Mimi at Shelagh's Birthday Party

This is another from the rolls of old film. This is Shelagh's birthday party, her first grade year. Shelagh would have been turning 7 this year, so it was 1993, and my Grandma Mimi, in the photo above was 90. Next to Mimi is Ashley Patterson, and the girl in the red bow is Becky Houdek. Mimi always loved children and loved a party, so she had a place at the table for every birthday party.

This is in the kitchen at our house. We used to have cake-and-ice cream birthday parties with musical chairs and Duck Duck Goose. You were allowed to invite only as many kids as the age you were turning, plus your sister, so turning seven made a pretty good party. Shelagh's birthday is just before Christmas, so other pictures on this roll show the girls making Christmas cookies. In another picture Shelagh is proudly modeling the hand me down white shoes that Ashley gave her. Shelagh was thrilled to get white shoes and I was honored that Ashley's mom trusted us enough to give a second hand birthday present.

Today is Mother's Day. All I wanted was to spend time with my family. Anna and I slept late, then went for a walk in the woods. For supper Richard, Anna, and I made half baked pizza crusts and cut all the fixings, then took it all over to my parent's condo and made them dinner. We also had baby lettuce salad and fresh cut tulips.

Swine Flu News

Readers might have wondered why Effect Measure has held the number one spot in my "Blogs I'm Reading now" list. I started reading Effect Measure, an epidemiologists' blog, when I was interested in avian flu and backyard chickens. Mainstream news outlets were desperately trying to take an evolving science story and fit it into the "beginning, middle and end" story formula, preferably with a gripping headline that would get us tuning in again tomorrow and the next day. Effect Measure's editors were engaging in a more collaborative investigation that was much more interesting and to which I, as a backyard chicken keeper, could occasionally contribute some practical observations.

Now, with the swine flu news getting similar treatment, I recommend Effect Measure to readers who want up to date news and science without the premature conclusions. I'm also stocking up on Lysol spray, decongestants, garlic, and chicken soup.

Anna Plays Ball

Anna on the volleyball court.

Anna, my third daughter, is younger than the other two by nearly a decade. She strives to distinguish herself from her sisters, who set the bar high with their academic achievements. Anna has spent seventh grade being a jock, playing basketball, then volleyball, and she is now co-manager of the varsity softball team.

I know little about basketball and less about volleyball. I haven't tried to learn. There seem to be enough parents around who know all of the lingo and all the strategies and who want to tell anyone within earshot what the coach is doing wrong. Seventh grade is when kids are starting to break away from their families and establish their own identities. I'm glad the coaches are there providing venues for kids to try out their newly minted autonomy.

Anna had one basketball coach who yelled, and one who wrote on a clipboard. Her volleyball coaches were mantra-types, repeating the same simple instructions, "Happy stance! Call it! Shuffle shuffle!" In volleyball, the kids were not even supposed to look at the score. They were praised by their coaches for using the proper six-step serving techinique, even if they never got the ball over the net. Once the ball was in play, they were supposed to try for six touches every time the ball came to their side, regardless of scoring possibilities.

Liz said, "Yeah, the seventh and eighth grade teams always lose, but by the time they get to ninth grade they're really good." We shall see. I'm happy to see discipline and practice stressed over "talent", whatever that is. And I'm happy to go to the games and make the popcorn when it's my turn and otherwise enjoy the show.

The Dirt on Kids

Two new articles about parenting came out yesterday, verifying my suspicions about workaholic parents and dirt. The first, from England, details a study that looks at childhood well-being. The headline, Selfish adults 'damage childhood' pretty much says it all:

The aggressive pursuit of personal success by adults is now the greatest threat to British children, a major independent report on childhood says. It calls for a sea-change in social attitudes and policies to counter the damage done to children by society. Family break-up, unprincipled advertising, too much competition in education and income inequality are mentioned as big contributing factors.

The report itself is not likely to be popular, as it points out the detrimental effects that divorce, two working parents, and too much competition in education have on kids. The report's recommendations are interesting:

• a civil birth ceremony conducted by a registrar in which parents publicly accept the responsibilities of parenthood


• free parenting classes available around the time of birth


• free psychological and family support if relationships struggle


• rules making it easier for parents to stay at home to rear their children

And

• abolishing sats tests and league tables in English schools


• a ban on all advertising aimed at the under 12s and no TV commercials for alcohol or unhealthy food before the 9pm watershed


• stopping building on any open space where children play


• a high-quality youth centre for every 5,000 young people

I'm not sure about that last one. I think the high quality play environment ought to be in one's backyard with a parent watching out, but not too close.

This brings us to the second article, sent to me yesterday by Liz. I'm sure she was thinking of the low cost play space she and Shelagh enjoyed when they were young. We had a sandy bank in the yard, and if they begged Dad, he would bring over a shovel and loosen the sand to make a pile to play in and a hole to excavate. The "dirt pile" was a major draw in our yard; kids would get a glimpse of the dirt pile from the back seat and they were all over it, down on their knees and getting dirty before anyone could say no. Often there was a dog or a chicken helping to dig, that's how the they came up with the summer "Chicken Circus" in which chickens would ride on bike handle bars and "fly" though hula-hoops.

I'm sure some readers are clucking to themselves at the unsanitaryness of all this. The article Liz sent, Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You is provocative, but it might gross you out:

Ask mothers why babies are constantly picking things up from the floor or ground and putting them in their mouths, and chances are they’ll say that it’s instinctive — that that’s how babies explore the world. But why the mouth, when sight, hearing, touch and even scent are far better at identifying things?

When my young sons were exploring the streets of Brooklyn, I couldn’t help but wonder how good crushed rock or dried dog droppings could taste when delicious mashed potatoes were routinely rejected.

Since all instinctive behaviors have an evolutionary advantage or they would not have been retained for millions of years, chances are that this one too has helped us survive as a species. And, indeed, accumulating evidence strongly suggests that eating dirt is good for you.......

