Diagnosis

We had the meeting to discuss the results of Dash's vision assessment, and this - in bald terms - is what we learned:

• He has an oculomotor dysfunction. That means his eyes don't track smoothly or move easily from one line of text to the next.
• He has a binocular vision dysfunction. This means his eyes don't work together quite the way they should. This is what makes the words blurry and makes it hard for him to read from the blackboard.
• He has difficulties with visual memory.

He's going to start therapy in a few weeks, two sessions a week if possible, for 36 weeks. They say his "prognosis for improvement with timely intervention is very good. "

The tests also showed things he was good at. He can tell left from right like a champ, which impresses me no end as I still have to stop and think every time. He's very good at reading made-up words, which proves that he knows all the rules and applies them. I know he can read pretty much any word he wants to; it just seems that his eyes get in the way sometimes. His fine-motor skills and shape-copying skills are dandy, so his bad handwriting is within the bounds of normality and let's just say he gets that from his father.

The doctor was particularly impressed, if that's the word, with the way Dash tackled one of the tests. He was asked to read out loud along a line of unevenly spaced numbers, and then to the next line, and so on. She and I both observed that when he got to the end of the first line, he looked down to the end of the line directly below, followed it back to the start, and began reading aloud again from there. It worked - he didn't lose his place - but it was tedious and slow and not the way the rest of us read lines of text. She said she'd never seen that tactic before, though.

I still have a lot of thoughts about all this. It seems like a very first-world problem. It seems like a very privileged solution. (Our insurance will probably pay for half of the therapy - the oculomotor part - but not the rest.) It seems like the sort of thing one could easily be duped about - what parent, when told they can give their child extra help, would say "Nah, we'll just let him keep doing it the hard way, thanks." Our bullshitometers were, if not exactly on high alert, at least engaged. Let's just say that our healthy Irish cynicism had us vaguely wondering if they're just trying to part us from our dollars.

Naturally, I also wondered what we'd be doing at this juncture if we were still in Ireland. I have no idea whether an assessment would be possibly or any therapy available if we were there. Would we be told he's a slow reader and left at that? (I'm inclined to believe that many "slow readers" have these problems, but have been left to fend for themselves and catch up if they could. How long would it take? How much would they fall behind? Or does the pace of schooling now mean we have to catch up more quickly whereas back then (whenever "then" was) it wouldn't have mattered so much?
 
But on the whole, though vision therapy is a fairly new field, it seems to get good results, and, obviously, deciding not to pursue it was not something we seriously considered. Dash's teacher, to name one trustworthy source, has done this for two of her children. The office has excellent credentials and they have a waiting list for therapy and are extending their premises right now. (So if we are being duped, we're not alone.) I asked the doctor, "Does it work?" and she told me it does. I'm willing to give it a whirl, because I can't imagine a life where reading is not a source of joy and excitement and the best pastime I could ask for.

Lots of kids have speech therapy; this is vision therapy. We'll see what happens.

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

If you want to find out more, I found this Reading and Vision site very useful and used the checklist linked there to decide we should investigate further. I found the office we used from the directory at the College of Optometrists in Vision Development site, which lists those qualified in behavioral, or developmental, optometry.

Things to do before I turn 40: a very short list

Happily, I didn't have any set-in-stone plans for things I had to do before my thirties - those halcyon days, how I have enjoyed them - ended. I wonder what I might accomplish in the time I have left...

• Finish reading this book. [unlikely; I'm only halfway through]
• Go to bed early [one more chance for that]
• Buy ingredients for something to bring to tomorrow's party [which is not mine, but I will be there, so I can appropriate it a little]
• Make pizza for dinner
• Buy a bottle of wine [ooh, ambitious]
• Break up numerous sibling battles
• Use emotional blackmail on the children to get them to bed on time for a change, just because it's my birthday tomorrow [how likely is that to work, really?]

A whole new decade. It'll be interesting.

Further uninformed thoughts on Dash's vision

 Continuing the story from here, if you missed it before.

I always thought so long as you were reading you'd be okay. (You being anyone, in elementary school, to make any sort of decent progress.) It never ocurred to me that reading itself might be a hurdle. We had books in the house, we read stories every night, we visited the library; I was pretty confident that some time between four and seven, the reading would just happen.

I have no memory of learning to read, I just remember shouting out all the road signs from the back seat and reading the cereal box from an early age. So all this faltering and halting progress was new to me; but he's a boy, I thought, and he's not me, I thought, and he's his own person and clearly more interested in running and jumping and taking things apart and thinking about how things work and what stuff they're made of than I ever was. I still think that.

Dyslexia is a recognised thing. (I don't think he has dyslexia.) But how many other similar, lesser, learning/vision difficulties are there, and when does it become just searching for new ways to say "Well, he's a slow learner;" or is there really no such thing as a slow learner, just children with undiagnosed vision problems? Conversely, are we just trying to put names and explanations (and excuses, maybe) on things that don't really call for it?

Will it all turn out fine in the end? Probably. But this is one of those in-between points where you can't tell whether it's a vital decision that you're about to make or if it really won't make any difference. Short-term, long-term: I know he'll be fine in the end, but I'd really like something that makes second-grade homework less of a pain for all of us than kindergarten and first-grade homework was, especially as I know the stakes are higher and the expectations greater next year.

