Recently in Children Category

I thought I'd dodged a bullet. I thought Liam's question about "why does a mommy have another baby" question was only a thinly veiled complaint: why did you visit this fresh hell called Caleb on my heretofore idyllic existence?

I was wrong. I hadn't dodged a bullet, I'd only delayed being hit. After I told him that people often had more than one child and that sometimes only children were lonely, he got to the heart of things:

Liam: How? How does the baby get inside her?

Me (dammit): Well, the woman has eggs inside her--

Liam, hysterically laughing: Like she's a chicken?

Me: Well, no, not with a shell or anything.

L: Wouldn't that be funny if in a million years or so there were invaders from space and they ate only human eggs, wouldn't that be funny? I mean, sort of funny but really pretty bad, too?

Me: Funny? I don't know about that -
 
L: Where is the egg?

Me (deep breath): In the uterus, which is inside the woman, sort of lower than her tummy--

L: What's a woombah?

Me: What? Oh, a w-o-m-b?

I explain--very briefly--that wombs and uteruses (uteri?) are both part of the baby-growing process, and realize that my knowledge of my own anatomy is shockingly--shockingly--vague.

Liam: What happens to the egg?

Me (persistent little bugger, isn't he?):  Well, the egg is fertilized with sperm from a man and then the baby grows inside. 

Wait for it, wait for it...

Liam: How?

Shit ... here we go...

Me: Well, when the people love each other very much it can feel very good to be close to each other and then sometimes they decide to make a baby together, but not always. 

Yes, yes, that's right, I did a TOTAL END RUN around the key details.

Liam, thoughtful, sinks under the water in the tub and blows some bubbles. Emerges: Where does the sperm come from?

I am exhausted. This is the longest bath ever in the history of baths. 

Me:  It comes from a man's penis--

Liam, panicked: WHAT?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN???

Me (confused): Well, sperm is inside the man's body, when you get older, and it comes out - sort of like pee, you know?

Liam, calmer: Oh. Okay. I thought you had to get it off the penis or cut the penis off or something-

Nice job, mom. let's get that therapist lined up, shall we? Can you say castration anxiety?

Me: No, no, when you're older--then you'll have sperm. And sometimes it will come out even when you're sleeping, like during a dream. It's just part of your body getting ready to be a grownup.

This detail led to some technical discussion about penile plumbing that I shan't go into here--suffice it to say that there were analogies to garden hoses without water and garden hoses with water, and then we pressed onward, into literally murkier waters (it was a LONG bath).

Liam, laughing: What if you don't have an egg? Do you get a mad scientist to concoct one?

Me: Well, actually, yes--I mean, not a mad scientist but--

Liam: Wow. Do you need a man and a woman to have a baby?

Me: Um...you need the sperm, but that can happen in lots of different ways. So if a man loves a man, or a woman loves a woman, or a man and a woman love each other, they can have a baby; or if just a man or just a woman want to have a baby, that can happen too. 

(Desperately inventorying all the families we know: have I included all the various permutations of parenthood and familyhood? This conversation was a hell of a lot easier in the Betty Draper era, when families pretty much came in only one basic model.)

Liam finally climbs out of the bath, demurely covering himself in a towel. I take a deep breath, figuring we're on the other side of the difficult bits of the conversation.

Liam: Mommy? What does gay mean?

You're killing me, kid. I explain what gay means and then say that people often use the word as an insult and he nods, names a kid who is a bit of a bully and uses the word all the time, to be nasty.

Liam: But why would anyone care about gayness, mommy?

Me: I don't know, sweetie, they just do.

Liam: I think I would like to have a baby. When I'm older, I mean. I mean, kids are fun, right?

Me: Mmmm, yep, just loads of fun.  

Liam leans close to me and I reach to hug him, sure that he's feeling all listened to and supported and understood after our Deep and Important Conversation.

Mommy, he whispers, can I use the computer now?

I knew it was coming. There'd been some observations, a comment or two...things were definitely percolating in his almost-nine-year old head. In preparation, I  had gotten a book or two from the library, asked friends how they'd handled it.  I wanted to be ready - but then, just like death after a long illness, when it actually happened I wasn't really ready at all.

There we were, at the dermatologist's office, having her look at some skin discolorations on Liam's face, and while she was checking something in her computer, Liam popped the question, with no introductory remarks, no prefatory throat clearing, just jumped in:

So how does a woman get a baby inside her?

