Half Changed World

Skip this one if you’re squeamish.

The boys now have their own rooms, but have been moving back and forth between the two, sometimes in their own rooms, sometimes both in one.  Last night, D asks if he can sleep with N in N’s
bed.  N says ok, so I say sure, as long as you guys actually settle down and get some
sleep (because they both have school today).

N is fussy in the night, and we’re both up a few times to check on him.  At one point, I hear him crying, but let T go downstairs since I handled the last one.  But then I hear T saying "oh my god" and then asking "what did you have for dinner?  Did you have ketchup for dinner?"  I know we didn’t have ketchup, so I figure I had better get downstairs.

N has thrown up.  Not onto D, but
onto his bed and the floor (which has light colored carpet).  And it’s bright red.  And we can’t figure out what it could be.  What it looks like is pomegranate seeds, but N says that he didn’t have any at school.    So we’re a bit freaked out, but not too panicked, because it doesn’t really look like blood. 

So
we send D to sleep in his own bed, and change N’s pjs and
sheets and start cleaning the carpet.  But as soon as we put oxyclean
on the stain, it turns blue.  Suddenly I realize that what we’re looking at is the blackberries N ate for dessert.  Blackberry juice is an indicator, so in the acid of his stomach, it
turned bright red.  And the oxyclean is a base, so it turns it blue
again.

I’ve promised the boys we’ll experiment with some mashed up berries so they can see the effect in a less gross context. 

(BTW, the oxyclean did a fabulous job of removing the stain overnight.)

So I blew off the first session of my conference today to go to Mommies and Muffins. And you know what?  I loved it.  I enjoyed watching N negotiate with his friends over the toys, and bring me into his play.  (Did you know that patting your knees is needed to launch a little people airplane?  Neither did I.)  I loved watching him point out his scabs to everyone who would listen, and explain that he had a boo-boo but it was getting better.  I liked watching him clean up, far more cooperatively than he ever does at home.   I loved sitting with him on my lap at circle time, happily singing in English and Hebrew.  I liked the concentration with which he strung beads on a plastic lanyard to make me a necklace (which he pronounces exactly the same as his name).  And the muffins weren’t bad.

Would it have been a disaster if I hadn’t gone?  No.  Not all the kids had parents there (one boy’s daddy came).  The ones whose parents didn’t come didn’t seem to particularly mind.  The teachers and other parents helped them string their necklaces.  N enjoyed having me there — and having some extra time with me without having to share with his brother — but he wouldn’t have been traumatized if I hadn’t.  Not even worth a quarter in the therapy jar.

But I’m glad I went.

(I’m scheduled to participate in MotherTalk this Friday, so no Tuesday book review today.)

Over the next two weeks, I have been "invited" to the following activities:

• Field day at D’s school — 9 am to 2 pm tomorrow
• "Mommies and Muffins" at N’s preschool — 9 am to 10 am next Tuesday (they had "Daddies and Donuts" earlier in the year.
• "Moving Up" ceremony at N’s preschool — noon to 2 pm next Friday
• "Coming Out" ceremony at D’s school — 9 or 10 am the following Monday.  (Yes, that’s what they call it.  It’s to celebrate the Kindergarteners.)

Meanwhile, I have an in-town conference to attend Monday through Wednesday of next week, and a business trip the following Monday evening through Tuesday.

I’m definitely skipping Field Day and the Moving Up ceremony —  T will attend the Moving Up ceremony, and may go to some of Field Day.  (N also has a dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon, scheduled before we knew about Field Day.)

I’m feeling like I should really go to the Mommies and Muffins event, because if I don’t, N may be the only kid there without a mommy present.  (Since preschool is 1/2 day, 3 x a week, most of the families have a SAH parent.)  But that would mean missing part of the conference.  And then D will be hurt if I don’t go to his Coming Out ceremony.

Why do schools think it’s a good idea to schedule daytime events that parents are expected to attend other than graduation/moving up/coming out ceremonies during the last weeks of school?  Grrr.

As I mentioned at the time, T went out the first day that the Wii went on sale and got one.  I meant to write a review, but when they became impossible to buy, I felt sheepish about doing so — it felt too much like gloating. So here’s the long postponed review.

In case you hadn’t heard, what makes the Wii cool is the controller, which is wireless and motion sensitive.  So, to play tennis you swing the controller like a tennis racket, to race a car you turn it like a steering wheel.  It’s incredibly intuitive, even (especially) for a non gamer like me.  And it’s an awful lot of fun.

We have four games — Excite Truck, Super Monkey Banana Blitz, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Wario Ware — as well as the sports pack that comes with the system.  We played them a LOT for the first couple of months we had the system, less often now.  As with most games, it’s a lot more fun to figure out how to play the game and develop an initial level of competence than it is to keep hammering away trying to get the last 5 points needed for a perfect score. 

So, a couple of months ago I got an email at the address on this blog, from a Nintendo publicist, offering to send me a system to demo.  They’re targeting moms, arguing that this is a gaming system that you don’t have to worry about your kids playing, because it gets them up and jumping around, not just using their thumbs.  And it’s certainly true that D gets an aerobic workout playing, because he often gets so excited that he jumps up and down the whole time he plays, even when it’s not required for the game. And I broke a sweat trying to get through the dance sections on the Rabbids game.  But overall, I think it’s a stretch to suggest that Wii games are all that more physical than your average video game.

