I never met a recipe I didn’t want to change

I have a favorite recipe from The Frugal Gourmet which I have been making for years. The first time I made it, I didn’t have any green peppers as called for in the recipe, so I made it without. It was delicious, so for the next twenty years I have made it my way and been quite happy with it. In fact, when I contemplate it with green peppers in it, it just doesn’t seem right.

It occurs to me that this is somewhat how I approach life in general. But I know that it goes against rules that we seem to think are important to teach in childhood, such as:

  • Fruit
    Giant fruit

    follow the recipe

  • don’t start something you’re not going to finish
  • don’t do things unless you have a reason to do them

The fact is, life is full of changed recipes, abandoned projects, and aimless yet completely fulfilling activities. When it comes to raising kids, I can see that I habitually break all those rules. First of all, I am always amazed that there are parents out there who profess to follow a single parenting “theory.” You’ve got your Positive Discipline disciples, your 1 2 3 Magic practitioners, and your Attachment Parenting adherents. They will attempt to follow a theory precisely, and on message boards and in real life they’ll ask each other advice for handling a situation within the worldview of their chosen parenting guide.

In our house, however, we mix it up the way we serve raita with South Indian curry. Sometimes I’m trying to be all Positive with a kid and it’s clear that she needs a countdown: “Get off that computer 3! right now 2! or I will lower your feet into our aquarium and let the sucker fish clean your toes 1!” Or Discipline seems to be agitating rather than calming so we go for the big hug instead.

Another one of my parenting beliefs is don’t be afraid to jump ship at any time if your designated coordinates don’t fit your current needs. So say you’ve decided that your family must be trained always to put away their shoes the second they come in the house, then you realize that means that your own shoes won’t be accessible when you’ve got an armload of used kitty litter that needs to get to the garbage can. Did I really say you had to put all your shoes away? Well, change of plans.

Life is full of abandoned plans, and let’s face it, some of them deserved to be abandoned. Did I really think I liked my kids being in private school more than being able to do something fun with all that money? Did I really say that if we kept all the scrap wood from the old fence I’d help the kids build a playhouse? Did I really buy ricotta thinking I’d spend the time to make homemade manicotti? How about baked ziti instead?

And finally, some of our most fulfilling family activities are done for no particular purpose. I noticed the other day that I had two adult passes to the deYoung Museum that were about to expire, so we decided to hop over to San Francisco for the afternoon. Usually we plan ahead, find out what’s showing at the museum, call up some friends we don’t often see to set up dinner, make a shopping list of things we need at our favorite Asian groceries on the Peninsula. But this time we just up and went. We wandered through the museum split (spontaneously) into two groups. My daughter and I spent a haphazard couple of hours wandering around with her taking photos of things she liked, like the giant, glass fruit. She also decided to look for horses in every room, which necessitated that she at least look at each of the paintings. A few of the ones she appreciated didn’t actually have horses in them.

I think it’s very easy to lose a sense of spontaneity with so many things to do in our hectic world. We schedule ourselves into a corner, making sure that every activity is done the correct way, done fully, and done with purpose. Sometimes it’s really great just to wing it. Who knows? You might find a painting you liked in an exhibit you would have skipped, or you might just prefer that recipe without green peppers, after all.

Swinging and multiplying

In the typical learning pattern for math concepts, kids first get the fundamentals of numbers—counting, adding, subtracting, sequencing, etc.—then they learn multiplying and dividing. Usually around the third grade, they are ready to memorize the basic 1-12 multiplication table.

My daughter was different. She was very interested in numbers from a young age and mastered most of the concepts that would be taught in K-2 with no problem. But she was much more interested in what people consider “advanced” math: she loved learning about tesseracts, pi, and the Sieve of Eratosthenes. As a kindergartener, she made us a googol dollar note. Then third grade came around, and I thought maybe she would be ready to start memorizing the multiplication table.

It was then that I found out that my daughter was different, but not unique, in her learning pattern. Despite how easy elementary math had been up to that point, she absolutely freaked out at memorizing. So I started asking around and found out that there’s a whole group of these kids and many of them end up being very good at math. But they end their elementary years thinking they’re “bad at math” because what seems simple to other kids is beyond their grasp. School math is obviously very frustrating to these kids, but since we homeschool, we could do things differently.

At the advice of other homeschoolers, I decided just to drop it and go on. Some parents report that their kids resist memorizing until they get to algebra, and then they get sick of looking up the numbers. Others report that they are adults who still suffer from this problem—often in STEM fields, they still figure out 8×7 through skip counting. In my daughter’s case, it came down to swinging.

One day recently we were outside and she asked me to push her on the swing. I told her I would if she’d answer a math problem, so I started shooting her multiplication problems that I knew she hadn’t mastered yet and rewarded answers—right or wrong—with pushes. When the answers were wrong, we figured out the right answer before the pushes were received.