I saw the doctor's head swivel towards me, then back to her computer, and it occurred to me that I could just punt: ask her to answer the question.  She is, after all the medical professional, and maybe she could even pull out a few charts and an anatomically correct mannequin.

But no, no, that wouldn't do.  We're supposed to, you know, be all patient and wise about this stuff, right?  I'm not supposed to let on that the very thought of my child--that sweet little body--getting all sexed up makes me want to cringe--and collapse in wild laughter. So I just said that when we were somewhere more private, I'd be glad to answer that question and we went on with the dermatologist visit.  And I can't swear to it, but I swear I heard the doctor chuckling as she left the examination room.

A week or so passed and I thought maybe The Question had gotten buried under homework and soccer practice and what-to-be-for-Halloween, but then one night when Liam was in the bath:

So mom, remember that question I asked you at the doctor's office?

I nod, knowing what's coming.

L: What's the answer?

I feint: "well, what do you know? What have you heard about how this happens?"

Liam: Nothing. I mean, basically nothing.

Me, following the instructions I read about in a really useful book called From Diapers to Dating (thanks, Carolyn, for the suggestion): so you want to know how a woman gets a baby inside her?

Liam: Well, I mean, once a woman has a baby, why would she have another one?

Fabulous, I think. We're not dealing with actual SEX here, we're just dealing with sibling rivalry. Piece o'cake.  I mouth a few platitudes about people liking to have a big family, and about how having a sibling can mean that you've always got someone to play with, even if they're sometimes aggravating, and so you don't have to be lonely--
 
Liam: So that's why anyone who is an only child has a gameboy, right? 

I nod, sure that I've dodged the sex-talk bullet.  But there is more to come, my friends, more to come.  It was a very long bath.

I didn't want to go. I hated the very idea of the movie, was all doesn't Hollywood ever know when to leave well enough alone?

But then today--Saturday--was very cold and very gray, Liam had played a morning soccer game and an afternoon soccer game, and Husband needed time to finish packing for a week-long (week!) business trip. I like to say he's going to "Arabia," but in fact he's going to the much more prosaic (although still very far away) Abu Dhabi (which is not Dubai).  So when two mommy friends asked if we'd join them at the movies, I said yes (okay, in part I said yes because one promised to bring me candy corn from Economy Candy and I will do just about anything for candy corn).

Thus it was that I found myself, with a 5 year old and a 9 year old in tow, in a very crowded movie theater for the 4:30 showing of "Where the Wild Things Are."  If nothing else, I thought, I could hide my iPhone under my bag and make lists for the upcoming week: having Husband out of town for a week takes our already complicated schedules into a defcon four status that hurts my head to think about.

But you know what? I didn't even look at my phone once. The movie is...good. Actually, it's quite beautiful. Actually, many of the parents in the audience were snuffly-eyed at the end of it (you can decide for yourself if that's good or bad), and so were some of the kids.

It's not perfect, and it's not true to the letter of Sendak's book, but it's pretty close, I think, to the spirit of the book: the conflicting desires that we all have for anarchy and order, independence and dependence, adventure and safety.

The opening twenty minutes or so, which situate Max in "real life," enthralled Liam and Caleb. I think they saw in his life elements of their own, particularly the ways in which Max's world conspires to make him feel powerless.  And I saw myself in Max's mom--the belated tag-on of "please" to the shouted command to "get your stuff off the table now...."  and her attempts to deal with her tantruming son while she has company--the initial attempt to discipline said child with whispered commands through gritted teeth and a fake smile, the plea for good behavior so that fights don't have to take place while there are witnesses...oh yes, that's familiar territory.

But then Max takes off, and we are on unfamiliar ground. True, his room doesn't grow over with vines, but there is still a magical transformation, an epic journey "across a year and a day," and a violent stormy landing on the island of the wild things.

Much has been made of these wild things--their fuzzy costumes, the animatronic faces, the fact that they have individual personalities and, clearly, back stories: Judith and Ira are lovers, KW and Carol have had some kind of fight, no one pays attention to Alexander, Douglas and Carol are best friends...And the wild things talk about these relationships, fret about their emotions, and hope that discovering a King will Make Everything Better.

