Ladies Clubs, Aid Societies and other Niceties

Ladies Clubs, Aid Societies...and anachronisms

Even after 15 years in The South I’m still an outsider – a “Northerner.” A few years ago when I received my first invitation to our neighborhood Ladies’ Club Meeting I looked at it with a mix of curiosity and cynicism. As a Northern transplant the idea of a ladies club seemed odd and anachronistic. Still, being new to the neighborhood I decided I’d check it out.

I dressed carefully for the meeting, choosing neat slacks, a sweater and low heeled shoes. Even in the new millennium the vast majority of Southern women seem to feel compelled to “put on their face” before heading out to the corner store. This is still the land of debutantes and social sororities, after all. Where adult women deliberately join clubs and associations with the unexpressed purpose of excluding other women…

When I arrived it was clear that I was under-dressed. The hostess was wearing a lovely dress, stockings and exquisite high heels. She was an older woman with silvered hair and just the hint of crow’s feet around her blue eyes. She had clearly mastered the art of full hair and makeup a long time ago.

The club consisted of women ranging from their mid twenties into their mid sixties. They had enchanting, old-fashioned names like Josephine and Rosalie. Listening to the conversations around me I discovered that some had young children, some had adult children; some worked, some stayed at home; some played tennis, some golfed. Except for an excess of gentility and makeup they seemed like the women I’d known my entire life.

I perched on the edge of an uncomfortable chair, waiting for the meeting to begin. A woman sat down next to me and patted my hand. “You’re new to the neighborhood, aren’t you, honey?” By then I had already learned that in the South “honey” is short for “I knew your name, but I’ve forgotten it.” The joke is that "sugar" means "I never knew your name and don't want to."

Agenda items included everything from the mundane to the bizarre. The final order of business involved social projects. That was what I had come for. I was looking for a sense of fulfillment more than a social network. I needed something more than reruns of “Say Yes to the Dress” to fill my days.

To my surprise, one of the charities suggested was a Baptist Church. I suddenly understood why my Jewish neighbor hadn’t shown up. Christianity is somehow assumed in the South. I’d realized that in the South people bless you when you sneeze, when you hold a door for them or when you do anything nice at all. “Bless your heart” is as common a phrase as “thank you”, perhaps more so.

After about half an hour, the group decided on aiding a halfway house for teenage prostitutes. I didn’t question the cause, just the motivation behind choosing it. When it was settled that “those sweet things don’t want to do that,” wine was poured and everyone felt much better. They’d saved some souls and the world was a better place thanks to them. Now they could get down to the serious business of secretly assessing each other’s taste in clothing.

Running with the Bulls....a no Bull Birthday Party

Spanish Theme Party

It appears that general consensus is that I'm insane to encourage Kevin's desire to run with the bulls in Pamplona this summer. NO, I am not looking for a quick windfall from his life insurance. Quite the opposite, I know that he's in excellent shape and can outrun a dozen bulls and thousands of crazed tourists.

In honor of this plan I created a special Spanish celebration for his birthday this year. Gifts included a leather wine bota from Spain and a copy of a poster from the 1939 Pamplona Encierro. The feast ended up spread over two days because I planned too much food for two people. (The girls opted for pizza). Night one was a  traditional lamb stew from the Navarre region of Spain served with yellow rice.  The next night we had a variety of  tapas and Spanish wines. I bought the wines at Whole Foods for less than $10 a bottle. The Protocolo was on sale for $5.99!  I'm sure they might have cost less elsewhere, but I was there picking up the rest of the exotic ingredients. We didn't drink 2 full botttles of wine, but I needed both red and white for the stew. Follow the links to read reviews of each.

Tapas Menu

• Manchego Cheese & bread

• Iberian Acorn ham and melon

• Marcona almonds, olives & marinated artichokes

• Spanish omelet & more bread

• Protocolo Vino de la tierra de castillo 2009 (red)

• Vega Sindoa 2010 (white blend)

Kevin asked for one of his favorite desserts, Individual Pear Gingerbreads. A dessert he claims "has grown near-mythic" in his memory. Not too much pressure there! Unfortunately he's been on a healthy eating kick for 5 years and anything that contains 1 1/2 sticks of butter hasn't been in my recent repertoire. I couldn't find my original recipe so I had to improvise based on my memories and some on-line recipes.

Upside-Down Individual Pear Gingerbread Recipe

1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon salt
3-4 Tablespoons crystallized ginger, minced
1 cup molasses (preferably mild)
1 cup boiling water
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2-3 firm pears, diced

Melt 1/2 stick of butter and 3/4 cup of packed brown sugar together. Pour into 6 individual ramekins. Preheat oven to 350°F.