And then I think "For heaven's sake, it's second grade. I don't remember learning anything in second class." On the other hand, I could read pretty well by then. On the other other hand, that was in another country, and besides, those days are dead and gone (and with O'Leary in the grave). And then sometimes I think that maybe everyone here and now is far too focused on getting your kids into "a good school" (that means university) and the notion that you can't get a decent job without at least a graduate degree; then again, people are also agreeing that degrees are devalued when everyone has one, and there's a glut of PhDs out there with no jobs to go into, and that if he becomes an electrician he'll never be stuck for work...

It's all hypothetical until I know what we're talking about, which we will find out on Friday at our meeting. Assuming that we trust the professionals, that we feel like they speak the truth and that their methods are good, then we will listen to what they have to say and make decisions about what, if anything, we should do to help Dash with his reading. I am eager to find out.

Minor obsessions and second-child woes

You may have noticed that I ran out of new obsessions after a mere four-day week. Sorry, but I can only muster so many obsessions at once. I considered including baseball, but it's more a case of "vaguely more interested than I was before," which doesn't really count as an obsession. However, I do want to note that Dash's team finished their season in second place (out of three, but it was still an upset) and he clearly improved over the course of the eight weeks. We also went to a special Star-Wars-themed game of Real Baseball (i.e. Minor League pros) on Saturday night, which was a lot of fun, if somewhat marred by Mabel being absolutely terrified of the excellent fireworks display at the end.

But there was something very nice, I found, about the sense of community with the other parents, sitting in the evening warmth on the little bleachers beside the local little-league diamond, listening for the sweet metallic clunk as bat connected with ball, clapping and shouting for all the kids, yelling "Heads up!" when a ball went the wrong way, finding myself saying "He had a good inning" and realizing that I'd just used an idiom perfectly literally.

My view from the free seats

Of course, that only happened for one minute out of every five, because if I was there, Mabel was with me and I was mostly trying to keep her out of trouble as the minutes ticked towards and far past time for her to be safely tidied away from human interaction.

After the trophy presentation on Sunday - in which every child who participated got a trophy, of course - Mabel was enumerating the injustices of life once more. "I don't want to play soccer or baseball," she told me, "but it's not fair that Dash has four trophies and I have none."

She's right, it's not. Dash did three seasons of soccer and got a trophy at the end of each one, and now he has another. The unfairness comes from the fact that while I've offered Mabel the opportunity to play soccer for the past couple of years, I haven't really pushed it when she declined, because all those Saturday mornings are a pain in the ass, especially when the older child is/might be doing some other activity. So she gets the bad breaks of the second, and maybe of the girl, and that's not fair at all.

But if she wants to play T-ball next year, and Dash goes back to baseball, we might have logistical difficulties with conflicting schedules. Or, if they don't conflict, having to be somewhere four nights a week, which was hard enough for two. B and I both have our own evening commitments every now and then as well. (And I don't just mean a hot date with the sofa, a bottle of wine, and a Netflix, though lord knows that sounds lovely and is hard enough to come by.)

For the moment, I'm just tidying Dash's trophy collection onto a high shelf inside his closet and hoping she'll forget about it for a while.

Finding the good

Last night, while Mabel failed to even try to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, I was filling in her forms for next year at nursery school. (She turns five in November, so she won't go to elementary school until she's nearly six.) It was, perhaps, not the most fortuitous timing. By the time I got to

What are your child's strengths? 

I wrote

She will win every argument and never back down. We just have to harness her power for good, not evil.

Reading back over it this morning, I think I need to print out that page again and frame my thoughts in a more positive light. Next year's teachers know her already; I don't need to make her sound like the preschooler from the Black Lagoon. (Besides which, sometimes these answers reveal more about the parent than the child.)

This morning she's painting calmly and delightfully while her brother plays at a friend's house, and I am more inclined to find the good in her. I've been thinking lately that this year, for the first time, she looks outwardly much the same as she did last summer: she's reached the age where she's not changing and progressing by leaps and bounds any more, and I have to look a bit harder for the advances. But if I put a little thought into it, she has grown up a lot in the past year:

• Last summer she was still nursing to sleep and several times a night, and would only go back to sleep for me and a boob. She would wake up two hours after she went to sleep, like clockwork, which was not good for my social life. Now, she only nurses first thing in the morning, and often sleeps all night. Even if she does wake up, she goes back to sleep easily with no nursing. We can let a babysitter put her to bed. This is HUGE.
• Last summer she was still biting people. She doesn't quite have a handle on her temper just yet, but at least she confines herself to hitting, which is a lot more socially acceptable.
• She's not picking the flowers out of other people's gardens this summer, which means I can leave the house without sneaking past the neighbours.

And she hasn't drawn on her face for at least a week.

Honestly, four-and-a-half was such a low point for her brother (in a different way), and he came out of it so well, that I do have faith in her. I think it's an age where they're starting to see themselves from the outside, to understand that others look at them and form opinions - and that they can influence those opinions. Sometimes they run away from that - as Dash did, by becoming overwhelmingly shy for a few months - and sometimes they fight it, as Mabel does now with defiant and rude behavior.

But trying to condense your child's personality into a few lines that will help her teachers in three months' time? This child is an enigma to me, and I should know her best. She's a bundle of contradictions, and anything I say has to be immediately qualified by its opposite.

I think I'll just let the teachers find her out for themselves.

New-obsessions week, day 4: My Little Pony

It's not new, and it's not mine, but it's certainly an obsession. I've put a limit on the daily television watching for the summer, and the kids are currently using all their allotted minutes on episodes of My Little Pony.

