Monthly Archives: April 2011

Cereal offender

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When I first moved to the USA, I was baffled and bedazzled by the supermarket aisles, with their millions of unfamiliar foodstuffs in such enormous quantities. The cereal aisle, in particular, took my breath away. I’ve always been a fan of cereal – Rice Krispies for breakfast every morning of my childhood, two Weetabix after I came home from school, a packet of Kellogg’s Variety mini boxes for a treat every now and then, with Coco Pops as the highlight of the week. As I got older, I embraced Special K – because the very act of eating it makes you thinner; and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes are like Frosties for grownups.

But cereal in America didn’t taste the same. Between the extra sweetness of even my favourite old reliables, and the funny taste of the milk – no matter what percentage I got – it tasted weird. The milk here is different from my beloved Avonmore SuperMilk of yore, but I think a major part of the difference can be boiled down to four little letters: HFCS.

When I found out about high-fructose corn syrup, I decided I didn’t like the sound of it very much. Call me insular, but I felt it would be better for my palate and my health to try to keep the basics of my diet in the US as much like my Irish diet as I could.

Initially, this was because I didn’t want to move home and find that nothing was sweet enough for me any more. Now that I have two small people relying on me for their nourishment (directly and in-), I’m continuing to avoid HFCS as much as I can in our everyday foods. At first I felt that my reasoning was a bit feeble: if I didn’t grow up with it, and if they wouldn’t get it in Ireland, I don’t want them to have it here. Then I read about Michael Pollan’s and discovered that one of his rules for eating is that if your grandmother wouldn’t recognise it, it’s not food. So I felt vindicated, because I’m pretty sure neither of my grandmothers would have an iota what that sickly sweet stuff was, or what it would be doing in bread, crackers, yogurt, or corn flakes.

I’m not obsessive about what my children eat: they’re not allergic to anything, and if there’s candy from Easter or Halloween or parties, they can have it; but since Monkey’s diet in particular is so limited, I do try to rein him in on the blatantly anti-nutritious goodies while I still can. I’ve managed to eliminate HFCS from the bread, cereal, crackers, yogurt, ketchup, ice cream, and even the cookies that we buy on a regular basis (the kids don’t get the cookies: I do). If Monkey has Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Ritz crackers in school for snack, I’m not going to make a fuss, but I don’t buy them for home consumption. When he has chocolate milk, I try to make sure it’s the sort without HFCS.

I don’t spend hours reading labels: I just find the item I want, and then it becomes part of our regular shopping list. Did you know, for instance, that Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats have HFCS in them, but the Safeway own-brand ones don’t? Isn’t that strange?

So. (That was just the back story.) As you may know, we like to go to IKEA every once in a while. (Though I must admit that since the buying-things-for-the-new-house frenzy has calmed down, I find fewer excuses to go.) Now, it’s not that I think of IKEA as a bastion of health food, but they do make a big deal of their kids’ food options. The chocolate milk there is HFCS-free, so that’s something, and usually, assuming I could run the gauntlet of ice-cream demands, I would get the children a yogurt each and be happy with a sticky bun for myself.

But lately, it has seemed that every time we go to IKEA, Mabel ends up like a whirling dervish, acting like someone who’s an hour past her naptime even when there’s still an hour to go. The last time this happened, it finally dawned on me that maybe I should be putting two and two together. The yogurt in IKEA is Trix yogurt: a small pot aimed directly at the jugular of youth, with pink and yellow dairy product together in one HFCS-enhanced sludge. I looked it up when we got home. If you google “Trix yogurt,” the first two hits after an ad for “Nutrition to help your kids grow up strong” and some images, are a series of blog posts detailing how horrible Trix really is, how it’s a big old pile of nothing good for you complemented by totally unneccesary additives and colourings.

So maybe, just maybe, that’s what sets Mabel off like an increasingly intractable rocket each time we go there. It could be the HFCS itself, since she’s not used to it, but it’s more likely the infusion of Red #40 and Blue #1 as well as the unnamed artificial flavourings.

