As you know, Mac attends a Catholic school here in Sao Paulo, so it wasn't surprising when he came home from school the other day saying that they watched a video on St. Patrick in anticipation of March 17. Not knowing anything about St. Patrick myself (and assuming he had nothing to do with leprechauns wearing green trying to find four-leaf clovers), I was interested to hear what Mac learned about this guy.
1. He was born in 1968.
2. He died in 1964 (he obviously did a lot in -4 years to get a holiday named after him).
3. He was a good guy.
I'm not sure how long the video lasted, but that's what Mac took away from it. All you ever wanted to know about the saint himself!
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Big 11
Today is our 11th wedding anniversary and I wonder where the time has gone. Eleven years ago today this time I was an ummarried girl, looking forward to my Cinderella day of a beautiful bridal luncheon, getting my hair done, and putting on my moma's wedding dress to be married. Wow.
Little could I have known that 11 years later, we would have moved from South Carolina to DC to NYC to Guadalajara to DC to Maputo to Baltimore to Brasilia to Sao Paulo. Little did I know that my career, which I thought would die once we moved overseas after my FDIC career ended, would re-emerge as a new spring flower with USAID and then with my most recent work with narcotics stuff. Little could I have ever guessed that my best-laid plans of having a houseful of children would result in just one perfectly-formed, precious love called Mac. Little did I know that when looking at my wedding photos, one of my favorite photos then - one of my dad and me just before we walked down the aisle - would become one of my most cherished now for even more poignant reasons.
For a couple of kids from Moncks Corner, it's been a crazy, wild ride. But the ride has been so much fun. I can't wait to see what the next 11 bring!
Little could I have known that 11 years later, we would have moved from South Carolina to DC to NYC to Guadalajara to DC to Maputo to Baltimore to Brasilia to Sao Paulo. Little did I know that my career, which I thought would die once we moved overseas after my FDIC career ended, would re-emerge as a new spring flower with USAID and then with my most recent work with narcotics stuff. Little could I have ever guessed that my best-laid plans of having a houseful of children would result in just one perfectly-formed, precious love called Mac. Little did I know that when looking at my wedding photos, one of my favorite photos then - one of my dad and me just before we walked down the aisle - would become one of my most cherished now for even more poignant reasons.
For a couple of kids from Moncks Corner, it's been a crazy, wild ride. But the ride has been so much fun. I can't wait to see what the next 11 bring!
Friday, March 6, 2009
Waging war at the breakfast table? A definite on Egg Day
As predicted, we had a battle this morning over egg day. I made scrambled eggs again that were diluted with so much milk that there was hardly any egg taste at all. I put a little bit on a bagel chip topped with grated cheese. How can you go wrong with that?
Mac would not even entertain the notion of trying it. We tried cajoling, we tried begging, we tried to inflict that southern "but you gave me your word that you would eat the eggs" talk. NADA. So Jimmy told him that on syrup food day, we would eat waffles and he would not. He didn't budge.
He said he wanted an apple and I said nope. So we're still very much in the running for Parents of the Year because today, I sent him to school with nothing in his belly. I told him that he would be starving by snack time and he looked at me with disdain and said that snack time was early in the morning and he would be fine until then.
While we were waiting for the elevator to come, I asked him if he wanted me to run in to pick up one little bite-size piece to try on the way down. He wavered. I could see it. I was this close to victory. And then he said he'd be late for the bus so no.
Now that I'm determined in this mission, I will not be deterred by his resistance. He is going to eat eggs at some point in the not-so-distant future.
Mac would not even entertain the notion of trying it. We tried cajoling, we tried begging, we tried to inflict that southern "but you gave me your word that you would eat the eggs" talk. NADA. So Jimmy told him that on syrup food day, we would eat waffles and he would not. He didn't budge.
He said he wanted an apple and I said nope. So we're still very much in the running for Parents of the Year because today, I sent him to school with nothing in his belly. I told him that he would be starving by snack time and he looked at me with disdain and said that snack time was early in the morning and he would be fine until then.