Sift together flour, baking soda, ginger and salt in a bowl. Whisk molasses and boiling water in another small bowl. Next, beat remaining stick of butter, 1/2 cup of packed brown sugar and egg until creamy. Combine with flour mixture and molasses. Stir in diced pears and candied ginger.

Pour batter over butter/sugar mixture in ramekins. Bake 20-30 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool slightly. Invert ramekin onto a plate to serve. Garnish with whipped cream and more crystallized ginger.

It's a little risky cooking food you've never eaten, but both of these dishes tasted delicious. I can't, however, vouch for their authenticity.

Spanish Omelet Recipe

• 1/2 pint of olive oil
• 5 medium potatoes, peeled & sliced
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 5 eggs
• Salt

Heat the olive oil in a nonstick skillet and add the potato slices. Cook, turning occasionally, over medium heat for 5 minutes. Add the onions and garlic and cook until the potatoes are tender. Drain, leaving about 3 tablespoons of oil in the skillet.

Whisk the eggs with a pinch of salt. Add the potatoes, and stir to coat with the egg. Add the egg-coated potatoes to the hot oil in the skillet, spreading them evenly to cover the base of the skillet. Lower the heat to medium and continue to cook, until mixture is set. Don't stir!

Use a plate to cover the skillet and invert the omelet on to the plate Slide the omelet back into the skillet on its uncooked side. Cook until completely set. Allow the omelet to cool, and then cut it into wedges.

Potatoes,onions and garlic cooking for the Spanish Omelet

 "A San Fermín pedimos, por ser nuestro patrón, nos guíe en el encierro dándonos su bendición"

Spanish Lamb Stew Recipe

1 tablespoon EVOO
2-3 pounds lamb shoulder (diced)
1 cup onions (diced)
4 garlic cloves (minced)
4 ounces Serrano ham or Prosciutto if you can't find the ham (sliced)
1 cup fire roasted red peppers (chopped)
1 cup dry sherry
1 cup red wine or ruby port wine
1 cup dry white wine
1 10-ounce can whole tomatoes
1 tablespoon Spanish Paprika, preferably picante or agridulce
1-2 cups cooked white beans, rinsed and drained if canned
1 bay leaf
2 sprigs rosemary

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add the diced lamb and brown it on all sides. Remove the lamb from the pan and set aside. Add the onions, garlic, and ham. Cook until the onions and garlic are soft. Stir occasionally to prevent sticking. Add the peppers. Deglaze the pan by adding the sherry and wines. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer the liquid until it is reduced by half. Put the lamb shoulder into the pan. Add canned tomatoes, Spanish Paprika, bay leaf, and rosemary. Simmer for three hours. Add beans during the last 10 minutes until just heated through.

The Lamb Stew served with yellow rice

Children's Mardi Gras Parade & Party

Years ago when we lived in New England and didn't have any kids I hosted a Mardi Gras party. It was very unusual in cold New England. I ordered beads and doubloons from New Orleans. I even had a King Cake Fed Exed to our house on the day of the party. We wore costumes, drank highly alcoholic hurricanes and danced.

Last year I brought back our Mardi Gras party, carefully converted for kids. No hurricanes, but we kept the beads and dancing. I made King Cakes since I was dealing with the ubiquitous egg allergy. Everyone had a great time despite a bit of rain.

We had the kids come in their leftover Halloween costumes, with bikes and scooters. We had supplies for anyone who wanted to add decorations - balloons, streamers, feathers, etc. Then the kids all paraded around our neighborhood. It worked really well for us because we could drive Amanda in the golf cart.

This year Mardi Gras is early (February 21, 2012) and I'm tempting fate by having our party in the park. For me that means no cleaning! And, unfortunately, no golf cart for Amanda so we'll be decorating her wheelchair. For my guests that may mean colder weather and nowhere to warm up. We'll see how it goes.

The party was more elaborate last year. We had a craft - decorate your own Mardi Gras mask or crown  - and a pinata. In addition to the King Cakes I made a vegetarian Jambalaya. We also gave everyone strands of beads from Dollar Tree (4 for $1).

This year I'm hoping that the playground equipment will provide enough entertainment so I won't need a craft. I'm also making it potluck so there is very little cooking involved. I've offered to provide "beads and beverages." Because I have streamers and other decorations left over from last year I estimate that I can keep the budget to about $30 - less than $1 per person!

Despite what "New Orleanians" may think, King Cake is really just a big cinnamon roll when you read the recipe. This one comes together very quickly. It is very moist, egg free and - best part for me- requires no yeast. For some reason yeast breads make me nervous.

