I like to feed my kids real food as much as possible – rather than something processed and canned and overpriced — so I like to cook for them.

Back when they were babies I cooked everything for them. But when they were hungry, there was no time for  waiting around for chopping, steaming, pureeing.

One of my friends introduced me to the genius idea of making batches of steamed, pureed vegetables, freezing them in iceblock trays and then tipping them out and quickly zapping one or two whenever I needed them.

Fast-forward six years. My kids are still hungry NOW! (with the exclamation mark).

Last month when I was cooking up some pasta for lunch, I realised (ka-pow!) that I could make a huge batch and freeze some individual portions for later. But how to store them? I dont’ have much freezer space so lumpy bagfuls of unidentified frozen dinner tend to get buried and forgotten and quickly fill up the freezer. I’ve toyed with squeezing the storage bags flat, but even at that, they end up slipping and sliding and causing a slippery, pointy avalanche whenever I open the freezer; plus I run into the problem of reheating them quickly inside their plastic prisons which, I’m assured, is not the most healthy option. (mmm, melted plastic).

Enter The Dinner Brick

While an icecube tray would no longer fill the stomachs of my growing lads, I realized I had, in my pantry, a nine-portion mini-loaf pan.

I lined the pans one at a time with cling film ¹, dolloped in a three quarters of a cup full of pasta and meat sauce, wrapped up each portion and shoved the whole pan into the top of the freezer.

When they came out: bricks of nutritious goodness ready for the zapping.

(Sorry I didn’t take any pictures.  We just polished off the last one at lunch time)

Updated: I took a picture of the next batch!

The Fun Part

When I first pulled one of my little packets out of the freezer I was being hounded by a hungry six year old.

“What can I have? What will you make me?” he repeated.

Losing patience I slapped one of my nutritional super-packets down on the quartz surface where it made a KLONK loud enough to silence the boy for a moment.

“That.” I said. “A dinner brick.”

Admittedly, I did have to endure about five minutes of wailing about how he didn’t want a brick for dinner while I defrosted and reheated said item, but when he was finally presented with a steaming plate of pasta and meat sauce (liberally dusted with grated parmesan), his face lit up, and he dashed off to tell his brother that he was getting to eat a Dinner Brick, like it was the most exciting thing in thing in the world. ²

I’m planning on making more batches of Dinner Bricks in different flavors and contents, so that the journey of discovery can continue! I’m thinking mini shepherd’s pies, next…

And so, I give you: the Dinner Brick. Use it well.

It is so refreshing to rediscover life through the eyes of a child.

Especially my slightly twisted children.

Today’s Stories From The Boys’ Blog:

1. How Urban Legends Start

I’m listening to A and G playing with a big cardboard box.

They’re pretending to mail themselves to Disney World.

For now, A is sealing his brother inside the box.

“Tape me!” says G.

“With real tape or Duck Tape?” asks his brother.

“Duck Tape.”

“Noooo!” cries . “That’s the WORST kind of tape!”

“Why?” G’s voice was slightly muffled.

“Because it’s Duck Tape. They make it from real ducks. They kill them and turn them in to tape!”

—

While I was typing I heard A scurry off downstairs.

Then I head G explode out of the box and scurry after him crying,

“Nooo! I was joking about the tape!”

I guess he thought A was off to murder some ducks….

2. Watch Out, God’s Finger Is On The Button

After prayers tonight G (aged 4), betraying his guid Scots Presbyterian roots, said,

“Julie,” (he’s very informal), “I think God is remote-controlling us.”

Predestination? At 8:14 on a Friday night?

I didn’t feel like getting into a theological debate, but I fear the thousands of dollars we’re spending on a good Free-Will-And-All-That Catholic Education might be money down the drain.

Heavens!

Sometimes being a stay-at-home mom is really really tough.

Those are the days where everybody is fighting, nobody is sleeping and you haven’t showered, talked to another adult or had a moment to yourself for as long as you can remember.

Then there are days when it snows just enough…

And the temperature gets up above freezing so you spend a couple of hours building a snow fort

or two…

and teaching your four year old how to make a really big snowball…

…or a snowman.

And you end up with some impressive hat hair…

And the only people who laugh at you are laughing with you.

Best job in the world!

Visited the school yesterday and, while hanging around, found myself reading the exhibits on the wall outside the Kindergarten classroom.

Embracing the idea of history and change occasioned by the dawning of a new decade (which it’s not. But don’t get me started on the whole “there was no Year 0″ thing. I’ve accepted that very few people care, and that ignorance is apparently a much more attractive trait than pedantry) the 5-6 year olds had penned (pencilled) tiny treatises on the topic of “In the next decade I will…”

Here’s a partial list of what I saw

In the next decade I will…

• Get a job (complete with drawing of office desk and vase of flowers)
• Get a phone
• Get a car
• Get a phone
• Be driving
• Get a job at Target
• Drive a car
• Get a new phone (emphasis mine)
• Be getting a car (notice the subtle implication that someonKindergarten Aspirations 2010-2020e had better be buying this kid a car before their 16th birthday or else…)

And to counteract the chilling effect of most of those, there were a couple of sweet and probably untruthful ones which read

In the next decade I will

• Make my bed
• Help more

However, I now offer up my favourite, which I find just charming in its utter lack of imagination, because it sounds just like a five year old boy has sounded for hundreds of years: as befits a five year old:

n the next decade I will

• Get a new cap.

