The learning lifestyle: spinning and mixing

My friend Heddi of the Educational Resource Center likes to talk about “living the learning lifestyle,” and what that means for families. (She also has a new blog here!) We had a good example of it the other day.

Centripetal force!

My daughter saw that one of her favorite things was in at the Resource Center. They are two plastic bowls called Bilibos, the perfect size for a kid to sit in. They spin really fast. They’re very strong and you can stand on them. They make really funny hats.

So my daughter checked them out and spent a couple of joyous days spinning and marching around with them on her head. Her babies took baths in them. Her ten-year-old brother, keeper of all knowledge and arbiter of all that is correct, turned up his nose.

“So how are those educational?” he asked me one morning.

Sometimes the universe (and 6-year-old sisters) gives you what you need. I come downstairs to find that my daughter has peeled kernels of dried corn off an ear of Indian corn sitting on our table. She has placed the kernels in the Bilibo, and is spinning it really fast.

“Wow, Mom,” she said. “Look how they stick to the side when I spin it really fast! And look how they fall back down to the bottom when it slows down.”

By chance, the book How Science Works was sitting on the table next to the ear of corn, a sugar pie pumpkin waiting to be cooked for Thanksgiving (I did, and it was good), and an interesting gourd we’d found. I looked up “centrifugal force” and was disappointed to see that there was no diagram. So I grabbed a piece of paper and drew the diagram of how the force radiates outward. My daughter took the gourd and stuck it in the bowl and spun that. Even cooler! The heavy gourd positively stuck to the side of the spinning bowl.

So there, Mr. Ten-year-old! It’s educational!

Chemistry drama

Later that day, I remembered about a cool experiment that I’d been planning to do. My daughter likes excitement, my son likes magic. And this promised to have a little bit of both. I diluted some red grape juice from our fridge so that it was cherry-colored. Then we added one tablespoon of acid (white vinegar) to one bowl, left the middle bowl alone, and added one tablespoon of base (ammonia) to the bowl on the right.

Alchemy! The cherry-colored juice plus that yellowish ammonia cleaner should have gone light orange. Instead it went instantly and dramatically dark green. Sometimes the science experiments you try at home aren’t as dramatic as the description implies. Sometimes they’re cooler than you imagined. We found some blackberries in the freezer. Same experiment, same results.

We plan to try a number of colored fruits and vegetables: red cabbage, red onion, beets. Apparently some of them will be indicators for acid, some for base. All are indicators for fun, and for living the learning lifestyle.

education children homeschool homeschooling parenting resources school learning science

Recognizing childhood asthma – do you know the signs?

With this year’s entry into the flu season early, we’re already well into the yearly spike in hospitalizations for kids with breathing problems. Reflecting on a friend’s recent experience and our learning curve with our ten-year-old’s asthma, I thought it might be useful for parents who don’t think that their kids have asthma to educate themselves. If you have a child under five, I hope this helps you be alert to the possibility that your child will have breathing problems sometime during this flu and cold season.

What is asthma?

Asthma is when the air pathways from the lungs seize up due to a trigger: an allergen, exercise, or an infection. Asthma looks like the person is having trouble breathing in – it’s actually the case that the air has trouble going out. Asthma comes in many flavors, from an occasional bout with wheezing to a dangerous, persistent problem that follows the person through life. Some children outgrow asthma; others continue to have breathing problems as adults.

People with asthma may or may not have audible wheezing. They may or may not cough as a result of it. As in all things, each person’s body reacts slightly differently.

Recognizing asthma

Our son had a couple of bouts of wheezing when he was little before we recognized it for what it was. My husband had severe childhood asthma, but it just didn’t cross our mind that our healthy little boy had it. Then we ended up in the emergency room and spent the night in the hospital. That was enough to get us educated.

If your small child’s cold or flu always descends into a cough, pay special attention to her breathing. Here are some simple diagnostic techniques:

  • Watch your child breathe without a shirt on. The little indentation at the bottom of the neck, where the collarbone comes together, should not suck in visibly when the child is breathing. If it does, this is one possible indication of breathing problems.
  • Similarly, look at the spot at the top of the stomach where the ribcage comes together. If this spot sucks in visibly during normal breathing, take note.
  • Take note if your child is panting after normal exercise or gasping while talking.
  • Have your child take a big breath and blow out hard. Pretend that they’re blowing you over – this always goes over well with little kids. A kid whose lungs are seizing up will probably cough when blowing out hard.
  • Listen with the naked ear to your child’s chest. If you can hear noise, call the doctor.
  • Buy a cheap stethoscope. Ask your doctor or nurse to show you where to listen. Wheezing sounds like popping, creaking, or sighing noises in the lungs.
  • Always call the doctor if you think your child is wheezing, no matter what.