.....“What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment,” Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, “Why Dirt Is Good” (Kaplan). “Not only does this allow for ‘practice’ of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.”

One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said in an interview that the immune system at birth “is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.”

He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they “also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us.”

“Children raised in an ultraclean environment,” he added, “are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.”

I must admit that it's kind of fun to hear the "ultraclean environment" moms getting scolded for once. They should give up some cleaning and volunteer a little more.

The idea that being infected with intestinal worms conveys an immunity to disease is really new:

Immunologists now recognize a four-point response system of helper T cells: Th 1, Th 2, Th 17 and regulatory T cells. Th 1 inhibits Th 2 and Th 17; Th 2 inhibits Th 1 and Th 17; and regulatory T cells inhibit all three, Dr. Elliott said.

“A lot of inflammatory diseases — multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and asthma — are due to the activity of Th 17,” he explained. “If you infect mice with worms, Th 17 drops dramatically, and the activity of regulatory T cells is augmented.”

In answer to the question, “Are we too clean?” Dr. Elliott said: “Dirtiness comes with a price. But cleanliness comes with a price, too. We’re not proposing a return to the germ-filled environment of the 1850s. But if we properly understand how organisms in the environment protect us, maybe we can give a vaccine or mimic their effects with some innocuous stimulus.”

In the end, we weren't going to keep all of those germs out of the baby's mouth, anyway. It's nice to know that letting them out of the car seat and into the dirt was what they really needed all along.

Blueberry Picking and a Bear

A Trunk Full of Blueberries

I have been working 45-plus hours each week since that break I took for Chris's wedding, so when Richard proposed that we go blueberry picking I was happy to just ride along and look at the scenery. Our final destination was the Baatz Blueberry Farm in Honor, but we took a side trip to the National Park Headquarters to renew our annual park pass, and then to the blueberry patch in the park on Esch Road, where the berries are free, but you have to crawl through the underbrush and overgrowth to get at them.

At the Baatz Farm, there are nice mowed rows and you can pick berries by the handful instead of one by one. I like to pick berries with my husband because we have such good conversations when we work together. Anna has hated blueberry picking in years past and this year I relented at the last minute and let her stay home on the condition that she organize her wardrobe for the start of school. Still, I felt like a bad mom for not requiring her to come along and pick what will be our winter food. A good parent is supposed to make you come along on boring hot car rides to nowhere, right?

We picked 11 quarts of berries in about 2 1/2 hours. It did seem slower without Anna to help. We talked a lot about politics, windmills, Europe, bugs and birds. The berries were $2.00 a heaping quart. We drove back into Honor for cold drinks and then headed home, back past the blueberry signs.

I had been thinking all day that I would see a bear. When we left the house, I felt sad that Anna wasn't with us, thinking "Now she won't see the bear," but knowing that I couldn't promise a bear, that seeing a bear was most unlikely. On Esch Road, there was a smell that immediately brought to mind the old question "Does a bear shit in the woods?" I was paying attention and looking before I crashed through the next set of trees expecting a bear or a mink or something, until Richard noted that the pig farm across M-22 was really stinky today. Later, at Baatz Farm, I heard young kids wandering down the rows from Mom to Dad, and I felt like saying "Stay close to the Big People! There's bears!" but I didn't say anything because I didn't have any real reason to think there were bears around. It might have been the fact that Anna slept outside in the hammock most nights last week, despite my worries. It may have been that old children's book, Blueberries for Sal. It might have been the book I'm reading now, David Western's In the Dust of Kilimanjaro, and its discussion of living closely with large mammals.

At any rate, we were heading north on Ely road, passing the blueberry signs again, when we came around a curve in the road and there was a bear. It was a younger one, bigger than a cub, but not heavy like a mature bear. It seemed to be interested in something that was on the road, but when it saw our car it turned and walked off into the brush. Richard was saying "What is THAT?" and I was saying. "It's the bear. I knew we were going to see a bear." He prompted me to grab the camera and get a picture, but it was gone by the time I unzipped the case. As it walked off the road, we saw the unmistakable bear silhouette.

At home, I baked two blueberry pies as Richard cooked bratwurst and corn and Shelagh made a salad. We all sat around and ate a great dinner and drank a bottle of wine. The hummingbirds chased all around the house for our entertainment, and we all enjoyed the evening off.

Everything about Caffeine

I drink a lot of coffee. I met my husband when we worked for a small Honolulu coffee company and have been drinking the stuff daily in the 20 plus years since. Working nights, coffee is essential to my ability to continue to do to math in my head while people holler at me well past midnight.

I know some of the kids in Anna's class start out each day drinking a cup of coffee with Mom. But last year's fifth grade field trip surprised me. The kids all had pocket money and bag lunches. I expected them to spend the pocket money on cheap trinkets and postcards, but the conspicuous spending was all on caffeine in the form of energy drinks at upwards of three dollars a pop. Most of the cans said "not recommended for children" but the snack stand guy didn't care. The kids claimed that they drank that stuff all the time, but it was clear that Amp and Rockstar and Monster possessed the lure of the forbidden.

The kids told me that they did better in school when the used caffeine. They knew how much they needed to "get a buzz". I thought that was strange, and I ended up talking to my bike riding companion about alcohol, and how binge drinking in teens impairs brain development. I didn't know much about caffeine, so I just listened, except to point out that if they spent their money on energy drinks at the beginning of the trip, they would be broke for the hour of shopping at the end of the field trip.

At Developing Intelligence, a blog written by a graduate student in cognitive Neuroscience at CU Boulder, I found today's entry to be a user's guide for caffeine. It doesn't answer my questions about kids and caffeine, I will be using the information there to modify the way I drink coffee for maximum effect.

In the Record Eagle

Making oatmeal cookies with Anna. Photo by Tyler Sipe of the Record EagleI was interviewed a few weeks ago by a reporter for the Traverse City Record Eagle for an article about bake sales.

