My Geek Baby

Maybe it’s because I’m reading “Life” by Keith Richards during this vacation break…Indie has been prolific in making up songs while we are riding in the car. Song titles include the following:

She: There’s the American Flag!
Me: That’s right!
She: We live in the United Steaks of America

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She: Where do babies come from?
Me: Baby town!

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…She: Ouch! I hit my arm on the counter?
Me: Are you OK? Did you hit your funny bone?
She: What’s my funny bone?
Me: A bone in your elbow.

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Me: Can you show me how you make your bed?
She: Sure! I just need to put my sunglasses on.

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She: Daddy, we’re playing princess. You be the prince and I’ll be the princess, OK?
He: Uh…
Me: Who will I be?
She: The witch!
(saw that one coming…)

Guest Columnist – Kim

I like surprises, generally if the other person/persons are the ones being surprised. And kids love surprises. So, like many new ideas, we came up with the idea of Adventure Day (or night). This is when we plan something for the kids that they usually do not know about until we arrive at the destination. I have to admit that my parents were the ones to think of this originally. And their adventure began with a trip to Florida and Disney. I still get excited thinking about it. And no, my adventures are not that exciting. So…here are a few examples of our adventures and how they turned out:

Adventure Night – Rodeo. We took the kids out to dinner and then arrived at the rodeo. They seemed very excited about the adventure, and then semi-excited about the rodeo destination. It was a new and fun experience, and the kids are still talking about why we not allowed to video any of the rodeo. The security guard sternly made us stop filming. Honestly, we really were not considering bootlegging the video.

Adventure Trip – Baltimore Aquarium. So the trip started out pretty well, until my 3-year old got carsick on the outskirts of DC and that turned into a major stomach issue. We stayed at a hotel in Baltimore for one night, and my friend took my 12-year old and her daughter to see the sites, while my son and I stayed at the hotel. I have not, to this day, seen the inside of the aquarium.

Adventure Day – New Car (or new to us). We took the kids to buy a new car and thought that they would like this adventure, coming home with a new car. Except that the paperwork took so long that we went to lunch at a pizza parlor (national pizza chain where I have not eaten since) and all came home with an unfortunate gastro-intestinal situation. So, no photos of this adventure.

Adventure Day Trip – National Zoo. I had heard that the zoo in DC is a great place to go, and it is. But not the day after Easter and not if the temperature is above 90 degrees. A few photos of this adventure show melting children. We’ll go back again, next winter.

Adventure Day – Movie. This has been the most successful adventure of late. We went to see Gulliver’s Travels in 3-D and this satisfied old and young alike. I guess you can never go wrong with good family entertainment.

What is the next adventure? I have a few ideas in mind. Just remember to make it something fun and out of the ordinary. And remember to carry the Pepto.

Were you ever suspended from school? Yes? Was it in high school when you got caught smoking cigarettes behind the gym? Was it for skipping school? Or was it because you punched a girl in a jealous rage over a boyfriend (oh, wait, that was me.).

Preschool? It was when you were in PRESCHOOL? No…way.

This, I imagine is going to be one of many embarrassing conversations for the little girl who was written about in a recent article about her suspension from preschool, for having too many bathroom accidents. This child is 3-years-old. Three. I don’t know who to be more mad at in this situation, but let’s start with the school and its’ policies, or possibly the the policies of many a preschool. This particular school has a set limit on how many times a child may have an “accident” before sending him or her back home to learn on their own. On the parents’ dime while they figure out whether to save their spot at this school, or to move the child to a school where the policies are bit less strict.

Did I mention the child is 3?

Then let’s think about the mom, or parents, the article only mentions the mom. A lot of interesting (and some idiotic) posts by parents seem to show the divisiveness of this policy. Some take issue with the mother, who took the child to potty training school prior to preschool to ensure the child was trained. I think this is nuts because the parent(s) is/are going to have a very hard time reading the child’s signals if they cannot spend enough time in the bathroom with the child learning together.

So let’s get back to the use of this girl’s actual name in the newspaper. Neither the mom nor the paper felt the need to protect this child? Well, actually, that covers it. Enough said on that.

Every child is different, and so each training experience, unique.

I was talking a person from a local preschool and she said they divided the preschool for age 3 up by not-yet-trained and trained. Two camps. This makes good sense to me. Of all times in a child’s life, this is not one to push them to “try harder.” They’ll figure it out eventually, otherwise we’d all be running around in diapers as adults. Sheesh!

At first I thought it might be a muscle-control thing, or not being quite ready to “know when to go” but when the article stated that at a new school, she stopped having accidents, that says to me, the school might not have been the right place for this girl. Maybe she was having a bad time at the school and this was her reaction.

