My House is Not Made of Gingerbread

Does anyone besides me remember the show Once and Again? It starred Sela Ward as a mom of two who is about to be divorced. Then she meets a divorced father (who also has kids) ... and sparks fly. I wasn't a faithful viewer of this show, but the writing was good and the acting was great.

One of the scenes I remember is lovable Lily (played by the gorgeous Ward) driving herself nuts during the holidays trying to make a gingerbread house from scratch. It was a tradition in her family, but no one wanted to help her with it this time. She spends hours in the kitchen trying to work on it, she's covered with flour, exhausted and really pissed off.

I always thought when I had children I would make a gingerbread house with them. I don't know why. It's not like something we did when I was little. Homemade sweet potato pie, yes. Fancy cookies and gingerbread, no. Maybe one year there was a pre-made one on my grandfather's holiday table, but no one every built one from scratch.

Last year I bought a little gingerbread kit at Ikea (really, in the gourmet, direct-from-Sweden food area they cleverly route you through right after checkout) and couldn't even manage to get that thing unwrapped! (So sad, really. I should bring it to a duck pond for the birds to nibble on. Did I mention we live in the city? Not a lot of duck ponds around here...)

So, gingerbread houses are not in our family's tradition I guess. I did make gingerbread cookies once, when I first moved in with my now husband. My family was coming for Christmas to our home in Philadelphia and I baked -- my gingerbread men came out way too thick, like gingerbread men who had taken steroids and spent all their time at the gym, but they didn't taste bad. I put little red candies in for their eyes. After all the relatives left we found a stack of the eyes my little brother had picked out and piled on the floor of the TV room. Some of which had stuck to a heating grate and melted on to it. Nice.

A few years ago I even made a snowman out of cheese, with a little Pumpernickel hat. Big hit with the kids. It looked a little like this.

But while we don't have a gingerbread tradition, one thing we do always mark is my mother's birthday. She was born on Christmas Eve. When we were growing up, my brothers and sister and I would make, or order, elaborate cakes for her. We would make sure we had candles, and try our hardest to wrap her gifts in paper that didn't have Old St. Nick or holly on them. (I remember that holiday in Philadelphia, I baked her an elaborate cake that called for currants and rum. At the end of the baking you drizzled the cake with some fantastic glaze. My siblings were dubious - but mom loved the cake that year.)

So - every year we do our best to mark her day... We'd sing, eat cake, (maybe) help clean up and then usually mom would immediately go back to work, probably staying up until 2 am wrapping our presents long after we'd gone to bed!

This year we will all be together for her birthday, and the holidays, but I expect it to be quite different -- since our mom has been fighting an aggressive and rare form of cancer for the past eight months.

It's hard enough to think about what we can get her to eat these days (not that much) to contemplate making a proper Christmas supper, with all the trimmings. Last night my husband and brother and I all joined forces: we made a salad, baked acorn squash, meatloaf and mac n' cheese. We had fresh cider at the table. And mom didn't eat anything but a bite of squash.

Traditions and Transitions

This is my favorite time of year. I start holiday shopping in the summer (and when I say shopping, I mean mostly picking up small things for people that I see, which I think they'll like. On sale.) I love listening to holiday music, lighting the Menorah with my daughter (yeah, we are one of those hybrid families) and getting a tree -- the works.

Despite how ill my mother is, the holidays are coming along anyway. And my almost 6 year old is very excited. She wants to decorate, like, yesterday. She wants to sing carols and make cookies.

I don't think this year is the one to start attempting a gingerbread house like Lily. In fact, we are ordering a pre-cooked Thanksgiving meal this year for the first time in the history of this family. And I suspect at Christmas we may do the same (although I am holding out high hopes for some homemade latkes.)

But, one has to adapt, even in the face of tragedy. Case in point: In an unexpected turn of events, my father is going to visit us from California before the holidays (he and my mom split up eons ago) and we are going to try and set up the old train set he and his brother played with in Indiana when they were children. (My uncle is shipping 3 of the 15 boxes the train is in, to us from northern California!)

Maybe I will find a moment to sit on the floor and watch the train circle the tree. While sipping a spiked Eggnog. Maybe my husband will realize that this train set is ancient and a behemoth and he and my dad won't be able to get it working (a likely scenario if you ask me, but then I am the family pessimist) and we'll all just end up on the floor, spiked Eggnogs in hand. Either way, I am looking forward to baking something this season (something that doesn't call for an engineering degree) and watching my dad and daughter unpack those train boxes together.

Reading Between the Lines of Breast Cancer Awareness

Have you ever heard of Project Censored? The group does a terrific job of writing about under reported stories. They are a favorite among investigative journalists and other media savvy people. Well, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month (or Breast Health Month, depending on who you ask) and two things crossed my desk this week that could fall under the category of "Under reported Breast Cancer Stories."

