bearing blog

Sourdough bagel update with actual measurements.

I have attempted to reproduce the sourdough bagels.  This time I measured carefully:  1 cup fresh sourdough starter, 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 cup bread flour; 3 Tbsp sugar, 1 Tbsp gluten, 1 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp olive oil; and the water I added during the kneading until it looked properly hydrated added up to 4 and 1/2 Tbsp.  Watch this space for a report on the results.

"On death as a blessing" --- and as a model.

"Dad?  Mom?  Does God love the people in Hell?"  

That's Milo, always with the theology questions at bedtime.  It would be easy to say "You're supposed to be in bed; go back upstairs."  

"Hmm.  We don't know for sure if there are any people in Hell.  But if there are people in Hell, then God must love them, since He loves every person."

"Then why are they still there?"  

There's nothing child-ish about children's theological thinking -- haven't the greatest minds among us been grappling with this stuff for two thousand years and more?   What good is this omnipotent omnibenevolence stuff anyway, if it can't or won't stop suffering, temporal or eternal?

"That's an answer nobody's sure about,"  I said.  "We know God's mercy lasts forever, but we also know that people might choose not to want His mercy.  Some people say that this must mean, either that any people in Hell must stay there because they really want to stay there, or else, because God knows that it is really the place where those people will be the most happy -- that because of their choices they would not really be happier anywhere else."

That was a couple of nights ago.  I thought of that conversation again this morning when I picked up the Office of Readings while I waited for the bread machine to make bagel dough for me.  The second reading was from "A treatise on death as a blessing by Saint Ambrose, bishop."  He writes about dying to self (this translation is from my dead-tree breviary, not the link):

Death must be active within us if life also is to be active within us... [The Apostle] therefore teaches us to seek out this kind of death even in this life, so that the death of Christ may shine forth in our lives---that blessed death by which our outward self is destroyed and our inmost self renewed, and our earthly dwelling crumbles away and a home in heaven opens before us.  

The person who cuts himself off from this fallen nature of ours and frees himself from his chains is imitating death...

The Lord allowed death to enter this world so that sin might come to an end.

I thought about that conversation with Milo, how some theologians suppose that Hell exists to provide a place of the most mercy possible for those who in the end don't want Heaven -- a concept that, though it's borne of logical argument from the premises that Hell and a merciful God both exist, probably seems odd to a child (why would you not want Heaven?  and also, can it really be so that Hell can be something merciful?)  Such an idea can only make sense given the terrible flaws in human nature, flaws that we can choose to cling to.

Physical suffering and death in this life often gets the same question, of course, and the good bishop Ambrose's comment got me thinking about the mechanism by which physical death could be a similar mercy in this life.   I've thought of it one way for a long time:  It's a sorrow because it's necessary even for the best of people only because of sin; it's a mercy because it does bring sin and sorrow to an end, at least in the here and now.  

But it had escaped me till now that, since our nature is so flawed as it is, we must learn to cast off those flaws and cut away that diseased part of the self.  To understand how to do this, maybe we needed something in nature to imitate, to understand -- something to which the analogy could be made.  So many of the truths of our faith have been taught to us through concrete imagery -- sowing and reaping, eating and washing, begetting and birthing.  The reality precedes the concrete:  "fatherhood" is what it is so that we could understand something about "God the Father," i.e., natural "fatherhood" was modeled somehow after what we call the Fatherhood in the Blessed Trinity.  

So perhaps natural death was created as a model for us to follow, itself after the process of cutting away the sinful part of ourselves, what we are told we must do with the help of Christ.  Perhaps death is what it is because of mercy, because it shows us something like what we have to go through during our physical lives, in order to come out the other side more alive than before.

Sourdough bagels!

Wow!

An installment in the series "I didn't bother writing down what I did because I didn't expect much on the first try, but then the results turned out fantastic and I wished I had the recipe."

I think maybe bagels are ideal for sourdough, because sourdough breads tend to be denser and chewier, exactly what you're looking for in a good bagel.  It turns out that sourdough bagels may also be a more convenient choice for breakfasts, because you must shape them the night before.   Most recipes for yeasted bagels, on the other hand, call for shaping the bagels just after the first rise and only a few minutes before boiling; this works fine if you have a bread machine, of course (here's my recipe) but still the shaping step might add just a bit too much complexity to a typical weekday morning.

