Photo by SF Knitter

If you are a mother, and probably even if you are not, you know the joy of finding the impossible moment when you can do just want you needed and wanted to do.  For me that is usually a long walk. 

The stars aligned today.  A good night’s sleep, waking on time, clean exercise clothes, a couple of hours when my child would be busy with someone other than myself, work completed, a silent cell phone, cooperating weather, even a few extra minutes to update my iPod (which was charged) with new music.  Impossible.

After delivering WJ to school I set off in the sunshine for a brisk walk along the waterfront.  Did I mention the weather?  Warm sun, cool breeze.  Impossible.

It was in the middle of this impossible moment when I spotted the springtime ducks swimming in the river.  There is just nothing like the fuzzy sweetness of a downy duckling swimming obediently behind its mother.  Multiplied by seven, I had to stop and watch.  And stopping I saw more.

Mama Duck was slightly frantic, more than slightly, as she ushered these seven young ones along the Hudson River.  “Relax!” I wanted to yell to her,  “Look around at this day!”

But it was I who looked around.  Behind her and the new babies rose up the skyscrapers of a metropolis.  Yards beyond her in the water, ferry boats zoomed commuters to work.  A giant barge chugged by.  Strange debris floated all about.  The strong current pulled out towards the sea.  The mother’s eyes darted in search of safety.  Her pace was too quick.  And the ducklings were pulled unexpectedly close, touching her and each other as they swam. 

Photo by Katherine "Cody" RobinsonIn that frantic mother duck, I saw myself.  I saw most of us.  I am bringing my child up right here right alongside of her.  Steel and concrete tower around us.  People and time zoom by and we dart along trying to keep the pace or keep out of the way.  I walk my child down streets that have known screaming and hatred and parked SUV’s that sometimes smoke and sometimes tick and sometimes are filled with destruction meant for the likes of me.  Cars crash, planes fall out of the sky, children vanish, the media bombards, abuse poisons.  Mama Duck and I, and probably you, face an impossible task.

Last weekend I had the privilege of attending a benefit concert for New City Kids Church, an amazing ministry in this area that is making an impossible impact on the lives of the children about whom we often forget.  Kids growing up right here, along with mine, along with the ducks.  Recording artist, Sara Groves, sang these lyrics that night.  They were on my iPod this morning thanks to those extra minutes and aligned stars:

"We are pressed on every side; Full of fear and troubled thoughts; For good reason we carried heavy hearts."

For good reason. 

Heavy heart and darting eyes.  I too search each moment for the safety I can find, places to huddle and hide.  And I pull my child close.  Maybe too close.  And I move fast.  Too fast.  For good reason.

I have good reason to think it impossible to offer freedom and independence to my child.  I have good reason to hold him too close.    

No? 

Do you wonder about this?

Do I have the hope and trust that I need right now to provide enough space for my child’s roots to grow without crowding?  Can his sprouting leaves catch the sunlight or does my shadow hover too close?  Will his trunk grow strong around its broken places or will it wither and bend as an overzealous gardener pokes and prods too much with misguided protection?

It seems impossible to me, and probably to Mama Duck too, but the time is coming when we will let the ducklings wander a little farther from us.  And soon even out of our sight.  And soon even off to make a way of their own.  Will the Mama Duck rejoice as they waddle away?  Will she swell with anticipation and pride?  Will I? 

I hope so.  Because there is good reason.  Sara Groves’ song continues:

"For good reason hope is in our hearts… For good reason this joy is in our hearts…"

Letting go begins at birth.  It begins before birth when everything happening to the child is tucked away and hidden and there is no way to know if all is well.

For good reason I hope.  I have joy.  I relax.  This child is not mine alone.  It is an impossible task for me but it is not impossible.

What seems impossible to you?

It is with a great ferocity that I am greeting the spring this year.  The winter seemed particularly long and dim.  Mine may even have been a two-year winter. 

Even on a day like today with rain sprinkling down slowly on us all, I just want to be outside.  Walking the streets, I am unlocked.

This spring my heart is gathering with the sunshine as if we two are long-distance loves finally reunited.  We have forgotten all flaws and hurts.  Together again, we are consumed with remembering each other.  The rest of the world slips away. It is just the two of us and everything is perfect.

There is a favorite day with my preschool class each year.  It is the day when we trudge through whatever horrible early March weather is being offered to us on a search for the first signs of spring.  The children are bundled in their layers, eyes barely peaking out from the wrappings.  They get confused because when we step outside, instead of heading east into the park, we turn toward the west and cross the street into the nearby apartment complex where the grounds people faithfully planted bulbs in the fall. 

