Monthly Archives: April 2010

Food for thought

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I consider myself a devoted fan of breastfeeding. Having been at it for so long now, I can hardly be anything else. I may not be so vocal as some of my friends, nor so good at advocating for it (hi, Mrs. Q !), though I do my best to encourage in a non-judgemental manner, but I am certainly very pro the feeding of the babies via the natural method of the breastular devices ready-attached to the maternal unit. Mostly I like it because I can be lazy and know I’m doing the best for my kids at the same time. What’s not to love?

But. However. And yet.

I can’t help wondering if something about nursing on demand has led us to where we are now with Monkey’s eating, and if I’m unwittingly heading down the same path with Miss. (Though for the record, Monkey eschewed almost all food from the beginning: Miss has a much wider repertoire and I hope to keep it that way. She eats strawberries, and pasta, and broccoli for heaven’s sake, so something must be going right. Even if she seems to have gone off the erstwhile staple of scrambled eggs lately.)

But when you nurse a baby whenever they ask for it, how do you also establish regular mealtimes? If they just nursed at 11.37, they’re not going to be hungry for lunch at 12.00. Or did they comfort nurse rather than hunger nurse? Am I supposed to be paying attention to that? How can I even tell, really?

I know that’s simplifying things: gradually one can cut down on the nursing, start saying no when a mealtime is coming up, make sure they’re reasonably hungry for lunch and dinner, nurse afterwards, whatever. It all makes lots of sense on paper, but it’s tough to do. Especially when they go from not-remotely-hungry to way-too-hungry in the blink of an eye, and then it’s nursing or nothing. At least, that’s how my kids seem to be, and Monkey was an extreme example.

So here we are, he’s four, and in a fit of would-be maturity he announced that he would no longer need “bed-side” in the evening. Which cuts him down to just once a day, when he wakes up. I was delighted and took him up on the offer post-haste. Every evening since the first, he’s asked for his bed-side, I’ve said, “But you don’t have bed-side any more. You’re four now,” and he’s taken it remarkably philosophically. He got himself into this mess, after all. (I’d call it a pickle but for the tragic irony. A pickle is a vegetable, you know.) But the trouble is that the deficit in his nutrition is evident. He wasn’t just comfort sucking before bed: that was a whole meal going on there.

This has thrown his eating habits into even starker relief, and I don’t think they’re going to go down too well with the doctor at his four-year checkup on Friday. A typical day goes like this: Morn-side at the crack of dawn. Mooch around refusing anything to eat for a couple of hours. Finally ingest a few oatmeal squares or frosted-mini wheats just before leaving for school, with some juice (fruit and vegetable juice, thank you very much) or honey milk (his new obsession). Just milk at snack at school, unless it happens to be a day when they have animal crackers or pretzels or quesadillas – in which case they make him a special one with no cheese, or anything else, in it. Peanut-butter sandwich (crusts cut off) and milk or juice for lunch. Possibly a snack of cheerios mid afternoon, or some chocolate milk if we go to Target or IKEA, or some bagel if we’re in the supermarket. And… it’s starting to look like another peanut-butter sandwich for dinner.

The best I can say is that he doesn’t get any junk – no cookies or ice cream or cake on a normal day unless he has actual food, and even then only a tiny bit. He doesn’t even like fizzy drinks. I try to avoid high fructose corn syrup in our bread and crackers and cereals, if possible. And I don’t buy the sugary cereals – Honey Nut Cheerios is about as exciting as it gets on that front. I’ve been trying to brainstorm with him about foods he might try, and it’s as if he wants to, but he just can’t bring himself to do it. (He has inquired about what foods his father and I don’t like, and now claims that he’ll only eat turnips and mushrooms. Fat chance.) Yesterday he made me buy a can of Chef Boyardwhatsit horrible ravioli, because he liked the ad, but when it came to the crunch, even though I have lost all pride when it comes to bribery and have told him he can have ice cream if he just tastes a new food, he couldn’t even look at it. (Miss wasn’t impressed with it either. Can’t say I blame her.)

The first night he had little or no dinner and woke me at 5.45 the next morning, clearly starving. Last night he appeared by my bed at 3.45, and I had to give him some emergency middle-of-the-night side to get him back to sleep. (After I pushed him off he requested cereal, but by the time I got back from the kitchen he’d dropped off again.) Tonight at least he had the sandwich, but this really doesn’t seem like a balanced diet. I really hope it keeps him till morning, but I don’t know. If he suddenly has a growth spurt, we’ll be up a gum tree.