I went to this website for advice on the technique, and adapted the recipe in ways that seemed sensible given that I had a bread machine, a whole cup of starter, and a little bit of experience.  The website stressed high-protein flour, so I decided to use some bread flour rather than making 100% whole wheat bagels this time, and add some gluten to be safe.  I had just refreshed my starter and that evening, after pulling off some for the fridge and some for the next loaf of sandwich bread, I had a bit more than a cup left.

(Finally caught a clue and started refreshing the starter in a Pyrex 4-cup measure so I can see how much I have.)

(When I started doing that, I noticed something that should have been obvious:  Refreshed sourdough varies widely in density, a possible source in variation in my results considering that I typically measure by volume.)

I scraped most of the starter into my bread machine pan -- about a cup, as I said, of fairly bubbly starter -- and added one cup of bread flour and one cup of whole wheat flour.  I added about a tablespoon of gluten, three tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon and a half of salt, and a teaspoon of olive oil.  I was shooting for a "standard" bagel so didn't mess with honey or molasses or any other kind of flavoring.  I decided not to add any water at this point, figuring to err on the side of stiffness.  I put that in the bread machine and set it to produce dough, and then stuck around.

Yes, I'm aware that next time I should be weighing all these ingredients.  I really thought this would just be the "let's see what happens" bagel recipe.

The machine labored and when I took a look inside during the knead cycle, it was obvious that water was required.  I'm sorry to say that I just splashed some in.  I guess it was about two or three tablespoons.  When I came back the dough looked all right, denser than bread dough like it's supposed to, so I left it alone after that.  I suppose if you mixed and kneaded by hand or in a stand mixer you would be able to adjust the hydration as you went; in any case, read some descriptions of what bagel dough is supposed to be like so you can make the necessary adjustments.   

I stopped the machine after the first rise but before it could knead the dough down again, and turned the dough out.  I knew at that moment I had something that could very well be successful, because the dough was firm and elastic and not at all sticky; I didn't even have to flour my board.  I cut it into 7 pieces and shaped it into bagels by the "rope" method.  I had to work pretty hard to seal the ends because the dough was so un-sticky, and ended by dipping them in water and really squishing and kneading them together.

I put a sheet of baking parchment on a baking sheet, sprayed the parchment lightly with cooking spray, arranged the bagels on the parchment, lightly sprayed the bagels, and covered them with plastic wrap to keep them from drying out.  Then I left the bagels at room temperature overnight.  The thermostat was at 71F, and I just found it really hard to believe that they would rise enough in the fridge.  But I didn't want to warm them because the rise would be about 8 hours.

In the morning they didn't seem to have changed much, which I figured meant I had made the right decision.  I preheated the oven to 500 F and put a heavy pan on the bottom rack; meanwhile I set a pot to boil.  Then I took a shower and got dressed.  When I came down the water was boiling and the oven was preheated.  I added 2 T of sugar to the water, because the sourdough website suggested it -- I have no idea what it's supposed to accomplish -- and boiled the bagels in two batches.  They sank at first and floated within a minute just as they were supposed to. I floated them in the boiling water for 1 minute on each side and then transferred them to a lightly sprayed baking sheet.  When they were all on the sheet I put them in the oven on the center rack, and poured a half cup of water in the hot pan on the bottom to create steam.

They baked 15 minutes, by which time they were starting to brown, and then I transferred them to a wire rack to cool.

Beautiful, just beautiful, with a crisp exterior made even more lovely by toasting, and a chewy middle.  I don't know if you would be satisfied with them if, say, you were a native New Yorker, but they were miles ahead of grocery store bagels and in the same league, I think, with wheat bagels from a chain like Bruegger's.   (Not quite as pleasurable as a fresh-baked bakery salt bagel, uncontaminated with whole wheat flour, would be, but whaddayagonnado.)  I am resisting the urge to go eat another one just so I can tell you more details about it.  There is a nice tang from the sourdough, and it's really hard to believe there's no yeast in these.

I'm not promising perfect results the first time if you do what I did -- my measuring was really vague here, and as I noted, sourdough starter is fickle stuff -- but be willing to try it, and to experiment and tweak.  The fact that you can do all but a few minutes' work the night before is a strong plus with this recipe and method.  I will definitely try to repeat this the next time I refresh sourdough, and when I do I'll keep better records.

