Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

On the bike: Promoting civility and good will

I last left you with a tale of a less-than-pleasant transaction on the road.  While these encounters are noteworthy, they are also rare.  On some level, I interact with every motorist with whom I share the roads on a given ride, and most times these are neutral encounters (though a neutral encounter is a good encounter in my book).

I prefer to make note of the good encounters, which seem to be on the rise of late.  Case in point, several blocks after the aforementioned negative encounter, I noticed a motorist behind me as I approached a red light.  I was to be the first person in the queue (going straight), and I noticed that the motorist had on a right turn signal.

Given the limited space on the street we were on, I knew that she would be less than a foot from my body when she made her turn.  I was perfectly happy to move left to let her pass, but I wanted both of use to come to a stop first, to facilitate a slow, safe pass.

I signaled my intention to stop (something I’m doing a lot more of these days) as I looked back and made eye contact with the driver.  Once I was stopped, I intentionally shifted a bit farther left and motioned for her to proceed with her turn.  She made her right turn on red, and after a couple of minutes, the light changed and I headed on my way.

A few blocks later, I approached a stop sign (again signaling my intention to stop), and noticed a vehicle coming up beside me.  I was bewildered and, at first, a bit annoyed that the driver couldn’t stay behind me and take her turn, until I recognized the woman from the stop light.

She rolled down her window and proceeded to praise my biking, noting the good communication (through the use of hand signals) and thanked me for embodying the idea of “sharing the road” (unlike many other cyclists she’d encountered.  Talk about affirmation — she took the time to backtrack and find me just to thank me for following basic rules of the road and observing basic courtesies!

I thanked her in turn for her courteous driving and handed her a CyclingSavvy card, explaining that I ride what I teach.

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This post seems like a good note on which to end Bike Month.  It also marks the seventh day in a row that I have posted, something that certainly has not happened since Gabriel was born!  So on that note, I’ll take a little break.

Garden in my salad bowl

With a variety of lettuce types, as well as abundant arugula and spinach, salads have graced our table quite frequently in the past two weeks.

At their simplest, I dress salad greens with vinegar (or lemon juice), salt and/or honey, and a drizzle of good olive oil.

Once you have a base of greens, the add-ins are limitless.  Here are some favorites:

  • Nuts or sunflower seeds (toasted/roasted for optimal flavor)
  • Black beans or chickpeas
  • Dried fruit
  • Roasted beets
  • Grated Parmesan cheese
  • Goat cheese
  • Tomatoes, in season (i.e., not yet here)
  • Avocado
  • Marinated tofu
  • Frozen corn or peas, thawed

I recently made this Asian-inspired salad with the idea of creating the flavors of a spring roll without the work of actually wrapping the filling.

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Base of greens with rice noodles, thinly sliced garden veggies (including radishes, carrots, and asparagus), green onion, cilantro, and marinated tofu, in a dressing of seasoned rice vinegar, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, chopped peanuts, minced garlic, and a dash of sriracha chili sauce.  It totally tasted like a spring roll in a bowl!

After spending Monday morning in the garden, the strawberries were calling.  I detoured by the store on the way home to pick up goat cheese for this salad:

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Base of spinach and arugula, tossed with sea salt and good balsamic vinegar, then allowed to sit and wilt slightly.  Topped with sliced (and lightly sugared) strawberries, toasted pecans, goat cheese and a drizzle of olive oil.  Yum, just what I had in mind!

Your turn
Any favorite salad combos that you’re enjoying these days?  I love suggestions, because even with all the options, it’s easy to get in a rut!

Baby, weaned

Thursday night marked the culmination of over twenty-two months of breastfeeding.  We started our weaning journey sixteen months ago, when we offered Sir his first tastes of solid food.

While Sir was enthusiastic about solid food from the get-go, the majority of his calories continued to come from breast milk until about the 10-month mark, and the balance has continued to shift to more food, less milk ever since.

When my job ended last summer, I continued with the regularly-timed nursing sessions that made it possible for me to breast feed instead of pumping at work (i.e., he wasn’t nursing on demand, and really hadn’t (other than overnight) since I went back to work when he was 14 weeks old).  The routine feedings worked well for us, and I didn’t see any need to switch things up at that point.

Our process of eliminating milk feedings felt pretty natural.  We went from five times a day to four times a day somewhere around the 12-month mark, then dropped another feeding around 15-months when he went from two naps a day to a single nap.

We stuck with the 3-a-day routine for quite awhile.  I wanted to continue nursing through the winter sickness/germ season, and winter weather certainly encouraged snuggling up.

In March, when the time change pushed his nap wake-up time very close to the time of his afternoon [solid food] snack, I dropped the post-nap feeding.

