now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

So this week, Sean’s class is focusing on healthy eating and healthy habits for life. Lots of positive modeling, lots of ‘good choices’, and apparently lots of yoga. Yesterday’s topic based craft project was ‘make a nutritious lunch sack’: the kids were allowed to pore over cooking magazines and pictures of food, pick the ones they liked best that were good choices, and make a balanced ‘lunch’ by gluing the pictures to a brown paper lunch sack. Eying up the various sacks, it was clear that anything identifiable as 1. a sandwich 2. a fried chicken product 3. a tomato-based spaghetti or other ‘normal’ pasta was a class favorite. Sean proudly swiped his off the table, handed it to me, and we hied home.

In the 3 minutes of sentience I managed before dragging my flu addled body back to bed, I asked Sean about his choices:

“Sweetie, can you tell me about your lunch sack? This looks awesome.”
“We had to pick healthy things to make a meal.”
“I know, and you picked really cool things. Can you tell me why you picked them?”
“OK, this, this I picked because it’s pasta, and it has spinach and pine nuts in it, and I can’t tell if that’s crumbled goat cheese or as-ee-ah-go but either one’s fine, and the purple onions are pretty and shitake mushrooms are nice.”
“….okay then! And…what’s on this side?”
Sean looks at me as though I’m daft. “It’s bacon, mom. Bacon is good. Gooooooooooood.”
“Do you know what it’s wrapped around, sweetie?”
“I don’t care. It’s bacon.”
(I decided not to tell him he’d selected a picture of rumayki.)
“And what’s this?”
“Duh mom, it’s MEAT. I like MEAT.”
“What kind of meat?”
“Pork. Pork with mustard sauce. Yum. Can we make that this weekend?”
“We’ll see how I feel. And what else?”
“Apples and oranges cause you need fruit. I had veggies in the pasta.”
“And what did you pick to dri—uh, Sean?”
“Coffee.”
“Coffee?”
“Coffee.”
“You’re a little young for coffee.”
“When I’m a grownup I’ll have coffee for lunch. But you can drink the coffee and keep me company with my healthy lunch.”
“….okay and what’d you do for dessert?”
“Pumpkin chocolate chip bread. Because I’m smart.”
“How does that make you smart?”
“Pumpkin is good for you. So I can get away with having two pieces of dessert, not one.”

Truly, if left to my own devices this would become a repository of charming kid stores and blank, slack jawed jibbering about things. Thank god for memes, thus saving me of the effort of coming up with something unprompted.

If you wish to participate, leave a comment. I’ll respond with five things subjects or things I associate with you, and you post them in your own blog, lj, whatever, and elaborate. Kassrachel gave me:

1. farmer’s markets
2. yarn
3. storytelling
4. comfort food
5. gaming

Of course, now I’m writing this as I’m coming down with a raging, raging case of the flu. Won’t this be trippy?

1. Farmer’s markets. Yes, have some. It’s kind of funny, that I wound up doing museum work (with all of its emphasis on real, and story, and artifacts, and veracity) and I’m a farmer’s market hound. Hell, I will screech right off a shabby little 2 lane highway and onto a stretch of gravel if I see a sign for ‘fresh picked asparagus’ in spring, or ‘pick your own sweet corn’ in summer. When we lived in Chicago we, quite simply, couldn’t swing belonging to a CSA (schlep for pickup, expense, etc), but we would haul to the big farmer’s market in Evanston religiously, and hit the Green City market in winter. When we elected to move here, farmer’s markets and u-pick were two of my first questions for internet friends here.