The great thing is that it's on YouTube, so they can watch it whenever suits us, like when I'm having a shower or trying to make dinner. The terrible thing is that they have to use my computer for that, so I can't do anything useful or important like blogging or checking out Facebook while they are quietly and harmoniously occupied.

(Which is why the TV is on right now and Mabel is watching unsanctioned Daniel Tiger. After a good start last week, I am currently failing at TV restriction.)

But as TV for kids goes, I'm pro the Ponies. It's not quite as educational as their other firm favourite, WildKratts, but it has a positive message - friendship really is magic, after all - and at least with ponies you don't have to worry about negative body image issues. None of the ponies are fat or thin, and though some are pegasi* and some are unicorns and some are just regular ponies, there is no ponyism. They do have slightly differing American accents (now I'm wondering if they dub them with UK accents for transatlantic viewing) and the poshest one, of course, has an English(ish) accent. For a while I thought she was a villain, but she's not. So that's a strike against typecasting right there.

When I started watching (that is, listening, while I did something else) I was horrified by the saccharine twee-ness of it all: they have to search for the elements of harmony to bring peace to the kingdom; they each have a "cutie mark" that tells them their destiny and appears when they're adolescent ponies, like a particularly informative first period, maybe. They warble sweet tunes about being there for your friends and showing up when needed and helping each other out. They learn valuable lessons about life and love and friendship.

Then I watched this episode and discovered it was essentially a takeoff of The Music Man, which just happens to be a much-favoured musical in this house. And gradually I came to see that the Ponies are pint-sized works of genius.

Which is just as well because now we are all stuck humming the words to "A True True Friend is a Friend in Deed" in the wee hours of the insomniac morning. At least, I think it's not just me.

*Pegasuses. Pegasusi. Pegasusi. Pegasus ponies. They have wings, right?

New-obsessions week, day 3: Coconut oil

If you heard there was an all-natural product that had inbuilt antiseptic properties and was an amazing moisturizer, and so pure you could actually eat it (and it would do you good on the inside too), and that on top of all this it smelled amazing, well, you'd go out and buy some, wouldn't you?

Well, there is. It's coconut oil. Go and get some. (Trader Joe's does a good one for a great price, but they have it all over these days.)

There are a gazillion websites telling you all the bazillion things you can do with coconut oil, from using it as a coffee creamer to curing athlete's foot to a personal lubricant (ahem) to polishing your furniture, so I won't ennumerate them all. 

But so far I've been using it as a facial and body moisturizer, make-up remover and cleanser, and have put it on mosquito bites (sure, why not) and fried some chicken in it. (I scooped up about a third of the jar into a separate container to keep for cosmetic use, so that I'm not actually eating from the same jar that I'm slathering my cracked heels out of.) I have great plans to do some deep conditioning on my hair with it soon, and make a body scrub with sugar.

The interesting thing about this oil is that it's liquid at 76 F and higher, and solid (like lard, for instance, or butter) below that. Coincidentally, 76 F is just about where our air conditioning is set in the summer, and upstairs is usually a little warmer. So at the moment, the jar in my bathroom is usually liquid while the one in the kitchen vacillates from one state to the other depending on whether the oven is on. It doesn't matter; it can turn from solid to liquid and back multiple times daily without doing it any harm; though I do like the soft-butter consistency for a body moisturizer when I can get it.

But the best thing about it is the smell. Remember ages ago I was washing my face with olive oil? Well, that was nice and all, but I did get a little tired of smelling like a salad. No such problems here - unless you hate the scent of coconut, I suppose. Does anyone? Is that possible? Well, I don't hate it, and to be honest, I would probably buy anything that smelled this good, no matter what was in it. The lovely all-naturalness is just a bonus.

It was Emily at The Nest who first drew my attention to this wondrous stuff, and she keeps promising to do a big long post about it, so please do just consider this a mere preview of what the expert will tell us, just as soon as the expert is done taking five children to Germany and back, not to mention all the amazing crafting, painting, homeopathing, homeschooling, doll-making, and baking that she does on a daily basis. Go check out her lovely blog and tell her I sent you.

New-obsessions week, day 2: Cold-pressed iced coffee

Okay, so coffee is not a new obsession. But this is something new for me: iced coffee at home.

I am a travesty of an American. Don't tell the people who gave me that certificate, but we don't have a coffee machine in our house. We drink instant coffee here, mostly. (This also makes me a very bad European. Sorry, everyone.)

But we do have a cafetière, otherwise known as a French press, otherwise known as a plungy-thingy [imagine me doing dodgy-looking hand movements to indicate the plunging]. And we have a fridge. And I bought some ground coffee in a bag. But the special thing about this is that it's cold-press coffee, which makes it even easier, as well as smoother and deliciouser. All you need to do is remember to make it before you go to bed.

1. Put four heaped tablespoons of coffee grounds (or more) in the French press.
2. Fill it up with cold water. Stir a little. Do not plunge yet.
3. Put it in the fridge overnight.
4. Get up on a warm summer's morning. Open fridge. Plunge, and pour into a nice tall glass.
5. Add ice cubes*, milk, and a straw.

* I do not have ice cubes. This is the other reason they'll throw me out of the country, but if we had ice cubes the children would do nothing but take them out of the freezer, play with them, and crunch them up for their dinner. Besides, I don't want to dilute my lovely coffee with anything but some nice creamy milk.