If you asked me to name my unique skills, running a bake sale would be far down on the list. It's something that I would think that anyone could do, or that a lot of people could do better than me. Like my kids, for instance. The reporter somehow got the impression that I had coordinated bake sales for NHS and the physics club, but of course I did nothing of the sort. All I did was teach my girls to cook when they were in grade school, and to handle money, so that by high school they were competent to run bake sales, and much more, with my contribution limited to flour, butter, sugar, cocoa, and eggs.

But I was glad to share tips for running a bake sale, especially a bake sale with kids, because I think it's such a good experience for kids. I hate the "Mom, I need ten dollars!" syndrome and kids love to make their own money.

I Was Prescient

Back in the spring I wrote, while riffing on ethanol, about hand sanitizer. I had just attended a TIPS training, the training where they teach people who work in the hospitality industry how to identify and handle people who have had too much alcohol. Since I was also thinking about fuel alcohol, ethanol, at the time, it's not surprising that I ran across the article about the prison inmate who got loaded on Purell. I predicted then that children would end up getting drunk on hand sanitizer, either on purpose or because they licked it off their hands.

Turns out both things have happened, and I can thank the person who got to this site by Googling "how much purell to get drunk" for leading me to these stories.

Two little girls, at least, have ended up at the ER after eating hand sanitizer. One swigged it during an unsupervised visit to the bathroom. Another licked it off her hands at daycare. The second case was particularly frightening as the parents had no idea what was going on -- they picked up a sick kid from daycare and went to the ER. Their daughter could barely sit up in the chair and was having trouble focusing her eyes. The ER doctors could not figure it out until the preschool teacher questioned the other kids and heard about the hand sanitizer.

There are at least two other potential hazards associated with hand sanitizer. At Rant Your Head Off, we find a story about a new urine test to determine if recovering alcoholics are still firmly on the wagon. The test detects alcohol metabolites at very small levels, so small that it appears that a few people may have lost their jobs because of their hand sanitizer use.

And there's this one, from a comment on the NY Times "Freakonomics"blog:

Anyone know whether the stories of hand sanitizers combusting when sparked by static are true? The hospital I work for circulated a memo to that effect. Great-we already have to worry about contracting MRSA, HIV, HepB, and various other nasties at work-now we need to worry about hand fires??
Should’a gone into teaching….
D. Cheryl, R.N.

You know it's a bad day at work when your hands catch fire.

Meanwhile I'm reading Michael Pollan's An Omnivore's Dilemma. The first part of this book is all about corn. He attributes the rise of food engineering to our nations ongoing glut of corn, which we can produce cheaply as long as we can keep synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer from fossil fuels. During our nation's first glut of corn, in the mid 19th century, the excess was converted to alcohol, whiskey, a form that was easily transported and sold to city dwellers. Modern day liquor laws have made that sort of trade impossible today, so corn is converted to a host of other products that are recombined into engineered food. It does make me wonder if hand sanitizer was invented to solve a human need for sanitizing, or to create another market for corn products?

I've got to start writing more about the restoration of the constitution and the rebirth of democracy and common sense. If my predictions are going to come true, after all, I might as well make some really good ones.....

The Christmas Shopping Post

The turkey and its stuffing are gone. It it snowing and blowing and the cars are sliding down the hill and into the ditch in front of the Kingdom Hall. The news anchors are keeping us breathlessly posted on the progress of "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", much as they kept us breathlessly updated on each wave of toy recalls a few weeks ago.

I was thinking that I was glad that I didn't have any little kids who were writing letters to Santa, requesting the latest in TV advertised trash. I asked some of the people at work what they were doing about toys for kids this year. "Well, I guess we'll just buy some toys, let them lick 'em, and see if they pass out," was one response. Another said: "Blocks. Can't go wrong with plain wooden blocks."

I realized that I had always struggled to fight the toy advertisers. I had, in fact, perfected a whole folklore about Santa and toy advertising, first published here two years ago. It went something like this:

The toys you see on TV are not really good toys. In the commercials they look like fun toys, but those kids aren't really playing. Those kids are actors and they are just pretending to have fun. Sometimes they are really good actors so the toys look like they're amazing --but if you get those toys they don't do what the commercial made it look like they do. The plane doesn't really fly. The doll doesn't really eat. They break, or the batteries run down, or there are so many pieces that it takes longer to clean up than it does to play.

Santa only brings toys that are going to be fun for a long time. He doesn't like toys that break or get their pieces lost. He likes to bring toys that can be whatever you need to pretend. He likes sturdy toys, and books that are good enough to read over and over. The people that make TV toys have to spend so much money to make those commercials that they don't have enough money left to make really good toys; that's why Santa won't put those toys in his sleigh.

It was a nicer world when the worst thing a toy could do was break or be boring. These days we have to look at toys as potential poison or potential recalls. Many of my coworkers are turning to electronics in their quest for safe toys. This scares me, too, as the "edutainment" of younger and younger children is a huge uncontrolled experiment on developing brains.

Over the years I have sought to replace seasonal shopping with other experiences. Music has played a huge part, as we devote a good deal of time to preparing for the Leelanau Childrens Choir concerts, as well as church services. The girls like to organize informal carolling parties, as well, using the holidays as an excuse to walk around the neighborhoods at night, maybe accepting a cookie or two.

We also cook a lot, making batch after batch of cookies, pies and sweetbreads. We also put together batches of oatmeal cookie mix and homemade baking mix, to give as presents. We sew polar fleece hats and mittens, make catnip toys, build birdhouses. When my kids talked about what they wanted to get for Christmas, I always asked them about the gifts they hoped to give.

Somehow, it all worked. Anna was one of the last kids in her class to give up the idea of Santa. Despite buying less and less, we seemed to have an abundance that convinced her. "There must be a Santa," she told me last year, "because you and Dad couldn't possibly afford everything that we have."