UPDATE:  In this post I repeat the recipe with careful measurements.

The quote not taken.

At the last meeting of the homeschool co-op, someone suggested using audiobooks on CD in the car to expose the kids to poetry.   I thought that was a great idea of the "why didn't I think of that?!" variety -- they have had little patience for poetry as read-alouds, but they have loved classical music CDs in the car.  I  had an order almost ready to go at Rainbow Resources anyway; I immediately added A Child's Introduction to Poetry and sent in my order, and when the box arrived we put the disc in the car right away.

Success!  The kids love it and have been reciting snippets of sonnets and haikus.  I will be getting more poetry CDs for sure.  It has been nice for me, too, to listen to recitations of famous poems, many of which I remember from high school English, while driving.  When they come in through the auditory channel, it's really quite a different experience from reading them off the page, even reading them aloud.  You're more of a passive receiver, rather than using your own voice to modulate and interpret the poem, and you have to receive the poem linearly instead of visually taking it all in at once, knowing which lines are long and which short, and when to expect the end.  Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandburg, Robert Browning -- it's a nice collection, mostly of well-known favorites.

Listening to the recitation of Frost's "The Road Not Taken," I was reminded of my favorite rant about quotations out of context.  By the time I got to tenth- or eleventh-grade English literature, I had read the famous quotation from this poem about eleventy-thousand times:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This quote is always, always, always used to support the thesis that the wiser, better man will take the "road less traveled."  Have you ever seen a place where it is not used as an implication that the road less traveled is the one that leads to happiness?  Something about being unconventional, I suppose.  You will see people writing, for example, that the poem offers "good advice."  That sort of thing.

I remember being really annoyed and angry at the quoters when I encountered the whole poem, finally.  Because of course the poem as a whole implies nothing of the sort, offers no advice at all, contains no judgment about the relative merits of the two paths.   The last stanza contains a whiff of mystery and not a little regret alluding to the consequences of the choice, but to me most of the regret is contained in the line "I could not travel both/And be one traveler."  

It strikes me as a simple meditation on the tragedy of reality:  that you can't experience everything.  Listening to it again, maybe for the first time, in a purely audio format, I was even more strongly struck by it.

But I have always been irritated at the quoters who take the last three lines, not even the whole last stanza with its "sigh," and use it to imply the inherent superiority of the road less traveled.  Hey, sometimes it's the right choice.  Other times it's not.  Logic, people.

Sourdough muffins.

Christy P is making sourdough muffins.  I know what I'm making for breakfast next Tuesday morning.

The information age.

It's "break time," that magical 45 minutes after lunch when the rule is that the kids can do almost anything as long as they leave me alone, more or less, to mess with the computer in peace.

Tromp tromp tromp BANG tromp tromp tromp.  Two boys are at my ear.  One has his hand tightly clamped over the mouth of a (recently washed) jelly jar.  Little sister is bouncing up and down excitedly behind them.

"Mom! Mom!  What do crickets eat?"

"Uh.  I don't know.  Grass maybe."

Furious whispering.  "Mom, are you sure?  We don't want to poison him."

"Hey guys, I said I don't know, I'm kind of busy here -- " and it's not till then that I realize that I'm sitting in front of a live internet connection with my fingers on the keyboard.  Or rather, I knew that, it's just that it's not until then that I catch a clue. 

 Not only can I use this awesome power to waste time surfing the web, checking my email and vegging out for a quick respite from my day's work... I can also use it to send the children on an errand that will keep them busy for maybe five whole extra minutes! 

Click click click.  "Ahem.  'Rearing crickets is very easy since they tend to eat anything.'  Um.... 'Rolled oats with fresh fruit and vegetables is an ideal food for crickets.'"

"Thanks Mom!"  Tromp tromp tromp rustle rustle rustle.  "Do you know what we're going to name him?  'Oats!'"

"No, 'Chester C. Cricket!'" muffled arguing

Mental note:  Write down an extra line under "Science" on today's page in the record book...

The dropping dreams have begun.

For me they are never literally "dropping dreams," i.e., dreams in which I drop the baby out the window.  But I like the terminology, so I'm keeping it.  