Here are a few sane tips for learning to take the next big step with your toddler.

Ask Dr. Sears

How to Get the Job Done – Mayo Clinic

I’m reading The Idle Parent, by Tom Hodgkinson, who argues against the over-scheduled, frenzied life of many a kid and I’ve taken some of his advice lately.

He recommends not overscheduling our kids, spending more time at home with them, with the TV off, and spending less money on plastic toys. He’s not a fan of competitive sports. I have mixed feelings on this. One one hand, they build physical confidence, especially important for girls, but also encourage rampant Us vs. Them mentality.

He suggests going to places where there isn’t a gift shop at the end, which, invites whining, almost immediately. I observe that at home too. If I didn’t have the foresight to record all cartoons and we are watching a SpongeBob episode because it’s on at 5:45PM and I’m starting dinner, as soon as a commercial comes on I hear, “I want that for my birthday!”

So yesterday, which was an indoor rainy day, after about an hour of this maddening cycle, and while dinner was already cooking away, I turned off the TV, right in the middle of a Disney Princess doll commercial. WAAAH!

But I ignored it and walked over to the pile of mail and grabbed all the catalogs. “Hey, do you want to make a collage!?” I asked. “Yes” she piped up immediately, not knowing what I was asking, but like most toddlers, excited to be invited to do most anything.

And soon, Indie and I were selecting pictures of kids in parkas, dogs in the snow, animal-shaped Christmas ornaments, and lots more from the junk mail pile and I cut them out and together we glued them onto a blank piece of paper. Viola! Together time that isn’t purchased, plastic, or pink.

This event is the key to the idle parent. Hodgkinson isn’t saying to do nothing, just do more with less.

A few gems from The Idle Parent Manifesto:

I also like the idea of blurring the lines between work and play. We think of work as drudgery (work we get paid to do or folding laundry, doing dishes, etc) and maybe consider time off as super fantastic fun time! But it doesn’t always work that way. As an adult, when was the last time you LOVED waiting in a super long line at an amusement park to get on a 1-minute ride? Then stuffing the kids back in the car, where they argue and whine, for the ride back home?

I love the idea of cooking together, of building things together, whether for real or pretend, to instill in the mind that some labor-intensive things are fun! And at the end of the activity, you have baked cookies or built that mini Taj Mahal together. Save those Halloween costumes, or parts of them; they make for hours of fun.

Indie and I worked together to start a garden at her daycare last summer. I suspect if I asked a kid where their food comes from, they’d respond, “From the grocery store, the co-op, the farmer’s market”. So it’s a lesson in where food originates. We started with sowing seeds indoors in spring, and took them to the tilled garden.
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All the kids helped plant seeds and watered the garden. They got excited when tomatoes and sunflowers started to push up out of the ground! And although the garden was sun-soaked from the unbelievable heat this summer, the process of planting and watering was all worth it.

My best takeaway from the book: In all these things be joyful. Having children is a choice and we should choose to love them to the max, because soon enough they will realize their choices too, and most choose to hang out with their friends.

In the early days I read many articles and parenting books on everything from selecting earth-friendly diapers, to feeding and sleeping schedules, and even some about discipline. So I surprised myself when Indie’s daycare provider, Fran, suggested that she was ready for training, and I jumped in with both feet, without doing all of my usual research. I reasoned that Indie might be ready because around her second birthday she started to say she needed a new diaper. She was also learning to dress herself, pulling shirts and pants on and off, with a little help.

Fran and I talked about it on a Friday and by Saturday, I had already purchased training pants, or pull-ups. I took my daughter with me to buy them, to make her part of the process. Indie was so excited! She seemed to already know a little bit about using the potty like the big kids at daycare. But by Sunday, I wondered what I would do with the had a basket-full of lots of unworn diapers and realized that I needed some guidance on this next step. I called our provider, a veteran mom and caretaker of children for more than 30 years. Surely she’d know the drill.

“What should my expectations be?” I asked. She told me, “Don’t have any. Just let her get used to the idea. Take her to the bathroom frequently. Make it fun!”

And we did. The next day we went searching for a potty seat. I have a distinct memory of falling into the toilet of the bathroom at my parents’ house when I was a kid and didn’t want her to experience the same icy waters. She picked out a pink potty seat and when we got home she was eager to sit on it while we read her stories, like Potty Time with Elmo. The books’s buttons made flushing sound and whirling toilet paper roll that added to the overall fun of this new experience. We found that she was likely to try right before bath time and had some success there. To further encourage her, I sometimes used the bathroom myself leaving the door open and she clapped enthusiastically saying, “Good job, Mommy!”