I’d have been better off letting them have the ice-cream, except that now I want to know what they put in that, and it doesn’t come with an ingredients list printed on the cone.

Look me in the cleavage and tell me the truth

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Guess what I did this week? No, I didn’t hoover the upstairs carpet (though I did con B into doing that a couple of weeks ago, so it should be good for another, what, three months?); I called the number about laser eye surgery . My excuse for procrastinating has been that I can’t ever make phone calls during the day, because as soon as the children see I’m on the phone, they rush over to yell in my ear or demand impossible things or fall over and hurt themselves or bring the toy shelves crashing to the floor, and only people I’m related to can be expected to deal with a phone call punctuated by “Stop that” and “Get down” and “In a minute” and “Just wait till I’m finished” and “Go! Away!”

So on Monday when I cunningly sent B and the children down the hill to the local egg hunt (postponed from Saturday when it had been raining), ostensibly so that I could ice the cupcakes for Monkey’s party that afternoon, I also took five minutes to make the damn phone call.

And guess what? My themes interlock effortlessly, as it turns out I can’t have laser surgery till three months after I stop breastfeeding. (Of course, they still want my money, so I’m booked in for a preliminary exam in a couple of weeks anyway, which is free unless I forget to ring them back and tell them that I won’t be doing it, and how could I possibly forget that; but it’s true enough that I may as well find out whether I’m a candidate up front rather than keeping the notion in the back of my mind for another year and then finding out that it’s not going to happen at all.)

The nice man asked me when I thought I’d be done with the nursing.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“How old is your baby?” he asked later in the conversation.
“Well, she’s two-and-a-half… but she likes to nurse…”

I’m happy to find that I’m not suddenly planning to wean just so I can go and have people stick lasers in my eyes. I think my priorities are in the right place. But maybe this will prove to be the long-term goal I’m aiming for whenever it may happen that I decide it’s time to call a halt. (Sometimes you really need a future subjunctive in English, don’t you?)

Mabel’s half-birthday is next Wednesday, and I’ve told her that she’ll be able to go to sleep on her own after that, like a big girl, like Monkey does. I’m planning to (maybe, hopefully, we’ll see how it goes) cut out the mid-morning and mid-afternoon nursing sessions she likes to indulge in if we’re at home doing nothing much, and try to cut it down to just morning, naptime, and bedtime – but then to stop after ten minutes rather than nursing her all the way to sleep, and get her to work it out for herself. This will take some doing, and some will power (and frankly, I’m not sure I’m up to her weight when it comes to will power), but if we manage it, my hope is that perhaps she’ll figure out how to put herself back to sleep without me when she wakes in the night too.

You can see by all my prevaricationary vocabulary there that I’m not entirely fully on board with my plan. But I have to start somewhere.

She’s a big girl, after all.

Wednesdays

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I may have mentioned our regular Wednesday lunchtime playgroup thingy before. It’s a community group of parents and caregivers who meet up with their kids at the playground if the weather’s good, or in a room in one of the community buildings if it’s bad. (We get the use of the room for free, as long as nobody else needs it, thanks to some long-ago donation of toys that we and other kids can use.) There’s a listserv and a Facebook page too, but the people who show up on Wednesdays are the really the core of the group.

The playdate officially starts at 11.00 and goes on till about 1pm or whenever the last people leave, though there’s a major influx just after 11.30, when the nursery school across the road lets out. We bring lunches of varying levels of healthiness, and the kids do what kids do, and we get to talk to other adults; and nobody minds if you have to leave the table mid-sentence to go and disentangle someone from the monkey bars or if your toddler steals all their toddler’s snacks. (Well, the toddlers might mind, but the parents are gracious.) Everyone keeps an eye on everyone else, and there’s an understanding that the general rules of engagement are the same for all the children.

On mornings like this, when Mabel ran away at least twice and was caught by someone else before I’d even figured out what was going on, I am more than grateful to my village. In return, I introduced a 22-month-old to my pineapple and later headed several two-year-olds off at the pass when they scrambled up the hill and in the general direction of the road.