I picked up that term from something or other I read during my first pregnancy -- not a normal you're-having-a-baby book, it was possibly some kind of feminist or sociological theory of pregnancy or birth thing.    I use the term to mean any sort of dream in pregnancy that expresses, in a fascinatingly weird and sometimes amusingly armchair-psychologist way, worries or ambivalence about the coming new member of the family.  In whatever book or article I originally read, she claimed that lots of women have dreams in which they "drop" the baby, sometimes in a horrifying accident, other times as a deliberate act -- out a window, from an airplane, off a cliff, whatever.  A similar category are dreams in which the mother gives birth to a puppy or a kitten or some such thing.

Me, I usually have dreams of misplacing the baby.  The recurring pattern -- I have dreamed a variant on this dream at least once in each of my four pregnancies -- is that I dream I give birth to a baby who is full-term but freakishly small.  Ranging in size from, say, Polly Pocket to Barbie.   And then in the dream I put the baby down somewhere, as if he were a cell phone, and then can't remember where I put him, and that's the end of that particular journey through motherhood.  Usually the dream is emotionally fraught, not in grief or concern over the lost baby, but with being worried that the authorities will come and throw me in jail, and then who is going to take care of my other kids?

Psychoanalyze that.   I think it's pretty obvious if you ask me.

I also have weird dreams of another category, mostly taking the form of "Labor and Childbirth:  Odd Ways To Think About It."  Like, for instance, dreams in which I have a pouch, sort of like a kangaroo, except it's more like a hip pocket, and just reach in and pull the baby out.  Perhaps this is some kind of wishful thinking.  Or perhaps it's just an extension of the cell phone metaphor.  In any case, it's not very realistic, not the least because I never seem to have any useable pockets, or to use the ones I do have.

Mothers among you:  Do you have "dropping dreams" or "extremely alternative childbirth" dreams?  What do you think they're expressing?

Biteback.

Mary Jane refused to go into the child care at the YMCA this morning because the Halloween decorations were too scary for her.

Why have I been spending so much money on packaged cookies?

Per Oscar's Civil War history activity, the children are joyfully gobbling up homemade hardtack for their afternoon snack.

It didn't even cost me any labor, since Oscar made the stuff.

I am pretty sure that a cup and a half of flour, a teaspoon of salt, and a half cup of water costs less than fifteen Oreos.  I think it maybe even makes less mess.  Even if you consider the tablespoon of molasses I gave each child to dip their hardtack in.

Hmph.

(mix flour, salt, and water in bowl, knead in bowl, roll out to 1/2 inch thickness on ungreased cookie sheet, cut into squares, poke holes with skewer, bake 25 minutes at 375 degrees.)

Okay, they're asking for gummy bears now.  Seems a little bit more normal.

Self-care.

I have a rotten cold.

These days, I hate being sick.   I never minded it all that much before I became a mother.  If I'm sick, I ought to be entitled to crawl into bed and stay there, uninterrupted except perhaps by the appearance of  cups of hot lemon tea at intervals.  Also someone should bring me chicken soup.  And yet here I am, coughing and sneezing and still having to take care of other people.  What is up with that? 

Oh, and:  Did I mention that my experience with, say, coughing/sneezing/vomiting, and other diaphragmatic spasming type issues has been seriously soured ever since I gave birth the first time?

(Cue the automatic Kegels practice)

Still, chin up!  I can, generally cope pretty well with a rotten head cold, even if I don't like it.

What I don't cope well with is rotten cold PLUS six months pregnant.  I do not know how to sum up the experience except with a single word:  "OOOOOOOOF."

Last night I persuaded Mark to let me crawl into bed as soon as dinner was over and stay there.   He took care of everything and I didn't have to make dinner or clean up dinner or read bedtime stories or nurse (no, Mark doesn't lactate, but he's good at toddler distraction) or break up fights or anything.  

I started to feel less generally-awful-all-over around four in the morning.  I still had the head cold, and am still 6 months pregnant, but those two conditions had decoupled and were no longer working together to destroy me.

At first I felt a little guilty at skipping my Thursday gym night, but now that I'm awake and coping a lot better, I am struck with awe at the power of simply getting some rest.  I haven't always noticed it; I guess it's not as important when you're younger, sick or not, pregnant or not.  Although to take to your bed for a few hours is not a quick and easy remedy  -- it requires someone to take care of your responsibilities for a while, and you can't get anything done that whole time, which I suppose is the point --  the results seem darn near miraculous.  How is it that simply lying still and closing your eyes can make such a big difference?  

