My girls had finally both gotten rid of their slight colds and it was time to get their annual flu shot. I think I had casually mentioned it at dinner at the beginning of the week. Mistake #1. Don’t ever talk about getting a shot with your kids. The fear of getting a SHOT is far worse than the reality – try explaining that to four and six year old children.

At the end of the week, after my poor girls have had all week to stew on their upcoming flu shots, we finally go to the doctor to get them. They fuss and cry in the car almost the entire 20 minute ride there. In order to get a little peace and quiet so that I can focus on driving, I bribe them with ice cream for dessert. It works until the nurse calls us into the exam room at the doctor’s office. Mistake #2. Don’t waste a bribe too soon, save it for when you’re really going to need it.

Like many doctor’s offices, ours has a waiting room with a serpentine hall to the multiple exam rooms. There is no door to keep the patients in, or keep them out. My two girls walk very reluctantly behind me and their nanny, (Stephanie, our awesome Au Pair!). We all step into the exam room. The nurse asks the girls who will go first. Both children backup very quickly out of the exam room into the hall so that there backs are against the wall. One starts crying and fussing, the other follows suit. With 17 months between them, they take turns copying each other’s bad behavior.

Neither child will come into the exam room. The nurse is waiting and starts to look a bit impatient. Her look says “Can’t you control your own kids?”. Clearly, not I think.

Bribe #2. Whoever goes first can select some extra play gemstones from the party favors I had gotten for an upcoming birthday party. My older daughter starts to step forward hesitantly. She puts one foot across the threshold of the exam room and then makes a break for it. Before any of us can blink, she and her sister are screaming at the top of their lungs and running back into the exam room and heading for the elevators. Mistake #3. Bribes are meaningless in the face of an impending shot.

I look at Stephanie not sure if I should laugh at this ludicrous situation or be truly mortified. I look at a group of doctors and nurses all watching our spectacle, and they nod reassuringly and tell me that this is normal behavior. Hmmm… I’m not convinced.

Stephanie and I take off after the girls and pick them up, crying, thrashing and all. I take my older daughter into the exam room and have to hold her down for the shot. A really horrible experience that makes me feel like a bad parent. The shot is over before she knows it, I hug her tight and pass her to Stephanie who she clings to like a monkey around a tree. The same thing happens with her younger sister. There must be a better way…

We’re all finished and I think, thank God, maybe next year when they’re a year older it won’t be so bad. The nurse then looks at me and says, please book an appointment one month from today so that your younger daughter can get her booster flu shot since she didn’t get it last year.

You’re kidding. Right?

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Have You Ever Seen Your Child Run for Her Life?

What I didn’t know until recently is, how bad for you processed meats really are. The World Cancer Research Fund and American Institute for Cancer Research’s “Second Expert Report” concludes that “processed meat is a convincing cause of colorectal cancer.”

The National School Lunch program, a federally funded program that often provides the best meal a child may get in a day, currently distributes and subsidizes processed meats like hot dogs to 30+ million children. Given the link between cancer and processed meats, it’s time to eliminate these meats from the National School Lunch program.

As a concerned parent who wants to make a difference, I’ve signed the petition to the Secretary of Agriculture requesting that the government halt the distribution and subsidization of processed meats like hot dogs through the National School Lunch program. Whether you have children or not, if you’re reading this blog you’re concerned about nutrition and health, please take a moment and click on the following link to sign the petition too. Thank you.
http://support.cancerproject.org/site/PageServer?pagename=usda_national_school_lunch_program_petition

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Controlling What Our Kids Eat

Altucher makes an analogy to the value of a college education to one strategy for winning the game of Scrabble.

“You have two choices. You can read every book you can find, build an enormous vocabulary, look up the definitions of words you don’t know (that will help you remember them better) and use your advanced knowledge, painstakingly constructed over years, to defeat all opponents.