Treating asthma

Asthma is serious: over 4000 Americans die of its complications every year. When we brought our son to the emergency room, we checked in behind a man whose daughter was holding a bloody cloth to her head. She had fallen, lost consciousness, then thrown up upon waking. Who did they take in first? My son.

When a child is wheezing, it needs to be treated immediately. These treatments are therapeutic and stop the wheezing. The medicine is used to stop the reaction immediately so that air can enter the lungs.

Other asthma treatments are preventative. One therapy is to remove the triggers from the environment. When our son was small, we found out about a free asthma home visit program through the state. A wonderful consultant came and helped us set up the best environment for our son’s health. It was great, though at the time the program was being cut and I don’t know if it exists anymore.

The medication that has changed my son’s life is an inhaled steroid that helps his lungs from reacting in the first place. He takes a dose so small that it doesn’t even register on the longterm side effects chart, and it keeps him out of the hospital. I know that parents have reservations about steroids, but these drugs are well documented and are far less risky than rushing to the hospital in the middle of the night. It also changes your child’s life from a child who is sickly to a child that is well most of the time.

Who gets asthma?

When you were a child, asthmatic kids were probably those kids with other illnesses, especially severe allergies, who looked sick. These days, asthma continues to grow due to a large variety of factors. You can’t tell a child with asthma by looking at him. Even if both parents never had asthma, your child could have breathing problems. It’s worth watching and asking your doctor if you have any suspicions at all. It wasn’t until my friend’s daughter was hospitalized that she realized that her daughter had been showing symptoms. In the everyday busy life of a parent, these small indications might easily get overlooked until the situation is dangerous.

Resources

Helicoptering, hovering, and hyperextending, but holistically

From Time Magazine

Someone forwarded me the cover story from Time Magazine this week and asked for my opinion. In summary, it’s about what some are seeing as a trend in parenting, the trend already dubbed “helicopter parenting” and made famous by Lenore Skenazy, the author of “Free Range Kids.” Parents who parent too much, who hover and worry and overprotect to the point of smothering their kids.

I had two reactions. One is my usual reaction to any mass journalistic attempt to generalize: individuals just aren’t general. So yes, you can generalize a trend, but when you ask people whether it applies to anyone they know, they’re likely to say, well, not really.

On the other hand, yes, really. We all know the parents that she’s talking about. Here in Santa Cruz County, we have a sort of “two sides of the railroad tracks” split in the parent community, as far as I can see. The helicopter parents are generally on the other side from me. The ones who obsess about getting their child into the right preschool when the child’s in utero, who get their preschoolers tutors so they can be sure to get into the right private school, who hire clowns for their kids’ birthday parties and won’t let them go outside alone…

Oh, wait, I know people in that last category. So perhaps it’s not such a clear split, but you know what I said about generalizations above. I don’t personally know anyone who fits the description to a T, but yes, I do know people who pamper their kids past believability (from my 70’s Midwest childhood perspective), and I do know people who smother their kids, who expect ridiculous things from their kids. So it’s hard for me to say whether I think the article is so much on target or whether it takes what we’re worried about as parents right now and gives us something new to worry about.

However, there are some great passages. This one is one I could have written:

But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.” Besides, she says with a smile, “a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It’s nowhere you’d want to be.”

OK, I admit: I have actually said to someone, “If you’re worried about your child being abducted by someone, you’d better take a good look at your spouse, first.” (Parents are by far the biggest perpetrators of this crime. Strangers are a distant last after other relatives and friends.) Our paranoia from being able to know about every bad thing that happens to every kid in this country (and many others) has led us to make ridiculous decisions. We would rather give kids drugs for ADHD than let them have ample unstructured, unmonitored play time outside.

I and many other parents I know are curing this problem by turning off the TV, flipping past the gory front-page stories, and remembering to enjoy our children’s childhoods. But that’s a conscious decision you have to make. And yes, like Skenazy, I’ve been the recipient of some flak, most of it non-verbal looks from people of grandparenting age. But we did have at least one friend express shock at our letting our son go out in the (gated, fenced) front yard (on our rural, dead-end street)… alone!

Here’s another quote from the article that spoke to me:

Shutting down your inner helicopter isn’t easy.