One is that Black women are more likely to die of breast cancer than white women; they also get diagnosed in later stages of the disease. Now, I knew that already, but what is new here is a study which concludes this is happening clearly because of race, not because of other factors - like, say, not having enough medical insurance.

Women's e-News just reported that: "Researchers at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. say they were surprised to find that among women with health insurance, African American and Hispanic women experienced greater delays in diagnosing breast cancer than Caucasian women. The number of days from abnormal screening to definitive diagnosis for those with private insurance was 15.9 days for white women, 27.1 days for black women and 54.1 days for Hispanic women."

The same week I was reading about this, I had the opportunity to speak with Gayle A. Sulik, author of the new book Pink Ribbon Blues, How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women's Health. Sulik, a medical sociologist, argues that while "pink ribbon culture" has brought a lot of attention to and advocacy around breast cancer -- guess what? It hasn't actually improved women's health.

The book has been getting rave reviews and Sulik has been everywhere this month, including the New York Times and Oprah Radio. Sandra Steingraber, the author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, said in her review that the book "takes us behind the pink curtain to a peculiar culture where sentimentality takes the place of scientific evidence, personal transcendence fills in for political action, and lofty platitudes replace actionable goals. Pink Ribbon Blues is the Frommer's travel guide to the country of breast cancer."

Columnist Janet Marshall from the Fredericksburg News in Virginia summed it up well I thought, when she said: "If you want my attention, talk to me about scientific breakthroughs and research roadblocks. Talk to me about treatments and trends. Talk to me about people and pain and progress. But don’t give me a ribbon, tell me it represents a disease and expect me to immediately print a story/make a donation/see the light. It feels blasphemous admitting that, but I know I’m not alone."

I am so glad these women are speaking out. I feel the same way. I don't want to suck on a pink Tic Tac in October. I want my friends to remember to get their PAP tests done, schedule their mammograms and take care of themselves. I don't want to buy pink socks or eat yogurt in a pink cup. I want to live in a country where everyone has equal access to medical care and the color of your skin doesn't have a lot to do with what your medical outcome, when you will be diagnosed, or how you will be treated. I'd like us to have an honest discussion about why cancer rates everywhere (and for lots of different kinds of cancer) are on the increase.

I am as opposed to pink washing as I am to green washing. With all this washing the United States should be clean as a whistle. It's not.

Forget the Lunch Box, What are Mom and Dad Eating?

Like parents everywhere I dreaded a few things that the beginning of the school year brings - like rushing out the door in the mornings. Like sending your almost 6-year-old to her room to put her clothes on (nicely laid out!) and checking back a few minutes later to find her playing soccer. In her underpants. I also dreaded the daily lunch box blues.

What to pack, what to pack. I am, amazingly, blessed with a child who will eat peanut butter sandwiches every DAY. She doesn't even want the jelly spread on, and you don't have to cut off the crusts - just spread that peanut butter. So you can understand why I felt like crying when I got to the door of her new Kindergarten classroom and saw this notice: "This is a NUT FREE classroom." I had the new lunch box, the reusable sandwich wrapper/bag, a brand new, chic, recycled plastic ice pack. I was ready - but the thought of having to come up with something every day besides our old standby, peanut butter, made me weak in the knees.

A few days later, however, there was an email from our class parent bringing wondrous news: the nut free rule was a mistake. I actually got up from my desk and did a dance, singing, to the delight of my kid, a song about how much I love peanut butter. I see the sandwich as the main course of lunch - if I have that figured out, it's not a problem to add to that - an organic milk, some sliced carrots, a piece of fruit, done.

But this is not actually a post about what our kids are eating. This is a post about what we, their hard-working parents, are eating. My own routine is to walk out the door with a travel mug of coffee for the trek to school. Afterwards I usually clutch it for an hour or more, slowly sipping while I get started with work. Eventually I will stop and grab something to eat - a piece of toast maybe. Sometimes a banana. Lunch is a similar game of grab and go - usually yogurt with granola. I just don't make time for a proper lunch or breakfast. If the kid hits a "witching hour" of being tired and cranky, I don't think my not eating a real lunch before I pick her up from school is helping my own state of mind.

I'm afraid it may be worse for my husband, because I at least have access to a full kitchen and can heat up some leftover soup or make something healthy if the mood strikes me. My husband often - too often - takes a frozen meal with him to work. It's not something I feel good about.

I often think about packing him a nice lunch too, but usually all I can manage is to wash him any extra fruit that we have on hand and encourage him to take it with him.