You can play around with the quantities until you get the strength you like best - this is weakish, but if you use ice, you might want it stronger. Keep the rest in a sealed jar (or just where it is) for tomorrow and the next day, unless you need to drink the whole thing in one morning.

You can also make a simple syrup to sweeten it a little, or just stir in some sugar if you're not fussy. I'm sure I'll get around to that some day soon, but for now I've just been enjoying mine along with a rhubarb muffin from the freezer for second breakfast after my workout.

Tune in tomorrow for my new all-purpose household and beauty obsession.

New-obsessions week: Day 1 - Exercise

When Jillian Michaels says "Just a couple more," she means ten. When she says "Nearly done" she means "Halfway through, maybe." When she says "You're well on your way to being shredded," it's true, but maybe not exactly the way she wanted. As I lay panting on the floor this morning with drips of sweat running into my eyes, those are the things that came to mind.

You know, this might be hard to believe but before last week I didn't really know who Jillian Michaels was. This is what comes of not having had cable TV for three years. Apparently I never really watched The Biggest Loser because I was too busy watching Top Chef and Project Runway when we did have cable, and I think I had her a little mixed up with some red-headed chick in the UK who tells people what they should eat. Is she a different Gillian, maybe?*

Anyway, I heard once again recently about this 30-Day Shred thing that's only Very Old News, and, always being last to run after the bandwagon and try to jump on board just as it's leaving town, I decided to give it a go, with my self-imposed motivator of BlogHer attendance coming up apace. It checked a lot of boxes straight away:

• Not all lying down like Pilates, so the kids have less opportunity to jump on me
• Level 1 available free on YouTube; I bought Level 2 for just 1.99 from Amazon downloads this morning
• Indoors in the heat and humidity of the summer
• Quick - half an hour and I'm done, and I can actually do it with the kids in the house and no extra adult for distracting/restraining

Not that that last is easy, mind you. The first day I had the seven-year old pacing me jumping jack for jumping jack during the entire aerobic part of the workout, and he barely broke a sweat. Which was great for my ego, of course. In between times he was bugging me to have a turn of the weights (I have measly 2lb ones that the kids love to swing around terrifyingly) and getting between me and the screen.

Sometimes the four-year-old would come and try to snuggle up beside me as I lay on the floor trying to do my reverse crunches or my arm flies (see how well I can say all the words now?), and generally my panting would be interspersed with the following monologue:

"Put down the weights. No. At least, don't hold them there. Move them AWAY from the computer. Don't hold them over your head. Fine, just do it that way. Yes. NO. No, don't drop them on the hardwood floor. No... okay, now I need them again."

At least it distracted me from the pain of the lunges, I suppose. Also, my feet are too small to do lunges without falling over. Some might say it's bad balance, but I'm going with the small feet thing.

Anyway, the point is that this morning I started level two, which means I have been working out for 30 minutes a day for ten of the past eleven days, and I'm quite pleased about that. I also stepped on the scales this morning and may possibly have lost some pounds too. If things are really spectacular, I might have some before and after pictures in another 20 days, but don't get your hopes up because I might totally chicken out on that front.

Tomorrow in my new summer obsessions: coffee. Wait and see.

*Aha. That's Gillian McKeith. Verrry different Gillian, apparently.

Extra-vision

 
You may remember that Dash got glasses late last year. I hoped that that would do the trick, and his reading would take off like a rocket, the way his teacher assured me that with his large vocabulary and interest in learning, it was bound to.

But it didn't. We sort of ignored it, and his reading did improve. He ended first grade reading at a mid-second grade level, which should be perfectly good enough for anyone. And yet. It didn't help that I kept hearing tales of his peers who were suddenly leaps and bounds ahead of their supposed reading level - I mean, a certain number of people have to be average (because we don't live in Lake Wobegone), and I'm not demanding that everyone has to admit that my baby is brilliant... but.

I still had the feeling there was more to it. The tipping point came last week when a comic arrived in the mail - a late birthday present that's a bit more advanced in reading requirement than the sender realised, I think, but Dash was eager to get stuck in. Listening to him laboriously sound out the contents of each speech bubble was painful. Thinking harder about it, the all-caps style of comic writing probably makes it harder to recognise words than the ups and downs of regular mixed case; but surely he should be further ahead than that by now, I thought. Something just hasn't clicked for him the way it should have.

I asked some helpful people online, and some helpful people online gave me just what I needed: the vocabulary to Google the right resources. What I needed to look for was not just a regular optometrist, or ophthalmologist, but a behavioral or pediatric or developmental optometrist/ophthalmologist. These are doctors trained not just to assess how well people's eyes work, but also how well the eyes are working together and sending messages to the brain, and how the brain is interpreting those messages.

In short order, I had found this website and this directory, and was feeling a lot more proactive about the whole thing.

A lot of what that Vision and Reading page said had me nodding and aha-ing. I got Dash to look at the examples of blurred text and he spotted the one that looks the way his blurry words look. (They're only blurry sometimes, but I don't think that's the full extent of his issue.) The clincher was the checklist: I came up with a score of 29. They say anything over 20 warrants further investigation.

The next morning I called our pediatrician's office and our local optometrist to see if they had any recommendations, but in the end I used the COVD directory and found an office not too far away that sounded from their website as if they were just what we needed. They had an appointment for an initial eye test on Tuesday, so along we went.

