Livingston, I Presume

TV Karts...just say NO F***IN' way!

I mentioned recently that we don't have access to the iPhone in Montana. In Livingston, we've been denied On Demand cable even though seemingly everywhere else in the whole United States gets it. But I’ve come to accept that we’re a small market, and small markets don’t get to be early-adopters with a lot of new technology. Sometimes I curse it, and other times—as happened when I started reading about new, “kid-friendly” shopping carts with televisions inside—I am thrilled to death to be out of the loop.

TV Karts™ —designed by a New Zealand firm—are described on the manufacturer’s site thusly:

Everyone knows parents of pre-school children have limited time and energy, let alone face what many have come to regard as a necessary evil—grocery shopping. Here is where Cabco comes to the rescue with TV Kart™, which helps parents and caregivers to have a relaxed shopping experience while their children enjoy the magic and fun of 'driving' their TV Kart™ and watching their favorite TV programs—without leaving their parents' side.

Even ignoring the truly awkward construction in that first sentence, there are already more things wrong with this idea than I care to count. And I haven’t even told you the most irritating part. The TV Kart™? It costs a dollar each time you want to use it. That means, in addition to dropping a hundred bucks at the checkout counter with the stuff in the basket, you also get to pay for the basket! But hey, it comes with free Child Zombification Unit, so maybe it’s worth it!

And about that TV… I’m not going to rail against parents who let their kids watch TV, since I am one. Granted, we're strict about it, but Connery is no stranger to “Johnny and the Sprites” and the “Backyardigans”. He likes to watch the occasional half hour, and I like to keep up on such luxurious forms of hygiene as showering. I don’t think it hurts him, but I also don’t delude myself that he’s “learning” anything beyond how to sit still for more than five minutes at a time. Besides, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for kids under two, and these carts are being marketed straight to that demographic.

Is there nowhere we can now escape television? It’s not that I relish going to the grocery store with a bored preschooler—it can be very stressful, in fact—but I wouldn’t want to have him zoned out and unwilling to interact with other kids, with adults, and most of all with me. How else is he going to learn about the proper way to behave in public, not to mention how to read labels to make good food choices, avoid slickly marketed junk food and make sure I don’t forget his favorite jam?

I can hear people out there sniffing that if I don’t like them, I shouldn’t use them. True enough. But have you ever tried to explain logically to a child in the grocery store that he just can’t get into that perfectly beautiful cart with its steering wheel, truck-like appearance and magical blue screen? Even without the lure of the tube, my son has to be convinced that grocery shopping is indeed possible without the assistance of one of those “kiddy” carts shaped like cars that are available locally.

According to A Little Pregnant, the shopping baskets are being test-marketed in discount retailers in major cities across the nation. It’s just another reason I’m not always sad that Old Montany is not yet one of those “major cities.” I’ll trade the iPhone for that.

Nicely done

Ah, Meowzer, your fat fu is strong, my web friend.

Meowzer's post explains in a tidy, beautifully composed nutshell exactly what I have spent countless hours discussing with my own mother lately, namely, that kids come in all shapes and sizes naturally and that efforts to mold and shape them into something that they aren't (read: skinny) will only result in longterm disorders and a helluva lot of guilt and grief for both mother and child:

C’mon, guys, cough it up. You know the truth. You know this “childhood obesity epidemic” is a bunch of trumped-up hooha, that kids are maybe, on average, ten pounds heavier and an inch taller than a generation ago. Poor children, particularly the children of the working poor who don’t qualify for government assistance, do seem to be in worse health all the time, because their lives and their families’ lives are measurably more stressful, their health care is a joke and their food and exercise options are an even worse joke. (Which is not to say that those who do qualify for government assistance have it great either, but at least they get a little help.) That is the real “childhood health crisis” in America, not the youthful spare tires of middle-class and upper-class kids.