Laura at 11d and her commenters (especially Tim Burke) have an interesting conversation going on about the value of video games.  She’s focused on their role as a form of social interaction, which hasn’t been an issue for us yet — whether because of D’s age or the makeup of the neighborhood, I’m not sure.

For now, we’re ok with the TV-based system — it seems to substitute pretty directly for TV time, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem. It hasn’t been an issue yet, but we’re really reluctant to even consider handheld systems, because D would definitely want to play with them all the time.  (Someone gave him a silly handheld electric Yatzee game, and he totally obsessed over it, even though he doesn’t really understand the rules.)  And I’d rather have one argument over getting the system than constant arguments over turning it off.

As a parent, I’m most impressed at how much D was willing to persist
and keep on trying until he got S (super?) scores on Excite Truck.  As discussed before, he
sometimes thinks he’s supposed to be able to do things perfectly from
the start and gets frustrated when he doesn’t.  So that’s a plus.

Ok, I’m coming really late to this discussion, but I really liked Penguin Unearthed’s comments on the research about how it’s better to praise effort than results.  I had a reaction similar to Phantom Scribbler’s to the New York Magazine article that kicked off much blog discussion — I’m pretty sure that no one is  going to break their kids by praising them the wrong way.

But the idea rang true that kids who are always praised for their smartness — particularly if they don’t feel smart — might get afraid to do anything that might show that they’re not so smart after all.  Among adults, it’s the same phenomenon sometimes called the Imposter Syndrome.  (This is supposedly far more common among women than men, but I think that’s probably a story for another post.)

I definitely worry about this for D, who already shows serious perfectionist tendencies, and an unwillingness to do things that he can’t do well.  I actually think this is at least in part a matter of innate temperament — we’re talking about a kid who didn’t take his first steps until 15 months, and then was walking without hesitation within days.  So I was very pleased that the imax film we saw today about the Mars rovers emphasized the parachutes shredding upon impact in the tests and the frantic work that the scientists needed to do to make them work before launch.  D adored it, and I was wiping tears from my eyes.

I can’t say that I liked the first book I read by Rachel Cusk, her memoir A Life’s Work.  While I thought her prose was remarkable, I found it incredibly infuriating that as intelligent a woman as Cusk clearly is, would do something as irrevocable as having a child with so little forethought about how it would affect her life.  It’s one thing to hate the tediousness and isolation of parenting a newborn; it’s another thing to be surprised to discover that caring for a newborn can be tedious and isolating.

But her writing was powerful enough to make me pick up her new novel, Arlington Park, when I saw it at the library. The good news — Cusk still writes some extraordinary sentences.  The bad news — Cusk doesn’t feel compelled to have any plot at all.   The book is just about a group of women who live in a suburb of London, and what they do one rainy day — drop children at school, drink coffee, go shopping, take care of children, go out to dinner.  But when I say it like that, it sounds something like Mrs. Dalloway.  So imagine Mrs. Dalloway if the author didn’t have any affection for her subject, and you’ll have something like Arlington Park.

Here’s a paragraph chosen pretty much at random to illustrate what I mean:

"’Gypsies,’ Maisie said.  She shook her head.  ‘What a place to have to live.  Right where people come to pick up their sofas.’

Christine pondered the caravans and tried to work out what Maisie’s remarks signified.  It wasn’t the nicest thing to have a pack of Gypsies staring at you when you came to collect your sofa, she could admit, but it wasn’t the end of the world either."

Ultimately, for a book like this to work, I think you need to enjoy the company of either the author or the characters, and I was left quite cold about both.

Poking around the Census web page today, I ran across this report, issued earlier this year, on A Child’s Day, 2003 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being).

It’s full of all sorts of odd and interesting statistic, like 6.7 percent of parents living with a child 12-17 said that they talked to or played with their child for 5 minutes "never" to "once a week."  What really jumped out at me is the ability to see what parental characteristics are associated with different parenting behaviors.  Affluent parents are more likely to report  reading to their preschool aged children than poor parents (although 40 percent of poor parents still said that they read to their kids 7 or more times in the last week).  The association with parental education is even stronger than with income.

I was quite struck by the correlation they found between "television rules" imposed on children (restricting the type of programs, the time of day, or the number of hours watched) and the frequency with which parents read to their kids.   This suggests at least the  possibility that the supposed negative effects of television on young children is a spurious correlation with parenting behaviors.

Consistent with Lareau’s description of concerted cultivation vs. accomplishment of natural growth, more affluent and more educated parents were far more likely to report that their school-age children participated in extra-curricular activities, including sports, clubs, and classes.  (There was no "egghead effect" — children of parents with post-baccalaureate degrees were still more likely to play sports than any other kind of activity.)  And the higher level of education the parents have, the more likely their children are to participate in gifted classes, and the less likely the children are to have been suspended or to repeat a grade.