Or you can remember the following five words: “xi,” “xu,” “za,” “qi,” and “qat.” “Ka” and “ki” are not so bad either. And every now and then “aa,” “ae,” and “ai” can prove incredibly useful. These are all legal words in the last edition of the official Scrabble dictionary. What do they mean? I have no idea. You don’t need to know… Once you are OK with the fact that “xu” is a legal word, then that means you can essentially slap that “X” down on a triple-letter score with much greater ease than any of your opponents really thought possible. While they are all stuck with their Qs and Zs, you’re racking up 50-point two-letter words and winning the game.”

Altucher states that college is too expensive, there is no value in a balanced education, and “there are far better uses of time”. Instead of college, he advocates working, getting good at one thing, taking ½ the fee of a semester to start a business, and getting involved with a charity.

All college students should do what he advocates while in college! A diverse college education will give young adults the skills and confidence they need to succeed in all of these endeavors. What’s the point of learning your multiplication tables if you don’t truly understand what 2×3=6 really means. Rote memorization and shortcuts are exactly the problem with our culture. There are no instant solutions. In order to make our world a better place to live, we need to think, feel, and understand why. We need to learn to question.

A college education provides motivated students the opportunity to live on their own without their parents’ constantly looking over their shoulder, develop their own group of friends from a larger community without family to pave the way, negotiate their own social relationships, not compete with their siblings on a daily basis, take responsibility for their successes and mistakes, take care of their own meals, home(dorm room), transportation, etc., try a variety of things to discover what they’re passionate about and what they’re not, learn to think on their own and to communicate, grow up and stand on their own two feet.

If our children can learn these skills while discovering what they’re passionate about, they will be happy in whatever they choose to do – and that, is priceless.

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Return on Investment of a College Education

We not only need to provide our children with healthy choices, but we need to teach them how and why we combine these healthy choices. Yet, the puzzle is still larger.

I believe we also need to teach our children to appreciate the wonderful choices that they have and the importance of not wasting food since it is a precious gift. When I was a child, my mom used to tell us that children were starving in Ethiopia and that we needed to finish the food that we had taken. As a child I don’t think I fully understood the implications of what she was saying, but it clearly made an impact on me since I recall her words 30 years later.

I am torn on this issue because I have been asked to participate in a group of concerned parents who want to improve the nutrition at my kids’ school. I would love to see my children have healthier choices with no fast or fried food. And yet spending my limited free time to help my children’s school is like tutoring a child who scored 90% on a test so that they can get 100% the next time. There are so many children who need much more help since they’ve only scored a 30%.

The National School Lunch Program provides $2.57 per lunch for over 30.5 million children, and for many of those children, that’s the best meal that they get. If I am to help my children’s school improve its nutrition, then at least I can make sure that my children learn that there are others less fortunate than themselves and that we all need to make an effort to help others less fortunate than ourselves in any way we can.

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Nutrition In Schools

As a mom, your kids cannot just give you the day off. Even if your husband or helper has agreed to let you rest so that you can take care of yourself to get better – did you tell your kids that this was the plan? When they’re little, they just don’t get it. If you’re in the middle of a nap and you hear the stampede of feet followed by “mommmmyyyyyy” – so much for the nap.

Not to mention, in my house I’m the grand coordinator of everyone’s schedules and plans. Because I wasn’t feeling great, my husband took the kids when they woke up Sunday morning to have brunch with friends and then to the playground. By the time they got back it was well past noon. Since my head was feeling fuzzy, I didn’t even realize until dinner-time that one of my daughters missed a birthday party.

As for work, as a business owner, there really are no sick days either, just somewhat less productive ones. There’s only so much you can get done when your head feels like it’s filled with custard. And, if you decide to work from home because you don’t want to infect the rest of your team, your kids are thrilled. You then have the challenge of telling them that they need to let you work even though you should be in bed resting to get better. Now if that doesn’t send a confusing message! So… it’s now 4:45pm and I have not seen my kids since 1:30pm. Guess they got it after all.