I would have thought that the five year old would be fidgeting and squitching during all the talky bits about these relationships, but it was the nine year olds who wanted to get on with the scenes of fort-building, mudball fighting, and, of course, the Wild Rumpus. Caleb sat entranced and when we got home, I realized why: after he dropped his coat on the floor (isn't that where it goes?"), he squatted down by his knight figures that he'd put down when we left for the movie and was immediately back to staging daring rescues and epic battles. The rest of us, as far as he was concerned, were completely invisible.  So Max's world, with some variations, was Caleb's world, while Liam and his friends have already left that world behind, for the (far inferior world) of computer games and sports.

Close to the end of the movie, as Max says good-bye to all his Wild Thing friends on the beach, Caleb turned to me and said, with whispered indignation "this a sad movie!" And then, when Carol comes lumbering onto the beach just in time to howl a bereft good-bye to his dear friend Max, Caleb whispered "Max has two families.The monster family and th'other family, wit'his mommy. I t'ink he loves both."

I was going to say something here about the whole power of imagination thing, or about hanging on to our inner child, or some blahblah like that, but Caleb's comment sent me in another direction. I went back to the logistics list that I didn't make because I got so caught up in Max's journey, and in the Wild Things' amazingly beautiful buildings, some of which resemble the sculptures of Martin Puryear.

My list of How I Will Manage While Husband Is Away include one friend who will pick up Caleb after school on Tuesday, another who will bring Liam home from after-school on the day I work late, a third who will watch Caleb for a few hours on Wednesday, and the long-time babysitter who said she'd walk Liam to school every morning (okay, true, I'm paying her, but she's a college student and I'm asking her to haul ass out of bed and be here by 7:45 every day, no small feat when you're 19). In short, this group--my other family, you could say--is saving my bacon this week. 

Caleb hit it just on the head. Max sails the vast ocean alone in his wobbly little boat, but at each end of his journey, there is a family. So too with us, don't you think? Two families: One we are assigned by the vagaries of blood and fate. The other we create for ourselves, but we love both.

For at least a month, Caleb has been saying that he needs a new bed. He'd gotten too big for the toddler bed he's been using since the morning we woke up and realized that the reason he was in snuggling with us was because he'd climbed out of the crib and sauntered into our room. (This is a kid who started walking at nine months, when--let's face it--children don't have the brains god gave a doughnut. A ambulatory nine-month-old? Terrifying). The toddler bed fit neatly under Liam's loft bed, in a kind of faux bunk-bed arrangement, which had worked nicely, until last month. We kept promising the new bed--we were busy and then we were away--but finally, the other day, we hauled ass out to Ikea in Red Hook to make good on our promise. 
 
We had thought about getting an actual bunk-bed but the ceilings in our apartment are so low we figured that Liam would end up sleeping only about a foot away from the ceiling--felt way too claustrophobic. So we went with second best: a new twin mattress for Caleb that would slot into the space under Liam's bed where the toddler bed had been. The boy's room isn't big enough for two twin beds and their legos, and there is no way we can part with any legos, becuase EVERY lego is VERY IMPORTANT. Thus, the boys get stacked up like cordwood. 

Many of our parent friends in two-bedroom apartments eventually make the Great Compromise if they have two kids: they turn the master bedroom into the shared kids room and take the smaller bedroom for themselves, on the basis (I guess) that parents can co-exist more comfortably in a smaller space than two children (and legos, never forget the legos).

Not gonna happen here. Call me selfish but Husband and I shared a very small bedroom once upon a time (and one small closet, but that memory surfaces only in nightmares) and we damn near killed each other. We need those precious feet of extra space around the bed for our own adult version of Very Important Stuff.

So Caleb, my beloved second son, stays on the bottom "bunk," as it were. He helped to choose the right mattress at Ikea, grudgingly (we took him away from playing with the toys in the kids section), and was thrilled to see the toddler bed be dismantled and stowed away to give to his cousin. He loved the "big boy" sheets, and chose all his favorite stuffed animals to keep him company at the foot of the bed.  And he loves the fact that in the morning, Liam now climbs down and snuggles with Caleb in his bed, instead of Caleb always having to climb up to Liam's bed. (Great parenting mystery eight-thousand-and-forty-two: why can my children play together so happily while I'm asleep but as soon as I wake up, they try to kill each other? Clearly, I should stop getting out of bed in the morning, maybe ever, for that matter.)

