How does the body decide what to heal when there are multiple areas that need help?
Discuss...
5.20.2011
5.19.2011
5.17.2011
5.16.2011
bag insert
So, I ordered this little bag insert from this woman in Switzerland. I love the concept. You put this inside your purse and when you change purses you can just move this thing rather than having to dump everything out of your bag.
I want to get her to make one properly sized for baby stuff: diapers, bottles, changing pads, etc.
Click here to go to the CouCou website and order one! The package came quickly and was not very expensive. The black one is even on sale right now: 13.50 Euros rather than 19 Euros.
I want to get her to make one properly sized for baby stuff: diapers, bottles, changing pads, etc.
Click here to go to the CouCou website and order one! The package came quickly and was not very expensive. The black one is even on sale right now: 13.50 Euros rather than 19 Euros.
5.14.2011
nothing like an accident
and being laid up on the couch for a week to drastically reduce your spending. I am just saying.
5.11.2011
maybe i should be careful
I posted that PSA last about driving...and then we almost died driving up I95 from DC to NYC the next day.
We were just making fun of the fact that there was a Newark, Delaware and how that town should change its name. I pointed out that since Delaware was one of the first states, the Newark in Delaware was probably older than the one in New Jersey.
I looked to my right, and as if in a movie, this purple Honda Accord was on two tires. The driver had not checked his blind spot before moving lanes to his right. We were in the far left hand lane. He over corrected coming directly at us. I tried to get around him, and almost did. And then he hit us and we went into the Jersey Wall full on, almost perpendicular to the wall. We spun around, and to my surprise, after the airbag exploded, we were blind. The smoke did not allow us to see out. So as we careened across four lanes of traffic, I frantically asked Brent what we should do. He said there was nothing we could do. Before we hit the median on the other side of the four lanes, I used what was left of the brakes to stop us. We jumped out of the car.
Brent's lips started turning blue. Two parole officers stopped to help us as did a nurse. I just wanted the ambulance to come. It took forever. Maybe it did not. I have no real sense of time. I texted Brent's mom and Erica. I tried to stay calm. I tried to avoid looking at Brent's mouth. Or thinking that he could have died.
I worried about the baby. A lot.
We went to the hospital, and luckily were fine. All three of us. We are bruised and sore and still out of sorts, but we are fine. Montana, Erin, and Ada came up to collect us and our stuff from the totaled car. We took the train to DC and then went to the hospital again to get double checked. Our doctor was on call so she took care of us. Montana drove down to collect us from yet another hospital and stayed with us until the next day when Carol, Brent's mom, flew in.
The car did a great job saving us. Some people think my driving is to be thanked. I kept wondering if I should have taken a different action: slowed down, moved to the left immediately, I don't know. But I have stopped this. No one died in the accident, so I am going to take solace in the idea that I took the best action in a situation that needed an immediate response. Analysis of the situation was not an option.
So, the bottom line: don't talk on the phone while driving, don't text in the car, look in your blind spot before changing lanes. If you are tempted, thinking you are a better driver than most, remember, killing someone would ruin your life and put the damn phone down. It can wait.
We were just making fun of the fact that there was a Newark, Delaware and how that town should change its name. I pointed out that since Delaware was one of the first states, the Newark in Delaware was probably older than the one in New Jersey.
I looked to my right, and as if in a movie, this purple Honda Accord was on two tires. The driver had not checked his blind spot before moving lanes to his right. We were in the far left hand lane. He over corrected coming directly at us. I tried to get around him, and almost did. And then he hit us and we went into the Jersey Wall full on, almost perpendicular to the wall. We spun around, and to my surprise, after the airbag exploded, we were blind. The smoke did not allow us to see out. So as we careened across four lanes of traffic, I frantically asked Brent what we should do. He said there was nothing we could do. Before we hit the median on the other side of the four lanes, I used what was left of the brakes to stop us. We jumped out of the car.
Brent's lips started turning blue. Two parole officers stopped to help us as did a nurse. I just wanted the ambulance to come. It took forever. Maybe it did not. I have no real sense of time. I texted Brent's mom and Erica. I tried to stay calm. I tried to avoid looking at Brent's mouth. Or thinking that he could have died.