Not really sure how that makes me feel, but it does let me get my work done. Now all I need to do is feel better so that I can get back to work and to my family!

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Sick Daze

Although I still had some work to get done and was exhausted, I brainstormed with my husband the best way to make a cat’s tail (try taping some crumpled up newspaper around a coat hanger and covering it with a piece of material or play scarf ) and some kitty ears (cutout from a cardboard cereal box with colored construction paper glued on and attached to a headband) given the late hour. I interspersed my late night art project with finishing up some work (easy to do while the glue was drying) and this morning - my daughter was thrilled.

Entirely worth it despite the last minute effort. Now it’s time to get ready to go trick or treating. And later tonight I expect a visit from the Halloween Fairy who I hear, will be leaving the next series of Rainbow Magic Fairy books by Daisy Meadows. Does she write anything about cats?

For more on the Halloween Fairy, see http://www.zoefoods.com/blog/hello-halloween-fairy/

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Happy Halloween!

I explained that although we don’t have anymore weddings coming up, I do have to travel for my work and would be away this coming week for one night. How do you get your children to understand that even when you’re away, your heart will always be with them?

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You’re Not Going Away Again?

Whenever we have this time together in Maine, it involves a 5+ hour drive from where we live outside of Boston. 5 hours is a long time to sit in the car, and certainly long for my 4 and 5 year old girls. We let them watch one movie, so that leaves about 225 minutes of being strapped into a car seat. The rest of the time we made up stories, read books, played I Spy, and for the first time, played 20 Questions.

I couldn’t believe how quickly our girls caught on. When it was my youngest daughter’s turn to think of something we had to guess, she’d very quickly announce “Okay, I’m all done thinking!”. She never once tried to stump us with a Disney princess (phew - they really do think about other things)! When it was my 5-year old’s turn, she blew us away with what she came up with. Through our questioning, we learned that it was a thing, it was alive, and it was real (not make-believe). Hmmm…

Can you guess it? We finally did. It was the planet Earth.

I’ve learned that my children and employees (not to infer that they’re childish in any way) do have similar qualities. When given a goal, they can surprise you with their initiative and the solutions they can create if you would only get out of their way. Hmmm, maybe I should take more time off. Thank you to the Zoe Foods team!

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20 Questions

How did my four-year old learn how to make a bet on the outcome of a game? It certainly isn’t the standard practice in our household.

I hesitated for a moment in my reply, “How about if Ozzie [our 85lb. dog] is your baby brother?” Weak answer, I know. How do you tell your child that your work is essentially one of your babies? I guess when she’s old enough to read, she’ll find this blog archived somewhere and by then, hopefully, she’ll understand.

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Wanna Bet?

The next morning (yesterday) I was excited to have my girls eat Zoe’s new crunchy granolas for breakfast. I figured that if two picky eaters liked Zoe’s Granolas, then we’d really have a shot at growing the company after eight hard years of just surviving. My 4-year old was all over it. She tried it, ate it, and went back for seconds and thirds! It was a hit, and a relief for me.

My older daughter was a little tougher on me. She told me that she doesn’t like granola but would try it. How could I have a child who doesn’t like granola when that’s what I spent my working hours thinking about?  Ugh! She tried it anyway, smiled, told me she didn’t like it, and walked away. I couldn’t believe it. Okay, I don’t need everyone to like my company’s products, I’ll settle for 50% (as if my children of two make a statistically significant sample).

A couple of minutes later I heard my youngest daughter screaming, “Mommy, she keeps stealing my granola.” Hmmm, at the young age of 5 my daughter has learned how to push my hot buttons. As long as she likes Zoe’s Granola, she can push that hot button anytime! I think Zoe Foods is finally off to the races, and after  8 years in training, I am really excited. As far as my older daughter goes, I think that my husband and I had better brace ourselves for her teenage years.

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“Mommy, she’s stealing my granola!”