Caleb, in other words, loves this new arrangement. True to form, however, his mother has reservations: she can't help seeing, in Caleb's new sleeping quarters, shades of a Potter-esque "cupboard under the stairs." I can almost imagine Caleb's therapy sessions later in life: "Yeah, so I slept under my brother's bed, on a mattress on the floor..."

Somehow, the toddler bed, with its little white slats, seemed cosier than this new set-up. But when I see Caleb scrunching happily into his covers or burying himself in his stuffed animals, I realize that he feels plenty cosy.

I'm the one waxing nostalgic for the little toddler bed and I realize that my reservations have nothing to do with the mattress on the floor, or bunk-beds, or my wish for a third bedroom. It's the fact that Caleb is five, hurtling into boyhood without so much as a backward glance.

Caleb turns five today. In fact, he was born almost exactly five years ago right now: 10:56 pm on August 24. He doesn't want to be five--or rather, yesterday he didn't want to be five, but this morning he woke me up (6:43) to say that "today is my birthday and i love you mommy and where are my presents?" 

Getting pregnant with Caleb felt a little bit miraculous (after all, I'd had a preemie, a miscarriage, and was pushing forty) and I was hell-bent on the process being as "normal" as possible. I was going natural childbirth, VBAC all the way. I thought about getting myself a varsity letter jacket with those letters across the front, but it was August and too damn hot.

Because of those risk factors, though, when I first got pregnant, I was a mess. I had ongoing nightmares about dead babies and I was sure it meant that Caleb had died in utero: a dream in which a long line of people trolled through shallow waters, looking for a drowned child and then a man came wading towards me, a crumpled boy-body in his arms; a dream in which  I had to watch Liam get electrocuted; a dream in which the baby was falling out the window and I couldn't quite grasp the hem of his little undershirt as he slid through my hands. Those kinds of nightmares: the kind where you have to tiptoe into the room of your sleeping child to make sure he's breathing. The kind of nightmares that felt so ominous I called the long-suffering, amazing Sylvie, who let me come into her office without an appointment so that I could listen to Caleb's hummingbird heartbeat and be reassured that he was still alive and thriving. 

When I finally went into labor,  I didn't know what it was. I hadn't gone into labor with Liam, so I thought at first I was just having standard pregnant-lady digestive issues, the details of which I will leave to your imagination. Finally--after a long night on the couch wondering what the hell was wrong with me, I figured it out: oh right....I'm having a baby. So we were very excited and Husband I and went off to the hospital, sure that in a few hours, we'd have our new little baby and all would be right with the world.

Well okay, so you'd think we'd have learned from almost four years of parenting that nothing goes as planned: Caleb didn't come. He didn't come and I figured out that the whole natural childbirth thing doesn't work if, like me, you're a chickenshit about pain. After an hour or so of contractions, I was all hell yeah, let's get that epidural!  Which I did, and then I spent a lovely five or six hours flipping through magazines, and watching the monitor indicate that I was having a contraction. I even apologized to Husband, who had been prepared for a more active role than that of fetcher-of-Vogue.

And then I don't know what happened--the epidural wore off, maybe? Or maybe what I experienced--the physical enactment of the sound velcro makes when it's peeled apart--was birth on epidural, which means that women who give birth with no drugs are heroic, amazing creatures who could probably do sword-swallowing in their free time. Six oclock, seven oclock, eight oclock, no baby. Then somewhere in the depths of all those squishy birthing sounds, I heard a sharp crack, and then, finally, finally, Caleb came into the world.

My early pregnancy nightmares came back to haunt me one more time, that night, after I'd been wheeled into my hospital room and Caleb had been whisked off to the nursery. Drifting into sleep, I heard two nurses walk by, talking about a problem with my baby. I clambered out of bed and staggered to the nurses station like a lunatic, insisting that something was wrong with my baby. The nurses--perhaps used to this sort of insanity--walked me to the nursery and showed me my little burrito, wrapped in his hospital blanket, sound asleep. I'd completely hallucinated the entire conversation.

The hallucinations didn't return, but it took me a long time to recover from that sharp cracking noise I'd heard during labor: my almost nine-pound child had broken my tailbone in his push to be born, which apparently happens more than you might think. And you know what can be done for a broken tailbone? Absolutely nothing. I now know without a shadow of a doubt that you cannot, in fact, put your ass in a sling.