NO EGG CINNAMON ROLL KING CAKE RECIPE

3/4 cup cottage cheese
1/3 cup buttermilk (or regular milk with 1 Tbsp vinegar or lemon juice to total 1/3 cup)
1/4 cup sugar 
4 Tbs. butter, melted
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups flour; more for rolling
1 Tbs. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda

For the filling:

1-1/2 Tbs. unsalted butter, melted
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1-1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

For the glaze:

2/3 cup confectioners' sugar
2 to 3 Tbs. milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract

________________________________________
eat the oven to 400°F. Grease a cooking sheet.

Combine the cottage cheese, buttermilk, sugar, melted butter, and vanilla. Add the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda and mix until the dough clumps together. The dough will be soft and moist.

Scrape the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it with floured hands 4 or 5 times until smooth. With a rolling pin, roll the dough into a 12x15-inch rectangle.

Brush the dough with the melted butter, leaving a narrow border unbuttered around the edges. In a medium bowl, combine the brown sugar & cinnamon. Sprinkle the mixture over the buttered area of the dough and pat gently into the surface.
 Starting at a long edge, roll up the dough jelly-roll style. Pinch the seam to seal, and leave the ends open. Bend into a ring

Bake until golden brown and firm to the touch, 20 to 28 minutes. Set the pan on a wire rack to cool for 5 minutes.

In a small bowl, mix the confectioners’ sugar, 2 Tbs. milk, and vanilla to make a smooth glaze. It should have a thick but pourable consistency, so add up to 1 Tbs. more milk if necessary. Drizzle and sprinkle with yellow, green & purple colored sugars.

Different Dreams

 

Parenting a Child with Special Needs

This seems somewhat unfinished to me. Maybe it's because I wrote I wrote it when Amanda was only 6 years old...

My life is dramatically different than I ever imagined it would be. I suppose that’s true for a great many people. Only people with clear vision and great drive end up pursuing their dreams.

 I’m not sure I ever had a dream. Or if I did I was only aware of it that way you are when you are first awake and your dreams are half-remembered. As soon as you try to articulate them they slip away.

When I was younger I wanted to be many things. Some of them realistic, some not. I wanted to be a writer, a poet, an actor, a lawyer, a mother… I left the idea of law school behind when I foolishly entered an MBA program in my early twenties. I was probably the least mathematically inclined student to ever be enrolled in business school.

Still, I intrepidly entered the business world armed with the softest business discipline I could find – human resources. Fortunately for me, I landed in a position that focused on developing employee training programs. A good fit for some one who enjoyed research, writing and lots of attention. I spent several years as a corporate trainer, occasionally flying around the country to conduct multi-day seminars. I liked it. I was good at it. I had a job with flexibility, good pay - where people often clapped for me at the end of the day.

In the summer of 1998 I was six months pregnant and planning on a maternity leave of 9 months. Then the unimaginable happened. I went to a routine prenatal exam and my first ultrasound. Everything was fine. However, when I got home there was a message on my answering machine from the doctor I had just left with six scary words, “we need to see you again.”

As it turned out, after reviewing my ultrasound the doctor spotted what appeared to be a cardiac abnormality. My husband had a business trip and flew off the morning of my level two ultrasound appointment. Neither of us expected them to find anything more serious than a heart murmur. Still, in the back of my mind I knew my mother had lost her first baby to a congenital heart defect.

The memory of that appointment still has a nightmarish quality to it. At first things seemed to be going well. The attendant asked if I had brought a videotape so I could see the baby at home. I hadn’t. I figured that was good news. No one would want to send me home with a video of a horribly disfigured baby.

The doctor looked at the ultrasound and mumbled to himself a little. Then he left the room. I tried to determine what I was looking at on the screen. It was a fuzzy black and white picture, worse than the picture on the TV I grew up with in the 70s. I could roughly make out the ribs and things moving. The doctor came back with another doctor. Then they both left. Now I was getting scared. They came back with a third doctor. "What could be so awful that my unborn baby needs three doctors?" I worried to myself.

All three doctors left and the first one came back alone. He sat down on the edge of the gurney and reached for my hand. "Oh shit," I thought, "this is going to be really bad". He calmly explained that it looked like the blood was flowing backwards through part of my baby’s heart. After consulting with his colleagues they felt our child had only three chambers to her heart instead of the usual four. This meant all sorts of bad things that I couldn’t process. All that stuck in my head was the phrase “cardiac defects are rarely in isolation” meaning that my baby could have a bigger problem than missing part of her heart.