I wasn’t really sure where we would go from there, other than knowing that breast feeding would culminate sometime before our current nine day separation.

Six or seven weeks ago, I dropped the first-thing-in-the-morning feeding.  He seemed happy enough to get out of bed, have a big drink of water, and reunite with all of his toys while I made breakfast, so we went with it.

That left us with the before-bed feeding.  I didn’t plan to continue that feeding for more than a few weeks, partly because I didn’t expect my milk supply to last with such infrequent nursing sessions.  Somehow he kept finding a bit of milk every night, and I had no compelling reason to stop nursing him, so we continued right up to the eve of his departure for Florida.

I held him a little extra long that night, gazing at his sweet face and heavy eyelids, savoring the end of this stage of our relationship.

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Related post: Breastmilkin’ it

On the bike: To honk or not to honk?

It was a quiet Sunday on the roads as I headed home from church at midday.  Nearing home, I was riding a stretch of curvy road, approaching a four-way stop.  Less than one hundred feet from the intersection, I noticed a motorist on a fast approach from the rear.

Something told me that passive discouragement through lane control (i.e., riding toward the left) was NOT going to discourage an unsafe pass.  I added the arm signal for “stop” indicating my intention to stop at the intersection, followed by active discouragement.

The young man behind the wheel chose to ignore all my attempts at communication and sped by me, cutting me off at the stop sign (where he kind-of, sort-of, maybe stopped) before gunning it through the intersection.

Fortunately, there was no oncoming traffic at that moment, but I was quite irked by the fact that he felt justified putting me and other [theoretical] road users at risk in the name of gaining ten, maybe fifteen, seconds.

And so I honked.  I have this horn, which I wrote about a long time ago.  My riding mentality has changed a bit since I wrote that post, and I’ve questioned Matthew’s assertion that a loud horn is a “necessity.”

I use mine rarely these days, most often if I’m approaching an intersection where I have right-of-way, or an alley with an exiting motorist, and I am unsure whether the motorist sees me (despite my highly visible roadway position).

I try NOT to use the horn in situations like the one described above, where the motorist clearly saw me but chose to operate his/her vehicle unsafely anyway.  In those situations,  a blaring honk may give me a bit of satisfaction, but it rarely does anything to change the behavior of the motorist or create a civil interaction.

Sure enough, the motorist continued his reckless driving after passing me (and very emphatically giving me the finger), making a high-speed left turn into a narrow alley half a block after the intersection.  I was through the intersection at that point, and close enough to hear some kind of a shout.

When I drew even with the alley, I was horrified to see a family assembling on bicycles outside their garage.  The motorist in question must have very nearly mowed them down, likely the cause of the startled [and angry] exclamations.

Seeing what had nearly happened to an innocent family, I couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty.  Had my unnecessary honking fueled road rage and exacerbated his poor driving which almost ended in tragedy?

In the end, I know that I don’t control other road users’ behavior.  Giving this motorist’s previous behavior, there’s a decent chance he would have made the turn too quickly regardless of my actions.

However, the event reminded me why a loud, attention-getting horn is not always a good thing, as it can escalate situations that would be better ignored, increasing hostility and incivility on the roads.  I’m thankful that, at least in this instance, the motorist’s poor choices didn’t injure anyone.

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The ride actually ended with a VERY positive motorist interaction.  Stay tuned for that post later in the week!

Are we there yet?

Sir chilling in the back seat with a fig tree they picked up on the the way to Florida.  Because a fig tree is a completely normal souvenir.

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According to my sources, he was a great traveler, despite a bit of trouble keeping his hands off of Mr. Fig.

He also discovered that making the “t” sound (for “tinkle” or “toilet,” something we’ve been working on for a couple of weeks now to help him verbalize his need to use the potty) resulted in the car stopping and getting to stretch his legs, leading to some crying wolf on his part.

All that time in the car paid off . . . .

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I’m SO ready to hit the beach!

From afar, Mama says, “Dude, where’s your sunhat?”

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Finally, I would like to note that President Obama issued a statement that this Memorial Day be a day of “prayer for permanent peace.”

Above all, we can honor those we have lost by living up to the ideals they died defending. It is our charge to preserve liberty, to advance justice, and to sow the seeds of peace. With courage and devotion worthy of the heroes we remember today, let us rededicate ourselves to those unending tasks . . . . Let us pray the souls of those who died in war rest in eternal peace, and let us keep them and their families close in our hearts, now and forever.

I would like to add that we should also remember and hold close the innocent victims of war and injustice the world over, and support policies that seek to end the oppression and unjust systems that lead to unrest and war.  We are not there yet, but maybe one day, we will be.