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How clean is your kitchen?
Enquiring minds want to know.
by Terri Mauro
"Reality" shows that put strangers together in unfamiliar quarters and tape their conflicts and camaraderie continue to be all the rage. We're invited to imagine what it would be like to be stranded on a desert island, or locked inside a strange house with cameras everywhere. How the participants cope with these new situations and new people, how they form friendships and rivalries, how they perform for the camera, how they react to eating rats, are all supposed to make for fascinating, glad-it's-not-me TV. But I've got a real "reality" concept guaranteed to send a shiver down viewers' spines: What if somebody planted a camera in your own comfortable house, recorded all the stupid, embarrassing, unhygienic things you do every day, and then had experts analyze them over the airwaves?
That's the high concept suggested by a recent study in which 100 Utah families had cameras placed in their kitchens so that researchers could observe all their food-handling mistakes. Like most of us, these were folks who would have said they do a fine job of keeping bacteria at bay. But once that candid camera was trained on them, the truth emerged: They were making mistakes with food that made eating live maggots look like a safer option than sitting down to dinner at their house.
Indeed, what desert-island indignity could compare with these horrors: People failing to use soap when washing their hands! Wiping up juice from raw meat with the same towel they use to dry their hands! Failing to wash the lettuce before making a salad! Tasting marinade after raw fish had been soaking in it! Not using soap to wash something that touched raw eggs! "Shocking!" said one expert. "People have no idea!" clucked another.
Well, of course, people probably do have an idea, but they also have a life, and that gets in the way. Researchers acknowledged that squalling kids, calling telemarketers, bawling babies, and all sorts of other true-life drama interfered with the cooks' attention to hygienic detail. And of course, if they had all washed their hands with soap, someone would have had to test the soap bar or bottle for germs, and whoo-ee, maybe they were better off with good strong hot water. I doubt that any of us would really want our cleanliness examined up close and personal. Personally, between the clutter creatures in my living room, the dust dinosaurs under my bed, and the mold monsters in my shower, my home's a horror movie waiting to happen. And talk about germ-filled kitchen rags? Mine is starting to talk back.
No, I can't say I feel any too superior to the mother in the study who fixed her baby's bottle with raw-chicken hands. Which doesn't mean I think she should be protected from public humiliation. The researchers kindly did not show the videotapes of the families' faux pas, hoping to save the already disgraced homemakers further embarrassment. But what fun is that? Surely NBC, a little light on the reality front just now, has a time-slot open? Call it "Kitchen Survivor," and whoever succumbs to food-poisoning last wins a million bucks and a truckload of Lysol products. If NBC passes, Fox is surely up for "World's Most Horrifying Kitchen Slip-Ups!"
Just as long as they don't try to film in my kitchen. I'd rather eat a rat.
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Summertime blues
"Back to school" can't come soon enough.
by Terri Mauro
Is it September yet?
Seriously, I think the summer is going to kill me. We're only a couple of weeks in, and already I'm in a tizzy. The kids are just finishing up on the half-day church camp that turned into a quarter-day for my son, adding to my rush-around-all-morning quotient, and now, on Monday, begins the mad-dash two-kids-at-two-camps-at-one-time derby. The camps are 20 minutes apart. They start and end at the same time, Where do I go to get me one of them time machines?
Then, after a week, my daughter's camp changes, bringing in a whole new set of transport challenges. And after that, she has no camp but her brother does, which makes transportation easier but also means I have a child at home to amuse. Then, when my son's camp ends, I have two. There's a vacation in there somewhere, but all that means to me now is packing and unpacking and occupying jumpy kids on a long airplane flight.
Probably the worst part of all these varied and rush-around summer plans is that we lose our nice predictable routine. The school year has its share of surprises, too, but the kiddos are in the same school, and they're there for a set amount of hours each day, and their after-school activities fall into a predictable pattern, and that's a good thing. For the kids, because routine is so important for children with neurological impairments. And for me, because without a routine to anchor the day's events I forget things.