Trial and Error
On the following Monday morning I was thrilled to report to Fran at daycare that Indie had used the potty several times over the weekend. I was happy, but also dubious. It was probably a fluke, right? The next few days she did great again and even pooped in the potty at daycare. But like most new things, the novelty wore off and we were back to square one — sort of. She didn’t want to use the potty seat, the kid-size potty upstairs, or go back to wearing diapers on a regular basis. In fact she started diapering her baby dolls and began to argue against having to wear them at herself night.

After her interest in going to the potty lagged, we let up on trying too hard. We got lax for a month or so. We thought maybe she wasn’t really ready and asking her to sit on the potty every hour was starting to irritate her and make for very long evenings. She was still letting us know that she needed a change and when and I felt that at age two that was pretty good. We weren’t in a rush to get her potty trained unless she was ready. I was just hoping she’d be fully trained by age three. So although she wasn’t going as much as home, she kept it up at daycare, most days, following the routines of the other kids in her age group.

My main concern was that when she needed a change, she wanted it to happen immediately. She could peel that diaper off quicker than a monkey peeling a banana. Indie let us know right away when was ready for a fresh one. And if we didn’t act fast enough, she took matters into her own hands by starting to rip off the training pants. And then she took “matters” in her own hands at daycare. That’s when our inconsistent routine came to a head. When I arrived to pick her up one afternoon, there was a tell-tale bag of clothes in plastic bag, waiting outside. I recognized her striped dress immediately and knew that something had gone awry.

“She’s ready, Lauren, they told me. She really is.” They suggested we keep trying at home. So I decided to start back up in earnest.

My Girl Wants to Potty All the Time

Well, not all the time, but we’re getting there. She’s two and a three-quarters now and seems to be getting the hang of it more and more. She often has to go right around the dinner hour and even though sometimes its a false alarm, we encourage her to try. We have started letting her go in the bathroom by herself, although we’re always at arms reach and keep the door open. Doing things by herself is very important right now.

We haven’t been giving her prizes to encourage her to go. I used stickers for about a week but she stopped asking for them, seeming just so proud of the accomplishment and enjoying the verbal praise she gets for using the bathroom like a big girl.

Now when she goes, she looks up with her laughing smile and says, “I tinkled! Are you so proud of me?”

During my pregnancy and early days with my daughter, I read a lot of articles and parenting books. One of the issues addressed was the ADHD and how it has been connected to vaccines. I never liked the idea of multiple vaccines given during a single visit but reasoned that I have to weigh the benefit with the potential harms of giving the vaccine.

The only quasi-evidence about the problems caused by vaccines involved a small percentage of children who also have been identified as having mitochondrial disease. Some of those children have been having health problems after vaccines. It’s very distressing and I feel horrible for the parents of those children.

Also in weighing the societal harm of delaying or choosing not to vaccinate, I had to think about the children who would also be protected, by what’s called herd immunity, by immunizing my child for all the recommended shots.

So it was interesting/scary to see in the news this week that one of the doctors who insisted that there’s a direct correlation between vaccines and ADHD, barred from practicing medicine this week.

I don’t want to base my decisions about how to care for my child based on one article, one study, or even a single doctor’s advice, but this serious misuse of power is frightening.

I wonder how many people were influenced by a single article, study or interview conducted by this physician, who have made decions that not only affect their children’s health but the potential health of infants and elderly who have budding or weak immune systems.

I never thought Indie’s first airplane trip would be out of the country but that’s how it worked out. After talking with a colleague who has taken his small kids on planes we decided to go to…Panama with Kim and her family. Our first airplane trip was really to see Jake’s family over Christmas but an ear infection kept us home. So after getting passports, kid-sized luggage, and finding out the ins and outs of car seats once we arrived, we went for it! And it was SO WORTH IT. For a lot of reasons.

1) It’s fun to travel in a big crazy group.
2) We enjoyed HOT summer weather in February.
3) We overcame our fear of traveling with our toddler on an airplane.

The flight was so early, but that worked out to our benefit because she napped on the plane and later, on a hammock.

I was ready for a few things like not having a crib in the room. We decided to sleep like sardines for the week. One thing I hadn’t anticipated — no bathtubs in two of the places we stayed. So we did a sponge bath/shower combo although she’s kind of afraid of the shower. Eventually I filled the bathroom sink with bubbles and dunked her bottom. One morning when I left the breakfast table to take a shower she announced to everyone that “Mommy was going to put her butt in the bubbles.” It makes sense that a country in a very hot climate people aren’t soaking in the bathtub.