But gaaaah, if we concentrated on that we’d be taking all your fun away by depriving you of the opportunity to bash uppity middle-class-and-richer women for thinking they actually have the right to have lives, who think they actually have the right to eat what they want and not spend every spare moment they have slaving over a hot stove and sitting with their children for five hours at the dinner table every night “making them” eat their kohlrabi. I wish more of these women would see these stupid-ass “lifestyle stories” for the antifeminist, regressive guiltbaggery that they are. They know damn well you can’t “make” kids eat vegetables, that even if you could, that doesn’t mean the kids will carry that habit with them into adulthood, and that even kids who like vegetables often wind up fat.

She's writing in response to a widely circulated AP study that found that all of the gazillions of "lifestyle interventions" we've been perpetrating on American kids for the past decade have resulted in more or less fuck all. Of course, they define the fuck-all-ed-ness in large part because kids have failed to get any skinnier. What would make them think that getting naturally fat kids to be thin is any easier than doing the same for naturally fat adults is an open question. (Or vice versa--let's not forget that the preponderance of the evidence shows that it is also nearly impossible to make a naturally thin person fat.)

As always, the caveats. I do think that far too many kids eat crappy food. It's easy, it's widely available, and it's cheap. And I think a lot of kids probably play more videogames and watch more TV than they should. Again, it's easier than fighting it. But I will argue strenuously that crappy food and too much quality time between kids' butts and their couches occurs with just as much frequency among thin kids as fat. And that should be the concern, because that's where some changes can be made.

I shouldn't have to scour the labels of my English muffins and whole-wheat bread and applesauce to avoid high-fructose corn syrup. I shouldn't have to take my life in my hands to take my son for a walk in a neighborhood with no sidewalks and badly enforced speed limits. And I shouldn't have to explain a thousand times over that a person can eat healthily, exercise, and raise happy, healthy kids and still be fat. Or that the mothers of fat kids aren't driving from fast-food restaurant to fast-food restaurant to feed their kids while they vegetate to the in-car DVD entertainment system. It's not all Twinkies and America's Next Top Model here, people.

You see, I'm ranting again. Go read Meowzer. She's a lot more cogent.

Agony

If Connery is a drama king--and make no mistake, he is a drama king--I have only myself to blame. After all, I spent much of my childhood with the parentally mandated nickname of Sarah Heartburn (Heartburn? Bernhardt? Get it?) Now I think it's funny, at the time--much like when I call Connery a drama king now--it caused me to commence further dramatics.

Anyway, Connery does love him some drama. If there's none around, he will do his level best to manufacture some. This morning was classic. See, he has this little Mama Bear-Baby Bear combo stuffed animal that was a lovely present from some old friends when he was born. As with all  his stuffed animals, he goes through stages of being really into certain ones, and right now it's these bears. They are attached to each other, and the baby bear plays...

Oh, hell. Here's a picture so I don't have to burn your retinas with stuffed animal descriptions:

So anyway, this morning on our way out the door to go to preschool, he says to me, "Mommy, maybe when I come home you can take the baby bear off the big bear."

When I told him that might not be a good idea because it would be easier to lose, he pondered that for a while and we went through various scenarios of where the bear could be lost, ending with the potential disappearance in a combine harvester, which I labeled as unlikely. In any case, he seemed to have accepted that keeping the two together was probably a good idea, and I felt victorious because it meant that I might not have to spend some future evening scouring Livingston for a 3-inch blue bear that plays "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."

He insisted on bringing it in to school, despite his initial desire to keep it up on a shelf, away from babies. ("They put everything in their mouths, you know," he sniffed in a kind of "filthy habit!" tone that would make you think he hadn't just yesterday been told to stop licking the picnic table.) At the last minute--probably in an effort to create some drama--he asked me to retrieve them from the baby-free shelf so that he could play with them.

So I'm talking with his teacher when I hear him burst into heartbroken tears. The Bears, they have been rent asunder:

Iris has detached little bear from big bear, and the world is at an end.