My tailbone recovered, my nightmares went away, and now here we are, in another hot sweaty August. Caleb doesn't have much toddler left in him, anymore; he's gotten longer this summer, lithe and agile. It's unsettling to look at the set of his shoulders or the curve of his cheek and see glimmers of the man he's going to be--and when he settles into my lap and puts his head on my neck, I realize how much I miss the warm heft of a baby's body, the soft curl of fingers around a hand.

Today Caleb didn't mind that he was turning five--but I did.

Sunday, August 23. 7:13A.M.  I am sound asleep

Sunday, August 23, 7:14A.M. "I DON'WANNA GO TO KINDERGARTEN."

Caleb is standing next to my pillow, bellowing into my ear.

I am awake.

Public school in NYC doesn't start until September 9, almost three weeks away, but Caleb has twigged to the fact that after he turns five (which he does on Monday), kindergarten follows close behind, and he wants to make absolutely clear his resistance to entering the educational pipeline.

I opened one sleepy eye at my still-four-year-old son and offer this really supportive comment: "Don't start the day complaining, please. Go somewhere else. Mommy's sleeping."

Good thing I've started therapy savings accounts for both my children, in lieu of college accounts. I figure they're bright, they'll get into colleges with scholarships (or else Daddy can't ever, ever quit his job at the university, so that we can have get that big-time tuition discount). But  there aren't scholarships for therapy (merit-based? need-based? oh-my-god-your-parents-did-such-a-number-on-you-I-will-pay-you-to-start-therapy-based) so I figured we should start socking away the dineros now.

In an effort to alleviate Caleb's anxieties about kindergarten--and because I'm not really the world's worst mommy, I just play one on TV--when Caleb finished nursery school this June, we tried a little summer day camp program for a few weeks, figuring he could start getting used to new stuff. It seemed to work: he loved his teacher ("Rita is the best teacher in the world!"), made a few new friends, delighted in carrying his own backpack ("I can do it, Mommy!"). Yeah, okay, so Rita said he was a Luca Brasi in training, but other than that, the experiment seemed to be a success.

Plus that, we've read all those going-to-kindergarten picture books: Froggy Goes to School, Franklin goes to School, Yoko...all of 'em. Read so many of them that when I told Caleb that our next-door-neighbor had a new book for him about kindergarten, he said, throwing his arms over his head, "NO! Not another kindergarten book!"  Of course, thirty seconds later, he was all can we go next door and get my book?  Patsy offered him a classic called Will I Have A Friend (first published in 1969) and we've read it a gazillion times.

He liked the books, he liked the day camp, he likes to make friends.

But he's not going to kindergarten.

I said--trying that clever reverse psychology that never works the way you want it to--that he could go back to nursery school, but that all his friends were going to kindergarten, so they wouldn't be there.

He didn't like that idea. So no, no, no he wasn't going back to nursery school. But he wasn't going to kindergarten.

I feel his pain, even though Caleb's temper tantrums are exasperating, to say the least. My semester starts tomorrow, and the idea of going back to classrooms and uninspired (and uninspiring) students in what feels like mid-August makes me seriously crabby.

It's hard to assuage the anxiety of a five-year old: all those "long-term" consolations (you'll make friends, you want to learn to read, you liked the school when we visited it last spring) carry absolutely no weight whatsoever. And then there's the part where a small piece of me can't help thinking that he's right: kindergarten is going to suck, compared to nursery school; and for that matter, aging ain't no picnic either. So maybe he's right to insist that he is not going to turn five but will just remain four, in perpetuity.

Do any of us really rush out to embrace change for its own sake? Don't most of us cling to our little cow-paths of habit for as long as we possibly can, until forced by circumstance into another direction?

Caleb knows that change is coming and he doesn't like it.

I just wish he'd wait until after I've had my coffee to tell me so.

Today my doe-eyed, almost five-year-old boy was compared to Luca Brasi. You know, the Godfather's enforcer, the one who only takes orders from Don Corleone, and who ends up sleeping with the fishes. Yeah, that guy.

True, Caleb has not yet capped anyone, and as far as I know, he's left no horse parts in anyone's cubby, but apparently, according to the head teacher at Caleb's day camp, Caleb seems to go along with whichever strong-willed boy is currently calling the shots. This teacher noticed that Caleb is sought after by these bossier classmates, in part because he seems willing to play the role of second banana. "You know," she said, "sort of like Ed McMahon."

