Recently, I've felt a fair amount of despair about feeding my family. T, my 3-year-old, is in a very picky stage of his eating life. (Someone I respect said that this preschool-aged pickiness could make a lot of evolutionary sense -- at three, early human kids would have been old enough to start going along with adults who were gathering food. Being too quick to try an unfamiliar food could have had deadly consequences. So I try to be patient.) P is more willing to try new things, but also difficult to please. Even UnschoolerDad has more food aversions than I can deal with very happily, much of the time -- and he'd like dinner to look like a meal, whereas the kids and I can be happy with some pretty ad-hoc stuff, like scrambled eggs, bread, and peas for a meal, or edamame now and soup later. And I'm gluten-intolerant, so my diet can be challenging too.
I identified something from my heritage recently that made a lot of sense. Someone more familiar with England than I am told me that food there is considered primarily a source of nourishment rather than pleasure. I'm sure this is an overgeneralization, but it rang true for my primarily-British-heritage-on-both-sides family. When I was growing up, I don't think there was much tolerance for picky eating. (My mom reads this blog, so if she tells me my memory is off, I'll post a correction here!) Good food was on the table every night, and we were expected to eat it. It's frustrating sometimes that the family I've built hasn't bought into that utilitarian, stop-complaining-and-thank-the-cook view of food. Money was also a bit scarce when I was little, and waste was frowned upon. In my frugal young adulthood as an underpaid teacher, this translated into a resistance to eating expensive foods regularly or in large amounts -- a feeling that I need to save them for special occasions, sort of like fine china, only more so since they actually get consumed!
So here I was, finding it difficult to meet all our needs and desires with reasonably nourishing food, even after letting go of the more extreme nutritional goals I was striving to meet pretty recently, before T started rejecting so many foods. This week, when I went to the grocery store (by myself after the kids were in bed -- I could get used to that!), I decided to try to get only things that could be part of meals or snacks that I (and my family, I hoped) would call "yummy." Focus on yummy. I tried to get savory yummies (artichokes -- yes, we like them -- interesting cheeses, chicken to barbecue, etc.) as well as some sweet ones. And I got some foods that were more expensive than I usually buy. Since my frustration about cooking has often led to going out to eat more than we can really afford, I tried to base my buying decisions more on a comparison to the cost of restaurant food than a comparison to the cheapest nutritionally similar food available at the grocery store. Even at $5/pound, brussels sprouts (all of us except T love these, roasted with olive oil and salt, and maybe he'll come around after a few more times of seeing the rest of us enjoy them) made more sense than a side order of broccoli at our favorite restaurant, where it works out to something like $12/pound. The meals and snacks made from this shopping trip are meeting with some pretty good receptions so far.
P brought me a recipe recently. She had painstakingly copied it out of a book onto a piece of paper, and she really wanted to try it. It called for spreading frosting on mini-marshmallows and putting sprinkles on top. Sugar on sugar, with more sugar on top, said my nutri-freak brain. But I didn't say no, partly because I wanted to honor the effort she'd put into the recipe. And on this week's shopping trip, I bought the marshmallows and the sprinkles. I couldn't find a prepared frosting that wasn't loaded with trans fats, so I got some spreadable cream cheese instead. P saw the ingredients the next day, and she was delighted! We tried the recipe that day after lunch. Both kids enjoyed it, and they also ate quite a few marshmallows plain. The next day, after having a couple more marshmallows, P said to me unprompted, "I think maybe I am stopping liking marshmallows." I'm noticing this happening as I am freer with sweets than before -- we still have the peppermints, lollipops, and bubble gum that have been available for weeks, since I decided it would be okay to have some sweets around the house more regularly. P still has a few mini-marshmallows or a lollipop now and then, but she isn't eating lots of them. She also reacts with less complaint if I ask her to defer sweets until after a meal or until the next day.