A year ago on this day there were still inches of snow on the ground and the sprouts peaked out from the snowy drifts triumphant.  The children responded appropriately.  Upon seeing the green showing through the snow, they began to rejoice, jumping and spinning, dancing and running wild with excitement. 

This year’s group got quiet at the sight of the signs of a coming spring.  They crouched low and their pudgy fingers collectively reached out to touch.  Their world is so much in the present, I could tell they had forgotten that there is green. 

I had forgotten too.  The flowers blossoming on the pear tree outside of this window and the leaves pushing out of buds on the trees in the park, these are the sweet, soft colors of the spring.  They will be with us for only a moment.  I want to see them and be with them and grow silent in their presence.  I too want my pudgy fingers to reach them, touch them, remember them.

As we come to the end of this March, it is fierce.  In like a lamb.  Out like a lion.

This post is part of Steady Mom’s 30 Minute Blogging Challenge.  If you are a blogger, why don’t you give her Tuesday carnival a try?  It is a great way to get a midweek post up without ignoring your other responsibilities… for more than 30 minutes anyway.  This post, start to finish? 28 minutes!

Dave and I used to make unsweetened, decaffeinated iced tea in a big plastic pitcher to keep in the refrigerator.  We made it using kind of a sun tea approach.  Basically, I would drop about five tea bags into the pitcher, run the hot water to fill it up, and put the whole thing into the refrigerator to finish steeping and cool off. 

But then came all of the talk about the dangers of BPA and I began to eye that pitcher and wonder if our attempt at avoiding soft drinks was actually creating more of a problem for our health.

In September, I shared our new solution with you here.  I have been making iced tea concentrates in mason jars stored in the fridge.  One of my favorites at that time was a tea flavored naturally with peaches.  Obviously now, as the winter drones on, peaches are out of the question.

Here is my new iced tea favorite. Pomegranate Green Tea.  Simmer four or five green tea bags in several cups of water until you have achieved a rich amber color.  When the concentrated tea cools, pour it into a quart-sized mason jar.  You should fill the jar about halfway or more.  If not, add a little water to reach the halfway mark.  Then fill the jar the rest of the way with pomegranate juice.  Antioxidant heaven!

I don’t sweeten, but you could very easily with some agave, simple syrup, stevia, or honey.

To drink, pour a few ounces (a quarter to a half a cup) of the concentrate into a glass and fill to the rim with water.  In the winter, I leave out the ice. 

This post is part of Steady Mom’s 30 Minute Blogging Challenge.  If you are a blogger, why don’t you give her Tuesday carnival a try?  It is a great way to get a midweek post up without ignoring your other responsibilities… for more than 30 minutes anyway.  This post, start to finish? 23 minutes!

A year ago, Dave and I were having many discussions with each other, with WJ’s teachers and school director, and with family members and friends all in an effort to make a decision about what to do about WJ and his schooling.

To send him to kindergarten or not?

I have been unable to avoid this desire from deep within my motherly pride to make it clear that this was never a question of intelligence.  So, here it is… This was never a question of my child’s intelligence.* 

WJ is “plenty bright enough,” was the message from the school.  Every indicator in front of us pointed toward a child who could learn easily, make connections, remember like an elephant on gingko balboa, and who was well equipped with pre-academic abilities. 

Plenty bright enough, but a little young. 

Whenever I wish on an evening star or a birthday cake candle from this point on, it will always be a wish for schools that start in January. WJ had been in school part-time for a year and a half when we made the decision for him to wait for kindergarten.  Many of you with children who have late summer birthdays may know the pattern we had already begun to see in the school year.

At the beginning of each school year, as the leaves changed colors and carpeted the ground with sweet smelling piles, I donned battle gear to cope with our morning routine and after-school exhaustion.  In the morning, WJ became Captain Loophole, devising clever strategies to avoid the getting-ready-for-school tasks.  When we finally got out the door (and it was a miracle if we reached this point with no yelling), we began the Walk to My Certain Doom. Six blocks of whining, dawdling, complaining, questioning, tugging in the opposite direction, sometimes even crying. 

WJ then proceeded to have a perfectly lovely day at school.  He loved his teachers, his friends, exploring the materials, singing the songs, playing the games.  Everything from 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM was pretty much golden.  He gave each day his very best.