They wheeled me down the corridor and announced that they needed to do an amniocentesis. I didn’t think of the potential complications, oddly all I thought of was that I was in a HMO and I hadn’t gotten authorization for an amnio. I grabbed the side of the door frame and made them call my insurance company for an approval before I let them take me in. I remember jumping off the gurney in maternity pants and a sports bra, threatening to use the phone in the lobby unless some one called the insurance company RIGHT AWAY. I guess I thought it would be an expensive procedure. More likely, it was my subconscious way of trying to avoid it all together.

As it turned out the amniocentesis was normal. Only later did I learn that amnios test for only a fraction of the existing genetic disorders. I spent the remainder of my pregnancy worried about my baby’s heart, but feeling confident that over all she would be fine. I stopped working because the doctors were concerned I would go into labor out of state and wouldn’t have the necessary medical facilities for the baby close by.

There’s no need to go into the labor or delivery. Just trust me when I say they weren’t normal. With a life flight crew standing by to wing my newborn away the minute she showed complications the delivery room was more like a stage – with a dozen doctors and nurses standing by.

Amazingly Amanda didn’t need immediate heart surgery. As it turned out although her heart isn’t structured just like ours (parts that should go around apparently go through it instead) it works. Feeling grateful that we had dodged not a bullet but a cannonball we were took her home with us after only five days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

As first time parents, a thousand miles from our families, we had no idea there was anything still “wrong” with her until she was six months old. While she was rolling from side to side she had difficulty raising her head from the floor while lying on her tummy and she couldn’t sit unsupported. If we sat her up she just sort of melted into a prone position. We bolstered her in her car seat and her high chair with old towels and cloth diapers.

After complaining to the pediatrician that Amanda’s head seemed unusually flat on one side she sent us to a pediatric neurosurgeon. To say the man was an unfeeling jerk would be a compliment. To this day he was the most insensitive doctor or specialist we’ve seen. He looked at her, announced that she had Down’s syndrome and would “always be funny looking” so he didn’t feel it was appropriate to prescribe a corrective helmet for her. Our beautiful baby – funny looking? I don’t think the man will ever know how close he came to being decked by my 6’4” husband that day. The only positive thing to come out of that appointment was that I was able to persuade our regular pediatrician that Amanda needed physical therapy for tortocullis.

Little did I realize the treadmill I stepped on that day! We’ve spent the last 13 years in and out of various therapies, most with little or no impact. She’s had physical therapy for gross motor skills like sitting and walking, occupational therapy for fine motor skills, speech therapy, feeding therapy, aqua therapy, music therapy and hippotherapy (therapy on horseback). I freely admit that I tried some of these simply because I was frustrated with conventional therapy and thought that if the poor child had to spend seven hours a week with specialists at least some of that time should be fun.

Hippotherapy

Fun is hard to come by for some of us. Many of our kids can’t run and play the way other children do. Others don’t even understand the concept of play as we typically mean it. Holidays can bring as much pain as they do joy. Surrounded by the typical members of your family and their typical offspring, the stress can be almost unbearable. Physically impaired children may not be able to open their gifts without assistance. Cognitively challenged children may find the wrapping paper the most interesting part of any gift for years. Emotionally challenged children may just find the difference of a holiday too much to bear and close in on themselves.

Relatives don’t understand why tactile defensive little Suzie doesn’t love her fluffy new teddy bear or why Bobby has gone off in the corner to play Game Boy by himself. The children are stressed, the relatives are confused and the parents are in the middle trying to soothe everybody’s feelings.

It’s hard to explain to some one who has never raised a child with special needs what this life is like. While all children with special needs are different, as families we share many of the same experiences. All of us have known the disappointment of shattered dreams, learning to live outside of the norm and still try to function like a normal family. The cycle of doctors, therapists and specialists is exhausting for everyone involved. There is a financial burden and an emotional burden. There are days when you see a spark in your child that lets you hope they will some day be able to blend into the mainstream despite this difficult beginning. There are other days when you wonder if anything you’ve said or done has made a difference.

Aqua Therapy

You constantly have to recreate hope. Some of us do it by switching doctors or therapists or types of therapy. Some of us try alternative medicines, special diets or novel therapies. You constantly feel like you have to do more, do better and then maybe your child will be all right.

Sometimes you just quit. You take a week, a month or even a year off. You try to live like other people who don’t have a therapy appointment every day after school and two on Saturdays. Then something happens and you wake up, re-shoulder your burden and move on.

I’ve used the word burden several times and I don’t regret it. But children with special needs are often the source of unexpected joy as well. Who knows better the miracle of a first step than the parents who have waited five years for it? When your autistic child suddenly makes eye contact and you KNOW he loves you the world stops for a few seconds and tears run down your cheeks. By having so many of the normal joys of raising a child taken away from us we learn to appreciate moments that other parents may overlook. We've learned to dream differently.