I worried about the baby. A lot.
We went to the hospital, and luckily were fine. All three of us. We are bruised and sore and still out of sorts, but we are fine. Montana, Erin, and Ada came up to collect us and our stuff from the totaled car. We took the train to DC and then went to the hospital again to get double checked. Our doctor was on call so she took care of us. Montana drove down to collect us from yet another hospital and stayed with us until the next day when Carol, Brent's mom, flew in.
The car did a great job saving us. Some people think my driving is to be thanked. I kept wondering if I should have taken a different action: slowed down, moved to the left immediately, I don't know. But I have stopped this. No one died in the accident, so I am going to take solace in the idea that I took the best action in a situation that needed an immediate response. Analysis of the situation was not an option.
So, the bottom line: don't talk on the phone while driving, don't text in the car, look in your blind spot before changing lanes. If you are tempted, thinking you are a better driver than most, remember, killing someone would ruin your life and put the damn phone down. It can wait.
5.05.2011
young driver: tell them these tips
The New York Times ran another article with tips for teenage drivers. Teenage drivers have 10 times as many accidents as older drivers.
There are 3 common mistakes young drivers make:
1. Failing to scan the road,
2. Misjudging driving conditions, or
3. Becoming distracted.
These mistakes come to us by way of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital in Philly.
The mistakes above are actually abilities that you develop as a driver overtime, without noticing. So as a parent you need to reenforce these abilities when teaching. Kids tend to focus straight ahead, rather than scanning. Asking student drivers questions like, what color was that car we just passed? Or How many people were on the sidewalk? will help them begin scanning.
Again, as a parent you have to let your child try driving in poor conditions, so they know how to react.
Finally, distractions. No cell phones in the car. Put them in the trunk. I am just kidding...kind of.
There are 3 common mistakes young drivers make:
1. Failing to scan the road,
2. Misjudging driving conditions, or
3. Becoming distracted.
These mistakes come to us by way of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital in Philly.
The mistakes above are actually abilities that you develop as a driver overtime, without noticing. So as a parent you need to reenforce these abilities when teaching. Kids tend to focus straight ahead, rather than scanning. Asking student drivers questions like, what color was that car we just passed? Or How many people were on the sidewalk? will help them begin scanning.
Again, as a parent you have to let your child try driving in poor conditions, so they know how to react.
Finally, distractions. No cell phones in the car. Put them in the trunk. I am just kidding...kind of.
5.04.2011
cancer and sugar
I told Brent about my office selling cupcakes to raise money for breast cancer research and he reminded me of the New York Times article about sugar that came out a few weeks ago. Here is a link to the whole story, but I copied the important part about sugar and its link to cancer. He made the point that serving cupcakes to raise money for cancer rather like selling cigarettes to raise money for lung cancer. My boss, while saddened, said they would look into other fundraisers!
The excerpt below is from the end of the article about the link to cancer. The whole article is worth your time to read, but at least read the part I cut out below.
All the people I have lost to cancer and to think that by not eating sugar we could spare our loved ones this sadness...but damn that stuff is addictive...and in EVERYTHING.
Is Sugar Toxic?, by Gary Taubes, The New York Times
"One more question still needs to be asked, and this is what my wife, who has had to live with my journalistic obsession on this subject, calls the Grinch-trying-to-steal-Christmas problem. What are the chances that sugar is actually worse than Lustig says it is?
One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.
This goes along with two other observations that have led to the well-accepted idea that some large percentage of cancers are caused by our Western diets and lifestyles. This means they could actually be prevented if we could pinpoint exactly what the problem is and prevent or avoid that.
One observation is that death rates from cancer, like those from diabetes, increased significantly in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. As with diabetes, this observation was accompanied by a vigorous debate about whether those increases could be explained solely by the aging of the population and the use of new diagnostic techniques or whether it was really the incidence of cancer itself that was increasing. “By the 1930s,” as a 1997 report by the World Cancer Research Fund International and the American Institute for Cancer Research explained, “it was apparent that age-adjusted death rates from cancer were rising in the U.S.A.,” which meant that the likelihood of any particular 60-year-old, for instance, dying from cancer was increasing, even if there were indeed more 60-years-olds with each passing year.