Tuesday's was mostly a regular eye test with a few different elements and a chat with the doctor about why we were there. But what we said, and my answers on their slightly different checklist, were enough for them to bring us back in today for a two-hour long evaluation that covered how Dash reads, how he sees and interprets and remembers shapes, how he writes and spells, how his eyes track lines of text, and probably many other factors I didn't even know were being assessed.

The paperwork included a question sheet to be filled in by the child's teacher, but with only two days' lead time (we'd filled the spot of a cancellation) I didn't manage to get hold of Dash's teacher before the appointment. However, she called me back later and said that her own children had benefitted from vision therapy, that she'd been surprised when Dash did not test into TAG (the more advanced stream) based on her observations of him, and that she had wondered why his reading hadn't improved even more than it did this year. (You know, I do feel she should have said something about that to me without this prompting.) So we'll add her input to the pile too.

We wait two weeks for all the information to be put together, and then we go in for a conference to see what's up. It's likely not to be something that's a quick fix with new glasses; it might be something that calls for vision therapy. I don't know if there's a middle path between those two. Worst/best-case scenario, I suppose, we just paid out of pocket to be told that our son is a perfectly average slowish reader. I would be okay with that. Honest. I don't want him to be a supergenius hampered by dyslexia. (It's probably not dyslexia. But the problems we're talking about are in that sort of family.)

I will keep you posted.

Windows to my soul

So far, my planning for BlogHer has mostly centred around what colour my toenails are going to be.

This is a vital consideration. One's toenails, in sandal weather, are an extension of one's very being, a porthole into one's personality, and an ever-present accessory. I don't want to spread pedicure paranoia or anything, but as far as I'm concerned the shade of my toenails says a lot.

I also have a problem with purple at the moment. My problem used to be with green, and I sort of declared an embargo on green things to deal with that. But apparently I moved to purple and now I'm in great danger of matchy-matchyness, which just won't do at all.

Let me run through the shades of nail polish I have at my disposal, and the messages they convey, at least in my head, and probably not in anyone else's.

• None: A classic option for the natural beauty. Groomed nails with no polish say that I'm above all that. Or that I didn't get a chance to paint them. Or that it's winter and I'm wearing socks and what, you brought your x-ray specs, Superman?

• Clear: Not much point, really. If you're painting your toenails, paint your toenails.
• Darkish tomato red: Fun, but not really me. A little too bright and clashes with most of my clothes.
• Dark sparkly red: Classic with a twist. Goes with almost everything, but doesn't say a lot about the purple/green-loving person I am deep down inside.
• Dark bronze: Very me (I'm an autumn, you know), goes with everything. But a little too much like the colour of my sandals themselves. Too safe, maybe; doesn't say "I take risks in blogging!"
• Palest lilac: Lovely, very summery; has the unfortunate side-effect of making my pale feet look as if they belong to a corpse. Pity about that. If I have to spend several conference sessions with my toenails in my line of sight, I don't want to be wondering whether or not I'm still alive.
• Brighter lilac/orchid: Also very summery, not quite so corpse-like. The problem is that I have too many t-shirts the exact same colour, not to mention my two orchid dresses and my purple/berry bag.
• Dark sparkly purple(not pictured): I just got a pedicure in this shade, and will probably never be able to find it again. It's very nice, though. On the other hand, it's exactly the same as my glasses frames. (See what I mean about the embargo?)
• Metallic teal: Last year's purchase - gorgeous colour but doesn't suit my skintone at all, and clashes with almost all my greens, which are more on the yellow side of green than the blue. Great with the bronze sandals, mind you.

Some might say I should choose my clothes for the conference first and take my cue from there. But then I'd be denied all this very engrossing and important contemplation. I probably need to invest in a few more options. Now taking suggestions.

I'll let you know what I finally decide.

My little gastronomes

Welcome to the June 2013 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Parenting in Theory vs. in Reality
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month our participants are sharing how their ideas and methods of parenting have changed.
***


"I'll never cook a separate meal for my children," I said, back in those innocent days when my firstborn was growing apace, nourished by nothing more than his mama's milk, as I thought scornfully of other families I'd seen doing just that. "Why should they need different food? Children's menus are an abomination. He's going to be a little gastronome."

I love food. I have a (fairly) healthy and varied diet. I enjoy vegetables, with broccoli right up there at the top of my list, and kale a new entrant not far behind. I enjoy cooking and baking, sweet and savoury. I like to make Indian food, Italian, Tex-Mex. I have eaten Korean and Ethiopian, Mongolian and French. I own a tagine, and I've used it too.

My children, I thought loftily, will not suffer as I did at the hands of their grandmother. My mother, a wonderful woman, was not a natural cook. She likes to say that some are born cooks, some achieve cookery, and some - like her - have cookery thrust upon them. She fed me and my father admirably for many years, with wholesome home-cooked food that was often not burned. But my parents come of meat-and-two-veg stock, where one veg is always a potato. "Meat" includes fish (on Fridays), but vegetarian meals are unheard of, unless you're actually one of those odd people, a vegetarian. "What did the good Lord put animals on the earth for if not for us to eat?" she'll ask you. I stopped getting into that argument a long time ago.

When I have children, I thought, I'll cook nice food.

And now I do cook nice food. My husband can vouch for it. He's a wonderful and appreciative audience. Our kids, however, not so much.

I don't think a single pea went in, then or since.

