Category: Health

Seasonal delights

Posted on by Suki

This morning I made Italian plum cake. My ten-year-old was helping me and it occurred to him to ask, “Are we going to Nana’s house tonight?” “No,” I answered. “Is someone coming over for dinner tonight?” he asked. “No,” I said, getting curious. “Why?”

“Because you’re making cake so I thought it must be a special occasion,” he told me.

“Aha,” I said. “It is a special occasion. Italian plums are out, and thus it is time to make Italian plum cake!”

In the old days, people thought that if we could just have more of the good things we had, our lives would be better. I’m here to tell you that’s not always the case. Italian plums prove my point.

Here in California, we get Italian plums once a year. Actually, they’re prunes, but when you say prunes, people think prune juice, which is not at all what you’re supposed to think when I say Italian prunes.

Italian prune plums (which is another things they’re called, though redundant) are not really very nice to eat raw, but they are very nice to bake on top of a cake. They’re a simple thing, really, good for a few uses, and we look forward to them every summer. When they appear in our market, I snap up a couple of pounds of them, and make this cake:

Italian Plum Cake

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 eggs, room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 pounds Italian prunes or a mixture of prunes and nectarines

Sugar and cinnamon for topping, mixed

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Grease a 13×9 inch Pyrex pan. (I’m lazy and spray it with non-stick canola spray.) Cut the prunes in half and remove the stones. It can be fun to include some nectarine slices to create a nice design. Cream the butter and sugar on high until smooth, then add the salt, eggs, and vanilla. Mix until smooth. Measure the flour and baking powder into a sifter and sift it over the batter. Mix until smooth. Dump the batter in the pan and smooth it out to the edges. Arrange the prunes on top, cut side down. Try to put them as close together as possible — they will shrink as they bake. Sprinkle liberally with cinnomon sugar. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes. Eat warm with whipped cream or ice cream. Eat leftovers for breakfast, if you know what’s good for you.

This is not a recipe from my childhood. This is a recipe from my husband’s aunt’s childhood. She gave me a recipe written in her own beautiful handwriting, and I can’t find it. So this recipe is adapted off one I got on the Internet. But they’re all pretty much the same. It’s not cuisine; it’s hearty, simple fare that you can’t help but love.

And the thing is, if I had the ability to make it any day of the year, I wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I do. It’s a humble cake. The prunes aren’t really the magnificent fruit you’ll find, but they do nicely on this cake. It’s a festive, end of summer feeling to make this cake. I am sure that if I could make it anytime, I probably wouldn’t.

Last time I visited my parents before they left Michigan, I stopped in astonishment at the display of cilantro in the grocery store. Cilantro in Michigan? Artichokes? Oranges out of season? Apples from New Zealand? When I was growing up, the grocery store fresh food aisle was pretty dismal in the winter. Stored apples, stored potatoes, stored cabbage. It was easy to see why our German forebears had invented things like sauerkraut and pickled fish to liven things up over the winter. By the time I was a kid, of course, we got all sorts of frozen vegetables (and canned and froze a lot from our garden), but to see fresh, exotic things was rare. We had bananas, oranges, the occasional pineapple. Things that travelled well or cost a lot so they were worth the shipping. I’m not advocating a complete return to this.

But on the other hand, when the first fruits of spring come into season, isn’t it just the most magnificent feeling if you haven’t had one in the intervening months? As a believer in the ways of Michael Pollen, I try not to buy things that are shipped across the world for many reasons. But along with the ecological reasons I don’t buy stonefruit in the winter, I just plain don’t want it. My kids beg for a nectarine or peach from New Zealand, but I’m willing to wait.

Not to be too cliche here, but good things do come to those who wait.

Except when you believe that the Italian Plum Cake will last till you get to it the next morning. I walked into the kitchen as I saw the last bite disappear into my husband’s mouth. Another year of waiting, and antipation. Thanks, honey!

Is it kids, parents, society, the water?

Posted on by Suki

I keep a little virtual sticky note on my computer of ideas for my blog. A long-running idea is summed up with “kids are different these days,” something someone said to me. I’ve been pondering it. Clearly something is different, but what is it?

A friend e-mailed me because she saw a banner ad on Yahoo that said, “Is your child happy in school?” and it occurred to her that such a question probably never was asked in her grandparents’ generation. I’m sure that’s true of my family: Neither of my parents had much choice in schooling. They went, and that was it.