I don't think I will get to repeat the experience tonight, but I did announce that I wasn't going to make dinner.  Mark can pick up a pizza or something.   It's a small thing, but it does mean just a little bit of pressure off my late afternoon, and maybe the chance to sit down and put my feet up at 4:30, or put on a DVD for the kids and go take a hot shower.  I don't play that card very often, and it means I can deploy it when it really counts.

Sourdough experimentation and the efficient foodie.

I continue to play around with the sourdough starter I ordered a few weeks ago, and am pleased to report that I have not killed it yet.  I've made a couple of successful loaves of traditional sourdough -- mind you, they are still denser than yeast-risen bread -- and also a few big failures (not so bad since they make yummy melba toast).   The add-some-sourdough-to-my-normal-bread-machine-bread technique is robustly successful.

But I have to tell you, I am not actually focused on producing the "perfect" loaf of sourdough bread yet, tweaking recipes to get the best texture and flavor.  I am a foodie, there is no getting around it; but I aspire to being an efficient foodie.   

You can start with the perfect recipes, and organize your life around your trips to the greenmarket, co-op, and Penzey's, around the cycle of driving out to the farm to pick up your free-range chickens (with extra feet) and bringing them home to skim off the foam as they simmer gently on the stovetop with leeks, carrots, and bouquet garni, and around the resting/kneading schedule of your home-baked rustic loaves, and the garden with its bounty of pole beans and heirloom tomatoes and pots of herbs, and you will produce wonderful food and your friends will toast you at your dinner parties.  Sounds like a nice life. Possibly describes my retirement, or at least it would if I wasn't married.  (I wonder if those mountaintop yurts have six-burner gas stoves?)

Me, I have this life that I am already living, and so my very first consideration -- this is how I do ANYTHING new, it was the same thing when I took up swimming or baking muffins for breakfast -- is -- can I figure out a process that, given the constraints I live in, produces acceptably reproducible results?

Because if I can't come up with a process, it doesn't matter how outstanding the results, I won't repeat them.

On the other hand, a workable process can be tweaked to improve the product quality.  Process first; formulation later.

So anyway, the sourdough.   After the weekly refreshing and after setting some back in my fridge for later, I'm left with approximately 2 cups of fresh sourdough batter, typically first thing in the morning.  Right now I'm keeping two strains going (in case I kill one in my inexperience -- I'll go down to one later) so I produce the two cups of batter two times per week.  You could call this the input to my process.  Given two cups of fresh sourdough batter in the morning, what can I make from it?

One possibility for the two cups of batter is working pretty well.  It's this:  one cup goes in a loaf of "normal" bread machine bread, the other cup goes into a loaf of traditional sourdough (and the loaf isn't actually produced until the next day).    

I also need something to do with two cups of batter, other than adding enough other ingredients to bake two loaves of the same bread with it (which makes more bread than my family can eat).  There are a number of possibilities open to me here.   I could figure out a way to turn the whole bowl into pancakes or waffles, for one thing.  (I'm a little underwhelmed by sourdough bran muffins so far).   I plan to try sourdough bagels or soft pretzels at some point.  

But what would really be easiest -- if it would work -- is to get 2 cups of fresh batter into 1 loaf of traditional sourdough, and so that's what I tried for the first time this week, with plain 100% whole wheat.  

With no recipe to guide me, I stirred a cup and a half of whole wheat flour into the batter and let that rest a while, then later added oil, sugar, salt, and gluten (I was going for a plain sort of loaf) and let that rest overnight before shaping it. 

I am discovering something about sourdough:  The dough can change dramatically during resting time, and generally gets more "batter-y" the longer it sits.  I think the bugs break down a lot of the gluten, or something like that, because what was a dough last night was more like a batter this morning.  I couldn't knead it so much as roll it around on a pile of flour on the bread board.  So I worked enough AP flour into it so it could hold its shape a bit, put it on a cornmealed baking sheet, and stuck it in the oven.  We'll see if I rescued it.

I'm thinking that if I start with two cups of sourdough rather than one, I probably don't need to ferment it as long, duh, because there's already twice as much live culture in the dough to begin with.  And if that's so, maybe I'll have an advantage.  Maybe I'll get lots of sour flavor out of a faster-to-bake dough.  But, I will have to wait till next week to see.