Last week, for example, I forgot to take my son to his camp orientation. Just plum forgot. It was on the calendar, I had rearranged my work schedule to accommodate it, I was looking forward to meeting his counselors and group-mates, it had been a cherished plan for weeks. And I forgot, because I spent the morning running around helping out at the church camp, brought my son home at the quarter-day mark, went back to church for my daughter's group's program, brought her home and made lunch, handled some work problems long-distance, picked up my niece from day care. . . About the only thing I didn't do was check the darn calendar. And so now I have to wedge a specially arranged camp visitation into this week's impossible schedule.
Two weeks, and I'm ready for a break. I'm ready for a nap. I'm ready to surrender. I'll admit, I can't keep up. Every day, on our dashing around, we pass the school the kids will be going to in the fall. It will take me three minutes to get them there, and then I will have my days back. Nine weeks and counting. I hope I last that long.
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Don't ask, don't tell
Will my daughter be okay without her labels?
by Terri Mauro
I just left my daughter at basketball camp. It's not a sleepover camp or anything dramatic, no great provoker of separation anxiety, no big growing-up moment. But I still felt like I was abandoning her, sitting there alone, waiting for somebody to tell her what to do. I know she desperately wanted me to wait with her until the actual activities started. I desperately wanted to. But her brother needed to be dropped at his camp, and time was a-wasting, and a mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do. So I kissed her goodbye, wished her luck, and left her sitting there with that little pursed-mouth look that means she's trying not to cry.
Here's her revenge, though: She's probably having a great time now, and I'm going to be a nervous wreck until we pick her up this afternoon.
This may seem like an extreme level of anxiety for a 10-year-old at day camp. But though I talk a good game about getting my girl out of the overprotective confines of special-education and special-needs settings, I can't help but feel a little protective of her myself. At school, even when she's in a mainstream class, everyone knows that she needs a little extra help. They keep an eye out for her. They even adjust the workload as necessary to make sure she keeps up and stays happy. I fight all the time for her to be challenged as much as possible, and for her limitations not to define her.
But when school's out and we're dealing with after-school and summertime activities, I tend to be the one playing up those limitations. I don't want to go into a strange setting and say: "Hello, this is my daughter, she has severe language delays and language-based learning disabilities, she's two years behind in school and will be more comfortable with eight-year-olds than ten-year-olds, she needs to be told what to do and if she's not sure what to do, she cries." I don't want to introduce her that way. But don't they need to know?
I'd like her to just be able to dive in and figure things out and shine as her own special self without all those labels and special-ed baggage. It's my goal for her to be able to adapt to new situations without lapsing into helplessness. But she's not there yet. If they put her in a group of kids her own age and expect her to function on that level, she's going to be lost. Maybe she can keep up with the eight-year-olds she's with in school. Don't I need to tell them to hold her back? And don't I need to explain why?
In fact, nobody at the basketball camp much wanted to hear about it. I put a note on her application, and mentioned it at sign-in, but it's a busy place with lots of kids running around and no one lingering long over the tender souls. Maybe it's just the nature of sports groups--not a lot of interest in what parents have to say about their kids' abilities. Yeah, yeah, lady, just drop her off and we'll take it from there. She'll prove herself by her ability, or she'll spend the week on the bench. Either way, she'll get through.
Me, on the other hand...
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Date night
Mom and Dad are going out,
but family still comes first.
by Terri Mauro
My husband and I had a rare evening out on Sunday in honor of our tenth anniversary. Well, it was supposed to be an evening out. It turned into an afternoon movie, a break to take our daughter to register at basketball camp, and then dinner for two. Family obligations don't stop just because Mama and Papa want to go on a date.