Maybe we should think about packing lunch together, just like we make eating dinner together a priority in our house. Either way, three squares a day is important for mom and dad too, and I'm gonna try to do a better job of that - even if it means I have to steal my daughter's cheese sticks.

Back to School, or Through the Cracks?

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the BlogHer conference, the largest gathering of women bloggers in the world. The event kicked off for me the night before the meeting with an invite to a private party at a champagne bar called Flute. I got to hang out with friends from the Yahoo! Motherboard group I am a part of, sip bubbly, and meet a bunch of other fantastic, inspiring women.

I was feeling pretty good about things, and looking forward to the conference as I walked down Broadway towards the Port Authority and a bus home. That's when I saw them - a young mother, sitting on the cement sidewalk outside McDonald's. She was cradling an infant in her arms, maybe 5 months old, while her three year old son stood at her side. I passed them, stopped, and swung around, frozen in place.

Could this possibly be an exhausted tourist, or was this what I thought it was? A woman begging on the street. Her son held a folded piece of cardboard in his hand, most likely the sign they had been holding up only moments before I'd happened along.

It turns out I wasn't the only one watching them. Outside McDonald's the Street Talk folks were, ironically, collecting money for the homeless. I spoke to two of the men who were there. (Street Talk provides income to impoverished and transient people who sell Street Talk newspapers.) They had taken money out of the collection so the woman could bring her kids inside McDonald's and get something to eat. I chipped in.

One of the workers told me the mom was not exactly homeless; she had a cousin's place to crash at, but nothing more. Obviously the cousin was not able to provide more than a place to sleep at night, and who knows for how long. The Street Talk vendors were hoping they might be able to get this woman a gig with their group, but even if she took her baby along with her, what would her 3 year old do all day? There are programs aimed at getting (and keeping) homeless kids in school, but preschool? What options would this woman have? What had happened to her?

As summer's long days begin to wind down, I've found myself anticipating a regular schedule descending on our home, the beginning of Kindergarten, a new school, the hopes I have that my daughter will have a great year in an institution that will nurture her. I've also been looking forward to buying her a new backpack and taking a short family vacation before September.

It's been a rough summer here, but seeing this woman with her kids put things in perspective for me. And I can't stop wondering about what happens to homeless kids like the ones I saw on the street that night. The Coalition for the Homeless says that there are 15,000 homeless children in New York City. From August 23 to September 17 the Coalition runs a project to raise money for these children. The donations go towards buying new backpacks and supplies for homeless children. You can donate here.

The number 15,000 keeps reverberating in my head. Homeless children have a harder time making it in school, but some of them persevere. While writing and researching this post, I came across this story in the Daily News about a young man who, despite amazing odds stacked against him, will be going to a community college in upstate New York this fall. I was shocked to find out he'll be attending classes in the rural community where I used to be a reporter and where a fellow journalist and dear friend now teaches. It is a large and vast world and it is one in which each connection can make a difference.

I emailed my girlfriend so she can be on the lookout for this incoming freshman this fall. It's a small institution, so the chances are she will probably meet him. The chances that I will see that young mother again are infinitesimal, but I can't stop thinking about her.

A Week in the Woods

I had dreamed that this summer our daughter would spend more time in nature, and less time in the steamy city. It hasn't quite worked out that way, but the Tenafly Nature Center offered a nice respite in the middle of this hot July.

I'd been dreaming of sending my kid here, and staying with my sister in the hip little town of Rosendale, where she lives. But work and family commitments meant we couldn't swing it, even after they called to say there was a spot for us (we'd been lingering on the wait list for weeks.)

So, off to Tenafly it was. We're big fans of the Nature Center for their family-friendly programming and trails. This was the first time we'd tried the camp however. The program is divided into week-long sessions and split up by age groups.

The kids started the week with a bang, tromping around in the woods, tie-dying fantastic T-shirts (complete with a quote by Edna St. Vincent Milay on the back) and making their own clay. During the week they also studied animals, including snakes, turtles, frogs and various insects. They collected leaves and nuts and twigs. Another day was devoted to fungi, and found them looking for mushrooms, examining lichen and doing some sort of experiment with yeast.

Trekking up there everyday from Jersey City however was a bit much on mom. A friend who also has a five year old attended the program too, so we split the driving, drop-offs and pickups. which helped a lot. But the last day the kids went to Van Saun County Park in Paramus to the zoo there, and there's nothing like Route 17 on a Friday afternoon to make me wish I were in Maine and not New Jersey.

Also, we were warned about ticks and took it seriously. Then on the very first day my friend found a tick crawling on her son after pick up! That really kicked it into high gear for us, which meant every night found us examining of every inch of our kid's body (my husband used a flashlight to search through her hair).