What began as a foodie thing has evolved into a mindfulness thing: I want to know what I am feeding my family. I want to know how it was raised, I want to try to- as much as reality and life and expense and job will allow- support local agriculture and ethical farming. We do not eat entirely organic, and in fact two of my favorite suppliers (a lamb and cheese producer and a beef and chicken producer) are purposefully NOT organic certified, but will happily discuss at length their farming practices and why they chose not to certify. Once I became a parent, it was a health thing- really, it didn’t seem bright to pump processed, laden with artificial shit food into a growing little body- as well as the mindfulness thing. Right now that is amped to bloody 11, thanks to the food dye thing, and assuming I am healthy this weekend will be spent, in part, unloading every single thing from the pantry, reading the label, and throwing out what is now allergenic. Not that I had lots of dye laden crap in the house to begin with, but it’s insidious, why the hell is there red dye 40 in friggen Cinnamon Life cereal? I was discussing with one of the heads of Sean’s school today, who asked curiously, “What is red dye 40 made from?” and when I informed him it’s extracted from coal tar sludge he was gobsmacked. We then got into a rollicking discussion of why use it? and how much more expensive fruit and vegetable based dyes are. “Great!” he replied. “All about profit.” Yeah. It’s banned in Germany, Denmark, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria, but here, all hail the allmighty dollar and cheap shit. So let’s just say that even though we were a farmer’s market shoppin, CSA-belonging, veggie growing hippie-ass family before? That’s a little turned up these days.

Sean and I spend a lot of time discussing food- not to make him psycho about it, but because he loves it, wants to know about it, wants to help pick what we eat, and now wants to cook. He loves to go to the farmer’s market and recognizes now that there are real people who work very hard to grow the things he eats, and will happily chirp how many trucks and boats it takes for Farmer Dan’s food to get to us (one truck) as opposed to the berries from Chile in winter. It blows my ever lovin mind. And if you had told me when I was 25 and bringing a cooler up to Madison because we just HAPPENED to plan our weekend getaway to Wisconsin such that I could hit the Dane County Farmer’s Market that someday I would have a child who as a direct result of our taking the time to know the people who grow our food loves all kinds of cheese, eats duck, pops soybeans into his mouth, and squeals with delight when the spring peas come in, I would have looked at you like you were insane. Possibly because I would have been hung up on the ‘kid’ thing.

2. Yarn. When I redid my office last year, I had the Lad install hooks on the wall above my new comfy chair, and hung yarn on them. I change them out, every so often. Yarn is possibility. Yarn is time, and effort, and (here’s that damn word again) mindfulness. Yarn is something which stills the mind, lets things just wash over me when I let it, as opposed to trying desperately to finish banging out a project. When the work day gets really shitty, I look over to that corner and breathe. There is beauty waiting for me, waiting to run through my fingers and make the world slow for a few minutes.

3. Storytelling. Once upon a time, I surprised kass for her bridal shower, showing up in an ice storm. This meant she hadn’t known I’d be staying at her house that night, along with other folks including her sister. Dotted about the house were, among her and Yao’s many beautiful, quirky, amazing things, stuff I had given them over the years. Her sister was amazed that I could remember each one- where I’d gotten it, why. Sometimes, to me, the story is more important than the thing (please do not revoke my museum cred right now, thnx). Things break, things get lost, things are impermanent. But stories, though they change and shift, can be passed down. If there are no books, there is paint; if there is no paint, there is charcoal; if there is no charcoal, there is voice.

Voice is what gets me; I find the most amazing work done in cultural and history preservation today to not be artifact preservation, but instead to be living history. The StoryCorps; Smithsonian Folk Life project, visitor booths at MCA Chicago, the effort to record the histories of the U.S. and German sailors involved in the capture of the U-505 in WWII- all of these things are not about artifact, but about story. The most exciting thing to me in my line of work is the sea change in who owns story: museums no longer solely own story and dispense it to their visitors. Now we let visitors tell their story. And that’s made of win.

4. Comfort food. My notion of comfort food is strange, and varied. Good food is comfort food. Meatloaf is not some panacea from my childhood- but chicken breasts slathered in dijon and rolled in breading and crisp-fried are. (Yes, I know you can make a good meatloaf; I do in fact. But it’s not comfort food). My mom’s oatmeal chocolate chip raisin cookies; the chicken soup I now automatically make when I slog home from picking up my prescriptions when I’m sick (yes, I make chicken soup from scratch when I am ill. Don’t ask.); young chow combo fried rice when I’m PMSing hard. Potsticker when I am facing a day which ends in the letter ‘y’.