The second observation was that malignant cancer, like diabetes, was a relatively rare disease in populations that didn’t eat Western diets, and in some of these populations it appeared to be virtually nonexistent. In the 1950s, malignant cancer among the Inuit, for instance, was still deemed sufficiently rare that physicians working in northern Canada would publish case reports in medical journals when they did diagnose a case.
In 1984, Canadian physicians published an analysis of 30 years of cancer incidence among Inuit in the western and central Arctic. While there had been a “striking increase in the incidence of cancers of modern societies” including lung and cervical cancer, they reported, there were still “conspicuous deficits” in breast-cancer rates. They could not find a single case in an Inuit patient before 1966; they could find only two cases between 1967 and 1980. Since then, as their diet became more like ours, breast cancer incidence has steadily increased among the Inuit, although it’s still significantly lower than it is in other North American ethnic groups. Diabetes rates in the Inuit have also gone from vanishingly low in the mid-20th century to high today.
Now most researchers will agree that the link between Western diet or lifestyle and cancer manifests itself through this association with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome — i.e., insulin resistance. This was the conclusion, for instance, of a 2007 report published by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — “Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer.”
So how does it work? Cancer researchers now consider that the problem with insulin resistance is that it leads us to secrete more insulin, and insulin (as well as a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor) actually promotes tumor growth. As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both. Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.
What these researchers call elevated insulin (or insulin-like growth factor) signaling appears to be a necessary step in many human cancers, particularly cancers like breast and colon cancer. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 percent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells. Cantley is now the leader of one of five scientific “dream teams,” financed by a national coalition called Stand Up to Cancer, to study, in the case of Cantley’s team, precisely this link between a specific insulin-signaling gene (known technically as PI3K) and tumor development in breast and other cancers common to women.
Most of the researchers studying this insulin/cancer link seem concerned primarily with finding a drug that might work to suppress insulin signaling in incipient cancer cells and so, they hope, inhibit or prevent their growth entirely. Many of the experts writing about the insulin/cancer link from a public health perspective — as in the 2007 report from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — work from the assumption that chronically elevated insulin levels and insulin resistance are both caused by being fat or by getting fatter. They recommend, as the 2007 report did, that we should all work to be lean and more physically active, and that in turn will help us prevent cancer.
But some researchers will make the case, as Cantley and Thompson do, that if something other than just being fatter is causing insulin resistance to begin with, that’s quite likely the dietary cause of many cancers. If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.
“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”
Sugar scares me too, obviously. I’d like to eat it in moderation. I’d certainly like my two sons to be able to eat it in moderation, to not overconsume it, but I don’t actually know what that means, and I’ve been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade. If sugar just makes us fatter, that’s one thing. We start gaining weight, we eat less of it. But we are also talking about things we can’t see — fatty liver, insulin resistance and all that follows. Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do."
The excerpt below is from the end of the article about the link to cancer. The whole article is worth your time to read, but at least read the part I cut out below.
All the people I have lost to cancer and to think that by not eating sugar we could spare our loved ones this sadness...but damn that stuff is addictive...and in EVERYTHING.
Is Sugar Toxic?, by Gary Taubes, The New York Times
"One more question still needs to be asked, and this is what my wife, who has had to live with my journalistic obsession on this subject, calls the Grinch-trying-to-steal-Christmas problem. What are the chances that sugar is actually worse than Lustig says it is?
One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.
This goes along with two other observations that have led to the well-accepted idea that some large percentage of cancers are caused by our Western diets and lifestyles. This means they could actually be prevented if we could pinpoint exactly what the problem is and prevent or avoid that.
One observation is that death rates from cancer, like those from diabetes, increased significantly in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. As with diabetes, this observation was accompanied by a vigorous debate about whether those increases could be explained solely by the aging of the population and the use of new diagnostic techniques or whether it was really the incidence of cancer itself that was increasing. “By the 1930s,” as a 1997 report by the World Cancer Research Fund International and the American Institute for Cancer Research explained, “it was apparent that age-adjusted death rates from cancer were rising in the U.S.A.,” which meant that the likelihood of any particular 60-year-old, for instance, dying from cancer was increasing, even if there were indeed more 60-years-olds with each passing year.