But then his class walked down the stairs to the pick-up area and WJ immediately morphed into Mr. Crabby-Pants.  The three hours of sustained focus at school left him with no reserves.  And he saved his worst for me.

In the autumn, school was exhausting for WJ.   His resistance in the morning was a sign of things being a little overwhelming, a little too hard.  Again, not in terms of his cognition, but in terms of his stamina.  His inability to cope, the ease at which he dissolved into tears or spacey-ness, his continued long naps (which often lead to poor sleep at night—oh, the cycle!), his general afternoon malaise, these were all more signs that his school placement was not the strongest fit.

But then after the winter holidays, suddenly things would begin to change.  WJ got ready in the morning without the fight.  He would take his clothes into his room, wanting to surprise me with how quickly he could get ready alone.  We would have pleasant conversations on our walk to school.  His teachers would begin to talk about an increased energy and involvement in the classroom.  Our afternoons would become the stuff of a mother’s dream—reading together, cooking dinner together, minutes upon minutes spent playing happily alone while I read a magazine or got on top of my to-do list.

School was just a little too much in the fall but by winter it was a perfect fit.  If only schools began their programs in January.  Or even February—alleluia!  

But we are working within a well-established system.  And a year ago, as I thought about my child’s school experience, I was clear on this… I did not want for the beginning of every school year to be hard.  I did not want to live with a child who kicked into gear sometime before Valentine’s Day.  Plenty of experiences happen at school between September and January.  Who would want for her child to be struggling through the laying of the groundwork of the school year? Every school year?

It was instead my hope that WJ would meet each new school year with energy and strength.  And for that to happen, given the equation of his late summer birthday, the school calendar and its cut-off dates, and WJ’s unique cocktail of developmental growth, waiting a year to begin kindergarten seemed the best choice.

Stamina was one of the biggest reasons we decided to wait a year for WJ to begin a full-day kindergarten program.  (Other issues were at play as well, however, including physical and social development.  More on those in later posts.)

Stamina is a key consideration as you ponder the placement of your child in a school setting.  Stamina, physical and mental and emotional, does often increase with development and age in children. 

Is stamina an issue for your child?

*Note: If intelligence or cognitive functioning or a classifiable disability is an issue, most research actually points at not retaining a child.  Federal statutes protect children from being held back when another year in the same setting with no additional supports will not begin to skim the surface of the learning issues at work.  If you would like more information about protecting your child’s placement in a least restrictive environment, please go to IDEA.ed.gov.

When I imagined life as a mother, I don’t think I understood the gravity of being the one making all of the significant decisions.  There are these moments we experience as parents when we seem to be living in some kind of Robert Frost inspired universe, standing at the fork in the road and trying to discern which path is best. 

We squint into the darkness, the haze and the fog, trying to force a vision of the future into being, searching for signs about which path is right.  Or which is wrong.  And the haze is hazier, the fog thicker, the light dimmer because the one bearing the weight of the consequences of these decisions is not ourselves, but the little people standing beside us on the road, clinging to our pant legs and asking pesky questions like: Where are we going now? What’s going to happen? Why? Should I be afraid?

Maybe what we are looking for as we peer out toward the future are road signs.  DO NOT ENTER would be helpful. WRONG WAY. CLEARLY THIS IS THE BEST CHOICE. There are no such signs for us.

As crazy as it seems, many of us are making decisions right now, in February, for school placement next fall.  For our family, the decisions this year are pedestrian compared to the weighty choices we faced at this time last year. 

A year ago we were debating the possibility of waiting a year to begin kindergarten despite WJ’s chronological age.  He would turn five before the cut-off date at our school and would qualify to enter kindergarten.  But the teachers and school director and even we, his parents, had questions about whether or not WJ was ready. 

I have been working this year to document the effects of our decision, which ultimately was to wait.  But many have asked that pesky question, Why?  Why did we decide to wait for kindergarten?  I would like to unpack that a little in the next few weeks.  The reasons were manifold and complicated.

But for now, I am wondering, what have been the toughest decisions you have been faced with on behalf of another?  How do you decide which road to travel?

I feel like I have been standing in murky waters for most of my parenting life, up to my knees in confusion about how to define the relationship with food that I was going to have on behalf of my child.  The Food Rules have helped. But before they worked well, my family needed to unpack the idea of a snack a little more completely.  

Dina Rose, over at It’s Not About Nutrition, wrote this post recently about redefining snacking and her wisdom has influenced my thinking on the topic.  Dina makes a worthy distinction. We typically think of a snack as a type of food when really a snack is a time of day.  