On that same shopping trip, I also bought some cheap imitation-maple syrup to complete the ingredients for an exploration of density that I'd seen on the Dragonfly TV web site. One day after lunch, I just started putting the stuff together -- this caught the kids' attention quickly. I poured some syrup into a big Mason jar, then some oil (which floated on top of the syrup). Then I got some water ready to pour in and asked what they thought would happen. P predicted the water would go on top of the oil and was pleased and surprised when it ended up between syrup and oil. Then I brought some small objects to drop in, and we guessed where each one might go before trying. T loved actually dropping them in, and the kids suggested a couple to add to what I already had. We ended up trying a piece of cork, a piece of plastic, two different kinds of wood, modeling clay, a chunk of apple, a raisin, and a paper clip. We poked each one down to eliminate surface tension and bubbles, and then observed at what level it came to rest. We drew a picture showing all the liquid layers and where each chunk floated or sank in them. I think I'll save the picture and see if, at some point, P is interested in looking up or directly measuring the densities of some of the materials. When we were done with that, P wanted to have a bowl of syrup so she make a model ocean with modeling-clay icebergs. She liked the way modeling clay floated in syrup much as ice does in water: mostly submerged, but with some sticking out on top. Then she asked for some of the cheap syrup to taste; she's had mostly maple syrup at home. She said it tasted really different. I asked if she thought she could tell the difference blind, and she thought so. So UnschoolerDad and I set up a double-blind taste test (I filled and labeled the little bowls and warmed them in the microwave, since the maple syrup had been in the fridge; UD presented them to a blindfolded P to taste.) P could, in fact, tell the difference under double-blind conditions. When she opened her eyes and saw the two samples, she was confused, because she'd expected UD would give A to her first, then B, and the way they looked to her was the opposite of how they tasted, assuming that was the case; but he'd given her B first. She wanted to know why we made it so complicated, so I explained briefly why scientists would use double-blind conditions, to tease out the real differences between things without worrying that the expectations of the test subjects or of those administering the test would influence the outcome. UD and I smelled the two syrups, and we both agreed that the imitation syrup smelled like childhood, and the maple syrup smelled like adulthood!
Another food adventure this week was making Jell-O for the first time with the kids. They've had it at restaurants, but they were very excited to try it at home. P linked dissolving the mix in hot water with our earlier experiment dissolving peppermint candies. The next day; T couldn't remember what it was called, but he persisted in describing it ("I want that thing I don't know what it's called. It's red and squishy. It squishes in your mouth.") until I realized what he was talking about and got it out to eat! It disappeared quickly. We'll see if it gets requested again. Maybe we'll try making it from real fruit juice with pectin next time; I have a recipe for that.
We also tried new foods: Artichokes with a new kind of dipping sauce; pasta with browned butter and mizithra cheese, as UD and I used to enjoy it at The Spaghetti Factory; blueberry-broccoli sorbet, which was a little weird, but much tastier than it sounds (T finished his; P, who saw what went into the blender, did not); and more. And since there are several foods everyone likes that can be made in a slow cooker, but my sad, cheap old Crock Pot from 15 years ago was ruining some of them, we bought a new slow cooker this week. Much better!
We also tried new foods: Artichokes with a new kind of dipping sauce; pasta with browned butter and mizithra cheese, as UD and I used to enjoy it at The Spaghetti Factory; blueberry-broccoli sorbet, which was a little weird, but much tastier than it sounds (T finished his; P, who saw what went into the blender, did not); and more. And since there are several foods everyone likes that can be made in a slow cooker, but my sad, cheap old Crock Pot from 15 years ago was ruining some of them, we bought a new slow cooker this week. Much better!
Not everything we do is related to food or candy. We bought an electricity "invention" kit a while back, when there was a sale at Barnes and Noble. Recently P's been asking to make things with it, and we found time to build a telegraph clicker (elecromagnet plus switch plus paper clip close enough to click over to the electromagnet when the switch is closed). I talked with P about how, if we left the circuit closed for a long time, the D cell we were using to run it would run down quickly, since there was very little resistance in the circuit. When we'd exhausted the considerable fun of playing with the clicker, trying it as an electromagnet, learning a few letters of Morse code, and playing "name that tune" by clicking rhythms, we tried putting a small light bulb in series with the clicker. The light lit up beautifully, making it easier to distinguish dots and dashes in Morse code. Then we noticed that the clicker didn't work when the light was in the circuit. I realized this was because of the added resistance of the bulb, and explaining this to P meant talking about how an incandescent light works, which has come up since then when P asked about what different kinds of lights existed. Later in the week, UD tried building the radio in the set (a simple LC oscillator hooked up to an earphone) with the kids, but it only picks up a little static, and only in what seems like an unlikely position for the adjustable capacitor. We may try rebuilding the capacitor in a different size, or with a different dielectric (UD chose black construction paper), or just debugging the circuit for unintended electrical contacts. We also wonder whether the diode provided has too high a resistance for the non-powered circuit; but we haven't tried any of these solutions yet.