I conveniently forgot that before my foodie-esque incarnation, I was a pretty fussy eater, and it had little or nothing to do with my mother's cooking: I was just made that way. I still remember the first time I tasted a pea (and swallowed it whole so it would go quicker). I remember putting sugar on raw tomatoes in salads to make them more palatable. I remember picking the chunks of beef out of the sauce of the stew, carefully scraping off any vestige of onion or whatever else might have been there. I remember the day I finally tasted a burger, and I'm pretty sure I was in double digits by then.

My husband too, it turns out, was a picky eater. As number five of five, he probably didn't encounter much pushback from his parents, who I'm sure had stopped noticing by then. If you didn't eat it, one of your siblings picked up the slack pretty quickly.

So of course, genetically as well as karmically, we were quite likely to produce a couple of picky eaters between us.

I started out as well as I could with my children. I ate lots of vegetables in my pregnancies. (And a fair number of toasted waffles and chocolate milkshakes too.) I breastfed my kids exclusively for the first six months, and continued well (very well) into "extended" territory. I introduced fruits and vegetables early. I provided them with a variety of attractive options. I read Ellyn Satter.

If my second child had been my first, I would probably describe her as a picky eater. As it is, I'm delighted that she eats a broad range of things: pizza, pasta (one brand only), scrambled eggs (sometimes), cheese (-sticks), baked beans, sausages, chicken (but never in nugget form), apples, strawberries, broccoli, even. (Yay broccoli!) That's about it, mind you. Nothing with a sauce, nothing mixed together, nothing differently made, at the moment. She's four. I think that's how they are.

Healthy meal. That's not even chocolate milk.

Her big brother, though, is far worse, and subsists on a diet of peanut-butter sandwiches, breakfast cereal, milk, and crackers. He's a self-proclaimed vegetarian, except that he won't eat a vegetable. In the past few months we've had some steps forward with tiny bites of raw carrot, some apple, a few grapes: these are a big deal for my seven-year-old. (Yes, he's seven. This has been going on a long time. Even as a baby, when they eat everything, he was resistant to tasting things.)

My son is healthy and growing. He's rarely sick, and he's right at the 50th percentile on the growth charts, where he's been since he was about 9 months old. The doctor encourages him to eat some fruits and vegetables, but beyond that she's not particularly worried about him.

I have, of course, spent many fruitless (hah) hours obsessing over his diet, coming up with plans and sticker charts, blogging, enquiring, self-flagellating, wheedling, putting my foot down, and generally worrying about all of this - but in the end, I had to accept that eating, like sleeping and pooping, is just one of those things you can't make someone else do. I cook a nice dinner for the grownups every night, our daughter might eat some of it or something else reasonably decent, and the boy has another peanut butter sandwich.

The good food is in the house. He sees it, he smells it, (he gags and removes himself to the other room), he knows what it's called. He sometimes even helps cook it. He has no interest in eating it, most of the time, though now and then he announces that he wants to taste, say, lettuce, and I give him a bit and he nibbles it and recoils in horror.

I have taken all my assumptions about how to get children to eat healthy food and tossed them overboard. My son is a smart kid, he loves school, he's growing and healthy and fast and strong. He eats what he eats, and it sustains him. He's a pain to take on vacation or out for a meal, but such is life. I have faith that he'll get around to eating more variety some day, and we'll let him get there and welcome him with open arms and a full plate when he does.

Just don't tell my mother he's a vegetarian. She won't understand.

Then he sat down and ate an entire apple, just like that.