A snack is just a time of day, not a type of food. Snack foods don’t have to come from the snack aisle of the grocery store.  A snack is a small meal eaten in between our larger meals and any type of food can be available for that small meal.

Remember those Gerber food puffs?  I think that is exactly where this whole debate about what foods I should be buying began.  It is the place where the snack food industry began to bully me with their convenience and portability and designed-just-for-kids mind tricks.  When I started thinking in a new way, following Dina's ideas about what makes a snack, the foods that have been worrying me because of their refined flour and sugar, high fructose corn syrup, sodium, and artificial ingredients began immediately intimidate me less.  They became treats, not snacks.  And the murky waters I felt like I had been standing in since WJ’s first bites of finger food began to clear up for me. 

This is a picture of the snack shelf in our cabinet.  It used to be full of boxes of cereal bars, pretzels, and crackers of all varieties.  It was like a delivery direct from The Little Engine That Could.  I am proud that this shelf is nearly empty.  In fact, I have been thinking about repurposing it altogether, maybe moving my spices into the newly cleared real estate. Snacks don't need their own special place.  They can be found all throughout our kitchen, in all the places you might find fresh, good food.

It certainly is not that we never have a bag of Goldfish in the house or that I am forbidding WJ from eating fruit snacks when his friends offer them in the park.  But those are treats.  Sometimes we have treats… sometimes we don’t.

A snack, on the other hand, can be any food.   Of course, I am not whipping up a little roasted chicken or rack of lamb for a snack. Our snacks mostly come now from the breakfast and lunch categories.  I am working to make sure we always have plenty of fruits, vegetables, and nuts, as well as whole grains and dairy options available for the mini-meals in our day.  My grocery shopping anxiety is cut at least in half. 

Here are some common choices from our repertoire of snacks:

• Apple slices and a mozzarella cheese stick
• A slice of whole wheat banana bread
• A handful of almonds or cashews
• Yogurt
• A clementine or orange sections
• Popcorn
• Cubes of cheese
• A handful of grapes and some nuts
• Bread (sometimes with butter or apple butter, often plain)
• A bowl of Kashi cereal with milk
• A whole-grain pumpkin mini-muffin, or other homemade muffin
• Ants on a log (celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins)
• A mini-bagel with cream cheese or peanut butter and honey
• Salami
• Half of a peanut butter sandwhich
• A soymilk smoothie with banana and berries
• Carrot sticks

Most of these can be slipped into my bag if we will be away from home at a snack time.  They are convenient. But few of them are overly processed.  And all of them offer actual sustenance.  WJ does especially well if his meals and snacks offer some protein.  These snacks are also a big part of his getting in those five servings of fruits and veggies a day.

A snack is a time of day, not a type of food.  A treat is a treat.  These are two principles that have made The Food Rules more livable and enforceable and have helped me relax, knowing that WJ is eating well.

What are the favorite snacks in your house?

By the way, if you are not familiar with Dina Rose, check her out. Dina is a food sociologist and her blog, It's Not About Nutrition, is a site full of useful information.

There was an article in the New York Times last week about snacking and our children.  (You can read it here.)  Like the author of this article, I have found myself asking, How many times a day do our children really need a snack? 

And are these snacks providing the nutrition that children need?  Especially the ones eaten on the run, the cereal bars and snack packs and fruit-like pieces, rolls, leathers.  The convenience items that are tossed so easily into mom's bag.  Last year we came to a place where WJ was pretty consistently not hungry at meal times.  When I really took a look at what he was eating over the course of a day, I was feeling like there were too many chances to say, “There’s no food in your food.”

So Dave and I sat down with WJ and wrote down a list of guidelines we call The Food Rules.  Basically, it is a schedule of eating times and a few simple guidelines.  The paper looked a little like this:

WJ’s Food Rules

Breakfast (must include protein)

 Snack

Lunch

Snack

Dinner

Snack (yogurt or applesauce)

• If WJ is hungry at a time that is not a meal or snack time, he may have fruit, nuts, or bread.
• WJ decides how much to eat at meal times.
• Adults decide about treats; no arguing.

We added a few symbols to help WJ read the schedule so that we could go back to it when he started his begging routine.  And we posted it in the kitchen.  It is still there, a year later.

These guidelines eliminated a lot of the struggles we had about food in this house.  Suddenly there was no more begging.  No more little boy begging his parents for snacks.  No more parents begging the little boy to eat his meals. Differentiating between snacks and treats helped a lot too.  More on that later. 