While we were waiting for the elevator to come, I asked him if he wanted me to run in to pick up one little bite-size piece to try on the way down. He wavered. I could see it. I was this close to victory. And then he said he'd be late for the bus so no.
Now that I'm determined in this mission, I will not be deterred by his resistance. He is going to eat eggs at some point in the not-so-distant future.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Waging war at the dinner table? A thing of the past for the Storys
Those of you who know us as parents know that Mac has not inherited our parental legacy of eating whatever is put in front of him as long as it slows down long enough to be eaten. You really would think that we had fed him something as an infant or toddler that made him so distrustful of us and our attempts to feed him well. We have indulged this picky eating and it has very nearly driven me crazy. I am a good cook and when this child turns his nose up at my offerings and says he only like school food (WHAT?), it is very aggravating.
When we were in Salvador last week, we had breakfast at the hotel every morning, as is customary here in Brazil. Mac ate some awful chocolate puffy cereal every single morning followed by white bread rolls. I know. We're up for Parents of the Year with that breakfast. The thing with chocolate puffy cereal is that it has nothing nutritious in it to fill you up and stick to your ribs so approximately 24 minutes after leaving the hotel restaurant, the mantra began: "I'm hungry. I need a snack."
After day 2 of this, we were tired of hearing the whining. I mean, does his teacher have to listen to him times 18 every morning before snack time?
Jimmy told Mac that he needed to eat some protein so that got me thinking that we were going to have to force eggs on the kid. Mac ate eggs very briefly as a toddler or whenever it is that you can first introduce eggs. Jimmy has made it out as though eggs were his favorite food. I don't remember it quite that way, but I do remember that he ate eggs.
I decided that we were going to have to show some tough love. So on Monday morning, when Mac got up for school, I asked him what he wanted for breakfast. His normal response is peanut butter toast, cinnamon toast, cereal (Frosted Flakes - remember we are in the running for Parents of the Year), waffles or pancakes. Monday's answer was cinnamon toast. So I told him that he could have a slice of cinnamon toast if he ate eggs. He only had to eat one bite. I made wonderful scrambled eggs. Simple. Everybody eats scrambled eggs. Not Mac. He picked up the most miniscule piece of scrambled egg that you can make stick to a fork tine and every time he got it near his face, he started this gagging that actually produced a little vomit. Well that just really ticked me off. It's one little piece of egg. So then he tried to hold his nose and eat it - more gagging, more histrionics, more throwing up. By now, we were all in a foul mood. The windows were open so I'm sure the neighbors thought we were beating him because of all the yelling and crying.
By now it was time to catch the bus, so the cinnamon toast went in the trash, the egg went in the trash, and I cut up an apple quickly for him to eat. (I could not - even in my running for Parent of the Year - send him to school without anything to eat at all). He must have been hungry because the kid who isn't so hip on fruit ate nearly the entire apple before the bus got there.
I decided I needed to strike while the iron was hot, so I went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for my first week of meals by SavingDinner.com. My friend Alisa uses this service and got me hooked on the concept. You pay a small fee and they email you a different menu each week. You can choose regular, low-fat, or low-carb. I still have a little South Beach wannabe in me, so I chose low-carb. Six meals are included in the menu so you can pick which you want depending on how many nights you'll be at home, whether you want to cook more of one meal and have leftovers, etc. In addition to the menu, you get this full grocery list that's broken out by category like dairy, produce, staples, meat, etc and then each item on the list has the meal number by it, so you can scratch that off the list if you're not cooking that particular meal. As you may know, I LOVE a good list, so this was right up my alley.
So for the first week, I chose 3 meals. I was quite confident that each meal would not be well-received, but I was going on tough-love adrenaline. Oh, another benefit of SavingDinner.com? Meal preparation and cooking time is something like 30 minutes tops as best I can tell. Revolutionary.