As far as my schooling was concerned, we didn’t have a lot of choices. I never heard of homeschooling. There was a Catholic school in town; my parents tried it for my oldest sibling and then switched her to the public school, and all five of us went straight through public school. There was no “school choice,” no “alternative education.”

On the other hand, my husband, who grew up in a much more densely populated area, chose to go to the “alternative” high school in his town. So alternatives were growing in the seventies, but they were generally alternatives geared to what parents wanted rather than what children needed.

I have to fast-forward over all those years that I was neither a student nor a parent to this century. Things have really changed. Certainly I know that a lot of people, perhaps the majority of people, still send their kid to the neighborhood public school, and the most choice they feel they have is to fight for the teacher they like in each grade. But there has been a quiet and deep change in our attitudes, and I think that kids are reflecting that.

First of all, there’s the change in parenting. I truly believe that parents now are actually thinking about being parents as something that involves choices; I’m not sure that was true in previous generations. Certainly before Dr. Spock came along, people pretty much did what their parents did. But now, more and more parents are actually considering what each individual child needs. Instead of “this is what parenting is” (the old approach) or “this is what I think is right” (the “new school” approach), we have “this is what I’ve determined is right for this child at this time.”

I’ve met so many parents who say that school is a year-by-year thing. This year they’re homeschooling, but next year remains to be seen. This year they’re fine with the neighborhood public school, but they’re keeping a close eye on how things go.

So back to the question: Is this a change in kids, parents, or society? I think it’s all three. Kids are living very different lives than they used to. I wrote a series of articles for Growing Up in Santa Cruz about behavioral problems in kids and some new ways of treating them. Almost all of the practitioners I talked to noted the incredible change in lifestyle that kids today have from their parents’ upbringing: a complete lack of unstructured time, very little time in nature, scheduled days that have them running from one activity to another, lots of time in highly structured environments, in close quarters with a lot of kids.

Parents are also changing. Pretty much every parent I know has tried out one theory or another: Positive Discipline, Attachment Parenting, etc. There are probably lots of theories I don’t know because they don’t appeal to me! This is a huge change from when my parents were parenting; they had their memories of how their parents did it, and if they didn’t want to take that as a model, they just had to figure it out for themselves.

Finally, society has opened up so much. I would guess that some things are largely the same for families in the small Midwestern towns I knew when I was growing up, but one major thing has changed for all of us: We are less connected with our physical neighbors and more connected with like-minded people regardless of location. Living in Santa Cruz is a good fit for me; there are lots of families here who have similar values to ours. But if it weren’t a good fit, I would still have a virtual community that could offer me advice and support, which they do every day.

It’s a whole new world, really, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable judging it “better” in every way. But in some ways, we have come a long way, baby. By paying attention to each child’s needs, parenting has been made all the more complicated, but (I hope!) all the more effective.

Soccer Girl

Posted on by Suki

There are a couple of areas of parenting in which I admit freely that I have given up. One of them was enrolling my kids in activities that would teach them the basics of group sports, especially those dreaded sports that depend on catching balls. You see, I grew up in a baseball and hockey family. I also have very bad eyes. So in my youth I did learn to throw a baseball pretty well, and skate well enough to get around, but when a ball came at me, I’d see two of them. I’d have just enough time to think, “eenie, meenie, miney, moe” and then if I didn’t duck the darn thing would hit me in the face.

Not surprisingly, I never tried hockey. I wanted to keep my teeth.

When my son, whose eyes are perfect, expressed his dread of signing up for sports, it wasn’t a big deal to me. I also thought of my sister, whose family schedule revolved around whether her son’s team was winning. And there was that husband I chose, who, like me, prefers solitary, man-battling-his-own-limitations sports. I eased my conscience by making sure that my son is enrolled in a school that has P.E.

So when my daughter mentioned that she wanted to play soccer, it hardly registered. It was like she’d said “I want to be princess of the universe,” one of those passing fancy things. (Well, OK, it is not a passing fancy that she is, in fact, Empress of the Universe!) But then she said it again. And then a flyer turned up in her box at school. “I want to go to soccer camp,” she announced. And she was serious.

The flyer was from an outfit called Santa Cruz Soccer. I know nothing about local soccer groups. But they had something they called “economy camp,” and that seemed to fit the bill. I signed her up. The appointed day was the other day, and we turned up with bells on. “Oh, the economy camp? You didn’t get a call?”