With The Food Rules, we all regained the power we were after.  WJ has the power to decide how much he eats and I have the power to decide what is available.  I have put my energy into making sure that our meals are balanced and that WJ’s snack options are as nutritionally sound as possible.  

What are your solutions to the food struggles in your house?

*This post is part of SteadyMom's weekly 30 Minute Blogging Challenge.  If you haven't met her yet, I encourage you to visit SteadyMom (and check out her new book). Post time: 23 minutes.

What’s the deal with the bread?  While no one has come out and asked this point blank, I have had a few emails lately with undertones of this question.  What is the deal with the bread?

I am enjoying baking bread and writing about it.  There are so many ways in which the BBA Challenge bread baking weaves itself perfectly into a metaphor for our struggle this year to remake our family's life into one that is moving at a more intentional and healthful pace.  But the truth is that I was baking homemade bread before we embarked upon this year of taking things slow. 

The real deal with the bread is an ongoing struggle I have been having, and I know many of you have been having, with the way our children eat.  For me it culminated with a period in our family that, if it were written as a made-for-TV movie, might be entitled The Boy Who Would Not Eat Dinner.  It became clear to me that I needed to change the way WJ was snacking.

Then two things happened.

The first thing that got me thinking was a conversation with a friend from Europe who is raising her children here.  “I hate these Goldfish,” she said, telling of how her preschool-aged daughter had begun requesting snacks all afternoon.  “My daughter should know,” she said in her rich and strong Portuguese voice, “after lunch… it is bread.” 

A light went on.  My child would not go hungry if I said no to the snacking on expensively empty calories.  I decided to borrow her Portuguese rule.  Before dinner, if you are hungry, you may have a slice of bread.

But when I began to institute the new rule, I found myself reaching most afternoons into a crinkly plastic bag of factory-made bread.  The kind that takes a week, sometimes more, to loose its springy softness and seems to repel mold like Deep Woods OFF! repels mosquitoes and ticks. I was still somehow feeling uncomfortable. 

Sighing deeply, I looked more carefully at the label on my carefully selected, whole grain, health food store loaf.  I struggled with the fine print: cultured dextrose and maltodextrin, monoglycerides and diglycerides, soy lecithin, and calcium propionate.  Maybe you speak Food-industry-ese and you are going to write in to tell me that I am mistaken, but to me these words translate into a simple adjective: processed.  I found that same cryptic jargon listed on the labels of the colorful boxes of snack foods I was trying to avoid, so how was this manufactured bread improving the situation any?  WJ would still be filling up on foodless food and missing the nutrition of our dinner.

Then the second thing happened.  I caught a scene in a movie, a completely inconsequential moment in Across the Universe, a film that tries to speak to us through the music of The Beatles.  If you have seen the film you will remember the scene where the dreamy young man leaves his job at the docks in Liverpool, stopping at home to pack a bag and kiss his mum good-bye, before setting off for Technicolor America. As he walks into the kitchen of his plain little flat, he slathers butter on a fat slice of homemade bread and gathers the shirts his mum has just ironed for his journey. There was something about this image that stuck with me.  The young man with his mother’s bread.

All over the world, I thought, there are boys, girls too, walking into kitchens and tearing off a handful of freshly baked bread.  It is that simple.  Whole grain wheat, yeast, warm water.  These are ingredients a mother need not fret over feeding her child.  If this is the way I wanted my child to eat, then I was going to have to change.  I was going to have to find a way to provide this simplicity. 

And so I have fiddled with numerous recipes.  Right now I am enjoying the challenges of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice but if you are hoping to begin baking bread regularly, a wonderful place to start is Artisan Bread in Ten Minutes a Day.  The basic formula in this book results in big batch of no-knead dough that keeps in the fridge, providing fresh dough to bake every day if you wish.

All of the bread I have tried, all of it... the children cannot keep their hands off it.  This weekend I baked a batch of Peter Reinhart’s Vienna Bread.  I shaped the dough into dinner rolls that were eaten up before I got even a chance to photograph them.  These two and a half sly rolls somehow tucked themselves under the corners of the cloth and hid safely from the little fingers that were reaching repeatedly into the basket all night.

I am not saying that there is freshly baked bread in this house every day.  Not even close.  But I am working toward having it available most of the time.  It is another way of eliminating the instant, the processed, the additives, the junk, in order to make room for more goodness.  That’s the deal with the bread.