In my more pessimistic moments I wonder if the doctor will say we need some sort of food therapy. Is he considerably worse than your average picky eater? Is the breastmilk the only thing standing between him and actual malnutrition? I keep telling myself that if he’s hungry enough he’ll eat – which is true: he just doesn’t see why he should eat anything different. He’s remarkably healthy and, while on the small side, I don’t think his growth has fallen off the curve or anything; neither his father nor I come from tall families. But whenever I see that ad for Pediasure, where they show a child who – horrors – refuses both fish and broccoli, and therefore has some gaps in her food triangle that must be filled with delicious chocolate-flavoured anti-Slimfast, or whatever the stuff actually is, I have to laugh, hollowly.

Guest Post

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Things I learnt on the way to Boston to see my dad run in the marathon, by Monkey (who will say he’s aged three and a half until the day he turns four, which coincidentally, is next Saturday).

1. Colouring is now a viable way to pass the time on a long car journey.
Parental reaction: excellent news. Must bring more than two crayons next time.

2. Fruit Loops are a delicious and healthy breakfast food.
Parental reaction: Not so thrilled. Wonders why he won’t approach other new foods with this much enthusiasm. Probably because they don’t come in neon colours.

3. More than my mother ever suspected my father knew about superheroes and their nemeses.

4. That my parents can always find a new and interesting way to get lost when trying to pass through upper Manhattan as quickly as possible on the way from New Jersey to Connecticut.

Things I did not learn.

How to fall asleep before 10.30pm when sharing a hotel room with my parents and baby sister.

A note from The Management:

A big thank you to the lovely people of Boston and everywhere else, who helped me get my enormous stroller and two children (one of whom was almost always asleep) onto and off the most crowded trains I’ve been on since rush hour at Sydney Parade at Christmas when Funderland is on, and up and down the stairs of the T, as we headed off to support B on his run, which went really well.

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Social skills

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Watching your almost-four-year-old go out there and put his heart on the line is just a bit gut-wrenching.

Scene i: The park by the lake, waiting for a friend to show up for a playground playdate. We were a bit early and some teenagers were playing basketball. Monkey wanted to play too, but I discouraged him, as I could see they wouldn’t even hear his advances, let alone welcome the diminutive company. Then they went away and were replaced by a solitary smaller boy – about six, I thought. Monkey really wanted to play with him, so I said, “Well, why don’t you go over and ask him if you can?” And watched my beautiful open-hearted boy head off to have his feelings trampled all over. There was a short exchange and he came back to me slowly, and a little confused. “He said ‘No’.”

What can you say? I told him I was sorry, that some big kids just don’t want to play with littler ones, that maybe he just wanted to play on his own today.

Scene ii: The bigger kids, the ones who are all of five years old and in their last year of nursery school, were gathered in a huddle to one side of the playground. (A different playground, a different day.) Monkey, who is in this playground himself one of the big kids when beside the three- and two-year-olds, is a good half-head shorter than the bunch, but still hovers gamely, drawn in by the shiny scooter one of the boys has. We have to go, so I head over to get him just as he’s asking for a turn and being knocked back.

“But why can’t I? Why won’t he share his scooter with me?”

Again, I fumble for a reason. Because he doesn’t want to. Because he’s bigger than you. Because he doesn’t really know you. Because his mum isn’t here to make him, because he’s five and you don’t hover over your five-year-old making sure he shares nicely with the others any more.

Scene iii: Monkey, indefatigable, wants everyone to know him. He insists that we tell the employee at the flooring center, where we’re looking for floor-tile samples, his name (even though he’s shy and doesn’t want to tell him himself). We try to explain that you don’t have to tell everyone your name, but eventually we do, and Jerry – his name’s Jerry – is very nice back. Maybe life would be a bit nicer if we did tell everyone our name.

Scene iv: I overhear Monkey at today’s playground, as he approaches one of the mentally disabled teenagers who goes to school near there: “My name’s Monkey. And my baby sister is called Baby Miss.” The boy doesn’t really know what to say, and soon heads off elsewhere. I muse about whether I should mention how some of the big kids here are “different”. Everyone’s different, when you’re three. Why would he notice the subtle cues that lead adults to assess that someone isn’t quite right, is not the full shilling, is other? Why should it matter? I think, until it matters, that’s a conversation we don’t need to have.