A few days after the radio attempt, P and I were driving near a railroad track and saw a train with many different kinds of cars, including some empty ones whose purpose wasn't clear to us. One turned out to be a lumber car, as we found out today searching online. The other one was also a lumber car, but with an odder design, including lots of oval holes. P mused aloud, "Maybe the empty train cars are carrying electricity to make the train go." This led to a discussion of ways electricity works, with electrons flowing from one point in a circuit to another and creating heat and/or causing work to be done along the way. Having made the telegraph clicker was a good point of reference for that.
P has also been asking to practice math lately. She and T found a memory game played with addition facts (e.g., match "3+4" to "7"), and they both liked that. T asks, "What's three plus three?" and P answers, or I answer; or P and T play the game together. P was very excited to find that game. She's also starting to think about multiplication, asking me multiplication facts from time to time to check her guesses. From what she tells me, I'd say she's building up an idea of multiplication as repeated addition, and it's pretty accurate.
UnschoolerDad scored a coup recently, when he discovered that the game Scribblenauts, formerly for Nintendo DS (which we don't have), had come out for iPad. He immediately bought it and loaded it on our iPads, and all of us have been enjoying it. In Scribblenauts, you can create almost any object you can name. Want a hungry giant? Type it in -- but watch out: he might eat you! Want to fly? Try making a jetpack or a Pegasus to ride -- or P's favorite, giving your character wings. Want to get a lion to go somewhere? Try conjuring some meat for it to eat. Feed a love potion to a monster if you like. Create a bulldozer to push heavy things around, or a backhoe to dig. The coup here, besides the considerable fun, is that this is one of the first things that has both kids wanting to know, asking, and remembering how to spell things, without anyone needing to convince them (as in the past) that using standard spellings might be a good idea. They're also learning the QWERTY keyboard, which is coming in handy in their lives much earlier than it did in mine. They enjoy the puzzle levels, but they play even more gleefully in the freeform sandbox level, where you can create whatever you like and play with it as you choose. Today Petra dug herself an underground cave with a backhoe and shovel. She tried to make it deeper with a jackhammer (she was delighted to know that the first part of that work was the name Jack, as in Jack and Annie in the Magic Tree House books), but she ran up against a limit of the game there.
I've watched a couple of documentaries recently while folding laundry. P and T orbit and play while I do this, sometimes coming to rest and watching for a while. One was an episode of The Planets called "Terra Firma." It covered volcanism and similar planetary activity, such as ice geysers on Europa and plumes of an as-yet-unidentified substance on Triton. This series is written for adults, so when the kids are watching, I stop it frequently to re-explain something that I think they'd find interesting, if they didn't already understand it. Io's constant volcanic activity caught P's attention. After thinking about how very active it was, she asked excitedly (correctly interpreting something the narrator had said), "You mean you could never make a globe of Io that would be good for more than a day?!" Then today she tuned in to a TED talk I was watching about near-earth asteroids, what kinds of damage they have caused in the past, and the tactics, crude and subtle, that we could use to divert a near-earth asteroid that looked like it would actually hit the Earth. She was a little concerned about this possibility, but after I said it was extremely unlikely, she enjoyed listening to the descriptions of diversion methods.
In gymnastics this week, P got scared and shut down for a while when she was asked to hop along the high balance beam. I flagged down her assistant teacher and asked if she needed to come out for a while; she did. I just held her for a few minutes while she cried and talked about wanting to quit after this term, and I reassured her that many gymnasts take a while to get good at things, and that my regard for her doesn't depend on what she can do. She rejoined the class just as it was ending. After class I mentioned to her teachers that she was really frustrated and talking about quitting. They considered some possibilities, like moving her back from group 2 to group 1, but when I told them she'd said she wanted to be able to try things on the low beam before doing them on the high beam, they said they thought they could accommodate that. The next day there was an open gym time available at another local gymnastics school, and when I asked P if she'd like to go, she enthusiastically agreed. At her suggestion, we alternated between working on the beam and playing fast-paced games of her choosing, using a timer for both. She got a lot better at hopping along the high beam, after practicing on the low beam several times. It was great to see her smiling as she did it, and transitioning from wanting me right there, close enough to grab if she lost her balance, to wanting me to stand so far away that I couldn't possibly help, but only watch and cheer her on. I'm hoping that this kind of support will decrease her frustration and enable her to continue with gymnastics if she wants to, since there is a lot she enjoys about gymnastics. We shall see!