I know some couples regret or even resent the changes that having children makes in their relationship. We're not one of them. Sure, we have less time for each other, but we never used that time together all that well in the first place. Before we adopted our kids, we would come home from work, eat dinner in front of "Jeopardy," and fall asleep on the couch. Now, we wait until the kids are in bed before we fall asleep on the couch. So actually, maybe we really have more time together.
We've had the kids for half our married life, and we're a pretty good parenting team. My husband shares in all the pick-ups and drop-offs, the homework-enforcing and the bath-supervising. I'm exclusively in charge of dealing with the school district, the doctors, and the therapists; I'm also in charge of the worrying. He makes dinner, does the laundry, washes the dishes, mops the floors. Discipline is mostly the jurisdiction of whoever gets there first, though the runner-up gets to second-guess and criticize. Preferably not in front of the disciplinee, but not always.
So a little kid-care interlude in the middle of our anniversary celebration was just business as usual. It rather fit the theme of the outing, actually. Our movie selection was "Disney's The Kid," a movie we could probably have taken the kids along to (though really, it's more an adult fantasy along the lines of "Groundhog Day" than it is true kiddie fare). And at dinner, although we didn't personally have to deal with children squirming and making noise and making messes, we couldn't help but notice the couple at the next table doing just that. Their baby was being good--only slightly squally--but their toddler was going to town. Rather like my son has done on more raucous restaurant occasions than I can count.
There was a time in our life as a couple when we might have found the tumult from across the aisle annoying--distracting from our conversation and dampening to our dining enjoyment. There was a time when we would have pitied those poor beleaguered parents and been glad we weren't in their shoes. And then there was a time, during our struggles with infertility, when we would have given anything to be in their shoes, screaming or no screaming. But now, we mostly just empathized with the Mom and Dad, having worn their shoes so very many times before. As the little boy shouted "MasterCard! MasterCard! MasterCard!" over and over until his dad let him hold the credit card, and then shouted it again when the waitress took it away, I didn't cringe--I chuckled. I wanted to tell the parents, "Don't worry about keeping him quiet, we have kids too."
And when he wandered toward our table, as he did repeatedly, I wanted to talk to him, give him a piece of the candy I keep in my purse to keep my son quiet in public, show him the toys I keep handy for similar purposes. Instead I just smiled, knowing that, when you're trying to make kids behave like civilized creatures, even the kindness of strangers can be embarrassing. But I wished them well as they scurried out of the place at the earliest possible opportunity. Who knows, maybe one day the parents will come there on their anniversary, and we'll be the noisy family at the next table. My son won't scream out "MasterCard," but he'll surely ask to see their keys.
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Bad medicine
Drug companies want to experiment on our offspring.
by Terri Mauro
Low on cash? Trying to build up a college fund? Just want to raise your kids' allowance? Medical science has an offer for you: Let us use your children as guinea pigs in drug studies.
For years, no one has bothered to test children's medications; doctors just made their best guess as to how much of a drug that works on grown-ups would have the desired effect on kids. Which means that one way or another, many of our children have been participating in drug studies all along. But now the FDA is formalizing matters and requiring that before a medication can be given to children, it must receive clinical testing on children.
And that's all well and good, but would you want them tested on your kids? Would you want to knowingly feed your little ones pills that might harm them? It's one thing for adults to consent to be test subjects of their own free will, but how can you do that for your children?
Drug companies, for their part, are offering incentives. Sometimes it's cash. Sometimes it's Geoffrey dollars. Sometimes it's an opportunity to try a wonder drug that might cure the child's very real affliction.
And that last one, I can understand. I can understand parents signing their kids up for drug trials in order to gain access to a particular medication. Most of the pediatric studies listed on the government's ClinicalTrials database are testing medications for cancer and HIV, and those are certainly desperate situations that call for desperate measures. It might be worth the risk of unknown side effects--or worth the risk, given the nature of medical tests, of dosing your child with a placebo that does nothing at all.