However, I think a conversation we maybe do need to have is the old-fashioned one about strangers. I know that current thinking is that rather than teach “stranger danger”, we tell kids always to let us know before they go anywhere with anyone. Yes, I completely agree. But how do I explain that while it’s fine to introduce yourself to another kid in the playground, you shouldn’t introduce yourself to the old man wandering shoeless in the park? Or that even though the lady who brings his lemonade in a restaurant tells us her name, we don’t have to tell her ours in return? Or maybe I need to take some lessons in openness and sociability from my son.

Carseats, other people’s business, a rant

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I was in line in Old Navy this morning (where, incidentally, I bought a pair of shorts without trying them on, due to the sleeping baby strapped to my back, and lo they actually fit and are nice, which makes the first pair of shorts I’ve bought in, what, eight years? Since my old pair – singular: Irish people don’t need many pairs of shorts – are from Dorothy Perkins and go up to my belly button, but they’re a good length so I keep them around… this is not the point I was trying to make…) as I was saying, there were two women in front of me with a baby in a carseat on top of their shopping trolley/cart. The baby was about three months old, I’m guessing, fairly big, but not very mobile. Certainly not wriggly like mine would have been even at that age, because I realised as soon as I looked at him that he wasn’t strapped in and the angle the seat was at on top of the trolley made him look as if he would slip out at any moment. (You know, or you do if you’ve ever used one for this purpose, that when you rest a carseat on top of the kiddy-seat part of of a shopping trolley, it always puts it at some precipitous angle, so that your child is either staring straight up being blinded by the ceiling lights or about to slip out onto the floor. Your strapped-in child, that is. Only Babies R Us, I’ve found, have big enough spaces there to fit it at the right angle.)

Breathe. New paragraph. I’m getting a headache again, that’s how much looking at this baby stressed me out. I was trying to figure out what sort of gravity was keeping him there, and when he’d start fidgeting and slither out, and if there were even any straps behind him at all – you can see that these people were having a long discussion about where their Old Navy card was and who had lost whose card and so on while I was thinking all these thoughts – and I would have really liked to say something but I didn’t want to look like a superior sort of busybody who felt she was better than these people and somehow was accusing them of not loving him, especially when his grandma (I think) took him out and started kissing him just as I would have done. And I saw that there were straps in the seat but they were down too low for him, since he was a big baby and they hadn’t been moved since the very first newborn slots, and I tried to make excuses for his mother, that maybe she was run off her feet with five other kids in the house and a full-time job and no husband and maybe she really didn’t have a second to check the manual every time her baby grew another half inch and maybe standing here buying sweaters that she was saying she didn’t really need was all the time she had and who was I to tell her to spend it looking out for her baby’s safety. (I fully admit that Miss was badly secured in her carseat for at least a week after we got our new car, before I took it to a carseat safety event thingy where they told me not to use the Latch system after all, that she was much more secure if we went back to the old way of using the seatbelt, just while she’s still rear-facing in the convertible seat: I merely mention this as a PSA in case it happens to you.)

But they I noticed that both women had inch-long nails with swirly designs painted on them. And I got a bit annoyed and thought, You could at least have maybe skipped the salon for one week and checked out the car seat manual to keep your baby safe. And they finally finished up and put him back in the carseat and proceeded NOT to strap him in, and THEN the mother said to him, crossly, “Sit back. Sit back. You gotta sit back,” as if this scrap of a thing had any clue what that meant, and as if that would keep him safe. Does she tell him to sit back in the car as they hurtle down the beltway at 60mph? Or did she actually use the straps when she put him into the car?

I don’t know. Steam was coming out of my ears as they left the shop and I bought my shorts with a very bad grace, wondering still if I should have said soemthing. Did I keep quiet becasue they were two large African American ladies who would have thought this skinny white girl with the baby whose head was clearly lolling unsupported on her back thought she was better than they were? Would it have been racist? Sizeist? Classist? Might it have helped the baby? I think I said nothing mostly because I’m non-confrontational, and also because I doubted it would do any good except to get their backs up. Maybe they got the seat second-hand and don’t have the manual. Maybe the manual got lost, or burned up in a fire, or eaten by wild animals. Maybe they have no access to a computer and no time to look it up, and don’t know anyone to ask, or maybe they just don’t care. I know that it’s not nearly as easy to get your carseat checked out at a police station or fire station as it’s always made out to be – last time I called our local police station they said “We no longer offer that service,” and when I asked where else I could go locally they had no idea.