How to Start the Conversation

It was over at No Impact Man, where I often contribute my MomVoice to the discussion. They were talking about the following scene:

When my friend Elizabeth drops her son off at school in Connecticut, the moms gather in the courtyard to chat. There is a cool new feature to their SUVs which allows them to lock the doors while leaving the engine on. They stand around, a bunch of them, having a nice chat, while their motors idle in the parking lot, keeping air conditioners going in cars that have no one in them and are going nowhere.

I volunteered that I am not the sort of person who could observe such a scene without commenting on it. Furthermore, I would welcome the chance to make that sort of comment at school, in front of my kids, because:

when the conversation takes place at school, I'm giving my kids a "responsible adult" role model. The other moms may not realize it for a long time, but everybody benefits when there are kids in the group who can say "Wait! This isn't right! Let's do something smarter!"

I was surprised when another poster said that she didn't have the guts to initiate such a conversation, and wondered how it was done.

I thought about this all day yesterday, as I did outdoor chores in the (finally) fall weather. I realized that I have, over the years, developed a technique for initiating these conversations. Here it is:

Sibylle, my script for starting these conversations goes something like:

I used to.....(fill in the offending behavior), but then I realized .....(fill in the new information or better practice.)

like

"I've been drinking out of these one-way plastic bottles for years, but lately I've read about how bad they are for the environment and how the water in the bottle isn't any better. I guess I might as well just drink tap water."

or

I used to let my car idle to keep in comfortable inside, but when I read that the carbon dioxide coming out of my tailpipe is going to warm the earth for the next fifty years, well that puts everything into perspective. I guess I can just crack the windows and let it breathe a little.

You don't have to get anyone to agree with you on the spot, just plant the seed. You don't attack anybody, just give them the information they need to make a better decision. And it is about information! Even veteran environmentalists are having to rethink their ways in the new light of global warming. I recently said this to one of my farmer friends:

I used to think I would end up being cremated when I die to "save space for the living" and all that, but now I realize that this body has already sequestered a certain amount of carbon, and why would I want to put it all back up into the atmosphere? I hope my kids can figure out how to compost me....

I didn't realize it until I read Effect Measure, but today is Blog Action Day for the environment, when bloggers are encouraged to write a post about environmental action. I think that having conversations in everyday life are much more important, and educational, than spewing words out into cyberspace. There is simply no subsitute for speaking up!

Ethanol Once More

Above: Liz and Carley, as drunks, in Leland School's 2004 production of "Lucky Stiff"

The Traverse City Record-Eagle ran a nice AP article on ethanol fuel this week.

Meanwhile I've been thinking about ethanol as drink. At work I was required to take TIPS training, as in Training for Intervention, as in intervening with people who want to drink more than they should. The training included a lot of quantified, scientific information that we are supposed to use to estimate how intoxicated a subject will become. For instance, a 150 pound male of average build will have a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of .05 after two drinks on an empty stomach. Unless it is a carbonated drink, then the alcohol will be absorbed more quickly. Or if a person carries more body fat, then the alcohol will be absorbed more quickly because fat and alcohol don't mix. If they've eaten a full meal recently, alcohol works more slowly. If they took prescription medicines, then drank, well that's just a wild card. Anything could happen.

I'm a gaming employee. Everything is a game for me. I tend to be pretty competitive, although my mind works in ways that allow me to redefine the game until I've found goals that are attainable; until I find a way to win the game. What bothered me about the TIPS training was that I was being asked to use a bunch of subjective observations-- starting right out with the old "Guess my Weight" question from the carney's booth-- to deduce someone's Blood Alcohol Content. The cop parked outside of the casino lot gets to actually test for BAC, but I have to guess. Yet they made a big deal of my personal liability in this and emphasized that an actual BAC test is the only thing that matters in court. There is no way to win the game, unless I make sure that nobody ever gets more than 2 or 3 drinks.

I'm not complaining about having to monitor alcohol consumption. I just wish there was a more scientific way to do it.

BUT THEN...I read this article about a prison inmate who swigged off a bottle of hand sanitzer and got drunk. It seems that your basic Purell-type hand sanitzer is about 60% ethyl alcohol, or 120 proof.

The 49-year-old inmate, who was not identified, was treated for alcohol poisoning. His blood alcohol level topped .33 percent, Doyon and Welsh wrote in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

“We’re primarily concerned about at-risk patients,” Doyon said. “Patients who intentionally do this to get drunk, especially those hospitalized, institutionalized or in rehabilitation or nursing care facilities.”

There is also a concern about middle and high school students drinking hand sanitizer to “be cool,” Welsh said. “It’s important for parents and school personnel to be aware that it is happening.”

He suggested parents treat hand sanitizer like any other potentially harmful household product, including storing out of reach of small children and instructing children not to drink from it.

In the casino, we have a problem with people who have been cut off continuing to try to get a drink, get their friends to buy them drinks, or even sipping off their friends' drinks. Now we have to monitor their hand sanitizer as well?

Thinking about this at work, I helped myself to a big dollop of Purell in the breakroom, spread it on my hands, and then licked the back of my hand to see what it tasted like. Not bad. Not so great, either. Kind of like if you had made gin with lavender instead of juniper berries. Would I choose it for a night out? No. Would an underage drinker mix it with Mountain Dew? There's probably already a name for this homemade kiddie cocktail.

But what about the extremely underage? I was thinking about babies licking the stuff off of hands. But when we talked about it in the breakroom, Rob asked if it could be absorbed by the skin.It turns out that skin absorbtion, or even inhaling the fumes are ways to get alchohol into the bloodstream.