A few days after the radio attempt, P and I were driving near a railroad track and saw a train with many different kinds of cars, including some empty ones whose purpose wasn't clear to us. One turned out to be a lumber car, as we found out today searching online. The other one was also a lumber car, but with an odder design, including lots of oval holes. P mused aloud, "Maybe the empty train cars are carrying electricity to make the train go." This led to a discussion of ways electricity works, with electrons flowing from one point in a circuit to another and creating heat and/or causing work to be done along the way. Having made the telegraph clicker was a good point of reference for that.
P has also been asking to practice math lately. She and T found a memory game played with addition facts (e.g., match "3+4" to "7"), and they both liked that. T asks, "What's three plus three?" and P answers, or I answer; or P and T play the game together. P was very excited to find that game. She's also starting to think about multiplication, asking me multiplication facts from time to time to check her guesses. From what she tells me, I'd say she's building up an idea of multiplication as repeated addition, and it's pretty accurate.
UnschoolerDad scored a coup recently, when he discovered that the game Scribblenauts, formerly for Nintendo DS (which we don't have), had come out for iPad. He immediately bought it and loaded it on our iPads, and all of us have been enjoying it. In Scribblenauts, you can create almost any object you can name. Want a hungry giant? Type it in -- but watch out: he might eat you! Want to fly? Try making a jetpack or a Pegasus to ride -- or P's favorite, giving your character wings. Want to get a lion to go somewhere? Try conjuring some meat for it to eat. Feed a love potion to a monster if you like. Create a bulldozer to push heavy things around, or a backhoe to dig. The coup here, besides the considerable fun, is that this is one of the first things that has both kids wanting to know, asking, and remembering how to spell things, without anyone needing to convince them (as in the past) that using standard spellings might be a good idea. They're also learning the QWERTY keyboard, which is coming in handy in their lives much earlier than it did in mine. They enjoy the puzzle levels, but they play even more gleefully in the freeform sandbox level, where you can create whatever you like and play with it as you choose. Today Petra dug herself an underground cave with a backhoe and shovel. She tried to make it deeper with a jackhammer (she was delighted to know that the first part of that work was the name Jack, as in Jack and Annie in the Magic Tree House books), but she ran up against a limit of the game there.
I've watched a couple of documentaries recently while folding laundry. P and T orbit and play while I do this, sometimes coming to rest and watching for a while. One was an episode of The Planets called "Terra Firma." It covered volcanism and similar planetary activity, such as ice geysers on Europa and plumes of an as-yet-unidentified substance on Triton. This series is written for adults, so when the kids are watching, I stop it frequently to re-explain something that I think they'd find interesting, if they didn't already understand it. Io's constant volcanic activity caught P's attention. After thinking about how very active it was, she asked excitedly (correctly interpreting something the narrator had said), "You mean you could never make a globe of Io that would be good for more than a day?!" Then today she tuned in to a TED talk I was watching about near-earth asteroids, what kinds of damage they have caused in the past, and the tactics, crude and subtle, that we could use to divert a near-earth asteroid that looked like it would actually hit the Earth. She was a little concerned about this possibility, but after I said it was extremely unlikely, she enjoyed listening to the descriptions of diversion methods.
In gymnastics this week, P got scared and shut down for a while when she was asked to hop along the high balance beam. I flagged down her assistant teacher and asked if she needed to come out for a while; she did. I just held her for a few minutes while she cried and talked about wanting to quit after this term, and I reassured her that many gymnasts take a while to get good at things, and that my regard for her doesn't depend on what she can do. She rejoined the class just as it was ending. After class I mentioned to her teachers that she was really frustrated and talking about quitting. They considered some possibilities, like moving her back from group 2 to group 1, but when I told them she'd said she wanted to be able to try things on the low beam before doing them on the high beam, they said they thought they could accommodate that. The next day there was an open gym time available at another local gymnastics school, and when I asked P if she'd like to go, she enthusiastically agreed. At her suggestion, we alternated between working on the beam and playing fast-paced games of her choosing, using a timer for both. She got a lot better at hopping along the high beam, after practicing on the low beam several times. It was great to see her smiling as she did it, and transitioning from wanting me right there, close enough to grab if she lost her balance, to wanting me to stand so far away that I couldn't possibly help, but only watch and cheer her on. I'm hoping that this kind of support will decrease her frustration and enable her to continue with gymnastics if she wants to, since there is a lot she enjoys about gymnastics. We shall see!
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