Rock and a hard place

So get this - DW needs to tell her jobs now what hours she wants over the summer. Summers are usually hard because teaching hours are limited, but like I said before, we depend on her income to help make ends meet, so we want her to work as many hours as she can get.

Thing is, the kids get out of school in late May and go back in mid-August. So what are we supposed to do with them during the summer while DW's out working? DK1 is going to sleepaway camp in for three weeks in July, and the other two have two weeks of Jewish Federation day camp and DK2 has an additional 2 weeks of specialty camps, and let's say I'll take a week off sometime during that time, so... that leaves about, oh, 9 weeks to fill for each of them.

Of course, the Y has a camp, which is about $100 per kid per week. If DW works as much as she could realistically work - just for kicks, let's say 40 hours - she'd be pulling in enough to pay for the camps and have a little left over for regular budget items. If she doesn't work full time - a more realistic possibility, given past experience - then she would barely, or possibly not even, be paying for the camps, with none left over for that all important ends-meeting. Of course, if she doesn't work, we don't have the camp expense, but ends don't meet either. Quandary, no?

So... what would you do?

No School Lunch Left Behind

Here's an oped from today's Times by the great Alice Waters, talking about how to make school lunches more healthful. She points out that while things like candy and soda machines often get negative attention when they're placed in schools (and rightly so), school lunches that are no better (chicken nuggets, pizza, etc.) are served every day.

Every public school child in America deserves a healthful and delicious lunch that is prepared with fresh ingredients. Cash-strapped parents should be able to rely on the government to contribute to their children’s physical well-being, not to the continued spread of youth obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other diet-related problems. Let’s prove that there is such a thing as a good, free lunch.

She points out that this would require a commitment by the Agriculture Department to provide and deliver fresh ingredients, and from the Education Department "to teach students to choose good food and to understand how their choices affect their health and the environment." This last part is especially important, given that school lunches are predominantly for kids of limited income, who may not immediately like healthier choices given the fact that the unhealthy choices are full of fat and salt and all the things kids (and adults, for that matter) love. Also, kids may not be getting much better fare at home, especially if they're low income.

I did a volunteer day in my kids' school a couple of weeks ago, and they served chicken nuggets, bags of chips, a little plate of peas and a cookie. The peas, of course, were the most unappetizing looking things you could imagine, and I would venture to guess that no more than 5% of them were actually ingested by the children. (My kids bring lunch every day.)

This would be a lot more likely to happen if parents took an interest in this issue and pressured their school boards and elected officials to help make it happen. Here's a sample page from a parents group in California, with a lot of links to material about junk food, some of the health concerns, and letters to school boards and Congress.

Oy vey - orthodonture

DW took the the 2 girls (ages 10 and 8) to a long-dreaded visit to the orthodontist yesterday and the news was rather what we feared - they both need extensive work, to the tune of about 7 grand.

Wow.

In case I haven't been clear, I don't have $7,000. We are just barely making ends meet. In fact, we're really not - I just put $300 from savings into checking so we could pay our rent this month. I suppose the orthodontist will have a handy dandy payment plan that I could pay off in, oh, 70 months or so, but I just took on $5,000 in additional debt to buy our way out of our second mortgage and I'm hesitant, to say the least, to take on another 7K! I'm supposed to be paying down our debt, and here I am, prospectively adding greatly to it.

On the other hand, of course, I'm a middle class Jewish father and I want my children to have what they need. (Should I put "need" in quotation marks there?)

It's times like these that cause unrest.

Prada-ganda

Article in Newsweek this week on "what to do when you kids want to dress like TV stars." This goes into the category of "helping your kids withstand peer pressure" which is a very sensititve subject with a lot of people. Our approach on this is multifold: we still have young kids, and they haven't quite realized yet what cool is. We use what the article considers one of the most effective approaches, which is to tell the kids, "We can't afford it," which in our case has the added advantage of being true. We're also very restrictive with TV to prevent some of this wantism, and what TV they do watch is accompanied by incessant propagandizing on our parts against anything they see advertised. (Rule of thumb #1 - Don't buy things that are advertised on television! You stay away from a lot of crud this way.) Of course this would be of only limited use if "all the other kids are wearing it". Our kids' school has a school uniform requirement, which also helps, but the middle school doesn't, so I expect to be more challenged on this front in the coming years. And this is Wichita, and not Manhattan, LA or the North Shore of Chicago. So the expectations are, I think, slightly more down-to-earth. At least, I hope so.

The stuff of learning

The kids came home today with a big fundraising packet for the school. They're supposed to sell candy, jewelry, wrapping paper and the like to people we know, with the school getting a cut and the kids getting a small gift for each certain number of things they sell. Well, this is another in a long list of things we're against, and here's why:

• We prefer to make our donations straight out. We just gave $30 to the school's library fund. This money will be used directly for the intended purpose. The school will only get a small percentage of the proceeds of the sales, with the private fundraising organization getting the lion's share.

• We don't want to bug our friends and loved ones for this. At some point in the year there will be a food drive, or a crop walk, or something else that we may want to hit up our friends for. And we don't want to waste the strong-arming on wrapping paper.

• But most of all, we don't want to encourage a focus on stuff. Buying stuff that we don't need and never knew we wanted is exactly what we're trying to encourage our kids to stand against.