But would you take the same risks to, say, test a hayfever medication? Most of these trials involve extensive blood-testing. I can barely get my kids in the doctor's office for shots and finger-sticks that they do need. I can't imagine signing them up for something that involves additional dances with needles. The testing staff would have to beef up for the job of wrestling my kiddos into submission.
Surely we can all agree that this is a necessary thing to do, that adult drugs should not be administered to children if no one knows how safe they are. But as with many necessary things to do, I sure wouldn't want to do it. If you did this sort of thing on your own--giving your kids pills out of your medicine chest just to see what will happen, for example--it would be child abuse. But I guess if the drug companies do it, it's research.
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Sudden death
Bleacher rage claims a victim.
by Terri Mauro
It's long been apparent that American parents have a perspective problem when it comes to kids and sports. We hardly needed someone to die to drive that particular point home. But that's what happened recently in Lynnfield, Massachusettes, when two fathers got into a fight over some rough play on the ice. Their own rough play ended with one dad dead and the other headed to jail for what will likely be a long time. So much for good sportsmanship.
What is it that spurs moms and dads to be so insanely competitive about what is supposed to be fun and games? What makes them shout demeaning phrases from the sidelines? What makes them sign their offspring up for every sport offered? What makes dads hound their sons to play better? What makes moms define themselves by the soccer games they schlep their kids too? We're a nation that's serious about its sports, to be sure, but even professional football players don't try to kill the people they play against. People they live with, maybe, random pedestrians on the street, but nobody in the game. That sort of bleacher rage is apparently reserved for rabid overreaching parents.
And that may be why, though I've come close, I've never signed my daughter up for competitive community sports. I've used her special-ed status as an excuse, but really, I'm scared of those other parents. She seems to have some athletic skill, but not a lot of game-sense to go with it. At soccer camp, she very deliberately, and with concentrated effort, kicked the ball into the wrong goal, with no clue she'd messed up. Since it was an informal game, the parents didn't rip me to shreds, but I'd hate to take that chance at a real game.
I didn't yell at her for mistaking the goal; she was so proud of herself, and I was proud of her for trying. I didn't yell at her when she managed to roll gutter balls even with bumpers in the children's bowling league she played in, either. Her form was bad, her scores were sad, but she was having fun. That wasn't enough for some of the dads who came to watch their sons play, though. They'd stand at the back of the lane berating them for bad balls, shouting at them to watch their wrists or the placement of their feet. I was embarrassed for them; for heaven's sake, it's just bowling. The kids, to their credit, seemed to mostly ignore them. And after a while, they'd go back to the bowling alley bar and have another beer.
There were no dads like that at the games my daughter played with the Challenger League, a softball league for children with special needs. For most of the kids, just getting around the field was an accomplishment, and the crowd responded accordingly. Both teams' worth of parents cheered for both teams, regardless of superficial affiliations. The one time I heard someone making negative comments, they were roundly booed. Each child got to keep swinging at the ball until they made contact, and the inning ended when everyone made it home. At the end of the season, every player got a trophy. Several trophies, actually. My daughter has the beginnings of a proper trophy shelf after that year of play.
But she didn't play anything this season. We felt that she was possibly a little too capable for the everyone-plays, everyone-scores atmosphere of the Challenger League, but not quite capable enough for the play-if-you're-good, score-or-you're-out atmosphere of regular Little League. She's now made it through a week of mainstream basketball camp with a good report, and so in the back of my mind I'm thinking--maybe she can be on our town's girl's basketball team. Maybe she could do that. Maybe she could hold her own. Maybe I could put everything else on hold to drive her to night games that will make her unable to do her homework or get a good night's sleep, and maybe I could do nothing on those nights but sit and watch her warm the bench.
Then again, there's a lot to be said for sitting sports out. Worked for me when I was a kid. Guess I'm just not a team player, or a team parent. It's a whole lot safer that way.
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copyright © 2000 by Terri Mauro