Great. So it's 9:15 in the morning and my child is being compared to a guy whose success in life was knowing when to laugh at someone else's jokes.

This completely unsolicited conversation happened just after I'd said good-bye to Caleb at the door of the art room. I'm soaking wet because it's raining as if it's the second coming of Noah; Liam isn't at soccer camp because he's got a doctor's appointment, so he's home alone, hopefully not setting fires or downloading porn; Husband is on day six of an eight-day business trip, and did I mention that it's pouring?

(Full disclosure: when Husband decided to go to this conference in London, his charming wife suggested that he go for a few extra days to visit with his elderly aunt who lives in London, and to see a long-time friend, who also lives there. "We'll be fine," I said, "don't worry about it." This was before I realized that my younger son was a Made Guy and before I fully understood what it meant to be a solo parent for more than a week. I bow down before all single parents, who never have the chance to say "not right now, let Other Parent get your milk/read your story/ wash your hair/find that goddamn lego." But I digress.)

In short, on this particular morning, I am in no way equipped to hear that my second child seems to have fully internalized his second-childness and delightedly abdicates his own (nascent) moral compass in favor of Being Told What To Do. Keep in mind, however, that when his older brother tells him what to do, the accusations of BOSSY and UNFAIR ring through the apartment with clarion clarity.

I asked Teacher if following these other boys ever got Caleb into trouble - and that's where Luca Brasi came in. Caleb gets caught up in whatever turf battle is being waged between other boys, it seems, just like Luca did, resulting in the kindergartner's version of swims with fishes: A Talking To By The Teacher.

The other day, for example, Caleb, following the lead of G., was teasing E. about something they had that he didn't. E. had a complete meltdown (thus rendering him unfit to serve on the Supreme Court, but again, I digress). Teacher takes G. and Caleb aside, tells them they weren't being very nice, and that both of them are smart enough to know that what they did would upset E.  Caleb looks at her and said, "I'm not that smart."

His answer cracks me up because it's so smart: after all, you can't blame him for doing something on purpose if he's telling you that he's not smart enough to have done it on purpose. And his answer makes me sad because he so readily described himself as inadequate.

After delivering her commentary, Teacher gave me a hug (she's that kind of person) and I trudged home through the rain. What do you do with conversations like this? I mean, this isn't the crazy lady at the bus stop muttering that your kid should be wearing a hat. This is a woman who has seen my kid five days a week, six hours a day, for about a month. She knows Caleb in ways that I don't, so as I splashed home, I wondered if when she looked at me, she was all, "oh, wow, you've totally done a number on this one, lady."

Is Caleb doomed to be second fiddle, second banana, second string? Does he already assume that he never gets shotgun when he's old enough to sit in the front seat? Does he let other kids tell him what to do because we've failed him in some essential way, already? I mean, I am completely willing to admit that I might have failed as a parent; I was just hoping not to have to reach that verdict until the kids were, you know, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

Birth order's a bitch, I guess: I'm the oldest, so I think of myself as having been replaced not once but twice (first by a brother, then a sister). My brother is the only boy - both a blessing and a curse - and my sister grew up in two very long shadows. As a friend once said to me, siblings don't actually grow up in the same family. Which is why, of course, belonging to a family is enough to drive anyone crazy.

I guess the question for me is how keep the second son from feeling like he's always in second place.

 Clearly this is where Mamma Brasi went wrong with little Luca.  

Liam stayed home from soccer camp for two days this week. He came home Monday and seemed fine, but woke up early Tuesday morning with a fever, aches and pains; he said his head hurt, his spine hurt, his knees hurt.

So okay, you do what you do, right? No need to freak out, it's just a fever, probably a summer cold combined with the physical strain of his first week of soccer camp: running hard for six hours a day, eating not enough lunch (because it's more fun to run around playing more soccer), becoming maybe a bit dehydrated because the sun finally came out and stayed out.

His feeling achy and tired is normal, I said to myself.  He's a kid, kids get sick, they stay home and rest, then they're better and life goes on.

Unfortunately for my peace of mind, however, on Monday night I had gone to see "Food, Inc.," a documentary about the food industry, directed by Robert Kenner, and suddenly, Liam's fever didn't seem so innocent - I entered the state that Judith Warner calls "Perfect Madness."