DW1 was pretty upset about this, because I guess the guy who did the tap dance for this was very effective. She wanted to get the flying disk that's the "gift" for two sales. (Point 4: She should give charity because it's important to give charity, not because wants to get the flying disk. I wonder what the implications of this would be for PBS pledge drives?) We explained it to her, she didn't like it but I think she heard it. We may give her a couple of extra bucks for tzedakah in the next little bit, let her decide where to give it. It'll be interesting to see if she gives it to the school.

Dinner and TV

I want to recommend a book to you - it's called Dinner Diaries and it's by Betsy Block - she's the mother of two young kids and she's wondering, through all the noise and the conflicting information, about what to feed them. She devotes individual chapters to looking at nutritional needs and supplements, the plusses and minuses of eating fish, school lunches, local produce, etc. - a lot of what I talk about here and some of what I haven't gotten around to talking about yet. Her kids and her husband are all picky eaters in their own way so that complicates her task, which of course we can relate to as well. I was kind of annoyed at the amount of pork she relishes consuming - she's Jewish, and it seems to mean something to her, but kashrut is something she doesn't give a single thought to. But despite this, I do recommend the book.

One thing in the category of what she talks about that I haven't much yet is advertising directed at children. There was a wonderful book on this subject a few years ago called Consuming Kids by Susan Linn. (She runs the Center for a Commercial-Free Childhood.) She describes and decries the big business that is advertising to children, in which psychologists and other professionals are hired and billions of dollars are spent to figure out exactly which buttons to push to train our little ones to develop brand loyalty, consumer "needs" and the talent to beg and nag for what they want. The best time to do all this is when the parents aren't around to explain or deny, which is why there is so much advertising in schools and on the internet these days, particularly on "free" sites. This has contributed mightily to the lack of exercise, the obesity, the unhealthy eating habits, not to mention the consumerism that have become part and parcel of childhood in American today.

The reason I haven't felt the need to write too much about this is because we have an extremely restrictive television policy at home. Our kids basically watch TV twice a week - a movie on Saturday night, and then one show during the week. It's almost always a video, so we can avoid the advertising.

It so happens that in the last couple of weeks, perhaps exhausted by the summer, I've been a little lax in this. We've watched a little more TV this week because the Olympics were on and I wanted them to see some of it, and then last week for some reason I let them watch a couple of things on Cartoon Network. I watched with them, and boy, did I see what we'd been "missing." Clothing, games, movies, but especially food food food - the ones that stood out were for sugar cereals and a kind of bottled water (it may be flavored, it wasn't clear) that comes in a pouch. Pouches, in case I need to say it, are the worst form of conveyance, because they are not recyclable or biodegradable, but there is no profit to be made from a glass of tap water.

Can I just pause here for a radical moment and decry the fact that the worst things for you and for the environment are exactly the things that get the most advertising and the most attractive packaging in this society?

Oh, boy. If there was anything that made me understand why we've made the choices that we've made, for ourselves and for our kids, it was this hour of commercial television. There is just so much that is wrong that can be fixed, or at least ameliorated, by the absence of TV. Sedentary? Bad eating habits? The "beggies"? Have trouble having dinner time conversation? The first answer is to lose the TV - or if not lose it, then severely restrict it. And no TV in the kids' rooms!

This is only the first step, but it's the most major single step one can take.

Kids and commercialism

Excellent post from Nature Moms blog regarding "Helping your kids see past commercialism." I would also recommend Center for a New American Dream, which has a lot of material on this - simplifying the holidays, doing things during the summer, etc. An excellent organization.

We've mostly been working on the "power of example" model - we're very anti-corporate, the kids have very limited access to TV (we mostly watch videos) and if they're watching sports with me or something we turn off the TV during commercials. (Sports commercials are the worse - beer and cars, both sold with copious amounts of sex - but fortunately they're not really interested in it.)

There's a book now, Parenting, Inc., which talks about the sheer amount of STUFF there is for new parents to buy, $700 stoller and all that. I sometimes think we're living in an alternate reality, and maybe we are (thank goodness we don't live in New York!) but then I happened to be at a middle school for an event recently and I overheard a kid making a snarky remark about another kid buying clothes at a thrift shop. I know that's something my kids are going to face, even though we buy most of their clothes at Target.

I would also recommend showing the older kids (who can understand it) The Story of Stuff, a 20-minute video which talks clearly and pursuasively about the environmental and human impact of our (Americans') unending appetite for STUFF. That's a lesson we'd all support, I think, and it's not just dad pleading poverty this time.

Frugal Family Fun in KC

If you're in KC, just about the best thing you can do with the kids is visit the Deanna Rose Children's Farm Stand. I was there with my son yesterday and there are beautiful gardens, animals to feed, petting zoos and chickens and stuff, a couple of playgrounds, a Kansas schoolhouse from the prairie era, and a lot more. And best of all, it's free! They don't even gouge you on the concessions - a popsicle was $1, and there were plenty of water fountains so you don't even get hoodwinked into buying Dasani (another in my long line of biggest rip-offs). You can give a donation (and I encourage you to do so - someone's got to pay for it) and you can do some activities that cost a couple of bucks, but it's a great place and you can't beat the price. I can't recommend it enough.

We also managed to take the kids to see the KC Symphony play a Memorial Day program, also free, with a very impressive fireworks show after. It was a pretty frugal weekend all around, aside from the gas!