Every year around this time I start looking at the group and thinking wistfully of the children who won’t be with us next year. As a new generation of babes-in-arms grow in to cruisers who can navigate the bottom of a slide or hog the baby swings like their brothers and sisters before them, and this season’s toddlers become next season’s fully-fledged playground consumers, those who are turning five before September are not long for this world. Next year they’ll be gone to the land known as Kindergarden, where the days are long and lunch is always indoors. If they don’t have younger siblings to carry the flag, their parents are gone from our group too, to that mysterious world of PTA meetings and recess and homework where we can’t follow until our time comes.

Next year I’ll be straddling both dimensions, still attending our Wednesday get-togethers, but with only Mabel, who as a three year old, will be right in the middle of the steps-of-stairs of kids (except when she’s heading the escape posse). And Monkey will have graduated.

Tales from the boob

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One day last week, in a moment of inattention, I asked Mabel if she’d just get off the boob so I could go and do something. Monkey happened to be listening; maybe it was something he’d asked me to do that I wanted to get up for. Anyway, he thought it was hi lar ious. Somehow, even though as far as he’s concerned breasts are called “booboos” and that’s perfectly normal and unfunny, he picked up on my use of “boob” and has decided to run with it. So now he keeps saying “Can you get off the boob, Mabel? Can you get back on the boob, Mabel?” and laughing uproariously at the comedy gold of it all.

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I was just upstairs putting Mabel to bed a minute ago. (At least, I started to. At time of writing she’s “reading” to herself over the monitor and I’ll be called back any minute to continue the job.) She was feeling particularly angelic and affectionate, blowing kisses and proffering hugs on demand, and as we lay down she put an arm over my breast in an odd contortion. I asked her what she was doing. “I’m hugging the mumeet,” she said.

************

Sometimes when Mabel is nursing in his vicinity, especially just after her nap when we’re all on the sofa, Monkey tries to cop a feel. (He’s still very much a breast man, and I suspect he always will be.) I used to tolerate it, but more and more it’s starting to drive me demented. I have told him that it’s just not appropriate, and then explained what that means. The other day I heard Mabel telling off one of her dolls for some infraction: “It’s not a- po -pi-et.” Then it came up in rear-seat conversation: “You’re not appropriate,” Monkey told her, a propos of nothing at all. “Yes I am . I am a- po -pi-et.”

Five

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So now I am the proud co-owner of a five-year-old. We’ll see how that goes. So far, I’m cautiously optimistic, although we’re currently in a bathroom regression phase, and he’s still subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and air (and cake; lots of cake), but his heart’s definitely in the right place. (Under his ribs, above his stomach, that sort of thing.)

Five years is half a decade, which doesn’t sound like very long until it’s your whole life so far. But it also means it’s five years since I had a full-time paying job outside the home, five years since I slept all night without so much as getting up to pee, five years since my breasts were my own and not someone else’s meal ticket, and five years since I sent my metaphorical heart out on a metaphorical limb, whence it will probably never return, because that’s what you do when you have children.

Seasonally appropriate musings

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On Friday we went to a playdate, and I brought gingerbread muffins, because chocolate chips seemed inappropriate for Good Friday. I decided gingerbread, while not exactly redolent of repentance, was just that bit more sombre.

This year, with Easter Sunday falling handily on Monkey’s fifth birthday, any quibbling about bunnies that may or may not leave gifts for other children or demands for luridly coloured marshmallow birdies have been pushed far out of the way by considerations like cake and ice cream and cupcakes and tomorrow’s party. I’m pretty sure any notion Monkey may have had that there’s anything else going on this weekend has been expunged from his memory. We were going to an egg hunt yesterday morning, but it was rained off.