(Of course, it’s possible that I’m being hopelessly romantic and  the kid simply misspelled ‘car’ )

PS I only have an hour between outings and figured I would keep on my tight, wriggly-into boots while writing this. But it has been so long since I’ve worked outside the home that it felt positively distracting to be typing with shoes on, and I was forced to shuck them so my toes could dig into the carpet like so much summer sand…

Stop hitting people, stop touching them as you walk by, don’t barge between them, don’t swing your lunchbox.

Sit still. Use your knife and fork. Put your fork in the proper hand. Use your napkin not your sleeve! Sit up, sit down, don’t talk with your mouth full.

Stop saying “no” before I’ve even finished the question. Stop looking at me like that. Look me in the eyes when you talk to me. Don’t you dare talk to me like that. Answer me when I ask you a question.

Love and respect me and forgive me when I say so.

For a while now I’ve just been hoping people would stop mentioning the term AD/HD around me.

Last night, instead of burying my head in the sand, I did some actual reading.

Apparently I had bought into the “AD/HD is way over-diagnosed and isn’t a real condition anyway” backlash without even being around for the first wave of information.

What The Medics Say

Neurons (My God, We're Full of Stars!)

All the medical sites and support group sites seem to have the same basic information:

• There are regions of the brain that show differences in some people: the regions that controls attention and executive control (this study on adults with ADHD is described as ‘preliminary’ and is small-scale, but interesting nonetheless);
• All children (and most adults) have some symptoms of ADHD sometimes;
• People are diagnosed with ADHD when these symptoms are chronic, extreme and make life difficult by harming their interactions with the people around them:
• In people diagnosed with ADHD these behaviours are not associated with willfulness and a desire to disrupt. They just ‘are’.

Now my job is to find some dissenting opinions that aren’t based in quackery, a desire to make money or sheer bloody-minded argumentativeness.

And then weigh things.

Genetics As A Factor

There is a strong suggestion, in what I’ve read, that ADHD has real, biological markers. There is also, then, a suggestion that it is a genetic thing.

Before I started my reading I was all set to point the finger at the paternal line: all that energy, all that brilliance, all that clumsiness.

After reading about ADHD symptoms and taking a little look back over my own life, I’m now semi-convinced that I have it too! (I’ll still pin the hyperactivity part on someone else though. That is soooo not me).

It could just be the old medical-textbook psychosomatic thing kicking in, but those symptoms are things I have fought (rather unsuccessfully) my whole life, and are character traits that cause me great frustration in my ability to overcome.

So What?

But whether I have a disorder is not so much the point.

Just the fact that I recognise many of the tendencies in myself and know, first-hand, how hard it is to overcome them, is making me a feel a lot more charitable towards the little  bundle of Attention Deficit that spurred my research (it really was tempting fate, wasn’t it, giving him a name with the initials “AD”?!)

So I don’t know what happens next.

But I feel better informed and less knee-jerky about the whole thing. And that’s got to be good.

If only I can focus long enough to make a decision…

Some hiccoughs in the Kindergartner’s progress recently have had my antennae tingling every time I come across any information about boys and schools and intelligence. I”ve discovered a few really interesting things recently.
This podcast of a recent Voices In The Family radio show was quite fascinating. The guests were a writer who has gathered all kinds of statistics and studies together to find out why boys are doing so poorly in school compared to girls (and there has been  a decline in boys’ performance in recent years) and a psychologist who studies these kinds of things.

Peg Tyre, the writer on the show has a book called The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do which is chock full of examples, studies and conclusions on the topic of boys and formal education. The thing I really like about it is that, although she does present conclusions, they are offered alongside the stats, which means that parents and educators can take that information and weigh it in the context of their own boys and their own situations.

The next podcast I listened to was a recent episode of Radio Times, also from my local NPR station. The guest was Richard Nisbett, who has written a book called Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Apparently the whole question of intelligence and what it is, is quite fraught and political and I get the impression that the experts all disagree with each other quite vehemntly. However, I liked this guy’s thesis (that intelligence is largely affected by environment). It just makes sense to me. The podcast starts off with a discussion of intelligence and IQ scores and brain size and racial differenes that you might find a bit dry (but which I found fascinating), but it warms up a bit once they start talking about schools and once the callers start calling in (a pretty intelligent bunch of callers, if you ask me. Sometimes you get runts, but this show attracted some interesting and concise callers).

I’d recommend both of these shows, and possibly the accompanying books, to parents of young children, who are concerned about how to help their kids negotiate the world of school and learning.

I love that I get to stay at home with my children, but there are, as in any career, downsides to the job. Sometimes they strike me as funny, so I’ve started compiling a list.