Possibly the most comforting meal anyone ever made for me was the dinner 40 Sardines sent over with the Lad on April 28, 2003. I had faced hospital food for lunch after 24 hours without eating, and it was a gift. It was celebration and comfort in one: eat, rest, enjoy, your life has changed but it has not, there’s still fancy food in your life and it’s not all Denny’s from now on. It was amazing, and nothing about it whatsoever said ‘comfort food’, but it was.

5. Gaming. Um, hiiiiii. I’m a gamer, and I’m a girl, and it’d be really nice if people stopped having issues with that. I RPed in college online, and grad school. I never seriously got into button-mashing console games, but I love the Wii with an unholy passion and rock out to guitar hero. I also play Warcraft, after finally caving to a year and a half of cajoling by husband and angeltiger. Whereupon for a year and a quarter I fiercely resisted tons of game content- especially PvP. Yeah uh, I’m buying my third piece of PvP gear with honor points….later today probably. What can I say? Wintergrasp in Lich is hella fun. I live in a gamer household- the epitome, if you read the PEW Internet/American Life and the ESI reports of the modern 2 parent well educated household. We both game, we’re both in our mid thirties, we have both gamed for over 12 years, we play games with our kid, we carefully monitor his game play experience and computer access. We own multiple computers and multiple consoles (only 2, actually)- and our big weirdness is that we do not have a single handheld gaming system.

Did I mention a relatively new, and important, part of my job is to understand the various gaming segments (in addition to social networking and new media) and their implications for design? Game behavior theory: I’m soaking in it. Let’s face it: modern early adopter nerddom, I’m soaking in it. And if you look back at 3, the thing which really gets me jazzed about all this crap is it’s no longer you and a box: it’s you and a bunch of other people. It’s live experience, with real people, and thus- say it with me- real stories. Just in a virtual medium. And because of this shift in how and what people play, it’s affecting what they do in physical space like a museum or a mall or a theme park and how they think things should work, and react to them, and connect them with other people. AWESOMENESS WITH AWESOMESAUCE AND A STEAMING HOT CUP OF AWESOME!

Wow, when I’m sick as a dog I bring the nerdly meta. Remember, if you want me to give you 5 things you make me think of, comment and I will comment back- you may need to check comments to see if I responded.

After 3 years of inwardly lamenting I had a child interested in food but uninterested in cooking (while he was happy to pick recipes out, his interest in participating in the actual activity usually waned between steps 2 and 3 if not sooner), someone has suddenly lit up to the fact that cooking results in tastiness. And so he has wheedled and cajoled and begged to cook every weekend with mom. Fine. Bust out the kid friendly cookbooks!

Oh wait.

“So mom?”
“Yes?”
“Can we make Chinese duck, like at Bo Ling’s?”
“….probably not on a Saturday night.”
“OK. Then tonight we read the magazine you got and pick things out. Or can we make the bleu cheese stuffed chicken?”
“The one from the magazine near Christmas?”
“Yes” Flip on accusatory voice. “The recipe YOU AND UNCLE LOTHIAN MADE WHEN I WAS NOT THERE.”
“You were having fun with Grandma and Grandpa.”
“that is NOT THE POINT, MOM. THERE WAS BLEU CHEESE. AND I WAS NOT THERE.”

Dear Kindergarten teacher,

We know you have a pretty good handle on Sean’s foibles and abilities, and recognize his keen interest in science. I understand he’s shared with you his enthusiasm for “Food Detectives” on Food Network. Thank you for your patience and understanding when we discussed, the other day, his interest in Martin Luther King, Jr, and how that lead to a discussion of the word ‘assassination’. I do apologize that while you were trying to explain about Rosa Parks and someone asked if she knew MLK, Sean saw fit to share with the class that MLK had been shot and was in heaven smiling on Barack Obama. And thank you for letting me know that while you are unconcerned about Sean having these kinds of conversations, that he gets it, the other kids don’t and so you swiftly changed the subject. You know how kids are about blurting out stuff, though.