The second observation was that malignant cancer, like diabetes, was a relatively rare disease in populations that didn’t eat Western diets, and in some of these populations it appeared to be virtually nonexistent. In the 1950s, malignant cancer among the Inuit, for instance, was still deemed sufficiently rare that physicians working in northern Canada would publish case reports in medical journals when they did diagnose a case.
In 1984, Canadian physicians published an analysis of 30 years of cancer incidence among Inuit in the western and central Arctic. While there had been a “striking increase in the incidence of cancers of modern societies” including lung and cervical cancer, they reported, there were still “conspicuous deficits” in breast-cancer rates. They could not find a single case in an Inuit patient before 1966; they could find only two cases between 1967 and 1980. Since then, as their diet became more like ours, breast cancer incidence has steadily increased among the Inuit, although it’s still significantly lower than it is in other North American ethnic groups. Diabetes rates in the Inuit have also gone from vanishingly low in the mid-20th century to high today.
Now most researchers will agree that the link between Western diet or lifestyle and cancer manifests itself through this association with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome — i.e., insulin resistance. This was the conclusion, for instance, of a 2007 report published by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — “Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer.”
So how does it work? Cancer researchers now consider that the problem with insulin resistance is that it leads us to secrete more insulin, and insulin (as well as a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor) actually promotes tumor growth. As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both. Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.
What these researchers call elevated insulin (or insulin-like growth factor) signaling appears to be a necessary step in many human cancers, particularly cancers like breast and colon cancer. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 percent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells. Cantley is now the leader of one of five scientific “dream teams,” financed by a national coalition called Stand Up to Cancer, to study, in the case of Cantley’s team, precisely this link between a specific insulin-signaling gene (known technically as PI3K) and tumor development in breast and other cancers common to women.
Most of the researchers studying this insulin/cancer link seem concerned primarily with finding a drug that might work to suppress insulin signaling in incipient cancer cells and so, they hope, inhibit or prevent their growth entirely. Many of the experts writing about the insulin/cancer link from a public health perspective — as in the 2007 report from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — work from the assumption that chronically elevated insulin levels and insulin resistance are both caused by being fat or by getting fatter. They recommend, as the 2007 report did, that we should all work to be lean and more physically active, and that in turn will help us prevent cancer.
But some researchers will make the case, as Cantley and Thompson do, that if something other than just being fatter is causing insulin resistance to begin with, that’s quite likely the dietary cause of many cancers. If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.
“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”
Sugar scares me too, obviously. I’d like to eat it in moderation. I’d certainly like my two sons to be able to eat it in moderation, to not overconsume it, but I don’t actually know what that means, and I’ve been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade. If sugar just makes us fatter, that’s one thing. We start gaining weight, we eat less of it. But we are also talking about things we can’t see — fatty liver, insulin resistance and all that follows. Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do."
4.29.2011
4.28.2011
children and learning
Humm...this brings up more questions than solutions. What do you do? How do you change the system? Thoughts?
4.26.2011
4.25.2011
sean and caitlin
my niece and nephew...Caitlin and Sean...the ones who were born at 24 weeks...are BIG! So cute. :)
4.22.2011
sugar is toxic
Here's the argument. I feel like sugar is one thing that is not ok in moderation.
How to stop eating it?
I know this show is 1.5 hours long. It is important to watch though. Really.
How to stop eating it?
I know this show is 1.5 hours long. It is important to watch though. Really.
4.21.2011
4.20.2011
excellent sheep
"So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, 'excellent sheep.'"
Today's post follows on yesterday's post. Why do I feel so concerned about unstructured playtime? Because that is when I feel children learn how to think on their own.
Solitude and Leadership
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
This speech was delivered by William Deresiewicz to the entering class at West Point and it really touches on a lot of topics important to me: creativity, leadership, the factual inability of anyone to really multitask. His argument if you will goes like this:
1. We have a crisis of leadership in America at all levels because we are training out future leaders to be lemmings.
2. People who "think" they can multitask are neither multitasking nor thinking.
3. Leaders need to know how to think on their own.
4. To think, you need to concentrate for an amount of time greater than 20 seconds.
5. To think of new ideas, you need to step away from other people's ideas.
6. And to be a great leader, you need deep friendships to help you think, or suss out ideas.
I really like all of these ideas. And I want to keep trying to activly live a life where I am thinking.