***
Visit Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!
Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

• Know Better, Do Better. Except When I Don't. — Jennifer from True Confessions of a Real Mommy was able to settle in her parenting choices before her children arrived, but that doesn't mean she always lives up to them.
• Judgments Made Before Motherhood — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama looks back on her views of parents she came in contact with before she became a mother and how much her worldview of parenting has changed!
• A Bend in The Road — Lyndsay at ourfeministplayschool writes about how her visions of homeschooling her son during the elementary school years have changed drastically in the last year - because HE wants to go to school.
• I Wish Children Came with Instruction Manuals — While Dionna at Code Name: Mama loves reading about parenting, she's not found any one book that counts as an instruction manual. Every child is different, every family is different, every dynamic is different. No single parenting method or style is the be-all end-all. Still, wouldn't it be nice if parenting were like troubleshooting?
• The Mistakes I've Made — Kate at Here Now Brown Cow laments the choices she made with her first child and explains how ditching her preconceived ideas on parenting is helping her to grow a happy family.
• I Only Expected to Love... — Kellie at Our Mindful Life went into parenting expecting to not have all the answers. It turns out, she was right!
• They See Me Wearin', They Hatin' — Erin Yuki at And Now, for Something Completely Different contemplates putting her babywearing aspirations into practice, and discussed how she deals with "babywearing haters."
• Parenting Human Beings — Erika Gebhardt lists her parenting "mistakes," and the one concept that has revolutionized her parenting.
• Doing it right: what I knew before I had kids... — Lucy at Dreaming Aloud, guest posting at Natural Parents Network realises that the number one game in town, when it comes to parenting, is judgement about doing it right. But "doing it right" looks different to everybody.
• A synopsis of our reality as first time parents — Amanda at My Life in a Nut Shell summarizes the struggles she went through to get pregnant, and how her daughter's high needs paved the way for her and her husband to become natural parents.
• Theory to Reality? — Jorje compares her original pre-kid ideas (some from her own childhood) to her personal parenting realities on MommaJorje.com.
• The Princess Paradigm — Laura at Pug in the Kitchen had planned to raise her daughter in a sparkly, princess-free home, but in turn has found herself embracing the glitz.
• Healthy Eating With Kids: Ideal vs. Real — Christy at Eco Journey In The Burbs had definite ideas about what healthy eating was going to look like in her family before she had kids. Little did she realize that her kids would have something to say about it.
• How to deal with unwanted parenting advice — Tat at Mum in Search thought that dealing with unwanted parenting advice would be a breeze. It turned out to be one of her biggest challenges as a new mum.
• How I trained my 43 month old in 89 days! — Becky at Old New Legacy used to mock sticker charts, until they became her best friend in the process of potty training.
• My Double Life: Scheduling with Twins — Mercedes at Project Procrastinot was banging her head against the wall trying to keep up with the plan she made during pregnancy, until she let her babies lead the way.
• Parenting in the land of compromise — As a holistic health geek trying to take care of her health issues naturally, Jessica at Crunchy-Chewy Mama regrets that her needs sometimes get in the way of her children's needs.
• Practice Makes Good, Not Perfect — Rachael at The Variegated Life comes to see that through practice, she just might already be the parent she wants to be.
• 3 Dangerous Myths about Parenting and Partnering: How to Free Yourself and Your Family — Sheila Pai at A Living Family shares in theory (blog) and reality (video) how she frees herself from 3 Dangerous Myths about Parenting and Partnering that can damage the connection, peace and love she seeks to nurture in her relationships with family and others.
• 5 Things I Thought MY Children Would Never Do — Luschka at Diary of a First Child largely laughs at herself and her previous misconceptions about things her children would or wouldn't do, or be allowed to do.
• Policing politeness — Lauren at Hobo Mama rethinks a conviction she had about modeling vs. teaching her children about courtesy.
• The Before and The After: Learning about Parenting — Amy at Me, Mothering, and Making it All Work reminisces about the perspective she held as a young adult working with children (and parents) . . . before she became a mother.
• Parenting Beliefs: Becoming the Parent You Want to Be — Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children discusses how we can make a mindful decision to become the parent we want to be. Decisions we make affect who we will become.
• The Great Breastfeeding Debacle — In Lisa at The Squishable Baby's mind, breastfeeding would be easy.
• What my daughter taught me about being a parent — Mrs Green asks, "Is it ever ok to lock your child in their bedroom?"
• Sensory Box Fail! — Megan at The Boho Mama discovers that thoughtful sensory activities can sometimes lead to pasta in your bra and beans up your nose.
• Montessori and My Children – Theory vs. Reality — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now shares her experiences with Montessori parenting and describes the results she sees in her now-adult children.
• I Like The Mother I Am Now More Than The Mother I Intended To Be — Darcel at The Mahogany Way thought she would just give her kids the look and they would immediately fall in line.
• How I Ended Up Like My Tiger Mom With Peaceful Parenting — Theek at The Laotian Commotion somehow ended up like her Tiger Mom, even though she purposely tried for the complete opposite as a peaceful parent.

Star charts, episode umpty: A new hope

Sometimes I wonder when having kids became this intricate tango of bribery that you can't call bribery and reward systems and star charts and calculated praise and natural consequences and parenting strategies and whatever else it is we do to try to outwit or outmaneuver these small people. I'm sure when I was a child - ah, when I were a lass - my parents just said "It's time for bed," and off I trotted like a good little girl. (Actually, my dad gave me a piggyback upstairs and read me my stories, but then I turned over and went to sleep and that was that.)

I did not have star charts, I did not have rewards or punishments or a naughty step or time outs. I was spanked a couple of times, but mostly the threat of parental disapproval was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. (I did have a penny taken off my 20p pocket money every time I said "Yeah" instead of "Yes" for a while, and I admit I went into negative equity pretty quickly on that one.)

So, what? Children these days, eh? Parents these days, more like, being one of them myself. I blame some amount of my good behaviour on my lack of siblings, having seen for myself how much better behaved my kids are one at a time rather than both together, when they egg each other on and rile each other up and kick each other and love each other simultaneously in ways I, a sibling-deficient only, could never even begin to fathom.

But I do keep thinking it should be less complicated. We should just tell them what they have to do, and they should just do it. I'm sure I'm not remembering it wrong. I'm sure my parents had it easy.

-----------

And so the summer vacation begins and I haul out a new star chart, a new System, a new set of bribes and routines and things to aim for and fun in return for no fun (also known as cooperation). I am suffused with hope, shot through with organization, filled with plans, inspired by lists.

It'll probably all fall apart in a couple of weeks, assuming it even gets off the ground. My goals won't be SMART enough, or my menus won't be planned enough, and I'll be winging it daily and we'll all be yelling at each other and then there'll be another reset when we're on vacation, and for camp, and for the second half of the summer.

But we have to start somewhere, right? We can be shiny with optimism and glowing in the delight of our no-failure-yet for a little while longer.

Accidental quiche

I remembered late in the day that I was supposed to bring some food to Monday night's board meeting - an appetizer or dessert, because it was at 6.30 and some people wouldn't have had time to eat. There wasn't much in the fridge, I didn't even have a lemon handy to make scones or muffins, and I knew someone else had already taken the chocolate option.

So my brain, as it sometimes does, lit upon probably the most complicated thing possible and decided that was the obvious choice. I would use that lone zucchini (courgette) in the salad drawer and the leftover cream from a cake at the weekend, and make mini quiches.

