of Raptors, theglobeandmail.com
‘Dry January’ Has Benefits All Year Long, smithsonianmag.com

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03 Jan, 2019

I resolve to resolve

By andrea tomkins in Misc. life

I reread yesterday’s post and am a hair’s breadth away from deleting it. I’m not entirely sure I made any sense.

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Normally, I’m not really into New Year’s resolutions. I suppose it’s because I haven’t felt like I needed to make them. Well, this year I do need them. I need to hit a reset button on my physical and mental health and this is it.

I have a feeling that resolutions are really only interesting to the person doing them, so I am going to keep the blather to a minimum. I will say this: I am doubling down on my resolve to keep my daily habits. I am also undertaking a Dry January and started a Facebook group for gentle support and encouragement in a judgement-free zone. So far, it’s been very positive. Send me a message if you want more information about this!

What else? For the month of January, I am:

Exploring my (new) tea collection from David’s Tea and kicking my afternoon coffee habit to the curb. I had the best night’s sleep in ages last night. I can’t even remember the last time I woke up feeling refreshed.
Not going to the gym, not even once.
Sticking with MyFitnessPal diary app and tracking my food properly.

In terms of creative projects, I’ve started a video project that logs my year in one second increments for 365 days. (Here’s the website of the app I’m using.) I have two days under my belt so far and am really excited about the potential here.

I am half considering buying a chin-up bar and subscribing to Headspace. If you have experience with either of these, I would love to hear from you.

Happy New Year, my fishies!

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02 Jan, 2019

The Christmas post that isn’t really about Christmas

By andrea tomkins in Misc. life,parenting

It’s been a very lazy week here at Casa Fishbowl but I’m totally ok with this. I am really enjoying having the family around. We’ve almost polished off the chocolate, eaten all of the cheese, and finished the Annual Christmas Puzzle. (It was a doozy this year.) We’ve watched a lot of Netflix too, but just so you know, we haven’t been sitting around on our butts the ENTIRE time. We went for a lovely walk in the woods and enjoyed a skate on the canal on New Year’s Eve.

The eldest daughter is home from school. The youngest has been dividing her time over the holidays between home, work, and friends. She also started drivers ed (!) this week. She opted for the “get it over with” session, which means a stretch of 8-hour days in a classroom before the in-car part of it begins.

Santa left lots under the tree for all of us this year. Even Piper received a few things in her stocking. If you follow her on Instagram (and I know many of you do!) you already know that one her gifts was decimated in record time. Frankly, I question whether I should bother buying her anything at all. She finds such pleasure in toy death and dismemberment… who I am to take that away from her?

What do teenagers get for Christmas? Good question. Well, the youngest needed a Chromebook for school, so that’s what she got, along with a book and some stocking stuffers. The eldest, now that she’s on her own, needed a bit of everything, including a few practical purchases such as a new phone case and charge cable, water bottle, and clothes. And of course, everyone always gets socks here at Casa Fishbowl, because the gift of warm feet is the best gift you can give anyone.

I didn’t necessarily want to share a big Christmas recap here today, but I did want to jot down a few thoughts about something that’s been on my mind and I’d love to get your take on it.

Perhaps let me start with this question: what do you make for your big Christmas dinner? Are you a traditionalist who makes the same dishes every year based on family favourites, or an experimentalist who likes to come up with a new menu every year? Perhaps you delegate dinner by going out or ordering in? I’m guessing you’re something in between or a combination of all three.

We shook things up by going out for sushi on Christmas Eve. I’d call that a big win and would definitely do it again. (The year before we ate fondue, which I really liked but I suspect I was the only one.)

For Christmas Day dinner we usually have a turkey with cranberry sauce and stuffing and mashed potatoes and a salad. There’s usually green beans and carrots in there somewhere as well. I like to try new dishes because I get bored of the usual rotation so I like to include an element of NEW.

For the second year in a row, I found myself baking a cake recipe via Canadian Living. This is the one we made last year (it was a win) and this is the one I opted to try this year.

This cake has had me doing some soul-searching ever since. WHY I am the kind of person who tries a new multi-step dessert recipe on my family on the biggest celebratory dinner of the year? I am not even that great of a cook, and what’s more, my baking experience is fairly low. So why I do this to myself?

My Christmas dessert personality disorder really hit home when the girls and I were about to ice the cake at my inlaws house on Christmas Day. We had made everything the night before (HAHA! So smart, right?), and although the cake didn’t rise as much as I had thought, I figured we were in the clear. The icing was delicious and at the time I was glad my daughters and I had made the leap and tackled the recipe together.

Fast forward to Christmas Day. The icing, which we thought we could make ahead of time, was a curdled mess. We brought it back to room temperature but it separated and no amount of beating could bring it back together. I was so disappointed; near tears, in fact. We put our heads together and added a few spoonfuls of icing sugar. This held it all together but the lovely whipped coconut texture was gone.

Our youngest was pretty matter of fact about it. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. She bustled around the kitchen with the icing sugar and the beaters, cool as a cucumber. “Sometimes baking projects don’t work out, mom,” she said. Of course, she’s right. Baking is an art and a science and any number of things could go wrong (and in this case, they did).

We decorated our cake and served it up. It looked ok, but wasn’t the light and fluffy pièce de résistance we were looking forward to:

Everyone was too polite to say anything, but the texture of the icing was almost like straight up butter. (And how could it not? We used three cups of the stuff. And where was the subtle coconut flavour?) Ugh. What a waste.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the failed cake. Why did I choose such a dessert like this, with a recipe like this? And why was I so upset when it didn’t come out right?

I think, for me, it boils down to this: I was subconsciously using the cake to show my love for my family and when it didn’t work out, I was crushed.

Sidebar: I forced myself to eat a slice the next day – mostly because I loathe the idea of food waste with every fibre of my being – and the rest of it ended up in the compost bin after a few days of looking sad and lonely in the fridge. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

It has also occurred to me that the way I show my love by serving my heart on a tray isn’t how others show their love, or for that matter, really appreciate or understand it.

For example, the other day our youngest was leaving for work and I told her to zip up her coat. The eldest overheard our exchange and laughed. “Mum, you will always and forever be telling us to zip up,” she laughed. I laughed too, because she’s right. This is how I show my love, but our teens, well, they might not see it that way. We are not on the same wavelength about coats in cold temperatures, but how can she not understand that I tell her to zip up is because I love her and don’t want her to be cold?

The way people some show their love is not compatible with other peoples’ ideas of love and how it should be received. We want to love people freely, on our own terms, but sometimes other people might not want to be loved that way, or really even recognize our words and actions as love.

It sure makes things more complicated, doesn’t it? We tell our teens to zip up and put on a hat but they don’t want to hear it. We bake a cake and it falls flat. We give someone a big hug when the target of that hug needs her freedom in that moment. So how do we find a middle ground? Maybe the giver of love should be more mindful of dishing out bone-squeezing hugs at inopportune times, and maybe the recipient could remember that a cake, is not always just a cake. Maybe the answer is to meet in the middle.