Night one was General Tsao's chicken, brown rice, and steamed broccoli. A nice, healthy, balanced meal. Jimmy had to work late so I prepared dinner, fixed Mac's plate so that nothing touched anything else to avoid cross-contamination of foods and placed it in front of him. The poor kid must have been scared to death to question the dinner because he said not one word about anything. I have probably served him broccoli 467 times and he's always said he only eats broccoli at school (which the teacher said is true), but Monday night, he told me he only liked the tree part and not the stem. Fine. You can't win every battle, right? He ate a few bites of the brown rice (which is a few bites more than the last time he was served brown rice), a few broccoli trees, and had 3 servings of General Tsao's chicken (which was minus the red pepper flakes to avoid hot spice for him). You could've knocked me over with a feather.
Mac has been on a serious ice cream kick lately and again, we overindulged. Tough love called for no dessert except on weekends. So after he ate, he asked for dessert. I explained that we were only having dessert on the weekend and that he could eat fruit if he wanted to. He chose to eat a banana.
Night two was southwest pork chops served with a corn and tomato salsa with black beans on the side. He didn't like the corn in the salsa and the black beans were too spicy for him, but he did eat the tomatoes in the salsa (SHOCKING!) and the pork chops. Dinner was followed by 3 little bananas after which he said his stomach hurt. No kidding. His bowels must be in knots from the influx of ruffage into his system.
Night three was a total bust by all accounts. It was beef covered in a very good mushroom sauce with mashed cauliflower (supposed to be mashed potato-esque) and roasted asparagus. I bought a terrible cut of beef that was really chewy, I didn't steam the cauliflower long enough so it wasn't anything like mashed potatoes in consistency, and there was no fresh asparagus so I bought frozen which should not be allowed to be sold in modern grocery stores. But we had a discussion that sometimes meals don't turn out as we'd hoped, we still need to be polite to the cook and thank them for their efforts, and then we can eat fruit afterwards.
Last night after the disastrous meal, he said he'd really like pizza, so I made delicious pizza tonight (rather than ordering in, which is what he really wanted). And I think we all enjoyed it!!
The really great thing is that meal times used to be time for battle, but it's just so much more pleasant now. Nobody sulks over the meal, we have nice, pleasant conversation, and my days as a short-order cook are over! Why didn't we do this years ago????
We've also cut out junk food for snacks after school. Today, for example, he had carrots, yogurt, bagel chips, and some little club social crackers. I can't tell you what a difference this is from just a week ago when a typical snack might have been yogurt if we were lucky but would have definitely involved doritos or potato chips or some other highly processed food that leaves grease stains on your clothes and fingers.
We're really trying to emphasize healthy eating versus eating to avoid fat. Mac is nothing but bone and muscle right now and I don't want him to have a fat complex. So instead we've talked about how a heart works in conjunction with arteries and that if we eat too much fat, the arteries get clogged and the blood can't get through and the heart has to work harder. No need to get into genetics right now which from my dad's side show that really no matter what you eat, you're going to have clogged arteries, which then begs the question of why can't we just eat doritos everyday. But we'll save that for another time.
We may have a battle royale in the morning because Friday is another egg day. While he was eating his apple at the bus stop on Monday, we struck a compromise. During the school week, we agreed to have two egg days, two cereal days, and one waffle/pancake day. The agreed-upon schedule is eggs on Monday, cereal on Tuesday, syrup food on Wednesday, cereal on Thursday and the detested eggs again on Friday. It's been a quick week and here we are again at egg day.
Mac got a little weepy at supper tonight when we discussed that it was egg day. I've offered to put cheese in the eggs, or to serve it with ketchup like my grandfather always ate his eggs, but nothing seems to interest him. He loves these bagel chips and I just got a batch from our bagel store today, so I think that's how I'm going to entice him. Maybe if I drop just a tiny bit of egg on a bite-size piece of bagel chip, he'll be suckered into eating it. Could I be so lucky? I have no idea, but stay tuned because I'll definitely keep you posted!