I guess I had hoped the kids would come home filled with a greater sense of wonder and talk our ears off about trees and frogs (or tree frogs). But it was hot and they were exhausted by the end of the day. Still it was a good tired, and we knew that the children had been outside all day, in relative shade, doing things with their minds and bodies. Not inside. Not watching movies.

Near the end of the week there was a campfire cookout which parents were invited too. The children got to watch the fire started by their counselors and then hold long skewers over the fire cooking hot dogs. We made s'mores and also had chips and fruit. As I sat in the shade smelling the fire, I looked up at the trees and could hear the leaves rustling in the breeze. It was very relaxing, even if the Turnpike was waiting for me beyond the idyllic woods.

Mommy, what's a password?

It started simply enough. One day the munchkin is watching PBS Kids and the next thing you know, she wants to visit her favorite shows online. Which is fun, of course. (Although it means I get booted off my computer.) But then Channel 13 promoted their Kids Club, and my daughter wanted to join up.

And so I found myself helping her register online for the first time ever, for anything, and getting her a login and password. I scribbled it down on a piece of paper for her but I can't find it now. Probably because I'm not ready to. I can barely keep track of my own passwords and email accounts and logins and blah, blah, blah. I can't imagine having to help her track this, but more importantly I wonder about the future and trying to protect her online.

Now of all the places she could go, PBS Kids is probably the best. I don't feel I need to worry too much about her on their site, or what public television would do with her information. But it sets a precedent. One password begets another. And while I know that privacy is dead, especially in this country, I would like to make at least some attempt to have my kid's privacy live just a bit longer. Like at least through grade school.

Is this too much to ask?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (a wonderful civil rights group focused on the digital world) offers this advice to parents: check out the privacy policy of anything your kids want to sign up for so you can see what kind of information is being collected. We should also educate our children "about the dangers involved in giving personal information to strangers they meet on the Net. Make sure your children don't give out personal information to people they don't know."

There is also the old advice about putting the family computer in a place where you can see what the kids are doing online. Of course, this is already outdated advice for anyone whose children have a texting obsession and a smart phone.

In the meantime, the request to go online and login seem to have fallen by the wayside here. But the issue won't go away anytime soon, I know. My brother brought home a box of Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats this weekend and the box is covered with a Toy Story 3 promotional tie in. But gone are the days where you can just get a toy in the box. No, for this promotion, you needed to get a code off the box and then go on to the Kellogg's site and set up a Rewards account.

What the heck? Why can't they just put a plastic toy in the box? Or ask the kids to mail in the code? But no, better to lure them in. All the better to track you my dear.

I have already fallen for this game with Tropicana. I don't need my kid to succumb to it as well.

I Took My Child to my Anniversary Dinner

We don't eat out that much around here. (Well, we are on a first name basis at the local Chinese takeout and pizza joints, but that's not what I am talking about here!)

I'm talking about white-tablecloths-and-a-great-wine-list dining out. Last night was my ninth wedding anniversary. We decided this year to include our five year old in the festivities. Why? Well, I thought it would be nice for her and honestly, if I didn't spend a heap of money on a babysitter I could eat more lobster, right?

We went to Court Street in Hoboken, a family run affair with a bar in the front and a pleasant, unpretentious dining room in the back. Did I mention that Wednesday's are Lobsterfest?

What I didn't know is that Court Street has some of the best french fries I have had in ages. My husband and I had to restrain ourselves from gobbling them off my kid's plate. They rocked. It shouldn't be hard to find good fries, but you'd be surprised. (I love the milkshakes at Johnny Rockets and it's my daughter's favorite place, but their fries leave a lot to be desired.)

To keep the munchkin entertained I had brought along a little coloring book, and that worked for awhile. I sipped champagne, my husband had an excellent white wine from Napa and we exchanged cards. But this was a meal with several courses, so I needed something extra up my sleeve to keep the kid placid and entertained.

Enter MudPuppy. This company makes some great items, including these self contained, totally cool magnetic sticker sets. You open the metal case and inside are two background cards (reversible) on which you can design and re-design scenes with your magnet stickers. We were first introduced to these a few years ago when my daughter had surgery. Her godmother bought her a set of these magnets (the dress up dolls version) so she'd have something to keep her busy while she recovered. Since then we've toted that set all over the place - to graduations and weddings, airplane rides and long car trips. I usually keep the set hidden away, so it is somewhat of a novelty when she sees it. We've used it so much that the metal case is bent.

Now she has a new set - the Robots one. She practically screamed when she the box. And we ate in peace.

So, to sum up: Court Street has a lobster night, terrific french fries, and your anniversary CAN be shared with a five year old. Just bring along some robot friends to help.