(Christy P is experimenting with the same starter here.)

(Previous sourdough posts are:

sourdough, how were the sourdough waffles?, what to do with a rye sourdough baguette that's too dense and didn't rise, sourdough not-fail!, success with a classic sourdough rye.) 

Ends.

Turn my heart towards your precepts

  and away from the pursuit of wealth.    ----Psalm 118

This passage has stuck with me over the past few days since it appeared in the Liturgy of the Hours (Morning Prayer from last Saturday).  

You only have to turn "towards Your precepts" and "away from the pursuit of wealth" when those things are at odds, right?  When the pursuit of wealth means stealing, or cheating, or perhaps something less glaring, something like working too hard and neglecting your other duties?

Maybe not.

  "Precepts" have to do with upright living, with doing God's will, with avoiding wrong and seeking the right.  It has to do with how you live, with the choices you make.   The psalmist is asking:  Make right behavior, doing Your will, my main goal... whatever the outcome.

"Wealth," on the other hand, is an outcome-based measure.  

We all know that "good" behavior is no guarantee of "good" results.   We don't get what we deserve; some folks are born with all the advantages, others struggle and never get ahead despite doing everything right.   You'd  think we'd remember that.  And yet it's so easy to measure our success by what we've managed to achieve or amass, and so hard to remember to measure ourselves by how we set about getting it.Especially if you define "wealth" broadly, to mean any kind of visible success or asset, the kind of stuff you can participate in getting by your own merits -- but you can also win or lose by chance alone. 

Turn my heart towards your precepts

  and away from the pursuit of ... 

Money, sure.  Or a comfortable, clean, organized home.  Or... good health.   Physical fitness.  Pleasant, well-behaved children.  A spouse who loves you.  A job you enjoy.

All these things are good and worth seeking; but none last longer than life.  The psalmist reminds us that they're not the point.  They aren't the reason we are to love God's precepts, they aren't our measure of whether we're doing "the right things."  We are to follow His precepts even if it seems they will not get us these things.  They're not, in fact, virtues.  They are kinds of wealth.  Material goods.  Things that will not last.

(Yes, even "health" is a material good.  These days it almost seems as if good health qualifies as an end in itself and as a proof of virtue.  Makes no more sense than assuming that the rich get to be rich because they are virtuous, or that they enjoy God's special favors.)

It's tempting to cut corners to achieve the visible results we wish our virtue would get us.  But we have to be focused not on the outcome -- which might be from luck, or forces beyond our control -- but on our own behaviors, our own choices.  Because in the moment, our own behavior is always subject to at least some conscious control, and however much choice we have, we are responsible for.

"Health" has been the kind of wealth I have been after for the last couple of years, and it's sobering to be reminded that it isn't the be-all, end-all, the goal that excuses anything.  

I have never had a knack for getting labs to go right.

I could have predicted some of the problems we'd have with Oscar's science lab this morning, the one where you mix baking powder with various liquids in bottles sealed by balloons, and see how much gas evolves.

For instance, that the balloons I'd bought would be too small to put the required amount of baking powder in, or that they would be quite tight and hard to stretch over the bottles.  

Or that the baking powder would not disperse well with the liquid, leaving a dry cake of baking powder stuck to the bottom of the bottle, unable to be dislodged even with vigorous shaking.

Yeah, I could have foreseen that, and if I hadn't been in such a hurry, might have been able to set the experiment up to run a little bit more smoothly.  I had Oscar write a list of problems and difficulties with the experiment, and things we learned from them.

What I couldn't predict:  that three-year-old little sister would run shrieking and weeping with terror out of the room at the sight of the expanding balloons, nearly tearing my pants off in her attempt to climb straight up my legs into my arms, out of fear that they would pop suddenly and loudly.

And that this performance would be repeated for every one of the six balloon-bottle-baking powder experiments of the day.

And that Oscar would need an extra pair of hands for most of the experiments (because the balloon necks were too tight for him to stretch over the bottles) so I would spend the morning alternately comforting a crying, frightened little girl, and peeling her off my body for long enough to act as laboratory assistant (while she screamed "Come BACK mommy!  Come BACK!"

I wish I could say that this was the sort of thing that drove me into theoretical rather than experimental work...