You know you’re a Stay-At-Home-Mom (SAHM)  when:

…You really amuse yourself by writing both ‘ketchup’ and ‘catsup’ on the shopping list and deliberately leaving it in the cart for someone else to find.

…You put on make-up because you’re Going Out! (To your annual OB/GYN check-up).

…You actually look forward to going somewhere that requires you to wear tights/panyhose.

More to come, as they occur.
What would you add to the list?

When I was a kid (back in the dim, dark days of the 1970s) a birthday party was the highlight of the social calendar.

There weren’t very many of them, certainly not one for every child in the class, and I don’t think they started before age 7 or 8, or whatever age parents then thought kids could be trusted to be left without one-to-one supervision.

The girls donned floor-length party gowns (mine, I think, was green and velveteen) and bows in our hair, and the boys wore smart shirts and possibly ties, certainly real trousers and shiny shoes. Then we sat cross-legged on the floor and played Pass the Parcel, or were blindfolded for Pin The Tail on the Donkey, or Blind Man’s Buff. All very Victorian and charming. Then there were little triangular sandwiches made from white bread (crusts off, hoorah!), filled with salmon paste or egg mayonnaise. There might be fizzy drinks and paper straws (straws? It MUST be a special occasion!). A round birthday cake encased in a paper fringe, with the appropriate number of candles on top rounded things out. There was usually jelly and ice cream to eat while the cake was cut, wrapped in a napkin and stuffed into your party bag to take home, where you would whine to be allowed to eat it, be told ‘It’s nearly dinner time!” and when you did eventually get it, you’d spend most of your time sucking the icign out of the soggy napkin. The party bag might even have been attached to a helium filled balloon, if the hosts had gone all-out.

It was heady stuff and only death or German Measles could stop you getting to a Birthday Party.

My eldest is turning six this week. We invited a few of the children from his class over to our house for a party. We don’t have a huge house so it wasn’t the whole class, just his favourite few. I’m a little nervous, but not about the prospect of having a house full of children: no, I’m nervous that they might all be too busy to come.

I managed to shoe-horn A’s party into a weekend in between two other birthday party weekends from his class, but I still wasn’t sure if people would come. So far I’ve only heard from a few people: one kid can’t come because he has a football (American) game. One can’t come because she has a skating lesson. Our favourite family friends might not make it because their son has a basketball playoff match.

Did I mention that these kids are six?

I know people who spend two hours two nights a week sitting by the pool at the Y while their eight year olds trains for the swimming team. I know six year olds who are on three or four sports teams (American football, baseball, basketball, soccer or icehockey). They also go to Karate classes. Then there’s the Cub Scouts and Brownies.

My children go to swimming lessons once a week (if I remember to take them) and the little one has a knock-about ‘sport’ class one morning a week when he’s not at pre-school and I think that’s extravagant! We play board games and video games and maybe they watch a little too much TV on Saturday mornings. We probably spend a bit too much time in toy stores. We kick a ball around the garden and try to learn to get along. We read. We make up stories. I’m grateful that I can’t imagine my eldest volunteering to do anything that would take him away from his toys yet, if ever.

And I just can’t believe that we’re wrong: that we’re somehow putting our kids at a disadvantage because they don’t yet know how to dribble and pass and be a “team player”. I don’t believe that having extra-curricular activities to run to every day after school and every weekend does much for a six year old’s health or disposition. I worry about what it does to the family dynamic when the parents have no time for themselves and become slaves to their children’s schedules. I wonder when these children have time to think and to dream and to become curious. I secretly suspect that they don’t. I strongly suspect that this constant stimulation shuts down their brains and breeds incurious adults who need to be busy but never really question anything and swallow whatever the ad-makers put on the mass media brain-suckling-tube. I foresee a hideous, dystopian future — a brave new world, if you will — all caused and created by childhood over-scheduling. (I have also been accused of over-thinking things.)

Or maybe I’m just ticked because I’m scared no-one will turn up for my boy’s party!,

It was a dress-down day at school today, which means the kids get to wear their own clothes instead of uniform. Wooo.

When you have an almost-six-year-old boy there is really no problem with this beyond ‘does he actually own a pair of clean trousers and is there a top that he hasn’t smeared food or paint all over?”. And that’s just me. He doesn’t much care if his clothes are dirty or ripped or clash or, for that matter, fit him properly (although he objects to ‘too big’ more than ‘so small you can see my belly and ankles’, even in winter).

So we stomped between piles of snow towards the school, and I wasn’t giving the dress-down day much thought until I saw a gaggle of 8th Grade girls coming towards us.

Now, I know I risk crossing the threshhold into curmudgeonliness when I say this, and I know there is no going back, but in the interests of full disclosure, I have to confess.

I laughed out loud.

These girls had swapped out their short kilts and knee sock uniforms and now walked towards me, a veritable wall of skinny dark-wash jeans, Ugg boots, puffy jackets and long, straight hair.

I know. I know. But I can’t help myself. I have to say it: they had swapped one uniform for another.

Still, I bet they were warmer than usual.