Mommage

What Is A Parent To Do?

We are trying to do the best we can by our kids.  You want them to enjoy their childhood, but you also want to protect them from all the bad things in the world.  You do not want them to get fat mostly for health reasons, but also for social reasons, we do not want our children to endure ridicule, because children are just so cruel sometimes.

So you do your best, you try to buy "healthy" products for your kids, but they are kids if they get wind of the fact that it may be healthy for them they do not even want to try it.  Some companies have been marketing directly to children and giving the impression that their food is good for them while also being tasty.  I found a very interesting article in Time Magazine, that basically tells me that I am not alone in this challenge. 

In a way I guess I am lucky.  My kids absolutely love for me to slice up a cucumber and serve it with their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  They also love bananas, grapes, apples, tomatoes, carrots and celery, so I serve them any chance I get.  As parents we struggle here, we want our children to eat nutritious well balanced meals, but most of us are going a million miles an hour all the time and eating right is not always possible.  According to the article we may have been tricked into believing that we were feeding our children nutritiously good food on the go by the manufacturers of these foods.  I guess this just shows that we still have to do our due diligence, we cannot just rely or trust the manufacturers on these issues.

--Contributed by Renee

Nerd Girls Have it All!

Some women may prefer to keep the sex of their unborn child unknown until that final push in the delivery room.  But when the moment of truth arrives, if the doctor announces "It's a Girl!", what's the first thing that goes through a mother's mind?.. Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice?  While there's nothing wrong with wanting girls to be girlish, maybe we should follow the lead of Nerd Girls, a hot and sexy group of women trying to shatter stereotypes by attracting girls to careers in technology.  The Nerd Girls are living proof that a woman can be both beautiful and brainy.

If you ask a child to draw a picture of what they think an engineer looks like, what do you suppose they will draw?  According to Karen Panetta, a belly-dancing professor of engineering at Tufts University and founder of Nerd Girls, almost invariably the pictures are of males wearing glasses.  Furthermore, Panetta describes how people in her profession are viewed, and it goes something like this:

TV or Not TV?

We're in the midst of a typical July heatwave here in the northeast, and the last thing on anyone's mind is cooking or spending time outside.  Thinking she had a perfect way to escape the heat where she lives in Michigan, Planetfeedback user Andrea took her family to McDonald's so they could enjoy a meal, and the kids could have fun in the air-conditioned PlayPlace.

When Andrea's seven year old son took a break from playing and joined his parents in the dining room, imagine their surprise when they found out what their son was doing in the PlayPlace.

Guilt By The Ton

-They hauled in guilt by the ton, those blue and orange vans out there on Walton Avenue.  But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term "criminal", if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law.  No, they were simple-minded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.-

That's one of my favorite paragraphs from Tom Wolfe's masterpiece “The Bonfire Of The Vanities”.  And it perfectly describes this case; that which has graced the front pages of our local papers for the past few days.  As did the mug of the thug responsible who, at last report, finally turned himself in this afternoon.

The story is simple...a 60 year old man was watering plants on a roundabout and placed cones along the side so car would drive around him.  Some young women drove up and took exception to the cones and demanded he move them.  He didnt.  An argument ensued and a few minutes later, another car drove up and a simple minded incompetent got out, walked over to the man and, in the words of the police, suckerpunched him in the jaw, knocking him backwards.  Mr. Incompetent got back in his car and drove away.  In the meantime, the 60 year old man had fallen backward, cracking his skull on the pavement.  He eventually died from his injuries.

And why is this fodder for a Mommage post?

Now You Know Why I'm Always Tired

It's summertime, and this season more than any other I am reminded of how much my life has changed since having my son. It has been this season more than any other that my husband and I have had to pick and choose our activities. For example, we enjoy going to festivals but taking the boy is not always feasible. I'm hesitant to keep him in the sun and heat for long periods of time, so an afternoon jaunt is sometimes out of the question. I also don't like to keep him up too late or fight the crowds with a big stroller (not to mention voracious mosquitos), so nighttime doesn't always work either. My husband and I also hate abusing family babysitters, so we don't like to ask unless it's really necessary. In many cases, we opt to just stay home.

Car Seat Recalls, Shockingly There Are Many

Just because we have not heard of any recalls recently must mean that all is well, right?  Wrong!   I was browsing recalls this morning and was shocked to see not only a tremendous number of car seats with some sort of a recall, but also other child related items.  There is children's jewelry and lip gloss sets recalled because of what else LEAD EXPOSURE.  There is a children's toy box that has been recalled due to a latch allowing the lid to come down to quickly causing the strangulation death of a 22 month old, etc.

The moral of this story is that there seems to be so many recalls that we are not hearing about all of them, or the shock factor is gone and we just tune out if it is reported on the news, always check for yourself.  You can check cpsc.gov or recalls.gov to see all recalls for yourself in almost every category that you can think of.

--Contributed by Renee