In other words, she has accomplished exactly what he had wanted to do no more than 15 minutes previously, but now it is a tragedy of epic proportions.

But you know what, even when I know he's probably being dramatic just for drama's sake, I couldn't help but scoop him into my arms to hug him and dry his tears with promises of a dramatic bear reunion, accomplished with a needle and thread. It will be done. Sarah Heartburn, to the rescue.

Better late than never

I'm late on this, but I hope you'll forgive the oversight. This post by Angry Black Bitch following the "school diversity" Supreme Court ruling exactly sums up how I've been feeling about the prospects of our nation under this court:

I’m tired of telling apathetic fence straddling sometimes I vote-ers that they need to give a shit…that these fucked up Supreme Court rulings will trickle down in a flood of oppression and a heavier boot on their neck.

For the love of all things holy, this is exactly what I've been saying since at least 1992. The presidency is important, of course, but it is the president's power to appoint Supreme Court justices that makes it absolutely vital that progressives get out there--holding their noses if they must--and vote. The Democratic candidate isn't all you ever hoped for? Suck it up. No one is ever going to be perfect, but at least you can be reasonably sure that the Democrat isn't going to be seeking the approval of the American Taliban on every move s/he makes. ABB continues:

...a sick part of me that I pray will go away soon welcomes the drama that will result from the recent rulings of The 5-4 Supremes. Because this house note was going to come due…and opting for that adjustable rate “he’s not that smart but he looks like he’d be a nice guy to share a beer with” presidential option who then appointed two freakishly conservative what fucking world do they live in justices FOR LIFE may turn out to be the fuck up that keeps on fucking.

She's absolutely, terrifyingly right. Just think of the other unbelievable decisions that have been handed down in the space of just one session. In this context, stay tuned is not an enticement but a warning. The worst is yet to come.

Auto anxiety

One of the things I loved most about living in Prague was that we didn't need a car. For 95 percent of our daily life, we could get where we needed to go by hopping on a tram or subway--or, still better, just by walking there. I love that about cities, and I hate with equal fervor the inability to get anywhere or do anything without a car living in a smaller town. Granted, there were days when I longed to be able to hop in the car and go to the grocery store or to IKEA or whatever big errands we had, but we could rent a car when the urge got too strong, and we never had to worry about car maintenance or finding a good mechanic or buying car insurance.

How I miss that.

We were very fortunate upon our return to have two cars waiting for us. We had put Chip's Saturn into storage while we were abroad (despite the many, many people who told us that was a dumb idea, and I guess in a way it was but not having a car payment is worth being told we were dumb) and my parents were generous enough to pass along a beautiful Chrysler mini-van that had belonged to my late grandfather. As far as transportation went, we landed on our feet (so to speak) in our re-entry to U.S. car culture. Touch wood, we've been extremely lucky with these cars and have not had to do much beyond the routine maintenance, which we do assiduously.

But you know, even when you take good care of cars, there comes a point in ever vehicle's life when things start to go wrong. Just little things, but they can start to add up. It's compounded when you are in a fairly new place and don't know where to go to have things checked out. Or you think you've found a place to go and then they screw you over and you're left wondering where to go now. By the time you end up at (ugh) the dealership, you've already spent several hundred dollars trying to fix something elusive, and that's before the...shall we say...aggressive pricing for which dealerships are well known. Oh, and did we mention they won't be able to see me for two weeks?

Much like my computer (the "old" reliable iBook G4 purchased in October 2004 2003 [yipes!]), the cars in my life need to hold on for a while longer. OK, a lot longer. And it's not helping my naturally anxious tendencies to have these little problems that seem inevitably to lead to bigger ones. I need the car to do my job(s) just as I need the computer. A hundred thousand miles isn't a lot in a modern car, right? At least that's what I keep telling myself.

It would be a lot easier to swallow if I knew I could leave the car in the garage and just grab a tram when I needed to get somewhere.