If a 150 lb guy needs 2 ounces (4 Tablespoons) of 120 proof to get borderline drunk, then the 15 lb baby needs a little over a teaspoon. Maybe less, because babies have a high percentage of body fat. Maybe more, because babies are always eating. The mom who slathers Purell all over the pacifier that fell on the ground or the bar of the shopping cart or her own or her child's hands at every opportunity may be planting the seeds of alcohol dependency as she kills all those germs. She may be getting the kid drunk. Those compulsive hand-cleaning people that reach for the hand sanitizer every 5 minutes may be getting enough to get buzzed up, or at least to relax a little.

The breakroom conversation was getting funny. Rob asked me "So how do you know if a baby is drunk?" I got out my TIPS training manual and reviewed the list of "behavioral cues for approaching intoxication".

"Well, you have to see whether the baby has lost his inhibitions. Or has impaired judgement." It seems being drunk pretty much means acting like a baby, so a baby could be drunk quite a bit and no one would know. Of course if your baby gets to the impaired reaction phase and starts "lighting more than one cigarette" you'll know something's up.

Courageous Caroline

Last summer we had one of those community dramas that is a little too personal to blog about. One of our friends, Shelagh and Liz's high school physics teacher, had a young daughter who was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In very short order she was flown to Ann Arbor, readied for surgery, and the tumor, mildly malignant, was removed with seemingly no lasting effects. Of course it was not quite so simple at the time, it was scary.

This story in the Lansing State Journal tells of a girl about the same age, also with a brain tumor, who has never had it so easy. Her trials started at birth, when she was born to an addict, already hooked on crack cocaine. Her adoptive parents are the sort of people that we all need to think of when we think that parenting is too hard, or we start to feel overly proud of our parenting. I can't hold a candle to these folks.

World's Biggest Conversation on Breastfeeding

I've been behind on this blog, particularly on updating the links. Effect Measure and Living the Scientific Life are now part of ScienceBlogs, whose mission is to hold the "world's largest conversation about science."

Two weeks ago the conversation turned to breastfeeding. The occasion was an article in the NY Times outlining a public health campaign to encourage new mothers to breastfeed for at least six months, by highlighting the health benefits of breast milk.

I have long been in awe of the biological properties of breast milk, since I read Karen Pryor's Nursing Your Baby. The Times article cited what was, for me, a new perk of breastfeeding:

But while formula tastes the same way at every feeding, advocates of breast-feeding say, the smells and flavors of human breast milk change from day to day, from morning to evening, influenced by the mother's diet. Many nutritionists believe that exposing an infant to this bouquet of flavors early on may make for less fussy eaters who are more flexible about trying new foods and more likely to eat a healthy, varied diet.

Does this explain why my kids are such adventurous eaters?

I jumped into the conversation, posting here, here, and here. But I'm disappointed with the conversation itself. Somehow when you talk about breastfeeding, even among scientists, it degenerates into dueling anecdotes and working mom war stories. Rather than focusing on the unique anti-infection components of breast milk, the conversation is centered around studies that seek to prove that breast-fed babies, as a population, are healthier than bottle fed babies.

Human beings are lousy test subjects. We want our privacy, tend to fudge when we are asked to report on our own behavior. We won't be forced into categories like "100% breast feeding" and the variations in our behaviors are enough the screw up any study. Plus the world we live in is changing in uncontrolled ways.

Last fall I wrote about the changing winds of parenting advice, including a new study that showed that seeping all night in the parents' bed correlates with an increased chance of Sudden Infant Death. That's bad news for breastfeeding, because nursing through the night is a wonderful alternative to getting up and fixing bottles. In March, Richard and I had occasion to go mattress shopping for the first time in 20 years. The mattress salesman, a veteran of the trade, told me that the market has changed in the last 20 years: back then, everyone wanted firm matresses because they were best for one's back. Now everyone buys pillowtops. We bought a pillowtop because it felt good in the showroom. Once we got it home I found that the longer I lay on it, the more it seemed to sag. I would never let an infant sleep on that mattress, it's too soft. I wonder if the "new" findings on co-sleeping are actually new findings on the effects of America's mattress buying habits on infants.

I'm guessing that devising a study to quantify the benefits of breastfeeding by comparing populations is an enterprise doomed to failure. Parenting is just too variable. But adopting the opposite stance, maintaining that formula is just as good as breast milk, requires one to claim that the antibodies, white blood cells, and hormones in breastmilk are useless. That we have evolved past our need of them.

I remember the news clip of the stranded mom in New Orleans crying because she hadn't had any formula to give her baby for two days. We haven't evolved all that far.

I think that breastfed babies do grow up to be smarter. (I'm biased, of course, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.) We know that well-exercised brains grow better than bored brains, and breast feeding is a much more interesting activity than drinking from a bottle. You face the breast while nursing; very young infants soon learn to slide their eyes to left or right to see Mom's face. You have to work harder to get milk from the breast. The taste of the milk changes from day to day and even from minute to minute. The first milk to come in a nursing session is thin and sweet "fore milk". High fat-content "hind milk" comes in those lazy, sleepy moments to the baby who keeps nursing on a full tummy. Breast milk doesn't come all at once; baby has to learn to suck nicely for a minute until the mother's "let down" reflex kicks in. Work brings pleasing results. Every baby experiments with biting (or hard gumming) the nipple, with alarming results. I can't think of a more rudimentary basis for intelligence than the knowledge that the world consists of cause and effect. Breast feeding is a human's first task, the first cooperative relationship. The alternative universe of bottle feeding is built on the foundation of "cry and you'll eventually be attended to."

I'm Not This Kind of Parent, Either

A while back I wrote about navigating the fine line between parenting and interference while watching 4 year old Anna trying to ride her tricycle down the slide.

I was myself calculating exactly how long I could wait before dashing out to catch her. She eventually chose to push the trike down and then slide down after it, but she did solve her own problem.

I flashed back to this scene this morning after reading about a new trend: parents accompanying their grown adult children to job interviews.

These parents are accompanying their 20-something year old kids on job interviews, listening in on phone calls, even calling prospective managers directly.