Today's post follows on yesterday's post. Why do I feel so concerned about unstructured playtime? Because that is when I feel children learn how to think on their own.
Solitude and Leadership
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
This speech was delivered by William Deresiewicz to the entering class at West Point and it really touches on a lot of topics important to me: creativity, leadership, the factual inability of anyone to really multitask. His argument if you will goes like this:
1. We have a crisis of leadership in America at all levels because we are training out future leaders to be lemmings.
2. People who "think" they can multitask are neither multitasking nor thinking.
3. Leaders need to know how to think on their own.
4. To think, you need to concentrate for an amount of time greater than 20 seconds.
5. To think of new ideas, you need to step away from other people's ideas.
6. And to be a great leader, you need deep friendships to help you think, or suss out ideas.
I really like all of these ideas. And I want to keep trying to activly live a life where I am thinking.
4.19.2011
education and creativity
This guy is a) really funny and b) I think makes some interesting points about education and creativity. The video is 20 minutes, but really worth it...even if you don't have any interest in education...
I have been thinking a lot about unstructured playtime and children and its importance for creativity. It is so important but I don't think our society actually promotes creativity. We send kids to school at 3 years old, or daycare even eariler, because we need dual incomes (or so we think...). But going to school is really society's way of socializing people to follow the herd. In order for society to function, we all have to do approximately the same things, otherwise there would be chaos. Starting kids in school early helps us socialize kids.
That said I don't see me staying home with my kids...but my friends who do, do a WONDERFUL job. I will try to emmulate their efforts. Before considering kids, though, I really felt that society had been cheated of these stay-at-home mom's abilities to contribute to society. These women are some of the smartest people I know, and to my then thinking self, they were squandering their abilities on their kids.
Thinking changes.
4.18.2011
"Whatever you do with your child, it’s appalling to someone."
Great article about the stroller...and, well, parenting...
April 2, 2011
Why Walk When You Can Stroll?
By TOM SCOCCA
THE stroller is up on the shelf. When we moved to New York from Silver Spring, Md., not quite a year ago, I thought it would stay there. New York is a walking city and we had found an apartment four blocks from our son’s preschool. He was turning 3. The stroller — infernal, clunky, annoying thing — would go into semi-retirement in the coat closet.
Actually, that was an earlier stroller. The brakes wore out and the foot strap ripped apart under constant use. Now there is a new red hundred-and-something-dollar stroller on the shelf, which replaced that $69.99 stroller, which had replaced the $18 stroller we bought two cities ago, when the kid truly was incapable of walking.
Time to go to school. I pull the stroller down, pop it open and strap on the clear plastic rain cover. Out the window, down on the street, there’s wet pavement and open umbrellas. I’ve attached one side of the rain cover to the wrong piece of the stroller, and have to redo it.
The only thing worse than the stroller is not having the stroller. It’s close. This stroller, bless it, hates itself, and wants to vanish — it’s an umbrella stroller, collapsible, less than 10 pounds. Like a real umbrella, it’s an irritant or a menace when it’s in someone else’s hands, clogging the sidewalks, a tragedy of the commons. Other people’s umbrellas are awful. But what are you going to do, get rained on?
(Actually, yes, if you are pushing a stroller, you are going to get rained on, because you don’t have a free hand.)
I roll the kid down the hallway, into the elevator, and out through the lobby. We roll west toward the river and head uptown. Children in strollers “have no idea how demeaned they are,” the psychologist and columnist John Rosemond wrote last year. He was writing in defense of parents who put their children on leashes and let them run. Whatever you do with your child, it’s appalling to someone.
Last time I lived in New York, when I was childless, I had to dodge the grim-faced parents rampaging down the sidewalks with their double-wide, all-terrain strollers. Where did their rageful sense of entitlement come from? They devoured every inch of space under scaffolds, obstructed store aisles — and did it righteously, as if the world owed them an unimpeded runway for their child-furniture. I couldn’t imagine what sort of yuppie lunatic would spend a hundred bucks on a stroller. (Answer: a yuppie lunatic who wants the warranty. Yet all around are ultrayuppie ultralunatics who spent $500 or $700.)