I think it’s at this time of year, even more than at Christmas, that I miss the pomp and circumstance of church. Once again, I puzzle over how to mark the special times of the calendar for my children without reducing everything to a present-grab or a frenzy of candy and chocolate and Red 40. I’d almost like to bring them to church, except that at this age they wouldn’t last five minutes in the quiet alien environment, and anyway, it feels hypocritical. Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday of the year to the Church, and the priest always used to issue a special welcome to anyone who wouldn’t normally be there (mind you, he’d say that at Christmas too). But even if I just crept in on my own to sit at the back and soak up the atmosphere or listen to the music or whatever I’d be there for, I imagine I’d feel either to a greater or lesser degree like an interloper and a hypocrite. I know they’re all for the return of the lost sheep, but maybe not the return and immediate departure again for another year or three.

I do believe that the world works in mysterious ways, whether God is involved or not.

I do believe that there are far more amazing things than we can fathom on heaven and earth, even if I don’t necessarily believe in Heaven.

I do believe above all that we should treat others as we would like them to treat us, regardless of irrelevant details such as race, colour, creed, or sexual orientation.

And I definitely believe that my gorgeous family is a gift, a privilege and a blessing, though couldn’t say whether it comes from God or karma or the amazing random universe. In a way, it’s all the same thing, so it doesn’t matter.

Maybe we’ll just blast Handel’s Messiah on the iPod every Easter and leave it at that.

Snips and snails

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Monkey has been thrown in among the two-year-olds quite a bit lately, thanks to the school break, and I have to say that he plays nicely with the younger kids – all that practice with Mabel must be paying off, or something. Though I’ve noticed that often, while parents are keen to pair kids of the same age off – the closer the better, for some reason – they often interact more happily when there’s a bit of an age gap. Monkey plays well with seven-year-olds and two-year-olds – maybe it’s because there’s less jockeying for position when the natural order of leader and follower is so obvious, and everyone prefers it that way.

Yesterday he wanted to play hide and seek in the back garden. He hid first and Mabel found him pretty quickly. Then it was Mabel’s turn. Monkey covered his eyes and counted to some random number – maybe it was twelve, and Mabel crouched down exactly where she was, her dark pink stripey t-shirt contrasting beautifully with the tufty new green grass. When Monkey looked up, he was momentarily discombobulated to see her right there in front of him, but he recovered beautifully. “Where’s Mabel?” he asked the world at large. “Where could she be?” He proceeded to walk straight past her and wander round the garden a bit, and then came back and sat down on her. “This is a nice round rock,” he commented. “Why is this rock laughing?”

I looked on and was all quite glowy with pride in my great son.

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And then, there are times like this:

- Mummy, do you want to see a Scrumbly-Wumbly?
- Wha–Gah! What are you doing? Doesn’t that hurt?
- No – look. You just roll it up like this, and then you pull down your scrotum and put your penis inside and squish it in and then … ta-da! It pops back out. And that’s a Scrumbly-Wumbly.
- Okay. Right. Just finish up, please.
- But don’t you want to see a Scrunchy-Wunchy?

As was pointed out to me the other day, he may have a great career ahead of him with these people . I’m glad that other options may present themselves if the metal-making for universal jet-packs doesn’t work out, but I think I might just keep quiet about this avenue for the time being, lest he start practicing in public.

Spring Busy

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Spring Break snuck up on me this week, as these things always do, and it was Saturday or so before the twin facts that all the toddler classes are taking a break and Monkey has no school all week impinged on my brain and I understood that I would be responsible for directing operations for both children all day every day without so much as a gymborama or a music time to distract us. Never mind having to do the grocery shopping and go to the post office and things like that with not one but two in tow.

On Monday morning I got the shopping over with early, and it didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped (child B runs away, totally, to another aisle; child A delightedly chases her, feeling all righteous and justified about it; I prevaricate halfway along the cereals straining to hear which end I should be aiming the giant truck-trolley for; they both appear in front of the milk fridges at the top end, where Monkey appears to be practising his cop moves with a most impressive wrestle-her-to-her-knees maneuver; I hope everyone understands it’s all in good fun, and go to restrain the perpetrator in the seats up front, only to discover that this, the supermarket’s most-coveted Blue Car, has no functioning straps so I can’t keep her anywhere, and the shopping’s only half done… anyway, I was a bit frazzled by the end of all that), but we managed to meet up with friends at a slightly different playground from usual and the rest of the morning went well enough.