When we were in Salvador last week, we had breakfast at the hotel every morning, as is customary here in Brazil. Mac ate some awful chocolate puffy cereal every single morning followed by white bread rolls. I know. We're up for Parents of the Year with that breakfast. The thing with chocolate puffy cereal is that it has nothing nutritious in it to fill you up and stick to your ribs so approximately 24 minutes after leaving the hotel restaurant, the mantra began: "I'm hungry. I need a snack."
After day 2 of this, we were tired of hearing the whining. I mean, does his teacher have to listen to him times 18 every morning before snack time?
Jimmy told Mac that he needed to eat some protein so that got me thinking that we were going to have to force eggs on the kid. Mac ate eggs very briefly as a toddler or whenever it is that you can first introduce eggs. Jimmy has made it out as though eggs were his favorite food. I don't remember it quite that way, but I do remember that he ate eggs.
I decided that we were going to have to show some tough love. So on Monday morning, when Mac got up for school, I asked him what he wanted for breakfast. His normal response is peanut butter toast, cinnamon toast, cereal (Frosted Flakes - remember we are in the running for Parents of the Year), waffles or pancakes. Monday's answer was cinnamon toast. So I told him that he could have a slice of cinnamon toast if he ate eggs. He only had to eat one bite. I made wonderful scrambled eggs. Simple. Everybody eats scrambled eggs. Not Mac. He picked up the most miniscule piece of scrambled egg that you can make stick to a fork tine and every time he got it near his face, he started this gagging that actually produced a little vomit. Well that just really ticked me off. It's one little piece of egg. So then he tried to hold his nose and eat it - more gagging, more histrionics, more throwing up. By now, we were all in a foul mood. The windows were open so I'm sure the neighbors thought we were beating him because of all the yelling and crying.
By now it was time to catch the bus, so the cinnamon toast went in the trash, the egg went in the trash, and I cut up an apple quickly for him to eat. (I could not - even in my running for Parent of the Year - send him to school without anything to eat at all). He must have been hungry because the kid who isn't so hip on fruit ate nearly the entire apple before the bus got there.
I decided I needed to strike while the iron was hot, so I went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for my first week of meals by SavingDinner.com. My friend Alisa uses this service and got me hooked on the concept. You pay a small fee and they email you a different menu each week. You can choose regular, low-fat, or low-carb. I still have a little South Beach wannabe in me, so I chose low-carb. Six meals are included in the menu so you can pick which you want depending on how many nights you'll be at home, whether you want to cook more of one meal and have leftovers, etc. In addition to the menu, you get this full grocery list that's broken out by category like dairy, produce, staples, meat, etc and then each item on the list has the meal number by it, so you can scratch that off the list if you're not cooking that particular meal. As you may know, I LOVE a good list, so this was right up my alley.
So for the first week, I chose 3 meals. I was quite confident that each meal would not be well-received, but I was going on tough-love adrenaline. Oh, another benefit of SavingDinner.com? Meal preparation and cooking time is something like 30 minutes tops as best I can tell. Revolutionary.
Night one was General Tsao's chicken, brown rice, and steamed broccoli. A nice, healthy, balanced meal. Jimmy had to work late so I prepared dinner, fixed Mac's plate so that nothing touched anything else to avoid cross-contamination of foods and placed it in front of him. The poor kid must have been scared to death to question the dinner because he said not one word about anything. I have probably served him broccoli 467 times and he's always said he only eats broccoli at school (which the teacher said is true), but Monday night, he told me he only liked the tree part and not the stem. Fine. You can't win every battle, right? He ate a few bites of the brown rice (which is a few bites more than the last time he was served brown rice), a few broccoli trees, and had 3 servings of General Tsao's chicken (which was minus the red pepper flakes to avoid hot spice for him). You could've knocked me over with a feather.