But the stroller-haters are self-centered, too, or unthinking. There’s a fallacy among childless people that there are simple ways for parents to make their children less annoying, and the parents just choose not to do them.
Would pedestrians infuriated by stroller traffic really be happier if the sidewalks were full of 2- and 3-year-olds toddling along at their natural pace, clutching their guardians’ hands? I know it’s hard on others when I’m going up the subway steps with a giant bundle of child and stroller in my arms. But you would prefer a 3-year-old climbing ... step ... by ... step?
I wouldn’t. I like to go fast, too. Ahead of us is one of the kid’s older schoolmates, walking hand in hand with his father. The boy wears rubber boots and a warm hat. It is an adorable scene. Our son would pitch a fit at the sight of the boots, and would peel off the hat and throw it in the gutter. Ice pellets are falling, bouncing off the stroller’s canopy. I give the classmate and his father a nod and a smile as I swing the stroller wide and speed ahead of them.
Why do we turn our children into rolling luggage? Parents are sacrificing their children’s opportunity to develop self-reliance, a childless stroller-foe told me, for the sake of their convenience. Well, heck, yes, we are. I do that all the time. I fork-feed my kid in restaurants to keep him quiet and tidy. I delayed his switch from diapers to underwear for two weeks because we had a vacation with a long plane ride coming up.
We can see the corrupting effects of the stroller. He goes to spend a week or two with his grandparents in the Midwestern suburbs, that sprawling American landscape of car addiction and epidemic obesity, and he comes back with his legs sun-browned and rippling with muscles, a little frontiersman, conqueror of empty lawns and parking lots. His grandparents don’t even keep a stroller around.
But time is money in New York: if I get him to preschool briskly and punctually, which is not how a small child moves under his own power, I get 2 hours and 55 minutes at my desk, uninterrupted. Wheels are faster than little feet. So he takes the stroller to school, rather than walking four blocks. He prefers it. Why? I asked him the other night. “Because I like to sit in it.” Why is that? “Because it’s nice in there, O.K.?” Why not walk? “Walking does not make any sense.”
We reach the school door just behind the twins in his class, their nanny doing an angled backing maneuver with their immense tandem stroller, like a U-Haul trying to get into an undersized driveway. How else would you get them anywhere? I pop the kid out of his seatbelt, collapse the stroller and hook it over a railing that I believe the school has installed for exactly that purpose. Down the hall to the restroom now, for mandatory hand-washing. This is the part where he starts bouncing on his feet, all the way back to the classroom door.
Raising children is about setting limits. The sales clerk told us that the new red stroller was good up to 55 pounds. The kid’s weight is holding steady, a shade under 30. If he stays on his current, normal growth curve, the stroller will be able to carry him until he’s about 9 years old. That is ridiculous, but those are the specs. Even a 3 ½-year-old knows it’s ridiculous. How old does he think he’ll be before he gives up the stroller? “I think just like one more year old.”
Tom Scocca is the author of the blog Scocca on Slate and the forthcoming “Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.”
April 2, 2011
Why Walk When You Can Stroll?
By TOM SCOCCA
THE stroller is up on the shelf. When we moved to New York from Silver Spring, Md., not quite a year ago, I thought it would stay there. New York is a walking city and we had found an apartment four blocks from our son’s preschool. He was turning 3. The stroller — infernal, clunky, annoying thing — would go into semi-retirement in the coat closet.
Actually, that was an earlier stroller. The brakes wore out and the foot strap ripped apart under constant use. Now there is a new red hundred-and-something-dollar stroller on the shelf, which replaced that $69.99 stroller, which had replaced the $18 stroller we bought two cities ago, when the kid truly was incapable of walking.
Time to go to school. I pull the stroller down, pop it open and strap on the clear plastic rain cover. Out the window, down on the street, there’s wet pavement and open umbrellas. I’ve attached one side of the rain cover to the wrong piece of the stroller, and have to redo it.
The only thing worse than the stroller is not having the stroller. It’s close. This stroller, bless it, hates itself, and wants to vanish — it’s an umbrella stroller, collapsible, less than 10 pounds. Like a real umbrella, it’s an irritant or a menace when it’s in someone else’s hands, clogging the sidewalks, a tragedy of the commons. Other people’s umbrellas are awful. But what are you going to do, get rained on?