The afternoon, mind you, was a moderate disaster, since it turns out that the only thing more stressful than getting the kids out of the house in the after-nap period is not managing to get them out at all. There was some dismantling of the sofa, some pulling out of the phone wires, some fighting over stuff, some dumping water out of the bath, some dumping the towels into the bath… it was tedious. I needed some wine.

Tuesday morning was much better: the stars aligned to give me a cloudy morning and no children with colds, and I took them swimming. Monkey got an early birthday present of scuba goggles (he wanted ones that covered his nose as well) and they were so excited they got themselves dressed in record time. We presented ourselves and our sadly under-used membership cards at the reception desk, where Mabel announced “We’re going to go swimming!” to the nice lady, who was impressed. Mabel then went on to tell her all about how the doctor cuts the umbilical cord when a baby is born (we’d been talking about such things in the car, as you do) but luckily the nice lady didn’t understand a word of that. They bobbled around me in the shallow pool for almost an hour, and afterwards Monkey was still talking about how this was the best day ever. Clearly, I should take them swimming just exactly this often, to engender such enthusiasm every time.

On Wednesday we managed a trip to Target without significant loss or injury, and our usual playground date for lunch, and the weather was so hot we had to break out the shorts and t-shirts. In the afternoon we went to a nearby playground-with-sandbox where a reasonable amount of fun was had, though I did have to go and explain to the father of the sobbing three-year-old that my two-year-old had just stomped all over her sand castles. Never my favourite moment.

Now it’s Thursday and I think I’m getting the hang of this, a little. The weather is more seasonal again, so this morning was a different playground and this afternoon will be a quick shopping trip followed by more playground. Tomorrow it’s going to rain, but we have muffins and an indoor playdate on the cards for the morning. By the weekend I’ll be knee-deep in birthday baking, so at this stage I just have to make sure that I’ve got all the eggs and the cocoa and the chocolate chips, and Easter will just have to look after itself.

Detritus

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I’ve just made another batch of chocolate ricotta muffins, to put in the freezer, to take out of the freezer, to bring to school next Tuesday, which will be the day we celebrate Monkey’s birthday at school (being the first day back after Spring Break); and which is also a day I’m co-opping, so I won’t be able to just whip them up after he goes in and bring them down at snack time. How prepared am I? (That was rhetorical. In fact, I’m only a tiny bit prepared. I still have to check I have all the ingredients for the birthday-party cupcakes and probably plan to make a cake the day of the birthday as well, which just so happens to be Easter Sunday. Which is why we have no plans for Easter whatsoever. It has been totally overshadowed by The Birthday, much as dinners have been totally overshadowed by Cake.)

Anyway, as I wait for the muffins and gaze around my – beautiful, gorgeous, lovely – kitchen, I am struck by the amount of sheer crap that takes up a square foot of real estate at the end of the counter. Here is a quick rundown of some of what’s there right now:

  • One giant water pistol, courtesy of last week’s trip to the thrift store with Daddy (he’s the expert on super soakers, having spent many useful hours playing Assassin as a grad student; which if you didn’t know is a long-drawn-out game in which, over the course of several weeks, you try to sneak up on your unsuspecting friends in the Assassin league table and ambush them with a soaking before someone does the same to you; it’s like being a secret agent, only wetter).
  • One clean tea towel, ostensibly on its way to being put away; in reality will probably sit there until called into active duty.
  • One pink water bottle.
  • One children’s library book.
  • One sheet of stickers, mostly used.
  • One tiny skateboard, with associated tiny screwdriver and highly swallowable tiny wheels.
  • One mini-tub of pink playdough.
  • One roll-up plastic eye-shield thingy from Monkey’s first ever visit to the dentist, about two and a half years ago. Despite its ultra-disposable nature, this may never be thrown out, as it is vital to his superhero costuming. It frequently goes missing, for months at a time, due to its small size and transparent nature, and is always re-found with delight.
  • A picture of someone else’s children, from a Christmas card. This sort of thing paralyses me: I can’t put it in the album, but it seems rude to throw it away. But I probably should. I’m sure their mother wouldn’t hold it against me now that it’s Easter.
  • A “chick” in an “egg” in a “nest” that Monkey made at school. On its way to trash as soon as I’m sure he doesn’t care too much.
  • Three lip glosses, either on their way upstairs to my bathroom or in the other direction to be put into a handbag, therefore realistically just living there near the mirror so I can use one before I go out.
  • The prescription eye-drops from the last time someone had pinkeye, which was at least a month ago now. On its way upstairs to the medecine cabinet in case we need it again before its best-before date.
  • A pile of pebbles rescued from Monkey’s jeans before they went into the laundry basket last night. On their way back outside. I hope.
  • Sundry receipts, thank-you cards, duplicate photos, coupons, and instruction leaflets, none of which I can throw out because B might be keeping them for something. 

So I’ll just square them up into a nice neat pile, put the bowl of “things the kids can’t reach” on top (except Monkey can, so now it’s the “bowl of things for Monkey to comb through and find treasures in”) move the book and the water pistol, put the pebbles outside, and call it tidy.

Phased

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It seems my sweet daughter is going through what I’m going to call a little phase. I’m hoping it’s a little phase, and not the phase otherwise known as 2.5 to 3, because six months is a long time, and we’re not even officially at the two-and-a-half point yet.

Before now I’d been fairly confident that Mabel was probably not beating up the other kids, unless she was talking them into submission with a detailed monologue. But lately, just to ensure an end to my smugness, she’s turned a tad, well, violent. With the hitting and the scratching and the biting, oh my. Poor Monkey is most often the recipient, since he’s usually logistically and emotionally closest, and he has that special brotherly trick of provoking her. But then, instead of retreating out of range, he stays where she is and just shouts, “Mummy, Mabel’s hitting me.” Sometimes this is interspersed with “Hit me again,” and “See if you can get me now.”

So I’m trying not to make too big a deal of it. If he’s idiot enough to (a) poke a known tiger and (b) stay there waiting for more, I think he can deal with the consequences. He’s big enough and ugly enough to run away on his own initiative, I think.

On the other hand, of course, Mabel can’t be let away with such behaviour. We look her in the eye and tell her in serious tones, “We don’t hit, Mabel” – and she faithfully, sweetly, and insincerely promises not to do it any more.

She’s not a two-year-old lashing out in frustration or anger because she lacks the words. Mabel has the words to explain pretty much anything she cares to. (Though I do remind myself not to expect too much. She may talk like a three-year-old, but she’s still very much two in every other way.) When I (idiotically) ask her why she’s doing it, she tells me things like “I want to be bad,” or “I’m going to hit him,” or “I just want to.” I think the last one is key: she can, and she’s finding out what happens when she does.

No longer content to do what she’s told just because we say she should (as if that was ever a trait of hers), she has made a new leap of autonomy and understood that she has the power to make people happy or sad, angry or loving. She cuddles up to us one minute, plainly manipulative, declaring adorably, “I wuv you”, and then dances off with the prospect of mischief lighting up her face. She sits in her carseat and tells me, “I’m happy now. I’m happy because you let me take my toys with me.” In stark contrast to before her nap, when she screamed because I had to strap her in.

Her hit is a closed-fisted arm flail: not a deliberate from-the-elbow punch, but not an open-handed slap either. It must come straight from impatient instinct, because it’s not a move she’s seen anyone else execute.  When Monkey was rougly this age, he went through a throwing phase; instead of hitting out with his hands (teeth, feet, nails), he used whatever object was to hand to express his displeasure. We removed the offending objects and told him not to, and in a while (too long a while, I’m sure, while it was ongoing) he stopped. We can’t exactly remove Mabel’s fists from her arms, so we just have to remove her from the object of her disaffection; but I do hope that soon enough I’m reminiscing about how this too was just a phase.