Although kids crave routine, they get bored easily. But I didn’t observe too much of that. We did a new activity each day, so there was always something new to look at. When she got tired, she napped in stroller and slept through a few meals that way. I’m eager to try the different foods in the area where I travel but when traveling with kids, it’s sometimes just worth it to go with what you know. We struggled to order a Happy Meal in Spanish but managed to get some pollo nuggets at Mickey Ds.

But what a beautiful country. We started out at the Gamboa Rainforest Resort and did a few local tours; the Panama Canal, the historic part of the city (with brand new ice cream shop!) and logged many hours in and around the pool. That was key to keeping the kiddos entertained and helped to tire them out.

A few days later we drove to Pedasi and stayed at Casita Margarita. Read the Evoy and Evoy blog for more details.

My mom always liked to see a rainbow of colors on our plates and I feed Indie in the same way. The more colors, the more vitamins she’s getting. The more veggies and fruits she’s eating, the less packaged food she’s eating.

Rather than focus too narrowly on the food pyramid by day, some experts recommend thinking about what you and your chlid are eating throughout the week? Missed some veggies veggies Monday? Try again on Tuesday. Indie happens to really like orange things lately. Oranges, carrots, cheddar cheese and goldfish crackers. Ok that last one isn’t a healthfood but it’s not potato chips either, so I figure she might as well have fun with it. Some weeks she vetoes yogurt, what I consider nature’s wonder food, and this week she keeps asking for it.

There’s an interesting Q&A about “green” parenting in the NYT this week. I do find it hard to believe that people are hard-wired to love salty, over-the-top sugary foods but rather we’re more susceptible to the advertising that accompanies fast food. I still eat the occassional fast food meal on the road but my tastes and preferences for food were built on a foundation of eating at home most of the time. So are Indie’s. She eats her share of french fries but asks for pears, applesause, carrots, etc.

I also liked the point in the article that children don’t need to eat bland food all the time, to eat what the parents eat. So although I give Indie chicken nuggets and applesauce, she also gets a sampling of the bean dish or spicy noodles we might be having at the adult dinner hour. Also we’re trying the purees from the cookbook I mentioned in an earlier post. Success! They were very good and not noticable, except that my mac n cheese was more orange than usual. No worries, that’s Indie’s favorite color this month!

Anyone who watched the Yo Gabba Gabba episode with the refrain “Try it, You’ll like It” or read Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham knows that there are a lot of picky eaters out there. Indie, once the Wonder Eater, has become a bit more selective about what she’s willing to try. She’s not interested in mashed potatoes, for instance, and this seems like the one thing every kid eats. But she loves her strawberries, blueberries, carrots and corn, so I’m not too worried about her nutrition. She’s getting lots of good stuff. But I was intrigued by this cookbook written by Jessica Seinfeld.

This book has some great recipes! I’m thinking that it’s less about hiding veggies but consciously incorporating good stuff into the comfort foods I love so much. I love potato soup but am doubtful that there’s a lot of great nutrition in that meal. However, add some carrot and cauliflower puree to this soup and voila! Same goes for homemade macaroni and cheese, a house favorite with the adults but again Indie is lukewarm on it anyway so I might as well “health it up” while she’s still figuring out what food should taste like. She’s not a big meat eater so I give her fake chicken nuggets and soy hot dogs and she eats them up. So I kind of think that because there are so many varieties of packaged food and lots of recpes to make your own, she won’t necessarily think there’s only one way mac n cheese should taste. But then…on the flip side…

It’s possible I’ve contributed to her picky eating or food snobbery. I bought some cheese sticks from Target that were different from her usual brand. When we got home I gave her one and I also wanted a snack and opened up my Cracker Barrel sharp cheddar to have with crackers. The next thing I know she is throwing her cheese stick on the floor and asking for a piece of the cheese I was eating. So now she’s a cheese snob. Boy, elementary school lunchtime is going to be a lot of fun! I’ll just have to pack her Grey Poupon in her backpack and call it a day. Maybe it comes in fun size!?

I’ll circle back to Deceptively Delicious after I’ve tried a few recipes. We’re about to get socked with another snow storm so it’s likely that I’ll make both of these dishes this weekend. Stay tuned.

As a journalist in search of balance, I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the claim that Jessica borrowed (without crediting) her ideas from the author of The Sneaky Chef. The outcome of the court case was that neither copyright nor trademark law was broken. It’s very coincidental that the two books came out around the same time and have similar themes and recipes. I suspect neither author is the true “first” on this one; I”m pretty sure moms across the world have been sneaking carrot puree into batches of brownies since the invention of fire.