We cannot do it all. 

Say it with me, ladies (and gentlemen, if you are out there, chime in too). Seriously.  Stand up, throw back your head and let’s whoop together in our outside voices:

We cannot do it all!

I say “we” because I know that we have this struggle together, this struggle for a life that is full of the things we love and need to do, the things our children and families need and love.  Our marriages.  Our work.  Our desire to be fully human and humane and participating in the world.

But we cannot do it all.

This is a realization that I come to regularly.  About twice a day.  Easily.  And I say this hanging my head with a due degree of shame… each and every time I discover it I am just as surprised as I was the first time.

My morning dose of this reality came as I was standing in my underwear in the gym locker room, looking into a gym bag that contained no sneakers. 

I can do quite a bit.  I will not bore you with the list, but I actually did do quite a bit today before foiling my own attempt at squeezing a workout into it all.

The second dose is coming right now as I sit here beside a sniffling boy who started the day with some sneezes, which then progressed slowly to glassy, baggy eyes and listlessness.  I am looking at him and sighing deeply and thinking about how this is the afternoon before I have a busy, booked-every-second kind of day at work.

I cannot do it all.

But there are things I can do. I can hold the door for that woman struggling with her stroller.  I can tuck my sniffling boy in and bring him tea. I can be kind.

And I can stop for a bunch of budding willows at the corner store.  I can bring a little bit of beauty into our home.  Something to gaze at just now, to remind me that at the end of this winter there will be spring. 

This is just a season. 

It is always just a season and there will always be spring.

The story of the Pain de Campagne really begins during my second attempt at Portuguese Sweet Bread.  Trying desperately to get that recipe right, I learned several lessons about bread baking.  One of those is that you are going to have to get your hands dirty.

I started this BBA Challenge so excited to finally have a use for the dough hook attachment that came with my stand mixer.  Apartment dwellers know that a kitchen gadget must prove itself worthy to occupy its valuable real estate on any shelf, in any drawer.  And I have been renewing the lease, giving the dough hook the benefit of the doubt, for many years now.  Many times I have questioned my decision to let it stay on without getting much in return.  I began to hope that these exercises with yeast dough would give the hook an opportunity to prove true my optimism about its potential.

But at the heart of a successful loaf of bread, like so much else in life, is a relationship.   When your dough is building its primary relationship with a mechanical hook, things may not turn out well. 

I was just reading Peter Reinhardt’s description of a notable Parisian baker. When baking sourdough miche in Lionel Polâine’s shop, each apprentice is responsible for seeing his loaves through the entire process, “mixing and baking as well as stacking his own firewood and stoking his own fire.” The baker and his bread are in this together.

You cannot really know what is going on with your dough unless you push up your sleeves and introduce yourself.  I may have been more free to multitask with my dough flopping away awkwardly in the Kitchen Aid, but I have also been too distant from the bread, more concerned with the recipe's instructions than with the actual dough.  It is while you are kneading that you begin to know the dough, to see how it responds to you, to discern what it needs.  

I have now begun to knead by hand.

When my hands press into the yeasty mass, I begin to experience a cross between the maternal-umbilical-fetal bond and a science-fiction, Jedi-Avatar, mind-body transformation. 

I am the dough and the dough is I.

Ok. That is taking it a little bit far, but now that I am kneading by hand it is true that I have much more information as I work through the process of each recipe.  Kneading the Pain de Campagne, I could feel the dough begin to spring back against my force and I knew that the gluten strands were beginning to grow. 

But I could also tell that those gluten strands were not as developed as they should be when the timer went off to signal the end of the kneading time.  So I kneaded a little longer until, ladies and gentlemen, I had WINDOW PANE!  As I stretched the dough, it did not break but instead held tight until only a thin film remained, letting light pass through.  The "window pane test" is the SAT for yeast dough readiness and I had never achieved it as clearly as I did here.

As you can see, this bread has a small amount of whole-wheat flour, which gives it a slightly sandy texture and makes it a little dense.   But it also gives it that wonderful multi-grain nuttiness and a hearty texture. Pain de Campagne has been a big hit over here. WJ immediately began to refer to these loaves as “your famous bread." As in, “Mommy, can I have a slice of your famous bread with some apple butter? No, I think I just want it plain.”

Not much is gained, I am confirming again and again, when you try to do things the quick and easy way.  Even with the dough, you have to put in the time, the communication, the bonding.

Too far again.  I know.