The "perfect madness" is that condition known to parents (particularly first-time, somewhat older parents) in which a child's every cough may be the beginning of a deathly illness; every electrical outlet a source of death; the cabinets walk-in tombs. To be a parent, Warner says, is to no longer live without fear. The trick is not to get so paranoid that everything becomes potentially lethal. Usually (I think) I manage to avoid paranoid parenting, but Kenner's movie set a whole new set of thoughts whirling in my head:

Liam probably has just a summer cold unless the tacos we made for dinner Monday night out of hamburger meat (organic, expensive Whole Foods burger meat, but still, burger meat) gave him some kind of slow-moving but ultimately lethal food-borne pathogen.

Or the little patches of grey in Liam's hair, and the light-skinned patches on his knees are a sign of an auto-immune deficiency that no doctor has yet managed to catch.

Or his tiny lungs inhaled so many toxins in the weeks after 9/11 that in fact he's got pulmonary disorders which will soon incapacitate him.

Or the almost nine years of avoiding green leafy vegetables, with the exception of what I can squeeze in, Sneaky Chef-style, have so compromised his system that he's got anemia or a B12 deficiency.

See what a little imagination and a powerful documentary can do? Kenner's movie brought together many things that will be familiar to readers of The Omnivore's Dilemma or Fast Food Nation, but the power of his visual story telling (let's just say: hidden cameras inside a slaughterhouse and leave it at that) hit home in a way that neither of those books did--which is to say that two things have happened: I'm now seriously freaked out by how a few multinationals can control our entire food supply from seeds to supermarket, to use the movie's phrase.The second thing that has happened, I'm afraid, is that I've officially become boring about food.

And maybe it is boring for people around me (okay, mostly Husband) to hear about all the bad shit that's in food (and a lot of that bad shit is, quite literally, shit), but the movie is anything but boring. It's a terrifying testament to what happens when the fox is put in charge of the henhouse (as when various executives of Monsanto, Con Agra, and Tyson are appointed to the USDA, FDA, or the Supreme Court). Take the despearately sad story of Kevin Kowalcyk, a two year old boy who ate a hamburger while on vacation with his family. Twelve days later, Kevin was dead: he'd eaten a hamburger tainted with E. coli. The plant that produced those hamburgers, the family eventually found out, had failed not one, not two, but at least three USDA inspections.

Kevin's ghost lurked in the back of my mind this week, as I put cool cloths on Liam's feverish  head. Liam dutifully swallowed his ibuprofen (comprised, as near as I can tell, from a dab of medicine and a bunch of inactive chemical compounds all derived from corn) and after two days he happily hopped on the bus back to soccer camp.

Just a fever. Nothing to be afraid of.

Except Kenner's movie suggests that not only should we be afraid of what's happening to what we eat but also that we should all be paying a lot more attention.

When I told Caleb that he could watch "Super Why" a few weeks ago, he said "Cool. Is there gonna be fighting? Because super in the name means there's gonna be fighting."

Okay, I think this means that my kid has gotten way too familiar with super-hero culture (which I think he gets by osmosis, because we don't watch superhero stuff at home and we don't have superhero comics, either) - I was afraid that when we turned on "Super Why," he would be bored silly: he expected smash! crash! pow! and was getting a show about reading, instead.

But you know what? Despite the lack of swords, guns, bazookas, and other weaponry, Caleb loved "Super Why." Just as the show's designers intended, Caleb called out responses to the questions, pointed to the letters on the TV screen, and clapped with satisfaction when he was right. Later in the week, when we did a Super Why jigsaw puzzle (with hidden words in the pictures), Caleb flopped on the floor with his Super Why magnifying glass and started spelling out the words he found: "C-L-O-U-D, what's that?" "Look, I found T-O-W-E-R!" 

Full disclosure: asking Caleb to watch Super Why was homework, of a sort; he was my test-case for the claims made about the show at a lunch I went to a few weeks ago.

This lunch, at PBS, was my first-ever blog-related event: as one of the contributors to the NYMom's Blog, I was invited to a lunch with other bloggers (a word I've decided I really don't like) in order to learn about "Super Why!"