Mac has been on a serious ice cream kick lately and again, we overindulged. Tough love called for no dessert except on weekends. So after he ate, he asked for dessert. I explained that we were only having dessert on the weekend and that he could eat fruit if he wanted to. He chose to eat a banana.
Night two was southwest pork chops served with a corn and tomato salsa with black beans on the side. He didn't like the corn in the salsa and the black beans were too spicy for him, but he did eat the tomatoes in the salsa (SHOCKING!) and the pork chops. Dinner was followed by 3 little bananas after which he said his stomach hurt. No kidding. His bowels must be in knots from the influx of ruffage into his system.
Night three was a total bust by all accounts. It was beef covered in a very good mushroom sauce with mashed cauliflower (supposed to be mashed potato-esque) and roasted asparagus. I bought a terrible cut of beef that was really chewy, I didn't steam the cauliflower long enough so it wasn't anything like mashed potatoes in consistency, and there was no fresh asparagus so I bought frozen which should not be allowed to be sold in modern grocery stores. But we had a discussion that sometimes meals don't turn out as we'd hoped, we still need to be polite to the cook and thank them for their efforts, and then we can eat fruit afterwards.
Last night after the disastrous meal, he said he'd really like pizza, so I made delicious pizza tonight (rather than ordering in, which is what he really wanted). And I think we all enjoyed it!!
The really great thing is that meal times used to be time for battle, but it's just so much more pleasant now. Nobody sulks over the meal, we have nice, pleasant conversation, and my days as a short-order cook are over! Why didn't we do this years ago????
We've also cut out junk food for snacks after school. Today, for example, he had carrots, yogurt, bagel chips, and some little club social crackers. I can't tell you what a difference this is from just a week ago when a typical snack might have been yogurt if we were lucky but would have definitely involved doritos or potato chips or some other highly processed food that leaves grease stains on your clothes and fingers.
We're really trying to emphasize healthy eating versus eating to avoid fat. Mac is nothing but bone and muscle right now and I don't want him to have a fat complex. So instead we've talked about how a heart works in conjunction with arteries and that if we eat too much fat, the arteries get clogged and the blood can't get through and the heart has to work harder. No need to get into genetics right now which from my dad's side show that really no matter what you eat, you're going to have clogged arteries, which then begs the question of why can't we just eat doritos everyday. But we'll save that for another time.
We may have a battle royale in the morning because Friday is another egg day. While he was eating his apple at the bus stop on Monday, we struck a compromise. During the school week, we agreed to have two egg days, two cereal days, and one waffle/pancake day. The agreed-upon schedule is eggs on Monday, cereal on Tuesday, syrup food on Wednesday, cereal on Thursday and the detested eggs again on Friday. It's been a quick week and here we are again at egg day.
Mac got a little weepy at supper tonight when we discussed that it was egg day. I've offered to put cheese in the eggs, or to serve it with ketchup like my grandfather always ate his eggs, but nothing seems to interest him. He loves these bagel chips and I just got a batch from our bagel store today, so I think that's how I'm going to entice him. Maybe if I drop just a tiny bit of egg on a bite-size piece of bagel chip, he'll be suckered into eating it. Could I be so lucky? I have no idea, but stay tuned because I'll definitely keep you posted!
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
The Story Tales makes 100!
This is my 100th post. That's it. That's all I wanted to tell you. Thanks for reading. More tomorrow....
Pollution, Paulista-Style
When we left Salvador on Sunday, we left the most remarkable blue skies - the kind that look fake because they're so brilliant and perfect. 
When we landed in Sao Paulo a little over two hours later, we were greeted by the double whammy of normal pollution exacerbated by extraordinarily high temperatures for days on end:
No wonder Jimmy's got a sore throat and Mac is back on his allergy medicine!
When we landed in Sao Paulo a little over two hours later, we were greeted by the double whammy of normal pollution exacerbated by extraordinarily high temperatures for days on end:
No wonder Jimmy's got a sore throat and Mac is back on his allergy medicine!