(Actually, yes, if you are pushing a stroller, you are going to get rained on, because you don’t have a free hand.)
I roll the kid down the hallway, into the elevator, and out through the lobby. We roll west toward the river and head uptown. Children in strollers “have no idea how demeaned they are,” the psychologist and columnist John Rosemond wrote last year. He was writing in defense of parents who put their children on leashes and let them run. Whatever you do with your child, it’s appalling to someone.
Last time I lived in New York, when I was childless, I had to dodge the grim-faced parents rampaging down the sidewalks with their double-wide, all-terrain strollers. Where did their rageful sense of entitlement come from? They devoured every inch of space under scaffolds, obstructed store aisles — and did it righteously, as if the world owed them an unimpeded runway for their child-furniture. I couldn’t imagine what sort of yuppie lunatic would spend a hundred bucks on a stroller. (Answer: a yuppie lunatic who wants the warranty. Yet all around are ultrayuppie ultralunatics who spent $500 or $700.)
But the stroller-haters are self-centered, too, or unthinking. There’s a fallacy among childless people that there are simple ways for parents to make their children less annoying, and the parents just choose not to do them.
Would pedestrians infuriated by stroller traffic really be happier if the sidewalks were full of 2- and 3-year-olds toddling along at their natural pace, clutching their guardians’ hands? I know it’s hard on others when I’m going up the subway steps with a giant bundle of child and stroller in my arms. But you would prefer a 3-year-old climbing ... step ... by ... step?
I wouldn’t. I like to go fast, too. Ahead of us is one of the kid’s older schoolmates, walking hand in hand with his father. The boy wears rubber boots and a warm hat. It is an adorable scene. Our son would pitch a fit at the sight of the boots, and would peel off the hat and throw it in the gutter. Ice pellets are falling, bouncing off the stroller’s canopy. I give the classmate and his father a nod and a smile as I swing the stroller wide and speed ahead of them.
Why do we turn our children into rolling luggage? Parents are sacrificing their children’s opportunity to develop self-reliance, a childless stroller-foe told me, for the sake of their convenience. Well, heck, yes, we are. I do that all the time. I fork-feed my kid in restaurants to keep him quiet and tidy. I delayed his switch from diapers to underwear for two weeks because we had a vacation with a long plane ride coming up.
We can see the corrupting effects of the stroller. He goes to spend a week or two with his grandparents in the Midwestern suburbs, that sprawling American landscape of car addiction and epidemic obesity, and he comes back with his legs sun-browned and rippling with muscles, a little frontiersman, conqueror of empty lawns and parking lots. His grandparents don’t even keep a stroller around.
But time is money in New York: if I get him to preschool briskly and punctually, which is not how a small child moves under his own power, I get 2 hours and 55 minutes at my desk, uninterrupted. Wheels are faster than little feet. So he takes the stroller to school, rather than walking four blocks. He prefers it. Why? I asked him the other night. “Because I like to sit in it.” Why is that? “Because it’s nice in there, O.K.?” Why not walk? “Walking does not make any sense.”
We reach the school door just behind the twins in his class, their nanny doing an angled backing maneuver with their immense tandem stroller, like a U-Haul trying to get into an undersized driveway. How else would you get them anywhere? I pop the kid out of his seatbelt, collapse the stroller and hook it over a railing that I believe the school has installed for exactly that purpose. Down the hall to the restroom now, for mandatory hand-washing. This is the part where he starts bouncing on his feet, all the way back to the classroom door.
Raising children is about setting limits. The sales clerk told us that the new red stroller was good up to 55 pounds. The kid’s weight is holding steady, a shade under 30. If he stays on his current, normal growth curve, the stroller will be able to carry him until he’s about 9 years old. That is ridiculous, but those are the specs. Even a 3 ½-year-old knows it’s ridiculous. How old does he think he’ll be before he gives up the stroller? “I think just like one more year old.”
Tom Scocca is the author of the blog Scocca on Slate and the forthcoming “Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.”
