In Which I Am Tired Of Giving A Crap

I care about a lot of stuff. Sometimes it is overwhelming, to be honest. I recycle and compost and buy as much organic/grassfed/locavore/sustainably farmed/humanely slaughtered food as I can. I clean with earth-friendly products when possible and I shop at consignment/secondhand shops a lot to avoid contributing to mass consumption of goods. I read articles about parabens and BPA and sulfates and now even buying shampoo and canned tomatoes can be exhausting. A friend with a fledgeling Mary Kay business reached out to me to see if I'd host a party, but the cosmetics are so full of chemicals I'm trying to avoid that I had to decline, so now I feel like the asshole who stole her pink Cadillac and used it to run over her dreams.

But it all really matters to me. It matters a lot for a whole bunch of reasons and even though my daughter's kindergarten teacher had to have a talk with her about why it is inappropriate to discuss the factory-farmed meat at McDonald's with the rest of the students, I am proud to be raising socially aware little people. (Secretly, I can't wait to hear when happens when she goes to school in November and says, "Mama is out of town deer hunting this weekend because deer are such a sustainable form of meat.")

Honestly, it's a good thing they're pretty kids because they're destined to be weird.

Right now we're having a dilemma over the Boy Scouts. On a local level, I think the Boy Scouts are awesome. AlmondBoy - aside from the nail polish and love of Disney Princesses - is your Classic Model of boy. He likes hitting things with other things and cars and explosions and mud and frogs and...I don't know. Stereotypical Y-chromosome junk. But on a national level, the anti-gay policies of the Boy Scouts repulse and anger me. And so Mr. Marzipan and I are not going to let him join. Which sucks, because AlmondGirl really wants to be a Girl Scout which I support and endorse because they are progressive and inclusive and don't make you mention God, but I just can't let my blue-eyed boy march around in Cub Scout gear.

And the thing is that I really want to. I want to give him this instead of it being one more thing to tell his therapist about his uptight mother years down the road. And I grew up Orthodox Jewish and I have all but completely eradicated all traces of that, so of course now I worry that my kids are going to grow up and eat McNuggets while they drive endangered-animal-fueled Hummers over gay people. I want to sigh and say, "Well, it's not like they protest same sex marriage at meetings or anything," but I just can't do it. And it sucks that this is even an issue, really, but that's a frothing rant for another day.

So we're looking into alternatives and I'm feeling pissed off at the Boy Scouts for being such medieval douchebags and at myself for caring and at the country in general for tolerating this kind of thing in a "well, the back of the bus is still the bus, Miss Parks" kind of way and I really think that if I find one more thing to angst about, my brain is going to liquefy and run out my ears.

In Which I Opine About Snacking

This morning I received a message from a friend whose children are in the same baseball league as my own. She was asking for ideas about healthy snacks for after the games, as her team assigns one parent each week to bring a snack and she has been disappointed with the offerings thus far. I gave her some suggestions based on what my own kids eat, though mentioned that I wouldn't even bother with snacks except for the fact that AlmondBoy's metabolism is such that he has got to eat about every hour or so or ends up feeling very sick.

I've been thinking a lot about snacks lately. Whenever I am out with my kids for extended periods or when we are going some place where we'll engage in lots of physical activity, I bring healthy snacks and water. But it seems to me as though the snacking habit has really gotten out of hand, culturally speaking. I feel like a snack should be a small, healthyish something to tide over an empty stomach until mealtime. Not a pacifier. Not a bribe. But all too often I see bored children placated with empty calories to keep them quiet and, as someone who fought an uphill battle towards healthy eating, it worries me to think about what kind of eating habits these children are learning. And I feel pretty strongly that Munchkins or "fruit" gummies are not what growing bodies need after 1.5 hours of t-ball practice.

My kids don't get to eat in my car because cars are for traveling. They are not mobile cafeterias. We do not eat in front of the television. There are no Dunkaroos or Fruit Rollups in our house. And I don't say this to brag in some kind of mommier-than-thou competitive way. It's frequently a pain in the ass to be That Mom. People think you're weird or judgmental or Amish. There are times I honestly wish I didn't give a crap about corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils and food dyes and corn agribusiness and the two dozen other things that give me the occasional headache at the grocery store. But the fact is that these things matter to me. Weight, health, and nutrition matter to me. I'm hoping to spare my own children many of the issues I have faced by not instilling bad habits which they'll have to learn to break on their own. I'm hoping to spare them the dubious distinction of membership in the growing childhood obesity problem in this country.