So, N’s preschool has a casino night/auction every year as its major fundraiser.  Admission is $50 a head, plus you get an "opportunity" to buy your child’s artwork. 

So, last week, we get an email from the fundraising committee telling us that there will be treats for each class where 100% of the kids’ parents buy tickets to the auction.  In other word, if we don’t buy a ticket, we’re the bad guys who prevent the whole class from having cupcakes.

Does this seem like a reasonable policy to the rest of you?  This sort of thing makes T and me *less* inclined to buy tickets, not more.  Are we over-reacting?

Last year, Landismom wrote that the essence of organizing is to give people anger, hope, and a plan.  In that spirit, I offer these links:

• Anger:  I was filled with fury at this story in today’s Post, about a 12 year boy who died for want of a dentist.  By the time he was seen, the infection in his abscessed tooth had spread to his brain.  My office is opposite the break room at work, and all day I heard my coworkers exclaiming in outrage as they picked up the newspaper.  We work on poverty issues, and so sometimes we get a little jaded, lose a little of our outrage.  But this story hit home.
• Hope:  Via Miriam at Everyday Mom, and Nanci at From the Mom Zone, I read about Wakanheza, a program of the Ramsey County public health office to get people to identify people in stressful situations and reach out with a helping hand.
• A Plan: Campaign for Children’s Health Coverage.  Insuring all children is only a start of a solution — adults need health insurance too.  But kids are relatively cheap to insure, and there’s an existing program — the State Children’s Health Insurance Program — that provides a lot of the framework for doing so.  And it’s up for reauthorization this year.  So sign the petition, and write your Senator and Representative.

I’ve had Ella’s Song stuck in my head for half the day.  I’d like to see as many people learning about the death of Deamonte Driver as about the death of Kyle Miller.  (And yes, I know the odds of dying from an abscessed tooth are probably about as low as the odds of dying from seat belt failure.  But a kid shouldn’t have to walk around with his teeth rotting out of his mouth for months either.)

Today I’m reviewing two books that were sent to me by their publishers.  Both are about health and disease prevention, and have a forward or introduction (what’s the difference?) by the authors of YOU: The Owner’s Manual.  One focuses on kids, while the other is organized decade by decade, from pre-natal to "the eighth decade and beyond."  Both of them basically tell you to exercise regularly, eat your veggies, and wear sunscreen.

First up is the book about kids: Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children, by Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD.  The email I got offering me the book showed the cover, which has the title spelled out in refrigerator magnets, with a carrot and some broccoli magnets thrown in for good luck, so I knew it was likely to push some buttons for me.  As long-term readers of this blog know, I have some issues around nutritional advice for parents — I know darned well what a healthy diet looks like, and that my older son’s diet isn’t quite making it to Planet Power but have more or less accepted that we can only control what we offer him, not what he eats.

So, when I got the book, I was predictably irritated by the blithe assumptions that involving children in food prep and cutting food into fun shapes would be enough to win over a picky eater.  But I was somewhat surprised (and pleased) to see that the book covers far more than nutrition, covering topics from good hygiene (wash your hands, floss your teeth) to safety (buckle your seatbelt, wear a bike helmet) and emotional well-being (spend one on one time with kids, develop relationships with extended family).  Overall, the book offers pretty solid, standard advice. 

My fundamental concern about the book is who is the audience for it.  It seems to me like the sort of well-educated middle-class parents who are likely to buy this book will generally know almost everything that’s in it already.  Certainly, that seems to be the conclusion of the parentbloggers who have reviewed it.  Anxious new parents might buy it, but relatively little of the book is about babies. Maybe it could be a text for a parenting class?  Or you could give it to grandparents who might listen to a doctor about seat belts more than to their children?  I don’t know.  I find it pretty hard to imagine anyone reading the book cover to cover.

The second book is The Checklist: What you and your family need to know to prevent disease and live a long and healthy life, by "Dr. Manny" Alvarez.  I focused on the chapters for 0-9 (the age of my children) and 30-39 (that would be me). 

The chapter on young children suffers from the problem that they’ve only got 38 pages to cover a huge developmental range.  So Alvarez makes no attempt to discuss the full range of health issues, but rather goes through a checklist of topics that you might have heard about in the news — cord blood, circumcision, vaccines, autism, ADD.

The chapter on 30-something adults has a different problem, that there are very few health problems that are unique to this age group.  So instead you get a bland discussion of nutrition, skin care, and urinary tract infections, and then a laundry list of ailments that (fortunately) relatively few people in this age group are actually likely to experience, from cervical cancer to MS.

Fundamentally, I think the decade by decade organization just doesn’t work.  Good preventative habits don’t really change that much from decade to decade, and the litany of diseases would have worked better in simple alphabetical order.   The only people I could imagine reading this book cover to cover are hypochondriacs looking for new diseases to obsess about.

Also, the writing/editing was sloppy.  For example, from the circumcision discussion: "The AAP also found that the risk of penile cancer in an uncircumcised man is three times more likely than in a circumcised man, though penile cancer is rare in the United States, just one in one hundred thousand males has it."  Someone get this man a semicolon.