4.13.2011
4.11.2011
ownership as a burden
This image really sums up how I feel about things. I get that rush when buying stuff and then it turns into a burden. Some friends I have are really good at carefully considering what they are buying before they do it...which can make them annoying to shop with! But being that considerate leads to less buying which leads to less of the cycle illustrated above. I have tried to deal with this by not shopping. I mean not going to the mall or other places. Those places are just giant time sucks...But then there is amazon...
Anyway, as we keep getting rid of more and more stuff in our house I am feeling more and more unburdened. I like the idea that moving will be easier when we are ready. And a lot of the stuff we have gotten rid of other people will actually use. This purging is cathartic.
From an article by Rich Radka for Sharable. Found over on Swissmiss.
4.08.2011
new topic: scaring people who are about to become parents
Why do so many parents take such delight in scaring parents to be? These are the kinds of things I have heard:
"Enjoy your life now, because it will be over soon."
"Get out to the movies, you won't ever go to one again."
"Your life will completely change; you will never sleep in again."
Really? Do these people think I am an idiot? Let me explain why I know they are fear mongering.
1. I have three younger siblings.
1a. My sister had a baby on her own, and do you know what she does every day off? SLEEPS IN.
2. I have friends who still have lives, and are still happy, and have kids.
3. If I feel like my life is over, I will hire a nanny.
Brent and I feel like the baby is joining our family, and we are excited about that. And I really think it will be just fine...like most things. I am just saying...
"Enjoy your life now, because it will be over soon."
"Get out to the movies, you won't ever go to one again."
"Your life will completely change; you will never sleep in again."
Really? Do these people think I am an idiot? Let me explain why I know they are fear mongering.
1. I have three younger siblings.
1a. My sister had a baby on her own, and do you know what she does every day off? SLEEPS IN.
2. I have friends who still have lives, and are still happy, and have kids.
3. If I feel like my life is over, I will hire a nanny.
Brent and I feel like the baby is joining our family, and we are excited about that. And I really think it will be just fine...like most things. I am just saying...
4.07.2011
4.06.2011
only let the French or Germans cut your hair
Seriously, the best hair cuts of my life have been by a hot French guy in Paris and a cute German girl in Berlin. And I have finally found their replacement in DC!
Evolve Salon
Lyonel Moreau - He's French!
2905 M St, NW
202.333.9872
He did a fablous job on my hair. Love.
Evolve Salon
Lyonel Moreau - He's French!
2905 M St, NW
202.333.9872
He did a fablous job on my hair. Love.
4.05.2011
the family, when Linda was sick
Cleaning things out I found this picture. Linda was so much more beautiful than she looks in this picture.
But the photo reminds me of a conversation we had. I asked her if she ever wanted to scream at god, "Why me?"
And she said, "No, I think, why not me?"
Grace.
Click here to see more of the pictures.
4.04.2011
4.03.2011
stuff
I am going to look at a house this afternoon...because we think we need more room.
Room for what?
I woke up this morning all ready to organize my life: bedroom was up first. I needed to put some winter clothes away, fold all of the laundry, and work on rearranging for the baby.
I am exhausted! I need to keep going. The clothes are not folded yet. And I have brunch in an hour...
And the living room is a mess. And the kitchen needs its reorg completed and I need to go through my desk stuff so I can downsize and we can be ready for Brent's mom to visit in a week.
Stuff. I hate spending time managing my stuff. And if we have a house we will just have more stuff to spend time on.
Our friend Steve mentioned a guy who gave away 40 things he valued for everyday of Lent a few years ago. Apparently it was life changing. I can believe that.
:)
Room for what?
I woke up this morning all ready to organize my life: bedroom was up first. I needed to put some winter clothes away, fold all of the laundry, and work on rearranging for the baby.
I am exhausted! I need to keep going. The clothes are not folded yet. And I have brunch in an hour...
And the living room is a mess. And the kitchen needs its reorg completed and I need to go through my desk stuff so I can downsize and we can be ready for Brent's mom to visit in a week.
Stuff. I hate spending time managing my stuff. And if we have a house we will just have more stuff to spend time on.
Our friend Steve mentioned a guy who gave away 40 things he valued for everyday of Lent a few years ago. Apparently it was life changing. I can believe that.
:)
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