To that end, I do apologize if he brings up any of the following things in discussion in school tomorrow:

“Magic” berries
Supertasters
Cell surface signaling
Receptor blocking
Neurotransmitters
Synaptic gaps
Hangovers
Brain cells dying if you pour alcohol directly on them
That ‘trepanning’ is not the same as ‘cracking open your skull’
Blowing up diet coke bottles with mentos

Thank you for your understanding and patience and again, I apologize if any of this comes up and you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation. We’ve reminded him that booze, hangovers, vomiting your spleen out, 6 foot tall sprays of diet cola, and ‘let me see your tongue!’ are all inappropriate things to bring up at school.
Sincerely,
Wench

There are times when you have to call on every bit of skill and insight you have, when dinner being ready ‘on time’ or ’sometime tonight’ or ‘at a decent temperature’ or ‘edible, can we get edible?’ gets back burnered while you clamber into the big bed, and snuggle a grumpy child until he stops with the balled fists and stompiness and I don’t-wannas about the most inconsequential and stupid of things and tells you what’s truly got him upset. When you stroke his hair and cajole out the words, and soothe his wounded little heart.

There are times when you have to realize he’s trying to understand his world, where he’s trying to make sense of what he learned about Miss Rosa Parks and the meanness that once was legal and commonplace and overt. And as he begins to realize it still exists, lurking. And you have to both soothe him and encourage him- soothe not to be afraid, encourage to stand up for what’s right.

And then there are the times when it takes every bit of strength you have. When you say ‘owned!’ at a game, and your child asks what that means, and your husband explains that normally, on the game on the computer not the Wii, you say ‘pwnt!’, and the child begins chirpingly conjugating ‘pwned’, as in “so you pwned those two horde guys!” Then it takes everything you have not to laugh until you sob.

Cough.

Since I’ve gotten a few emails (aw gosh, y’all, thanks for caring about the perfect unitchy smoothness of my child’s tender young flesh), lemme clarify in more boring! less engaging writing!

So, as I blogged previously, Sean manifested a suspected red dye allergy, pretty spectactularly. Right before the holidays. His pediatrician noted that as long as this was an intermittent to rare thing, we should stay calm and just douse him in zyrtec. But if it hit ‘frequent’ we would need to get him to an allergist. Sho nuff, he blew hives again and again and, in fact, again. Long time readers will remember this is the pediatrician who got us a referral- and pulled strings to get us in quick- to the best pediatric hearing and speech clinic in the region. So I didn’t even bother checking the lowdown on the allergist she got us a referral to, until AFTER our appointment.

Oh, only one of the top allergists in the country, an expert on asthma, and an officer in the regional asthma board. WELL OK THEN!

To his credit, this guy listened and listened well. And very clearly understood he was dealing with a mom who has a more than passing understanding of allergy and asthma. The upshot:
Sean was screened for environmental, food, and dye allergies via scratch test.
I vetoed ANY intradermal tests or blood draws: he’d had enough for one day, and the doctor felt that his dad and I are vigilant enough on his food intake that if a problem arises we will catch it swiftly and have the brains to identify likely culprits.
Hey guess what, Advair is doing a brilliant job of handling his asthma, and we have a plan now for spring and outdoor activity.
Scratch tests on food are NOT CONFIRMATORY and in fact have a high false positive rate- you have to couple them with observed reaction and/or blood tests. Which is good, because both he and I were like ‘oh hell no’ when Sean reacted to chicken, shellfish, mixed nuts, and SOYBEANS. But a negative is reliable: we eliminated wheat peanuts and eggs as possible offenders. And, to his delight, chocolate.
Scratch tests on environmental and dye ARE confirmatory.
Despite what one reads about IgG reaction vs IgE meaning dye is not an ‘allergy’ but an intolerance, oh holy shit no, Sean is well and truly allergic. To, I might add, about half the known world in terms of environmental allergies.
Sean is allergic, in addition to 14 kinds of molds 2 kinds of trees and countless grass types, to cats and dogs. “Stick,” the doctor said with a sigh, “With the fish.”