General Electric made an offer to one recruit last fall, only to get a call the next day from the recruit's mother trying to negotiate an increase in pay, says Steve Canale, manager of recruiting and staffing services. GE didn't rescind the offer, but ''we didn't give in to Mom'' either, Mr. Canale says.

Shelagh and Liz have worked as babysitters since they were about 12. Of course Richard and I kept an eye on who they were babysitting for and how they were going to get home. We made sure that they had an adult to call if they needed it. We also made sure that once they committed to a job they did the job, even if something more fun came up. As they got older, we expected them to negotiate for themselves, and they did.

Shelagh's first "real" summer job was working housekeeping at the Whaleback Inn. Richard and I both argued against this job, but Shelagh was convinced that doing physical labor must be easier than working with one's brain and she wanted to take it easy for the summer. After two weeks she wanted to quit, but we more or less required her to stick it out for the summer. She had made a commitment. Summer is short and it is too busy to waste time replacing employees. She worked until the middle of August when her wrist got sore and the doctor told her to take two weeks off. She learned to finish things, and how to clean a bathroom really fast.

Her boss at Enerdyne is an old friend of mine. Nevertheless, Shelagh was on her own when she called Pat the next spring and told her that Enerdyne was where she wanted to work that summer.

Shelagh is working right now in a work-study position with America Reads. She drives to Vetal Elementary in Detroit twice a week and tutors 2nd and 3rd graders in reading. Lately she sounds like she is in the "this isn't so much fun anymore" phase, but she will finish because it is her job, not mine.

I did suggest that job to her, after hearing that America Reads was one of the highest paying work study jobs and observing how much she was missing kids while she was living in Ann Arbor. I don't even accompany her to the doctor anymore; I can't imagine accompanying her to a job interview.

The Chicago Sun-Times article claims that employers are adjusting to parents' participation in the job search. I find this hard to believe. Many parents of high school kids seem hell-bent on insulating their kids from the consequences of their actions. They call the principal, hire the lawyer, pay off the credit cards. Why would an employer want to hire someone who expects to be bailed out if he makes any mistakes?

More to the point, I think I would consider myself to have failed as a parent if I had raised kids who could not handle a job search on their own. What's next, arranged marriages?

Electronics for Babies

Today's New York Times has an article about the growing trend of designing and marketing electronic toys for younger and younger children.

Quite frankly, this trend scares the crap out of me. The human brain is not something that we are born with, it is something that has to be developed. If you use a portion of your brain, it will grow new synapses to handle that sort of experience. If you deprive a kid of a particular sort of experience, their brain will never bother to develop the synapses that helps him be good at that sort of experience.

I'm not talking about little experiences. I'm talking about the big categories: language development, gross motor skills, fine motor skills, social skills. We know that the greatest age for brain growth is before age three, when kids are practicing all of these things constantly. If you don't get these skills, especially language, by age 4, you have little chance of learning them later. Babies and toddlers should be learning the skills of navigating the 3 dimensional world, and driving their parents nuts doing it.

You simply can't learn those things by relating to the 2-D "screen world" of TVs and video interfaces. The content may be "educational" but the content is immaterial. What is going to happen to kids who can push buttons but can't read a person's body language or throw a rock to hit the broad side of a barn?

People admire my two great teenagers and ask me all the time how I raised such smart kids. My answer -- which they don't want to hear -- is "No TV." We kept our TV in the closet until the 1991 Gulf War and the kids amused themselves just fine. They played with marbles and Fisher Price people. They had cats who wore doll clothes and a dog who played hide and seek. They made bread with me and trained chickens for a "circus". They dug holes in the yard. Our house was messy, the yard was full of toys, and there was writing on the wall.

Why Santa Doesn't Bring TV Toys

The Halloween Pumpkins are still on the back porch, but the ads on the breakroom TV last night were all about Christmas shopping.

Santa has never brought our kids any of the toys that are advertised on TV. When my kids talked about those toys, my response went something like this:

The toys you see on TV are not really good toys. In the commercials they look like fun toys, but those kids aren't really playing. Those kids are actors and they are just pretending to have fun. Sometimes they are really good actors so the toys look like they're amazing --but if you get those toys they don't do what the commercial made it look like they do. The plane doesn't really fly. The doll doesn't really eat. They break, or the batteries run down, or there are so many pieces that it takes longer to clean up than it does to play.

Santa only brings toys that are going to be fun for a long time. He doesn't like toys that break or get their pieces lost. He likes to bring toys that can be whatever you need to pretend. He likes sturdy toys, and books that are good enough to read over and over.

The people that make TV toys have to spend so much money to make those commercials that they don't have enough money left to make really good toys; that's why Santa won't put those toys in his sleigh.

I said these things over and over again until they became family lore. And as I watched how my kids played, I saw over and over again that a few good toys are much better than piles and piles of crappy ones, or pieces of crappy ones.

I happened upon Shelagh and Liz one day with a pile of marbles in the rocking chair, and a group of Fisher-Price people standing in a semi-circle around the back of the chair. I was attracted to the sounds of their play: One marble would fall, then there would be some ooohs and aaaaahs and maybe a comment: "Look! a green one!"

When I asked what was going on, they said "Fireworks!" The Fisher Price people were watching a fireworks show, and the kids were rolling marbles off the back of the chair to make it happen. The marbles and the Fisher Price people were recast in various roles for years, while other toys fell by the wayside.

I wrote down the "Santa Spiel" a few years ago after a parents' discussion at the Leelanau Children's Center. I was really worried about the number of parents who thought that their children would feel deprived if they didn't get everything on their Christmas list. Even when I pointed out that many toys are just worthless junk, and some (video games) make kids boring, parents felt pressured to come up with this stuff. This is how I always explained the situation to my kids.)