  Going into the lunch, I carried three secrets:
first, ignorance: prior to the lunch, I'd never seen the show, didn't know it existed, had to watch it on youtube even to know what it was about.

second, superciliousness (a word that I should use more because it's so fun to say, like Episcopalian and azure): my kids mostly don't watch TV during the day, unless they're sick, and even then I try to ration it out so that being sick doesn't become "fun." (One of the most satisfying moments of early motherhood for me was hearing three-year-old Liam say to a friend who was over for a playdate, "oh, no, you can't watch TV in the daytime," as if he were explaining some incontrovertible natural law.)

third, an ongoing marital discussion (a word I use instead of argument): Husband says screens (TVs, computers, etc) are just screens and that what matters is what's on the screen. I say screens create a kind of passivity, or, at best, encourage only limited creativity.
 
So as you might imagine, I went off to this lunch filled with curiosity but aware that I might not be the ideal audience.

Reader, I have to say: the food was good, the questions excellent, and this show - really, really smart: it knows how to reach its young audience without creating the parental ARGH that something like "Barney" causes. It's so smart, in fact, that your kid will get excited about calling out letters, words, directions. So smart, in fact, that some in the audience may have entertained thoughts about wrong career paths being chosen...wondered why she's chosen a life of slogging through badly written student papers instead of helping to craft terrific children's programming...

At the end of the lunch, we were given PBS-related swag (my first swag!) to use with our kids and asked to write about their experiences (and ours) with "Super Why" and other PBS shows, like "Cyber Chase." Being a part of the conversation about media and kids filled me with energetic thoughts about how it was time to change my children's media habits and that if, as Husband says, a screen is just a screen, then I was going to bloody well make sure that what came out of the screen wasn't just the equivalent of brain twinkies.

Well, my good intentions smashed first into the obdurate surface of stubborn, eight-year-old Liam, who claimed that "Cyber Chase" seemed too much like homework and the stuff he did in his computer class at school. My resolve smashed secondly into Caleb's love of "Scooby Doo," which he won't give up, despite having seen every episode a gazillion times. "Super Why" can't persuade him to turn off the cartoon (yes, I know, I could turn it off, but it's his end-of-day forty-five minutes of TV, and let's be honest people, by the end of the day, I'm tired).

So here it is: I'm willing to concede Husband's point that a screen is just a screen, and that what comes out of the screen is what matters. But now that I've been presented with smart, nutritious programming, in the form of Super Why and other PBS shows, I'm realizing just how addictive brain twinkies can be.

No, this picture is not taken at an airport. It was taken at approximately 5:26PM last Wednesday, in the cafeteria of Liam's school. Caleb in tow, I was picking up Liam from his after-school karate class and taking him to a make-up baseball game (due to the 8500 days of rain we've had this spring, baseball games have been rained out almost more than they've been played).

Never mind the ridiculousness of asking eight-year-olds to play a two-hour baseball game late in the day on a school night, let's look at the gear:

• one bag full of baseball gear (uniform, cleats, glove, bat);
• one tote bag with snacks/dinner, toy cars for Caleb to play with at the baseball game, wallet, water bottle, extra sweatshirt for Liam;
• Liam's school backpack, in which he's carrying the just-released (hardback) conclusion to the Percy Jackson series;
• Liam's bag of karate gear: uniform and pads for sparring practice

From the school to the baseball field is a distance of about twelve long blocks (from 1st Avenue to the East River/FDR, basically). Yes, we could take a cab, but I figured we'd be taking a cab after the game, as well (cold tired hungry children = mandatory cab ride), and I wasn't crazy about spending fifteen bucks on cabs.

I've thought about starting a new company: Mommy Mules, that would allow parents to rent small docile burros for short distances, as a way to portage all their child-related crap from place to place, but mule-storage is an issue. You can't just fold a mule up at the end of the day and shove it in the closet.

So yes, to shlep our stuff from school to the baseball field we used our trusty Maclaren assault vehicle. Slung all those bags across the handles, plopped the almost-five-year-old Caleb in the seat and off we went.

I know that some folks frown when they see "big kids" in strollers - and truth be told, Caleb doesn't ride in it very much any more - but they should unwrinkle their brows. The stroller's got nothing to do with the child riding in it and everything to do with what's strapped across the back. Until I solve the mule-storage problem, the stroller will have to do. Sir Edmund Hillary had a sherpa...I've got a Maclaren.