I suddenly knew that things were going to go badly… but then they didn’t! “No problem,” said Bill, who runs the camp. He got a couple of teenagers to take my daughter onto the field, and she was gone, totally hooked in. He explained that they’d had to cancel my daughter’s camp, but that they’d just work her into the one that was going on.

It was at that point that I had to start into my standard speech about my daughter’s behavioral oddities. People sometimes find it surprising at first that I stay to watch her, given that she’s not a clingy kid and seems so completely with it… till she isn’t. Although I don’t want to prejudice people, I think they’re better off forewarned and she’s better off if I’m there to support her and help teachers understand her needs. Bill was totally understanding. He and one of his coaches, Katie, told me that they got lots of kids who have behavioral difficulties, and in fact Katie works with special needs kids during the schoolyear.

I felt like I’d walked into a place where I was understood, and where I just didn’t have to say anymore. It was a fabulous feeling. So was watching my six-year-old out on that field. I noticed that they kept someone — a teenage counselor or a coach — on her all the time, which is what she needs. She was happy and confident.

This is how I wish all the things my kids take part in were run: The people running it don’t bother worrying about whether the mix-up was my mistake or theirs. They find a way to include children who don’t fit in. They’re relaxed about the kids’ behavior, but also prepared to take care of whatever they get. When a kid needs something different than the rest of the kids, they find a way to accommodate.

My daughter was so in love with the experience that she was relatively easy to deal with. Some other kids had various “issues,” though, and I watched the staff take care of them supportively and firmly. They didn’t coddle the kids; they were just realistic about the differences between kids and what they are able to do. I guess that perhaps in this regard they have an easier job than a classroom teacher, but I bet if I saw these same people at work during the schoolyear, they’d be just as impressive.

Some people get kids. It’s such a joy to find them and watch them work their magic.

Socialization and the Homeschooled Child

Posted on by Suki
Homeschooling parents will tell you that the comment they get most often from well-meaning adults is that their homeschooled kids might not get proper socialization while being homeschooled. Usually the well-meaning adult has an example or two to give as proof of the deleterious effect of homeschooling on the social skills of children.
Homeschooling parents get angry about it, joke about it, brush it off, but still it keeps coming back and back.
I’ll tell you my own experience: being in school five days a week had an awful effect on my daughter’s social skills. She started kindergarten generally happy. She left kindergarten in a different state entirely.
She went to a school where the word “bad” was never spoken by adults and never tolerated from children. Not a single adult or child referred to her as “bad” in her entire three months there. Yet by the end of her short kindergarten career, my daughter was drawing self-portraits with the word BAD scrawled at the bottom. She would say things like, “Mommy and Daddy are good, Brother is pretty good, and I am bad.” She had nightmares and said that everyone hated her.
How did that happen?
A structured kindergarten environment was the very worst social experience for her. Her small, quiet, orderly program was the worst sort of place I could have chosen, but I didn’t know that then. My daughter stuck out as different. She had a lot of trouble following some of the rules, and because the rules were so strictly enforced, she was often called on for not following rules. The other children noticed. She started to be made a scapegoat in the classroom.
When I was a freshman in college I wrote a paper about George Orwell’s “Newspeak” in the novel 1984. Orwell posited a world in which the government controlled people’s minds by using a language that made bad things sound good. To a certain extent, this is just what advertising does. But really, there’s no way people can change fundamental ideas. You might use the word “ungood” for “bad,” but it doesn’t cancel out the concept of bad. You replace a set of sounds with a new set of sounds, but you can’t change the concept.
Every child, whether or not they’ve been called “bad,” (my daughter hasn’t been, to my knowledge) can tell you who the “bad” kid is in their school classroom. Even if they don’t use the word “bad,” they know who it is. In my daughter’s case, when she was very young she wanted a word that expressed a revulsion at something, not just “bad” but really, really gross and awful. The word she invented was “gox.” Food she didn’t like was gox. Clothing she wouldn’t wear was gox. She has stopped using the word, but the concept remains.
So for my daughter, the most socially healthy thing I ever did for her as far as schooling goes was to take her out of school. Now she sees her school friends a lot less often. And yes, they still, in their limited times together, notice that she is different. They notice that when they sit in circle, sometimes she sits in circle, but other times she lies down in the middle of the circle, pulls up a chair outside of the circle, or turns her back on the circle and ignores it completely. They notice that if they do something she doesn’t like, she’s likely to react in a stronger way than other kids. But she doesn’t have to be with them all the time. She doesn’t need their constant approval. Twice a week she gets to play and have fun, to share her interests and passions, and the rest of the time she can relax. She no longer finds herself playing the “bad” kid so often, and so she is happier. Her self-portraits now have gone back to having the word “love” or “I love you” on them. She’s back to being herself.
I realize that there are some people who homeschool because they want to keep their children away from society, but in reality homeschooling families are anything but homogeneous. If you spend time with a bunch of homeschooled kids, you’ll find that they are as ungeneralizable as any group of people. Yes, as younger children they are probably harder to corral into a unified activity — this isn’t something they practice on a daily basis. But the most compelling argument against homeschooled kids not being socialized well is right there in front of you in every mainstream school in this country: when, in the rest of your life, are you going to have to march around in a group of people all your same age, have a set place in line, do what you’re told, and learn a set group of facts that will be tested by filling in bubbles? These are not social skills any of us need in our daily lives. And certainly we don’t need to be forced into situations where we constantly feel bad about ourselves. For now, as long as she needs it, I’ll take my happy little girl feeling good, and drawing her lovely, loving pictures.