So should I have said something? Would you?

Jammy tigers

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In Ireland, spring is a leisurely affair. Over the course of many weeks, spring sproings slowly, with plenty of false starts and teasing back-and-forths. It begins with a snowdrop or two in January or February, and finally reaches its apex with the cherry blossom in May. Ususally the daffodils are out by St Patrick’s Day, but there are no guarantees.

Much like summer in Ireland, where we say, “Oh, I remember last summer. It was a Tuesday,” spring here comes and is gone in a flash. One day we were under two feet of snow; the next – or so it seemed – the white blossoms had popped like popcorn all over, and now we have daffodils and tulips and cherry trees, oh my. The green leaves are already revealing themselves behind the white blossoms and in a week or so it’ll all be over bar the shouting. No wonder they have a festival here, otherwise it would be finished before you’d even managed to pay attention and think you should go look at some trees.

It’s Easter and we’ve been partaking in secular celebrations. There was an egg hunt (“hunt” implies there was some sort of search involved; it was more of a fast egg collection, really, since they were all just lying there in the grass waiting for the hordes of basket-wielding, flouncy-dress-wearing munchkins) yesterday, and another at a party today. Monkey has a huge haul of small plastic eggs containing stickers, M&Ms, and jelly beans, while Miss was just as happy collecting stones as eggs. It was pure chance that I didn’t make a comment about all the work one of the mums had put into filling and hiding all 300 eggs this afternoon, because somehow it completely bypassed my notice that this was supposedly done by the Easter Bunny. In Ireland, there’s no such thing. You get a chocolate egg from your parents, and maybe another from your grandparents, and maybe some more from assorted relatives and friends, especially if you’re an only child like I was, and then you gorge yourself silly on substandard chocolate-flavoured substance and doom the planet with all the unrecyclable plastic packaging. At least, that’s how it used to be done. But there were no mythical beings to worry about.

Speaking of mythical beings, Monkey sometimes wakes in the night, or doesn’t want to go to sleep, because he’s afraid of tigers. (Just now. It was a scary giant last year.) In these instances, I find it’s easier to work with what you have than to tell them not to think about it, because there’s nothing harder than trying not to think of a scary tiger, or giant, or three-horned dragon with purple spots, or whatever it is that’s bothering you. So, in much the same fashion as Harry Potter vanquishing a Boggart, I try to make it ridiculous, and told Monkey that the tigers weren’t after him, they just wanted jam sandwiches and were looking for him to open the fridge for them because they don’t have thumbs. Now he says they like jam made of little boys. I’m not sure how to deal with that one.

Spring Break

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Monkey traps me by lying across my legs; Miss sits on his head. “This is my evil plan,” he cackles.

After a long day with a lot of sunshine, wherein Monkey had some amount of difficulty following direction (which is parenting-speak for was a pain in the ass and went out of his way to do exactly the opposite of what he was asked), both children conked out at 5.30. So I put them in bed and went on my way.

The house was eerily quiet as I made dinner, and I thought, This is what it will be like when they’re old and I have time to myself again. This is what it used to be like all the time. How strange. How silent. How odd not to have to keep looking up to make sure nobody’s killing anybody, not to have to worry that the quiet is an ominous sign of someone getting up to no good.

(Tell me I’m not the only mother who sometimes finds her children have gone to bed without actually getting round to eating dinner. No, I probably am.)

Miraculously, they slept until the usual time in the morning, with only the usual number of wakings (Monkey: one, alleged bad dream, nursed and took a while to fall back to sleep. Miss: several, for one of which she was very awake telling me, “Dora. Dolly.” But she nursed back to sleep after a while too.)

At the playground this morning, Monkey, of course, needed to go. So we found a tree and he went, as per usual. A little while later, Miss was observed to stand herself in front of a much less secluded tree (right beside the picnic table, in fact) and proceed to lift up her shirt and arch her back.
“Is she … peeing against the tree?” asked one of the other mums.
“Um. Maybe we need to stop answering the call of nature in nature quite so often.”