I love food. In particular, I love beautiful, delicious food. I try to prepare myself three meals a day and then I sit down to eat and enjoy them. I find that I am more mindful of my eating this way, that I enjoy what I put in my mouth. That respecting my food equates to respecting my body. I am trying to pass this on to my children, this idea that eating should be both for sustenance and pleasure, but not just for something to do. By constant snacking - especially snacking on empty calories - food becomes part of the background noise. It becomes an expectation. We eat when we are bored or lonely or happy or sad. We eat for something to do, and often it's when we're already being entertained. (I'm looking at you, movie theaters.) And as more of us have our butts parked in front of the computer (hi!) or the 4,382 channels on the TV or the Wii or let the kids play with [current trendy electronic device], we're doing less and less to burn those snacks off. By constant eating we take our bodies out of their natural rhythms. We don't learn what it means to feel hungry and instead, we eat right through those hunger cues. And by not knowing what hunger feels like, it becomes very difficult to learn what satiation feels like. There is no "clean plate" rule in our house for that very reason. In addition, many people also think they are feeling hunger when they are, in fact, thirsty.

I don't think snacking is completely evil by any measure. I always have a high-protein something after the gym or I don't feel very well. But I do think that getting children established in a routine where all outings and activities include something to munch isn't a great idea. And as I said, my son has to eat constantly or he loses weight so I certainly know that there are kids who really are hungry all the time. But I do suggest that we all try to be more mindful of what we're putting in our kids' bodies and in our own bodies, particularly between meals. I try to pack healthy, filling calories like full-fat cheeses, cashews, fresh fruit or vegetables, boiled eggs, etc. And I urge everyone to take a look at this article.

In Which My Son Is Totally Pathetic And Things Are Not Set Aflame

We had dinner with some friends last night at Sushi Hana in Mount Washington. I hadn't been to that location before, but the food was even better than the Towson one. We ordered a metric ton of food, and one of our dining companions noticed another table receiving a tray of Mystery Rolls which had been ignited and were burning quite impressively. She asked the waitress to add "the burning thing" to our order. But after we had gorged ourselves on an immodest array of foodstuffs, we realized that the flaming suhsi had never arrived. We were disappointed but too stuffed to do anything about it. Yay for an excuse to go back and eating flaming things!

We went to The Papermoon for dessert, which always brings back fond memories of college, because I practically lived on their barstools for a few semesters. I'd sit in a dark corner and smoke horrifying amounts of cigarettes while studying ghost cells or muscle insertions or some crap. But I quit smoking over 7 years ago, and you can't smoke in there anymore anyway, which as a Libertarian I deplore and as an individual person who thinks cigarettes are flagrantly stupid, I like. In any case, we had the bread pudding. It was good, but the Dark Side of the Moon cake is superior.

So. We get home at around 10:30 or so. At 11 AlmondBoy awakes, screaming as though he is undergoing some sort of ancient Chinese torture designed for maximum volume output. He said his mouth hurt. Then he screamed some more. The only breaks in his hour-long screamathon were (1) yawning from exhasution (2) vomiting up the pain medicine I gave him. So Mr. Marzipan took him to the ER while I stayed home and fretted. AlmondBoy continued to scream until someone there gave him oxycodone and put everyone out of his misery. They diagnosed him with a pretty severe ear infection, of which he has already had like a dozen. He and Mr. Marzipan got home around 2 AM. We snuggled into bed and enjoyed an interlude of sleep.

At 5 AM, there was more screaming. Because AlmondBoy had thrown up all over his bed. One bath and some laundry later, we were all back in bed. I dozed off again at 6.

AlmondGirl poked me awake at 7 to let me know she was slowly starving to death and needed breakfast NOW or she'd probably waste away to nothing and could I get UP. I lacked the energy to ask her if some kind of memory wipe had done away with her ability to peel bananas or obtain cheese or open a granola bar. Mr. Marzipan escorted her downstairs, we he discovered that one of the cats, in a grand gesture of interspecies solidarity with AlmondBoy, had thrown up on the table.

I made bread and strawberry jam to keep myself awake. I did laundry. I sang a disturbing amount of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. AlmondBoy spent a largish part of the day in his skeleton pajamas, languishing on the couch, rotting his brain with Bugs Bunny. (Secret Mom Confession: Sick kids are really cuddly, which is so sweet.) Later on, two of our friends came over to visit this afternoon and brought me some Gnosis Immunity Boost chocolate on account of I am looking like Death's spinster aunt these days. They are homeopathic, all-natural, yoga type people and seemed rather horrified that we are planning to have tubes put in AlmondBoy's ears. They gave us the number of a lady who does [thing] with infrared light. I'm fairly openminded and trend towards granolaism in some ways, but I'm also a member of the Well Why Don't We Just Try Some SCIENCE Up In This Joint? School of Not Being Ill. But I'm going to call, because anesthesia makes me twitchy and, hey, what the hell?