No kidding. But for me, it wasn’t the inner helicopter, because like Skenazy, I’m a pretty fact-based person. I was raised that way. I look at the odds. That’s why I’ve never gambled in Vegas, and I only bought a lottery ticket once, as a joke, with someone else’s money. (I won four dollars!!) That’s why I do get my kids vaccinated and why I do put them in carseats but I don’t say no when they want to walk down the street alone.

For me it’s the constant external pressure. Yeah, my eyes do go to those headlines, the one I said above that we shouldn’t read. And I, like everyone else, gawk at the “Amber Alert” sign over the highway. And even more than that, I do notice and care about what my fellow community members think of me and my parenting. The writer of the article tries to make it seem like it’s parents of my generation who are the worst, but I can say I’ve gotten more bad vibes from those of my parents’ generation. Dunno why. This isn’t science, just observation.

When I think of my parents’ job of raising me and my four siblings, in some ways it was very, very easy for them not to fall into these traps. For starters, there were five of us. I remember a time in my life when I continually attempted to run away from home. I’d come home absurdly late from having been out all day, hoping that my mother would run up to me and say, “Finally! I missed you so!” Well, she didn’t. She probably greeted me with, “There you are — set the table!”

My parents did indulge some of our whims, when they had the time and resources to do so. There was a time when my mom would take me out of school to drive me to another town to take harp lessons. She would write me excuse notes that would say “Susana was not in school today.” And finally the school counselor asked me to have my mother put a reason on the notes. My mother didn’t want to lie. I believe the notes from then on read something like, “Susana didn’t want to go to school today”!

But they were constrained in time and money, so I find my response to my son’s asking for an iPod Touch an echo back thirty-five years: “That’s nice, dear. Put it on your wishlist!”

I will close with a last quote from the article, itself a quote, which does sum up the major thing I think the kids today are really missing in most American family life. Brilliance, it is clear, does not arise during a session at Kumon. It comes from exploring your own mind, turning into odd, dark lanes you haven’t gone down before, letting your fingers put together the Legos in ways that are not printed on the package, and most of all, being left alone enough that you come to enjoy it.

If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D.H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.”

Things we teach kids, and they teach back at us

So we were having our semi-monthly veracity talk with one of our offspring. You know the one: It’s not the wrong thing that you did that’s the real problem — it’s the fact that you lied about the wrong thing you did. The wrong thing you did would have wasted 30 seconds of you confessing and us telling you to do it right. The lie you told about the wrong thing you did has derailed our entire evening.

You know the drill.

Then the lesson came right back at me.

So to recap: Last week we started out the week with swine flu in our midst. Son, 10, was vaccinated and then 5 days later exposed. He came down with a mild case. (It takes ten days for the vaccination to reach full strength. Read flu facts here.) 2 days after that, husband got sick. Son was mildly sick. Husband was can’t-get-out-of-bed, gimme Tamiflu sick.

Daughter 6 had been fully immunized because, ironically, it was easier to get an immunization for a healthy child (who could get the nasal, “live” vaccine) than a kid with asthma (who was required to get the shot). So daughter didn’t get the flu. I have never gotten the flu so far in life, as far as I noticed, so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get it. (I said this to another mom and she warned, Knock on wood, Suki!)

Knock on wood!

So along we go with our week, and daughter and I go out and take part in our usual activities because, it is clear, we are not going to get sick. Son goes back to school. Husband slowly recovers. All seems well.

Then our daughter gets a little cough Friday afternoon. Then in the evening, a fever.

Back to the veracity problem. I went to bed wracked with feelings of guilt. I was sure that she wasn’t going to get the flu! Could I hide her for the next week? Did I really have to tell everyone that we’d been around? Darn it, she’d roller-skated with The Whole School that afternoon.

To make a long story short, my daughter does not have the flu, doctor-certified. Common cold, bit of a cough, little bit of a recurring fever. But the point is, right after an evening lecturing my son, I was presented with that very situation, in a grown-up way. I was going to have to admit that I’d made a mistake, and my first instinct was to figure out how I could avoid that.

But I have learned that lesson, and I knew I was going to ignore my first instinct. I practiced the e-mail while waiting in the doctor’s reception area. “Dear friends, I know that I told you that we weren’t going to give you the flu, but…”

I was telling a friend at my daughter’s school this today, and she said, “How embarrassing that would be!” Yes, indeed. But I would have grit my teeth and done it. And that, in a nutshell, is the lesson. Not that doing the right thing feels good, but that sometimes it’s uncomfortable and embarrassing and we spend a lot of mental energy trying to wiggle our way out of it. But we know that in the end, it will be better.