Monday, March 2, 2009
Post-Carnaval Trip to Salvador
Last Wednesday, Jimmy, Mac and I headed up to Salvador in the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil. Salvador hosts the second-largest Carnival celebration in Brazil so we timed our trip to coincide with Ash Wednesday so that the noise and commotion would have ended or at least died down.
Remnants of Carnival in Salvador's Pelourinho Salvador is hot and humid and gritty, but it's also colorful and beautiful and loud with music and full of historical buildings. A fresh coat of paint on a lot of buildings would work wonders. Salvador was the port of entry for slaves brought to Brazil, so there's still very much an African influence. There were times that Jimmy and I looked at each other and said "this feels and looks and smells like Mozambique".
We spent Wednesday afternoon, all day Thursday and part of Sunday morning in the city, touring some of the historical buildings, shopping, eating and people watching. Unfortunately our hotel was not right in the historical center, named Pelourinho, so we probably didn't do as much as we should have, but we visited several churches and museums, including the cathedral, the Sao Francisco church, the slave church, the Senhor do Bom Fim Church, and the Afro-Brazilian Museum; we shopped in the Mercado Modelo; and we used the very cool cable car to descend to the Cidade Baixa and rode back up in the more modern elevator.
Cable Car Trip from Pelourinho down to Cidade Baixa - all for 2 US cents per person!
The gate leading into the Senhor do Bom Fim Church is covered with these ribbons that you can buy all over the city. People add ribbons to the gate as they pray and petition.
View of the Mercado Modelo (market) in Cidade Baixa (the lower city)
On Friday and Saturday we took day trips to Praia do Forte, which is tied for first place with Porto de Galinhas as my favorite beach in Brazil and possibly the world. Praia do Forte is about an hour's drive north of Salvador and it is simply spectacular. There are natural pools formed at low tide that are just full of all sorts of cool ocean-dwelling things like tropical fish, sea slugs, eels, octopus and other interesting sea creatures. You can rent snorkeling gear on the beach and these things are just an arm's length away. The beach itself is a spectacular coconut palm-lined stretch of white sand and crystal clear blue water. A little piece of Bahian heaven for the world to enjoy.
Beach Scene in Praia do Forte
Natural pools at low tide at Praia do FortePraia do Forte is home to the Tamar Project, which was started 25+ years ago to save marine turtles (TArtaruga MARinha in Portuguese, hence the name TaMar) in Brazil. The Brazilian coastline is home to five of the seven marine turtle species in the world, but for a long time, fishermen and villagers didn't care about the life of the turtle - they just wanted the eggs and would kill the turtle for the eggs. Now, in large part thanks to the Tamar folks, the fishermen and villagers are protecting the turtles, their nests and their eggs because they've been taught the turtles have more value alive than dead. Tamar works directly with the communities where it has facilities (now all along the Brazilian coast) to improve jobs, teach skills, provide income, foster education, and save turtles.
The Tamar facility is excellent and well worth a visit if you're in the area. Jimmy helped the folks there get turtle-tracking tags that are clipped to the turtles so they can monitor where the turtles go. They've found that some of "their" turtles have gone as far as Ghana and turtles tagged in Ghana have come to Brazil. By monitoring the turtles' progress via GPS, they know the turtles use the exact same "corridor" across the Atlantic, regardless of whether they're traveling east or west. Sort of like what happened in Finding Nemo when Nemo went across the turtle highway to get to Australia. Very cool.
Luciano showing off the newest Tamar "graduate" while the nest exploration continuesBecause of Jimmy's involvement, we got the royal tour by Luciano. He showed us all the exhibits plus we got to visit the off-limits hospital plus Mac got to feed a turtle during the feeding time. Tamar also has a hatchery where they move endangered nests. On the day of our visit, two nests were being opened to pull out the baby turtles for release into the sea so we got to see these adorable turtles before their release. It was a completely marvelous way to spend a couple hours.
Mac feeding a turtle at the Tamar Project
Bahian coastline from airplane heading back to Sao Paulo
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