These are a few places that I like to look for cool, lasting toys and books:
American Science and Surplus
Chinaberry Books
Hearthsong Toys

And here in Leelanau:
Enerdyne (Shelagh's summer job)
Misfit Toys Suttons Bay's new toy store

The Good Enough Parent

One of the best books I've read on child rearing was The Good Enough Parent by Bruno Bettelheim. This is from the introduction:

In order to raise a child well, one ought not to try to be a perfect parent, as much as one should not expect one's child to be, or to become, a perfect individual. Perfection is not within the grasp of ordinary human beings. Efforts to attain it typically interfere with that lenient response to the imperfections of others, including those of one's child, which also make good human relations possible.

But it is quite possible to be a good enough parent -- that is, a parent who raises his child well. To achieve this, the mistakes we make in rearing our child -- errors often made just because of the intensity of our emotional involvement in and with our child, -- must be more than overcompensated for by the many instances in which we do right by our child.

The book never was widely read, probably because it was not an easily read how-to book, but an invitation to look at a child's world from the child's point of view and to remember one's own childhood to discover what hidden agendas we bring to the world of parenting.

I'm thinking of this book after pondering the "Mommy Madness" articles. My siblings and I are also trading anecdotes in preparation for our parents' 50th wedding anniversary. It is quite fashionable nowadays to find a few flaws in one's upbringing and attribute all sorts of psychic harm to one's childhood trauma. Maybe that's what makes those Mommies so crazy. They have become accustomed to pursuing and achieving perfection, they fell that less than perfect parenting will ruin their kids, yet there is no such thing in parenting.

Working on an Indian reservation gives me a totally different perspective. The lucky rez families have stayed intact through the generations, but many families are still rebuilding after generations of alcohol abuse, poverty, and the old practice of forcibly separating kids from their families in an attempt to make the kids "less Indian".

I work with some people who suffered through abysmal childhoods, but they are determined to do better by their kids. They have forgiven their parents and are even caring for those parents who forgot to care for them. I know that when I get really stressed with my kids I blurt out the same things my mom said to me, and I'm thankful that my "inner soundtrack" is reasonably sane. My friends who were raised in foster homes and orphanages, my friends whose parents were literally never sober, these people are inventing parenthood from scratch. I am in awe of their bravery and dedication as they forge through what is, to them, uncharted territory.

I Still Don't Get OM

Last fall, Anna asked if she could be in "OM", Odyssey of the Mind, an "international educational program that provides creative problem-solving opportunities for students from kindergarten through college."

I didn't get it. I couldn't figure out why it was neccesary to provide creative problem solving opportunities for kids. I've been telling my kids to solve their own problems since kindergarten, even if it meant that they wore weird clothes in public and that they missed some things because they forgot to write them on the calendar.

I remember hovering behind the kitchen door as Anna (then four years old)dragged her tricycle to the top of her slide and considered riding it down. I was myself calculating exactly how long I could wait before dashing out to catch her. She eventually chose to push the trike down and then slide down after it, but she did solve her own problem.

My kids have spent the day in the principal's office because I won't come to their defense when they get in trouble. They have had multiple opportunities to spend all of their money and then be broke. I stopped buying clothes for my kids in junior high when they started earning babysitting money. My teenagers still try to make their problems into my problems ("But I need to use the car....) and I am still resolute in calculating how to stand ready to catch them while providing them with the chance to solve their own problems.

But Anna really wanted to "do OM". The coach, a good friend of mine, was anxious to have her on the team. Anna's sisters and I had a hurried meeting at school the day of signup during which they said I should let her be in OM, since a lot of their friends had "done OM" and enjoyed it. I allowed myself to be swayed, on the condition that Anna's schoolwork and piano practice not suffer.

Her team met once or twice a week through the winter. I was blissfully unaware of most of what went on. They wrote a play and then lost the script on the playground and then found it and made costumes. Anna glued some balsa wood together on the kitchen table and I gave her some clothespins to use for clamps. Her coach told me that they were "getting a lot done".

So it was that Richard and I ended up driving to Traverse City East Junior High School on Saturday morning to see the OM competition. It was snowy, and it had been pretty much a March white out as I drove home at 2 am the night before. We were crunched for time and worried that we would miss their 9:30 start time. The parking lot of the school was full. There were signs for overflow parking at the school next door, but there was a long line of people parking their vans and SUVs in the firelane or cruising the lot in case a space was vacated. We aren't the sort of people who park in fire lanes; Richard dropped me off and went to park next door. The school was one of those contemporary mouse maze designs with minimal signage and lots of circular hallways. The OM people had put up maps, but this was a younger generation of parents and the print was too small for my 47 year old eyes. I walked around the whole school and then circled the room twice before I found it. The team was in there, waiting for the judges to give them the go ahead. They waited a long time, long enough for Richard to make it back from parking the car.

The room was a half a a gym with bleachers pulled out and a loud ventilation system. Anna's team had chosen to solve the Crazy Columns problem, in which they presented a play that featured the testing and ultimate crushing of some balsa wood structures that they had built. They performed the play, they crushed their structure, the judges talked to them, Anna gave me a hug, and then the team left the room to go watch something else. Richard and I were kind of left there, wondering what to do next. We watched another team from our school, this time performing in a classroom where the parents stood at one end of the room and the judges sat at the other so we were watching the kids' backs. They did a play with a communications theme. Some of the more purposeful parents did an impromtu school cheer as the kids walked in. The kids ignored them.

Our kid was ignoring us, too. The school was crammed full of parents standing around while their kids ignored them. The parking lot was crammed full of illegally (and dangerously) parked cars, cars that had been parked by parents who were frantic to get to this venue where they were now being ignored by their kids. On the one hand this was good: kids were supposed to be doing their own stuff and not leaning on their parents. On the other hand I wondered what these parents were doing here. They needed to "get a life." This is the same generation of parents who forgot to stop the war, the same generation who are standing there with their thumbs in their ears as our public school system is being systematically dismantled, the same generation who can plow $30,000 into a "safe" car, but who can't hang up and drive the speed limit. Somehow being supportive parents was getting in the way of being responsible adults.