A few minutes of truth, vs. all the unforeseen outcomes of the lie. 30 seconds redoing the task the right way. An entire evening hashing out the reasons for telling the truth.

I’ll probably talk to said unveracious child (yeah, I know that’s not a word, but I like it) about this. I do think that we parents can teach our kids a lot by screwing up and then talking about it. Or realizing that you were in a situation in which you really want to do the wrong thing and you know you have to do the right thing anyway.

“Yes, officer, I do realize that I was speeding, but you shoulda heard what was on the radio…”

We teach kids, then they teach back at us. It’s a viscous circle, slippery and rife with occasions to slip up. And here we go again…

Thanksgiving off the shelf

My husband’s cousin sent a link to a very useful site: http://www.goodguide.com/ [See my article about it on Examiner.com]

I enjoyed perusing it, and thought I might find it useful in many circumstances. However, it was a head-shaking, shocking realization to look at their reviews of their “Thanksgiving Food Collection” that they are probably spot-on about how Americans cook for Thanksgiving. There was exactly one product on the list that I have used — ever! Libby’s pumpkin. I do swear by Libby’s to deliver the same old product every time, never disappoints.

However, how about a Thanksgiving like this:

Sara Lee Signature Selections Deep Dish Orchard Apple Pie

Kraft Stove Top Chicken With Whole Wheat

ShopRite Turkey Stuffing Mix

Heinz Homestyle Gravy, Sausage

Amy’s Apple Pie

Shady Brook Farms Frozen Whole Turkey

ShopRite Chicken Gravy

Sara Lee Signature Selections Deep Dish Traditional Pumpkin Pie

Perdue Fresh Turkey

Safeway, Vons Jellied Cranberry Sauce

ShopRite Chicken Stuffing Mix

Shoprite Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce

Honeysuckle White Fresh Whole Turkey

Pepperidge Farm Sage & Onion Stuffing

R.W. Knudsen Cranberry Sauce

Shoprite Organic Jellied Cranberry Sauce

Heinz Homestyle Savory Beef Gravy

Diestel Farms Organic Turkey

Perdue Fresh Whole Turkey Breast

Stove Top, Stuffing Mix, Savory Herbs

ShopRite Beef Gravy

Shoprite Jellied Cranberry Sauce

Stove Top, Turkey Stuffing Mix

My head is swimming. Must be all that sodium and high fructose corn syrup. (Think that’s not in your favorite packaged food? Look again: it’s in everything these days.)

So, OK, I know my family is a bit weird. I’ve always known that. When I was very small I thought that everyone else was weird, but then I got a little perspective and I accepted my birthright. We’re weird, we do what we do and that’s it.

But people, are you really serving Heinz Homestyle Savory Beef Gravy over your Diestel Farms Organic Turkey? Do you really think that there’s any reason to buy an Amy’s Apple Pie or Sara Lee Signature Selections Deep Dish Traditional Pumpkin Pie? Did you know that making a decent pie is easy as…um…pie?

And are you really buying Shoprite Organic Jellied Cranberry Sauce when making a fabulous cranberry sauce involves cooking cranberries (readily available at any supermarket or at your local vege shop) with sugar (not high fructose corn syrup)?

OK, one of my brothers-in-law, I believe, once told me that cranberry sauce ought to have the can lines in it when you dump it into the dish. But hey, get your empty can of Libby’s pumpkin, clean it, pour your homemade cranberry sauce into it, and chill. Come Thanksgiving dinner, voila!, can lines on your cranberry sauce, which cost half as much and has twice as much taste and nutrition, and no high fructose corn syrup.

Sometimes I realize I’m out of touch, and then I know how lucky I am!

So here’s your basic plan for a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner. It’s all about time-management and learning to delegate:

  1. Delegate everything but the turkey, stuffing, and potatoes.
  2. Stuffing is easy to make.
  3. OK, there are some great things you can do to make your turkey fabulous, but it’s pretty darn OK if you stuff it and stick it in the oven till done. Really.
  4. Real potatoes, please! Again, not such a hard thing once you’ve done it once.

OK, so now I admit the truth, which is that I have a vegetarian husband and have only done the turkey, stuffing, and potatoes part once, when my parents were living in Germany. Usually I’m one of the delegatees: I make pumpkin pie and some unusual appetizer and a vege option for my husband. But my mom makes it look easy, so I’m sure I could do it, right?

If I haven’t convinced you, though, and you must get your Thanksgiving meal in packages, please do go to http://www.goodguide.com/ and find out what you’re really buying when the label says “all natural.”

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