I give his school a lot of credit: they prepare all food on site, though they do use canned goods as ingredients, and the cook has diligently gone through every single thing she makes, every ingredient and noted what Sean cannot have, and substitutes especially for him. No Sysco truck pulls up to the school and belches out pre-packaged crap. His teacher is now hyper aware, especially since she (she’s a saint) gets the kids treats out of her own pocket- bringing in hot chocolate mix for cold afternoons, throwing a Chinese New Year’s party with takeout, a super bowl party (which, lamentably, there was dye in the jarred guac she bought, and neither she nor I caught it. We both thought ‘it’s guacamole, no worries’. Wrongo.) and asks me about everything. I have to get better about reading every single fucking label, because damn hippie that I am, things like dye-in-guac would never ever occur to me: ask me if my kid can eat guacamole and I’ll say yes, because cilantro, onions, garlic, peppers, salt, avocados, lime, lemon- any of that stuff, he’s fine with.

So upshot: he’s fine. In reality, this changes about 2% of what we have in this house (sprinkles for ice cream, and popsicles in summer, I’m looking at you). He will continue to be fine. He is very good at ‘owning’ his allergy (perhaps too good, he’s a little obsessive) and I demonstrated to him this weekend that Life Will Still Have Frosting, by taking him to whole foods and getting him a cupcake with vegetable-dye colored frosting, and that we can buy sprinkles which are safe for him to put on his ice cream. But whereas I regarded holidays and events as fun milestones in my child’s life, I’m now regarding them with a wary eye; I have to find valentine’s candy he can safely eat, so his teacher can quietly do the swap for me at the party. When we rsvp to parties I’ll have to explain, and ask if they mind I bring a Sean safe cupcake. And I don’t even want to think through how to handle Halloween. Add into that what your average ‘kid snack’ product contains these days (spiderman froot roll ups, I’m looking at your revolting selves), and every playdate and party just makes me sigh inwardly.

Then again, he’s such a food freak, the good news in all of this is he’s not lamenting missing anything (yet). We are, after all, talking about the child who upon trying shropshire blue cheese for the first time had a reaction not unlike the writhing unhinged feline expression of unbridled ecstasy some 10% of all cats have upon getting catnip (unlike the 90% of catdom who turn into owen wilson like stoners). And who ate duck AND frog over the holidays and enjoyed them both.

I remember friends’ birthday parties dimly, from my childhood. I remember not eating the ice cream; I remember very close friends’ mothers slipping me a piece of wench-safe cake quietly, without fanfare. I remember the mothers of less close friends looking more than a little confused and peturbed by my lisped apologies that I couldn’t eat the (fill in blank of childhood treat). Most spectacularly, there was the party where we decorated cookies and then I couldn’t eat the results.

Allergies, as a kid, suck. I don’t want to be that mom, the death of fun food police mom, the demanding other parents kowtow to my will mom. I didn’t want to be that mom a few weeks ago, burying my face against the hair of my son as he lay prone, screaming and crying that he was “DONE. NOW.” as they did scratch tests on his back, whispering “I’m so sorry baby” to him over and over again.

(He was a trooper. I was a mess. When the nurse departed, telling us he had to lie there for 15 minutes before they could read the results I grabbed a book out of his backpack and read to him and he becalmed immediately, and afterwords I took him out for a very special and way too expensive lunch before dropping him at school where he could tell all his friends he’d had sushi and they’d made FIRE at the teppanyaki restaurant).

And I don’t want to be that mom, spouting off crap science half cocked and suddenly being some ardent protester against big corporations not having our children’s best interests at heart and making scientists roll their eyes. But I’m also a goddamn hippie: we grow some of our veggies. We belong to a CSA. I shop at whole foods. I take the time to know the chefs whose restaurants we go to and the farmers who grow our food. I cook many things from scratch. And maybe that kept us from knowing for a while about this new set of allergies, though likely they just roared into life now. But there are things banned in swaths of Europe which now turn my child into a hive-addled itching miserable mess, and I can’t help but think is pumping kid-marketed food full of something extracted from COAL SLUDGE really what we want for our kids? Is that really acceptible?

Then I realize the hippie natural-dyed M&M like candy is about 5X as expensive, and I sigh.