Here’s To My Health!

Posted on by Suki
I have decided to take everyone’s advice, all at once. I will be the perfect consumer of medical advice, turning my body into my Temple of Medical Correctness.
I’ll start with today’s news:
Slippery Slope! One Tiny Truffle Can Trigger Desire For More Treats. Boy, did we have to start with chocolate? Well, they say you should face your problems head-on. “When participants were allowed eat a truffle, they unconsciously activated a goal of indulgence, the authors explain.” So if I eat that truffle, next thing I know I’m at Bittersweet Bistro ordering that dessert plate where they give you one of everything.
No chocolate, check.
My husband, when he sees me stealing chocolate from the baking basket, likes to joke, “Getting some medicine?” You see, I have read that the reason I have such low blood pressure may be my addiction to, eh, affection for chocolate. And today I have learned, “Dark Chocolate Is More Filling Than Milk Chocolate And Lessens Cravings.”
OK, so how do I work this into the truffle thing? Oh, yeah:
Truffles AOK as long as they’re made from dark chocolate, check.
I’m trying to figure out how this could affect me. I already have my husband, and I guess this tells me, for one, that I must like his smell. But the thing I really learned was to ask a lot of questions before I ever volunteer for medical experiments: “To make their odor evaluations, panelists sniffed vials of underarm sweat previously collected in the laboratory from volunteers.” Ew.
In the world of generating sweat, I just learned that “Caffeine Reduces Pain During Exercise.” I wish I’d known that in high school, when I was a competitive runner. Now that I’m an ex-competitive runner with bad knees and a mal-formed back, I like to listen to my pain. But maybe I’ll try caffeine for psychological pain. The only thing that hurts worse than back pain is hearing your kids fight while you’re laid up on the couch with back pain!
In case my back pain gets so bad I’m laid up in bed, I will pay attention to this one: “Control, Treatment Of Bed Bugs Challenging.” Note to self: don’t get bedbugs.
I used to think that I worry too much about the future. But now I know that I was wrong: worrying about the future is good for me! This just in: “Focus On The Future: Long-term Goals Help Us Resist Unhealthy Urges.” OK, so they did say longterm goals and not longterm things I definitely don’t want to happen. So instead of worrying about the future I plan now to think about the lovely future ahead of me in order to keep down my unhealthy urges. So when I run into your car at a stoplight, don’t be mad. In the future, you wouldn’t have been there anymore!
And then there’s stress: There’s a whole stress thread on Science Daily that makes for an interesting theory: Cortisol is the hormone your body releases under stress. The bodies of children with Asperger Syndrome (the form of autism formerly known as “Idiot Savant”) don’t release heightened levels of this hormone in the morning, as the bodies of “normal” people. (Note to self: find a better word than “normal” in quotes.) Women who were under stress during pregnancy are more likely to give birth to an autistic child. Further, “Antisocial Behavior May Be Caused By Low Stress Hormone Levels.” However, “Children Distressed By Family Fighting Have Higher Stress Hormones.”
So lastly, after I binge on dark chocolate, tell my husband he need not shower anymore because I’m attracted to the scent of his sweat, drink double espressos to numb the daily pain of being a parent, all while thinking about the fabulous plans I have for the future, making sure not to be a future volunteer for medical experiments, I will instigate plenty of family fights to keep my children’s stress hormones up so that they will neither suffer an adolescent-onset form of autism nor become delinquent teenagers.
What a relief it is to have a plan.

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