We left. On the way home we debated what to do about next year. Homework and piano practice has been suffering, but I'm not sure that they wouldn't have suffered even without OM.

Anna came home later; her team won 2nd place and is going to state final competition next month. Her idea of why they won was almost the opposite of her coach's story. Oh well. State finals is at Grand Valley State University; she is looking forward to staying in a motel with a pool. I will have to work so Richard will take her down. Maybe after that he can explain this OM stuff to me.

Bread in the Oven

The last steps of baking bread are to shape the loaves, let them rise a final time, bake, and eat.

When the dough has risen in the bowl about 45 minutes it will look like the classic description “doubled in bulk”. That 45 minute figure is a flexible, of course, but if you let it rise too long, the yeast will exhaust itself and your loaves won’t rise so well. In a hurry, I have started shaping loaves as soon as there was an observable rise and that works out OK, too.

Take the whole pile of dough and lay it out on a floured bowl. Flour your rolling pin and then roll the dough out flat, being sure to pop the air bubbles that turn up at the edges. You don’t need to roll it paper thin, but you need to eliminate those bubbles because they will end up as voids in the finished loaves. After the bubbles are gone, fold the whole thing in half, fold it in half again, then one more time into a wedge shape. Roll the dough up starting at the point, and then let it rest while you grease your pans.

This recipe fills four 5 by 8 inch bread pans or you can use three 5 by 8 and two 3 by 5 inch pans. Cut the lump of dough into fourths and then cut one of the fourths into two hunks of dough for the kiddy pans. If you are baking with kids, let them grease their pans and then let them take turns rolling out their dough and putting it in their pans. Kids will do what they do and be happy with the results; adults will want to take a more methodical approach.

Roll out one piece of dough at a time into an irregular rectangle, still looking to get rid of bubbles. Roll the rectangle up tightly from the narrow end, and then fold the ends of the roll under so that the cylinder you have left is the same length as the pan. Lay the loaf into the pan with the seams down and then shape your other loaves the same way.

I used to let my loaves rise on the counter under a damp dishtowel, but I found that the dishtowel often stuck to the dough, causing it to fall again before I got it into the oven. Now I set all four loves side by side on the middle oven rack and let them rise in the cold oven. If you have kneaded well, they will rise for quite a while. When you have more experience you can try for giant loaves. The first time just get wait until they have filled the sides of the pan and rounded an inch or two over the top of the pan. After about an hour, I check them and if they look nice and plump I turn the oven on to 350 degrees and set the timer for 40 minutes. (If they are going into a preheated oven they only need 35 minutes.)

Lately I have been using the timed cook feature on my oven to start the bread after I have left the house. This is only a good idea if there is going to be someone home at the end of the cook time to take the bread out of the pans, as it will sweat and turn mushy if it is left to cool in the pans. My teenagers love it when they are home alone and suddenly smell bread baking.

Bread is done when you turn it out of the pan and the bottom of the loaf looks golden and sounds a little hollow when you tap it with your knuckles. If you have an instant read probe thermometer the internal temp should be about 190 degrees.

Cut bread with a bread knife, that is a serrated knife. The serrations make the knife rip instead of crushing. Cooled bread is easier to cut, but everyone wants to eat fresh bread out of the oven, even if the loaves get mashed in the process.

When the bread has completely cooled, you can put it into plastic bags for storage.

If you make this bread recipe with all white flour it is very much like the bread that Grandma Bunny used to make. I have often wondered exactly why my grandmother gave me a book about baking bread instead of inviting me into her kitchen to show me. Grandpa was the vocal half of their marriage. Even though Grandma Bunny had been a central figure while I was growing up, after she died I found that I actually knew very little about her. She shunned cameras, so I had no photos. She had never told stories about her childhood or about herself at all. Even her hometown of Dewdrop, Pennsylvania had been flooded when the Kinzua Dam was built.

Grandpa Lee had earned an engineering degree at University of Michigan and launched a successful civil engineering firm. Until I was 5, he also ran a sand and gravel company from a pit about half a mile behind our house. He was legendary for the “silver tongued speeches” he used to persuade the townships of our county and the adjoining one to build a regional water system. He was also quite at home riding a construction crew. Unlike Bunny, Lee told everyone about his life and experiences and for his grandchildren it was usually to illustrate how little we knew and how easy our lives were in comparison to his.

I think now that Leon was frustrated that his wife didn’t “hop to” on his command the way the rest of the world did. Grandpa often argued with her about baking bread, saying that if you counted up the cost of the ingredients and the electricity to run the oven it would surely be cheaper to just buy bread. She didn’t argue with him, but she didn’t stop baking, either. Still, I recall that Grandpa’s opinion was that it was a waste of my time to learn to bake bread, that I should learn more important things. (This was in the late 1960’s, when it was still an oft repeated prediction that in the future people would not bother to cook and eat at all, but would get all of their nutrients from vitamins.) Grandma countered in her quiet way; I knew right away that she had carefully picked out the book she gave me and it did start me on a lifetime of baking bread.

The conversations with Grandpa when he was worrying about people knowing how to feed themselves came well after Bunny’s death. A much as he had criticized her during her life, he missed her terribly and spoke of her like a saint. Living alone, he had time to really appreciate what it takes to feed oneself. He baked beans over and over again but they never came out the way that Bunny used to make them. His curiosity about food extended to wondering about where it came from. At this time I was learning to keep bees. Grandpa, now in his eighties, was fascinated to hear how bees forage for nectar and pollinate crops. He asked over and over again how I would make the bees collect the sort of nectar that I wanted; it was a revelation to him that you couldn’t direct them, but you could simply take advantage of what they were going to do anyway.

These were the last conversations I had with Grandpa. I had moved to Hawaii when he started becoming sick and disoriented. Perhaps his personality change was the beginning of his decline, but that short interval of conversations made more of an impression on my than the years of lectures that came before.