My brain also decided it was too good for recipes, or couldn't find anything just exactly right, and so thought it would wing it. This could have been disastrous, but by happy chance things came together deliciously and I ended up with some very nice mini quiches.

But then we had nothing for our own dinner, so I decided we should keep the quiches because there weren't enough for everyone at the meeting, and that I'd make some healthy blueberry muffins (frozen blueberries) instead. I ended up bringing seven quiches and some slightly odd-looking mini muffins (all the blueberries stuck to the pan), and I'm sure everyone thought I was a terrible overachiever.

Apologies for the approximate quantities, but I eyeballed the liquids.


Zucchini (and ham) mini-quiches

Pastry:
1 cup (200g) flour (I used white wholewheat flour)
Pinch salt
4oz (100g) butter (I used some spreadable Dairygold I had in the fridge, which might be what led to the very soft texture of this dough)
1 tablespoon cold water

Filling:
1 zucchini (or any vegetable, probably)
About half a small onion
A slice of deli ham (if you have it, or want it)
Some feta, if you had any, would be a delicious addition
Two eggs
A large splash of heavy cream (if you happen to have some hanging around)
As much milk as it takes to get what looks like the right amount of filling
A good grating of parmesan
A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Turn your oven to 400F.

I made the pastry in the food processor. Put the flour, salt, and butter in the bowl, and pulse until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the water through the tube, pouring slowly. You might need a little more - I was surprised that the dough came together after just one tablespoon. Remove from the processor, smush into a ball, and chill in the fridge for half an hour, if you can spare it.

Meanwhile, finely chop the onion and cut the zucchini into 1/4-1/2 inch cubes. Saute them in a little olive oil until soft but not mushy - maybe five minutes over medium-low heat. Cut your ham into little squares and mix it in with the vegetables. If you have some feta, put that in too.

Mix the eggs, cream, and parmesan in a measuring jug, and then add as much milk as you think will make enough filling. I had perhaps 16oz (500ml) in the end. Better to have too much than too little. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Take the pastry out of the fridge and knead it a little on a floured surface, before rolling it out as thinly as you can. This dough seemed scarily soft to me as I rolled it out, but it stayed together and turned out deliciously. I don't know if it was the flour or the butter or the weather that did it, but I can't swear yours will be just this good.

Use a cookie cutter or a drinking glass to cut circles to fit your well-greased muffin tin or mini-pie pan (I used my mince-pie tin, imported at vast expense from Ireland, but they probably sell something similar here too). Put a circle of dough in each hole, pressing it out to fit the shape, and then prick the base all over with a fork.

(I was afraid at this juncture that I'd made a huge mistake because now my filling would run through the holes, but that didn't seem to happen.)

Bake the pastry cases blind (that just means with nothing in them) for 10-15 minutes at 400F. Take them out when they're still pale - don't wait for them to be golden brown. Take it out and (carefully - remember how hot the tin is) spoon an equal amount of the zucchini mixture into each piecrust. Then pour over the thick and creamy egg mixture to fill each one up.

Bake for about 20 minutes more, turning the oven down a bit to 375F or so, until the top is set and starting to turn brown. Cool before serving, but they're delicious still a little warm.

I had a bit more filling than pastry, so I made three muffin-sized crustless quiches with the rest.

If I'd known how well they were going to turn out, I'd have taken more photos

How to blog in the summer vacation

• Send the children on a treasure hunt. Forget to bury the treasure.
• Start a game of hide and seek. Don't seek.
• Blog one sentence at a time.
• Actually, just turn your whole blog over to your Twitter account.
• Recycle old posts from when nobody used to read your blog. Pretend you just had that baby last week.
• Send the children out to forage for food instead of going to the supermarket.
• Make the children cook your dinner.
• Drunkblog.
• Send them to camp.
• Send yourself to camp.
• Hire a mother's helper.
• Hire a ghost writer.
• Get all your friends to write guest posts.
• Ask famous people to contribute guest posts. (This entry actually written by the Dalai Lama.)
• Sacrifice your half hour of TV a night to a noble cause. 
• Or use that time to blog.
• Blog while watching TV. You won't be Jon Stewart's so funny distracted at all.
• Stop doing Sporcle quizes.
• Stop playing GeoGuessr.
• Embrace the chaos. Liveblog the children's fights.
• Photo entries. Lots of photo entries.

Things I may be doing tomorrow

• Panicking, because Wednesday is Mabel's last day of school and Friday is Dash's.
• Going to Target and panic-buying ALL THE THINGS.
• Doing all my grocery shopping for the summer so that I don't have to bring two children to the supermarket twice a week.
• Painting my toenails.
• Paying someone else to paint my toenails while I relax. 
• Not being able to relax while someone else paints my toenails because of all the other things I could be doing with this very precious morning.
• Giving myself a home a facial and dying my hair, which sorely needs it.
• Cleaning the house, which sorely needs it.
• Reading a book, because when else will I get the chance?
• Writing a bunch of blog posts and scheduling them in advance so that you don't all wander off and leave me during the summer when posting dips below acceptable levels.
• Surfing the Internet.
• Telling Facebook how it's my second-last morning of freedom.
• Telling Twitter ditto.
• Compiling lists of things we can do during the summer.
• Compiling lists of things I should do but won't get done till September.
• Going to the post office to mail my mother's birthday present.
• (I should probably definitely do that last one. Remind me in the morning, 'kay?)