Since that day, she’s been requesting “swing math,” and it occurs to me that I should have thought of this earlier, much earlier. When she was a preschooler and having trouble controlling her behavior, our occupational therapist recommended swinging—lots of swinging—as therapy. Swinging has always made her a happier person, but even more, she seems to come in from swinging inspired and full of ideas. The movement obviously stimulates her brain.

Little by little, “swing math” is helping us overcome her block. I’ve extended the types of problems to include fractions with unlike denominators and other computational challenges. They all go much better when she’s moving. I don’t have a report on how it’s affected her ability to do math on paper yet, but I suspect after a while it will start to creep in and become automatic.

Now if only I could somehow get her to make her bed while swinging, our household would be a lot more peaceful!

Crisis healthcare

I’m getting to know our healthcare system a little more up close and personal than I’d like this week. My brother got hit by a car when he was out bicycling and had to be helicoptered to a trauma care facility. He’s doing better and may be moving out of the hospital and in with my parents tomorrow, but it was a weeklong lesson in how to get good healthcare in modern America.

1) Make sure you have insurance

Of course, hospitals are required to save the lives of anyone, regardless of their insurance status. But as important as that is, the lifesaving aspect of healthcare is just the beginning. I have to admit, I actually didn’t know if my bro had health insurance, and that was one of the first questions I asked his fiancee, who was with him when he was hit and has been at his side for every allowable minute since then. If he hadn’t had insurance, yes, they would have saved his life. But the first thing we would have started to do was worry about how it was going to be paid for. There are many more important things to worry about, such as making sure he gets good care, making sure we do everything possible to help him along, and setting things up so he’ll get care once he is out of the hospital. We have the luxury of knowing that he’s not going to spend every cent he has on this accident, but millions of Americans don’t have that luxury… yet.

2) Make sure you have a loving family and caring friends

When you’re spending a lot of time in a hospital, you start noticing the other patients, and the other patients’ families…or lack of family. For part of his stay my brother was next to another head-trauma patient. No one came to visit that young man. No one made sure he was comfortable outside of the few things hectic nurses can do for their patients. No one questioned his doctors on their decisions. No one brought him drinkable coffee from the Vietnamese cafe across the street. From the important decisions on down to getting your favorite snacks delivered, having your family around is extremely important. And it has to be family: Friends were not allowed in the ICU.

3) Corollary to #2: Make sure your loved ones are close by and can spend time with you

We have a family joke that we have contributed greatly to the population growth in California. I came here in the 80’s for college, and my entire family followed: 4 siblings with their eventual children, parents, cats, and dogs. So when my brother was hospitalized, we had enough people close enough to make sure someone was available at all times. Of course, none of us lives anywhere close to the trauma center where he ended up, but we could drive to get there. And a few of us had flexible enough schedules that we’d go to the hospital with our computers and smartphones and spell each other so we could get a little work done. But what if we’d lived across the country, or in another country? What if none of us had the ability to skip work? In my brother’s case, he wasn’t able to sign documents so he had to have a family member nearby at all times for the first few days. Though the staff at the ICU were kind in ignoring the fact that his fiancee wasn’t technically allowed to be there, they had to have a signature from an actual relative.

4) Make sure you have advocates

This is why #2 and #3 are so very important: when you’re in the hospital and not able to stand up for yourself, you need an advocate. This can be a close friend, but for legal reasons (see above) it helps to have family members (or a legal representative) who are there to sign for you. You never know when your job as an advocate will change from legal to something much more important. When my dad was admitted to the hospital a few years ago with extreme abdominal pain, my mother patiently explained to each person who took his health history that he only had one kidney. They all seemed to think this was not urgent. Finally the surgeon showed up. My mother asked him whether he’d noted on my dad’s charts that he only had one kidney—the surgeon was the first person who knew how important this information was and took it seriously.

5) Prepare ahead of time for disaster

I have found out in the last few years how few of my friends, most of whom are parents somewhere in my age range, have advanced directives or wills. Though paying a lawyer is, of course, the very best way to get this done, Nolo Press has done a great job of providing those of us who can’t afford a lawyer with instructions for putting together these very important documents. In case of disaster, does your family really know what you want done regarding healthcare and, in the worst circumstances, death? If both you and your spouse died at once, what will happen to your children? If someone has to make healthcare decisions for you, who do you want it to be? If you don’t have family, or if you are not close to your family, who do you want to be able to make decisions for you? All of these questions can be answered ahead of time, and they make it so much easier for the people you love to deal with a catastrophic health crisis.

We have been by and large impressed with the care my brother has received. The staff seems completely on top of things—computers have gotten rid of the many errors that came of scrawled charts hung on the ends of beds. And they are generally helpful and caring. But still, hospitals are places where lots of things can go wrong. If you want your family to get the best care, you have to be there, and be vigilant.

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